I really liked W7. I got the 64 pro version and I got a good deal back in the day for £100. I got my recent pro64 key for W11 for £3.50. Clearly M$ must be making money some where else. I prefer W11 to W10 So much easier to use. Although W10 was great.

vestibule:

I really liked W7. I got the 64 pro version and I got a good deal back in the day for £100. I got my recent pro64 key for W11 for £3.50. Clearly M$ must be making money some where else. I prefer W11 to W10 So much easier to use. Although W10 was great.

Probably selling telemetry data.

Selling Office subscriptions and OS licenses to more or less every company that I've ever worked at. Web services. That's probably where they make money, not us people at home. Which makes me wonder why they still expect people at home to pay for non commercial use...

@fantaskarsef Good call. 🙂

Am i the only one who loved windows 8.1 more than windows 7?

moab600:

Am i the only one who loved windows 8.1 more than windows 7?

You are not alone, i remember i used "start 8" or something like that, that software emulated the W7 windows menu, it was flawless also it used the everything search engine and you can't beat that. I even used windows Vista some good years, imho if you had the performance, it was way better than XP

moab600:

Am i the only one who loved windows 8.1 more than windows 7?

No, me too. Still using it

moab600:

Am i the only one who loved windows 8.1 more than windows 7?

I never installed win 8 but win 8.1 with start8 was fine I was forgetting I had win 8.1 instead of 7 really

I'm simply shocked that anybody likes 8... it never felt like it was intended for a PC... and being PCMR, we should hate it to the guts, no? I mean, I also had 8.1 because it got more features than 7 back in the day, but generally speaking, I liked 7 more. Until 10 surpassed it anyway.

fantaskarsef:

I'm simply shocked that anybody likes 8... it never felt like it was intended for a PC... and being PCMR, we should hate it to the guts, no? I mean, I also had 8.1 because it got more features than 7 back in the day, but generally speaking, I liked 7 more. Until 10 surpassed it anyway.

I felt 8 was one of the worst OSes I've ever used but 8.1 was fine. I think I liked it more than 7. I'm fine with 10; my #1 gripe about it is the inconsistent mashup of the old Control Panel and new Settings. It feels so incredibly amateurish, and honestly... how hard could it possibly be to write a new UI to configure your system? Granted, this is MS, where they seem to have a knack to over-complicate a lot of their own software. It's still weird to me how Windows takes up so much disk space (even in a fresh install) yet does so little, when compared to all other OSes.

schmidtbag:

I felt 8 was one of the worst OSes I've ever used but 8.1 was fine. I think I liked it more than 7. I'm fine with 10; my #1 gripe about it is the inconsistent mashup of the old Control Panel and new Settings. It feels so incredibly amateurish, and honestly... how hard could it possibly be to write a new UI to configure your system? Granted, this is MS, where they seem to have a knack to over-complicate a lot of their own software. It's still weird to me how Windows takes up so much disk space (even in a fresh install) yet does so little, when compared to all other OSes.

Sometimes I have the feeling the issue with Microsoft's OS refreshes is that they constantly have to incorporate small, meaningless changes and features to actually justify a new OS in the first place. On a technical level, they could very well run the same OS with a win7 look anyway (I think). So sometimes it feels like they're actually worsening things so that they can "improve" them half way with the next OS...

fantaskarsef:

Sometimes I have the feeling the issue with Microsoft's OS refreshes is that they constantly have to incorporate small, meaningless changes and features to actually justify a new OS in the first place. On a technical level, they could very well run the same OS with a win7 look anyway (I think). So sometimes it feels like they're actually worsening things so that they can "improve" them half way with the next OS...

I mostly agree, however, even when things are better (even in some cases, objectively better), people complain simply because it's different. It often shocks me how whiny people get over the smallest differences and unwillingness to adapt, even if it means their life will get easier. As someone who works in IT, it's pretty irritating. A new platform could be faster, more stable, easier to use, an industry standard, and you'll still get people complaining "but it doesn't do things the old way". Yeah... that's the point...

Those were the best operating systems Microsoft ever created. W7 (based on W2003 Server kernel) was stellar, and W8 functional-wise may have been even better, unfortunately it was plagued by the unremovable metro interface. W10 is basically spyware that looks somewhat like W95 but consumes a lot of resources (for spying on you all the time). W11 is an evolved spyware + garbage in all other regards (it is so bad I don't have words to express how I feel about it)! If I didn't needed W10 for work, I would have ditched Windows entirely.

All Windows versions after XP started to get on my nerves. As time passed, Windows started to become more and more like Android, where you feel like you don't have control over your own device. It's a slow process, but that's where it seems to be headed. Around 2008 I switched to Linux as my main OS and only boot Windows for playing games. That's where I stopped caring what MS does with Windows. All I need it to do now is run my games. They can make it the worst OS of all time for all I care. If it runs my games, that's all I care about. My bootloader entry for Windows is called "Wintendo."

schmidtbag:

It's still weird to me how Windows takes up so much disk space (even in a fresh install) yet does so little, when compared to all other OSes.

What do all the other OS's do that windows does not?

RealNC:

All Windows versions after XP started to get on my nerves. As time passed, Windows started to become more and more like Android, where you feel like you don't have control over your own device. It's a slow process, but that's where it seems to be headed. Around 2008 I switched to Linux as my main OS and only boot Windows for playing games. That's where I stopped caring what MS does with Windows. All I need it to do now is run my games. They can make it the worst OS of all time for all I care. If it runs my games, that's all I care about. My bootloader entry for Windows is called "Wintendo."

How dare you to turn your back to Wintendo and use that free, private OS? 😛 Have you gone insane? How can you stand that Linux who does whatever you want?:D No, that's not the way. 🙄

Denial:

What do all the other OS's do that windows does not?

My personal list of things Windows doesn't allow me to do, or would require me to hunt down some third-party program to do it: Launch programs through a keyboard shortcut of my choosing (I use Winkey+W for Firefox, Winkey+M for Thunderbird, Winkey+N for the NVidia control panel, F12 for a Quake-style drop-down command-line terminal, etc.) Windows requires me to use three keys (like Ctrl+Alt+Key.) Shut down an internal HDD at will when I don't need it and without the OS spinning it up on its own again later. Give me a bootmanager where I can easily boot memtest without needing to have USB drive for it but instead boot it directly from internal storage. Integer scaling on my NVidia 980 Ti for old games (on Windows this requires third-party software like dgVoodoo2, or I would need a new GPU that offers integer scaling.) Preload small-ish games entirely to RAM and lock them there. On Windows you have to install a RAM disk tool and install the games there and then juggle game files every time you want to run it. Easily set I/O priority when running something that would result in saturating the I/O of my HDD and thus result in long freezes of other programs that also try to access the same HDD. (Like extracting a 10GB RAR file.) Configure the SSD trim task to trim every 10 days instead of once a month. A filesystem that is designed to prevent HDD fragmentation without requiring a defrag task to run every week. Windows that snap to edges of other windows and the desktop borders when moving them. (Like the Steam client window does, but imagine this automatically works with all windows.) Programs that can correctly restore their windows to their "vertically maximized" state. On Windows I always have to vertically maximize Firefox every time I start it. For software that doesn't even try to restore its previous size, have the desktop manager do it instead. Dark theme that works. On Windows, most software doesn't respect the dark theme and still uses bright colors (like Notepad, the Windows control panel, the NVidia control panel, and pretty much everything else. The only things that seem to respect the dark theme are "apps" shipped with Windows.) Not having to worry whether my sound card from 2008 will be supported or not (Asus and CMedia have dropped driver support for it for ages now, I use community-modded Windows drivers for it.) Linux will fully support that card until the end of time. No reason to set a fixed "system audio sample rate" (like 48khz by default.) On Linux, the audio hardware itself is set to the sample rate requested by the application. Resampling only happens when more than one application output audio at the same time and they have requested different sample rates. Not having like a hundred background services (and I have no idea what most of them are even doing.) Get automatic updates for my applications through a central system. On Windows, programs are responsible for updating themselves, and many will install Yet Another Background Service for their update functionality. Better at running old Windows games (Windows 9x and XP era games) than Windows is. For modern games, Windows is best though. No hidden Internet access crap. The external network access LED of my Internet router is almost constantly blinking when I run Windows. What the heck is it sending/receiving? In Linux, it's only blinking when I actually access the Internet. These things might not be major showstoppers on their own, but they all add together to be a real annoyance. If it weren't for games that are either modern or older ones where I want things like SGSSAA, I would have wiped Windows off my machine years ago. And before Linux users here reply with "but, but, Steam Play and Proton and DXVK", yeah those are really nice, but Linux still kinda sucks for me for games. Shader compilation stutter and lack of things like nvidia inspector, RTSS and the 3D settings in the nvidia control panel make Windows the better OS for running games. At least for me.

moab600:

Am i the only one who loved windows 8.1 more than windows 7?

For some things I actually prefer win 8 over 10. 8 was a lot less aggressive about rebooting after updates, my uptime on win 8 could easily be 3 months, with win 10 it is 20 days max. I am not able to trust it as a fileserver anymore after the "upgrade", and my nvme disk just lost its win10 boot somehow from one day to the other, all other files on the same disk looks intact and without errors.

Denial:

What do all the other OS's do that windows does not?

Nowadays that's a hard question to answer because OSes do so many things, and, there are things that some would argue are obsolete while others aren't. But let's account for the most common reasons people own/use a computer: A. Web browsing / emails B. Office suites C. Gaming D. Media consumption E. Media (video, photo, audio) production F. Programming Let's compare how Windows functions to Mac OS and the average desktop Linux distro. Remember: this is about an OOBE, because most OSes can do quite a lot if you keep tinkering with them. A. For the longest time, Windows came with IE; I don't need to explain why that was a problem. Thankfully it was replaced with Edge, but only within maybe the past year has it been worth using. So, now Windows is okay for this category, but for most of it's history it was awful. Mac comes with Safari, which is fine - not great, but it's never really been bad. Linux usually comes with Firefox or Chromium, the latter of which will yield the best overall web experience of the browsers mentioned. B. Windows hardly comes with anything for this. If you get an OEM PC, you might get some demos or perhaps MS Works, but in a fresh install you just get WordPad. That isn't awful but there are better free alternatives. Mac comes with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I haven't really used any of those but from what I've seen, they have plenty to offer for free tools. Linux tends to come with LibreOffice, which in most cases today is a perfectly adequate replacement to MS Office. C. Windows is arguably the best for gaming but the least prepared for it in terms of the OOBE. Windows will typically only install failsafe drivers (and OEMs will install outdated drivers), the CPU scheduler is often pretty stupid, and is too aggressive with paging files. With Mac, everything "just works", albeit, performance isn't that great and neither is compatibility, especially if you're on an M1/M2 Mac. But, play a Mac-compatible game and it will probably run just fine. With Linux, as long as you're not using Nvidia or surround sound system, the OOBE is actually easier than Windows and there's a good chance performance will be better too. However, there are a lot of games (particularly online multiplayer) that won't run, but there's still a wider selection than Mac. With Nvidia, some distros make it easier to install drivers but it otherwise requires a little extra work and knowledge of the OS. Linux supports surround sound but it's not user-friendly to set it up in most cases. D. Windows comes with Media Player, which is barely adequate. It comes with the essential functions but various versions of Windows seem to swap out which codecs it comes with, where you're expected to pay for more.. Mac seems to use many separate programs for different media purposes and as far as I understand, supports all of the most popular media formats; it's not clear whether they support some of the more obscure ones. There doesn't seem to be a standard media player for Linux (many would argue it's MPV or VLC) but most distros support just about every media format that doesn't have royalties (they make access to them easily but they legally can't provide them OOB). The only way where Linux severely lacks is HDR and GPU-accelerated transcoding. However, seems HDR has already been solved this month. E. Windows comes with Voice Recorder, Paint, and in some cases Movie Maker/Video Editor. I don't need to explain any further about those. Mac can record audio through QuickTime, Photos can do a little editing, and I don't think it comes with any video editor. Most Linux distros come with a media player that can record video or audio, sometimes come with Audacity, and come with either GIMP, Kolourpaint, Gpaint, or really just anything that's better than Paint. Most don't come with video editors, though some do. F. Windows fails hard here. You get Notepad, which has largely been unchanged since the early 90s, and you also get the Command Prompt, which lacks some of the most basic CLI conveniences. Mac comes with TextEdit, which is... okay. It's not terrible but it's feature rich compared to Notepad. Mac also comes with a true Terminal with enough shell scripting and POSIX compliancy to make development easier. Just about every text editor Linux distros come with can function as an introductory IDE, and some of them are better than paid programs while using a fraction of the disk space. The only thing Windows does better OOB than either Mac or Linux is a comprehensive and [relatively] light weight task manager, and even then, there's room for improvement. There are also lots of other small things where Windows is really lacking, like supporting more compressed file formats, symlinks, the ability to kill a process, excruciatingly slow updates, sensible security (this has improved), or even just a decent file browser. The thing is, what Windows comes with would be totally fine as a "here's the bare minimum to get you started" but the sheer amount of bloat just gets me to wonder: what are they doing so wrong? Mac OS uses roughly the same amount of disk space as Windows 10 yet most of the software Mac comes with is actually adequate. A typical Linux install will have more+better features than Windows and use half the disk space. I understand that much of Windows' bloat comes from the winSxS folder, among other similar functions, yet that folder seems relatively useless considering most apps provide their own libraries anyway.

vestibule:

I really liked W7. I got the 64 pro version and I got a good deal back in the day for £100. I got my recent pro64 key for W11 for £3.50. Clearly M$ must be making money some where else. I prefer W11 to W10 So much easier to use. Although W10 was great.

I have W11 on a LG laptop I've bought a month ago and I really deslike the changes they have made, everything is done in order to push users towards MS services, it feels more like a Ms store than a normal OS!... For me, W7 is the best version ever.