Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn’t always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?
Windows 7. Some may say 8.1 if they were willing to tolerate it, but most will agree that Win7 was the last “true” OS that wasn’t riddled with adware and telemetry collection.
Microsoft lost a lot of money on Win8 (and by extension, 8.1). That made them rethink their business model, and they shifted away from selling the OS. Instead, they gave the OS away and made money on the data collection. Because Win8 made them realize that the world didn’t want or need a new OS every other year.
It’s the same reason people don’t upgrade their cell phones every year anymore. At first, the hardware changes were meaningful, and you actually got large upgrades with every new iteration. You were noticeably behind if you had a phone that was two or three years old. But now that modern hardware design has slowed down, (and hardware changes are more akin to updates on existing hardware), people don’t feel like they’re behind if they put off upgrading for two or three years.
And this reluctance to upgrade hardware meant people and businesses weren’t constantly buying a new OS every year. So Microsoft lost a lot of money when Win8 launched and everyone collectively went “actually, I’m good with my current computer.”
One another factor is hardware manufacturers started to screech at them to make Windows even cheaper for them, because Android is technically free (save for the driver licenses) in exchange for user data collection, so they started to kneel.
Phones can have exponential growth in hardware capabilities, but the bigger thing is they don’t need to get more powerful.
All the app makers want their apps to work on any device, so a 10yo budget phone with 1/60th the horsepower of a modern flagship will work just fine with most apps, and New phones are just way overpowered for what they actually do.
I’d go as far as Windows 2000. This new XP crap is too shiny, and why did they hide the controls?
The same is happening with Windows 11 as well. People don’t want to upgrade to it. With its pervasive adware and information gathering. The only reason the company I work for is buying Windows 11, is that you can’t buy Windows 10 anymore.
It’s weird to not see any posts about Azure. I remember watching a keynote from Microsoft’s CEO several years ago where he explicitly said the company’s focus was on Azure and cloud applications, and that the role of Windows was simply to get you there. That’s it. This is also inline with comments about Win7 being the last good OS because that’s about when the transition started.
Microsoft has always made windows good… … … For them.
I’d say Windows 8.1 was the last “good” one (as in B tier good), and Windows 7 was the last great one. Everything went downhill from here.
And yes, I’m considering Vista as part of the good ones.
Truth be told, Vista wasn’t bad, it needed a bit of polish here and there but most importantly, you needed a good PC to run it smoothly.
And it was riddled with issues due to lack of 64bit driver support. You could have released 7 instead of vista and ended up with some of the same issues.
I’ve long thought it was fine and subjected to misplaced ridicule.
Windows ME, however…
Win98 was so bad they released Win98SE.
And I was one of the very few who were lucky enough to have one.
And it lasted me like, 11 years.
It had the annoying habit of asking “Are you sure you want to run this?” too often; and early cheaper consumer-grade PCs that were really just moderately nice XP machines that could on paper even boot and run Vista that in reality were slow and had poor driver support. I had a Vista machine that was fairly powerful for the day and had decent driver support, like Gateway put some give a shit into it, and it was pretty okay.
Satya Nadella.
Past times will always be better.
Windows 2000
It’s never been great
Not really slower, just more shit going on under the hood than ever before. Considering all of the novel ways to attack the operating system, the ubiquity and level of integration of computing in everything, the OS is a much higher value target than it used to be back in the days of Xp-7. However, MS has introduced numerous security features and significantly improved the built in AV. 10/11 is a hell of a lot more secure, but there is a performance cost to that. That and the software we run on top of it has only gotten more resource hungry and complex as well. There are also things that you might hate but are worlds better than they used to be. Updates are a lot faster, support automatic rollback and are practically flawless compared to the broken mess they used to be. We now have things that were never possible before, like first party tools to convert a MBR/BIOS-boot system to UEFI boot.
I’ll concede the point about service advertisements, however depending on the edition that is suppressable. MS is not alone in its sinful capitalism however, MacOS is full of stuff like that too, they’re just sneakier/more subtle about it. MS will have you griping about their promoted services or apps; Apple will have you licking their boots and not realizing it because you’ve deluded yourself. The only operating systems that are really free are the ones no company fully owns. I work with multiple different operating systems in an IT job, and the notion that it is acceptable to run old versions of Windows in this day and age or that they were objectively better is just nostalgic horseshit. It was always a corporate product, you’re just chafing against that now.
Massive overhead for no reason is what “slower” means.
Linux has better security and even heavy distros don’t come anywhere close to being the massive resource hog Windows is. For “features” that downgrade the experience.
You know what’s also good “built in AV”? Good design with code that’s open to review. There’s not nearly as much performance cost to good security if you start from a good foundation. Saying windows is slower because it’s doing more security and more anti-virus is like saying I only run slow because I trip over my own feet. Like, no shit, but that’s no excuse.
And singing the praises of updates and rollback systems that are like a decade behind everything else and still a consistent pain point for users is a little bit of weird fanboyism too.
I wouldn’t say the updates are ‘like a decade behind everything else’. Like most things in software, there’s a really broad array of what is available from really bad to really good and a lot of things are in between. If we’re comparing major OS architectures in terms of market share, then we’re comparing what, 6 things? Anyway. I’m a fan first of the ideologies and designs present in the linux/BSD world but I’m not willing to overgeneralize the difficulty of what has been achieved in other corners…and I guess mostly I’m sick of ignorant people saying “XP is the best, why can’t I use it on my institutional device”. My point about how the updates are actually good now was about pointing at the stupidity of thinking that the older versions were better when they quite clearly were not. It’s not as simple as “oh the old stuff was so much better than now”. That’s reductivist thinking that doesn’t even try to understand the massive complexity of the problems of computing and software development today. We are constantly increasing the amount of overhead that we are putting into our software, and people are wondering why things are not just endlessly getting faster when we’re improving the hardware year over year. It’s like folks complaining about the idea of “planned obsolecence” when that obsolescence is a consequence of all the additional shit that you are requiring a computer to do. I’m not just talking about one vendor here, or one operating system, I’m just tired of these kinds of statements with so little thought behind them.
Windows 7 exists, and there’s no need to improve upon perfection. But there’s no money in releasing nothing, so they release ad-filled “upgrades” to bring in more money from the doofuses who buy it.
This is something Apple got right. OS X 10.0 was good and they’ve made lots of incremental changes but didn’t just arbitrarily change the whole “centered application dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top” situation. When new form factors emerged, they just made a new interface and didn’t try to hot glue a mouse/touchpad OS and touchscreen OS together for the fuck of it.
Vista* but otherwise yes
Yeah, every UI change since 7 has been for the worse, increasing the number of steps required to get work done.
I heard someone refer to what happened from XP to 10 as “onioneering” because they just added layers.
TIL Windows is an ogre…
To be fair, 10’s Settings screen makes dealing with wifi and bluetooth much easier than 7
Yeah but they had to do that because bluetooth became much more commonplace between 7 and 10.
Although I’m not sure if it was like that out of the box or it was improved with an update.
I wasn’t using bluetooth with 7, so you could be right. But if I need to fiddle with wifi beyond just changing what AP I’m connected to, the network settings I typically want to look at, eg disabling adapters or manually setting an IP address, were available in fewer steps in 7 versus 10.
How bad is security if you still have Windows 7 installed today?
Looks like 3% of windows users worldwide could help answer that question. Well, up to 3%… guessing not too many of them are too savvy.
I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that those machines are corporate owned and running legacy systems that are hanging on by a thread.
Every year someone talks about replacing Ol’ Smoky but the new system would need to go through validation and that costs time and money so they limp along for another year
I try to not connect mine to the internet anymore
I would have been happy to pay for continued improvements to DirectX and Vulcan and increasing security and minor useful incremental changes over time keeping the same Windows 7 playbook running. I wish I lived in the timeline where our greatest complaint with Windows is that it hasn’t changed very much in the last 15 years.
Vista I think
According to South Park the movie, Windows 98
deleted by creator
AVD, because broadcom fucked up VMware good.
It used to be “skip the evens”. But since they themselves skipped 9, now it’s “skip the odds”.
I hope you don’t expect their next OS to be good, whether they call it 12 or otherwise. Skip all Windows from now on, IMO
There is literally nothing that competes with Windows in office environments or gaming. And for that reason it will continue to blow all competition out of the water.
A lot of businesses can get by with just a browser these days.
You can game perfectly well on linux thanks to Steam. Except for VR.
They must’ve stopped with Windows 11 because I’m still on Windows 10 Pro and don’t see even a fraction of the BS I keep hearing about Windows having.
I’m on 11 and don’t see it either because I turned it off a long time ago and it has yet to turn back on, ever.
I think they tried on 8 to make something and it was a flop then they flipped their whole business model upside down when they released 10
I suppose the weird surprise lesson of the Windows 8 fiasco is no matter how badly they bollixed it up, they wouldn’t lose enough customers that they could afford break a lot more of the user experience than they ever originally thought.
Even Vista, while people had issues*, still provided a largely familiar interface and didn’t go out of its way to break muscle memory and traditional workflows.
IMO, Vista wasn’t as bad as is commonly held. A lot of the problem was that it was more resource-intensive than previous systems-- it really asked for decent graphics cards and 2Gb memory, but they sold a lot of cheap machines with 512Mb and crappy shared-memory chipsets that only qualified as “Vista Basic Capable” so that the manufacturers wouldn’t have to formally declare them obsolete. Some drivers had teething trouble, but switching to 64 bit was going to have growing pains anyway.
