5 ms·

MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows h

MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows has never recovered from there.

stetrain 1y ago
Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs. Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family. Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.
- steve1977 1y ago
  > Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family. I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu.
    - lproven 1y ago
      I decided the same, but for myself. I liked Windows 2000. XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X. 10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.
      - rbanffy 1y ago
        Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed. From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.
- BirAdam 1y ago
  I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  7 was basically a Vista service pack but after the hardware vendors had time to cure some cerebral rectitis and give proper hardware.
anonymars 1y ago
Vista was an enhancement of XP. We got search in the start menu and made it a first class part of the OS with the indexer WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive) No more running with full admin privileges all the time. Bitlocker was introduced Yes, compatibility issues affected people to various degrees, and yes it required good hardware to run well. Intel's onboard graphics / 5400 rpm drives we're not kind to it. And there were too many editions With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
- kasabali 1y ago
  XP has had shadow copies. File history tab in explorer was first available in Server 2003, but AFAIK there was a hack to enable it in XP, too.
  - justin66 1y ago
    All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume shadow copy.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
      - 1y ago
jodleif 1y ago
I actually liked windows 7 quite a bit
- jonbiggums22 1y ago
  Certainly better than where we are now but I never really loved it. It was to heavy for me, the search doesn't find files that are there reliably and the update system system sucked. Windows 7 always developed disk sucking WinSxS folder cancer, a particularly fatal disease during the early SSD era where space became a premium again. It did have faster file copying though. I'd say it had 64-bit for more memory addressing but that was actually available with XP as well.

MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows has never recovered from there.

stetrain 1y ago

Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs. Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family. Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.

steve1977 1y ago
> Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family. I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu.
  - lproven 1y ago
    I decided the same, but for myself. I liked Windows 2000. XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X. 10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed. From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.
BirAdam 1y ago
I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network.
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
7 was basically a Vista service pack but after the hardware vendors had time to cure some cerebral rectitis and give proper hardware.

anonymars 1y ago

Vista was an enhancement of XP. We got search in the start menu and made it a first class part of the OS with the indexer WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive) No more running with full admin privileges all the time. Bitlocker was introduced Yes, compatibility issues affected people to various degrees, and yes it required good hardware to run well. Intel's onboard graphics / 5400 rpm drives we're not kind to it. And there were too many editions With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now

kasabali 1y ago
XP has had shadow copies. File history tab in explorer was first available in Server 2003, but AFAIK there was a hack to enable it in XP, too.
- justin66 1y ago
  All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume shadow copy.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
    - 1y ago

jodleif 1y ago

I actually liked windows 7 quite a bit

jonbiggums22 1y ago
Certainly better than where we are now but I never really loved it. It was to heavy for me, the search doesn't find files that are there reliably and the update system system sucked. Windows 7 always developed disk sucking WinSxS folder cancer, a particularly fatal disease during the early SSD era where space became a premium again. It did have faster file copying though. I'd say it had 64-bit for more memory addressing but that was actually available with XP as well.