It handled multiple monitors and had Internet connection sharing, two things 98SE couldn’t do.
Most people don’t realize that ME wasn’t completely terrible. Same with Vista, and 8.1.
Windows 8 is unforgivable. The UI changes were simply a mistake. Made the OS really difficult to use unless you were fat fingering a touchscreen all day… That’s the only scenario where the UI of W8 made any sense. For kB/mouse users, out was just unwieldy. The function of W8 was fine, but it was like putting a sports car motor into a minivan, and then loading it up with lead plates and wondering why the handling sucks.
I have… Thoughts about W11 too, but they’re more under the hood complaints. Some UI complaints but mostly under the hood stuff that makes me go hmmm.
Windows ME broke DOS support just to pretend it wasn’t 9x in a new hat. At the time - this was kind of a big deal. 98 was objectively better for any typical suburban setup.
XP was also NT in a new hat, but they had it fake all the bugs that popular games expected. Plus the hat was nice. That Fisher-Price UI era was genuinely great, especially compared to modern ultra-flat nonsense. Windows 95 had instantly visible hierarchy in sixteen colors. Nowadays you can’t even tell what’s clickable without guesswork and memorization. Or at best you get a dozen indistinct monochrome icons.
Windows 7 was the only time Microsoft nailed everything. Each XP service pack broke and fixed a random assortment of features. Everything from 8 onward is broken on purpose, first for the stupid tablet interface (when WinCE’s 9x UI worked just fucking fine on 3" screens with Super Nintendo resolutions), then to openly betray all trust and control. I would still be using Windows 7 to-day if modern malware wasn’t so scary. It’s not even about vulnerability - I must have reinstalled XP once a month, thanks to the sketchiest codec packs ever published. But since I can’t back up my whole hard drive on five dollars worth of DVD-Rs, the existence of ransomware pushed me back to Linux Mint.
There are so many sins that have been committed in the name of progress.
Most of the early Windows games won’t even run anymore. There’s been more lost than we can reasonably understand.
My journey took me through to Windows 2000 pro (as opposed to server) for a while there. I eventually moved over to XP, then Vista, then 7.
I was one of the first people I knew of that ran Vista 64 bit. Most didn’t have the hardware for it, but the core 2 duo in my mobile computer was capable, so I jumped ship as soon as I could.
I’m both unsurprised and disappointed that itanium, Intel’s first attempt at 64 bit CPUs, failed. Starting new with an instruction set that was built from the ground up for modern applications was both very ambitious and presented a fairly unique opportunity for the industry, but they just couldn’t move enough units, and AMD saw the writing on the wall, and created the 64 bit extension for the x86 instruction set.
Oh well. Another opportunity lost.
We have another one with the whole ARM processor race that Apple kicked off with the M1.
I’m only sad that it went to arm and not RISC V.
That would have been quite the change.
Oh well. Maybe RISC V will see another opportunity soon, since NASA commissioned a new generation of radiation hardened processors for spaceflight computers, and they’re RISC V… Who knows.
ME did have some improvements over 98SE.
It handled multiple monitors and had Internet connection sharing, two things 98SE couldn’t do.
Most people don’t realize that ME wasn’t completely terrible. Same with Vista, and 8.1. Windows 8 is unforgivable. The UI changes were simply a mistake. Made the OS really difficult to use unless you were fat fingering a touchscreen all day… That’s the only scenario where the UI of W8 made any sense. For kB/mouse users, out was just unwieldy. The function of W8 was fine, but it was like putting a sports car motor into a minivan, and then loading it up with lead plates and wondering why the handling sucks.
I have… Thoughts about W11 too, but they’re more under the hood complaints. Some UI complaints but mostly under the hood stuff that makes me go hmmm.
Windows ME broke DOS support just to pretend it wasn’t 9x in a new hat. At the time - this was kind of a big deal. 98 was objectively better for any typical suburban setup.
XP was also NT in a new hat, but they had it fake all the bugs that popular games expected. Plus the hat was nice. That Fisher-Price UI era was genuinely great, especially compared to modern ultra-flat nonsense. Windows 95 had instantly visible hierarchy in sixteen colors. Nowadays you can’t even tell what’s clickable without guesswork and memorization. Or at best you get a dozen indistinct monochrome icons.
Windows 7 was the only time Microsoft nailed everything. Each XP service pack broke and fixed a random assortment of features. Everything from 8 onward is broken on purpose, first for the stupid tablet interface (when WinCE’s 9x UI worked just fucking fine on 3" screens with Super Nintendo resolutions), then to openly betray all trust and control. I would still be using Windows 7 to-day if modern malware wasn’t so scary. It’s not even about vulnerability - I must have reinstalled XP once a month, thanks to the sketchiest codec packs ever published. But since I can’t back up my whole hard drive on five dollars worth of DVD-Rs, the existence of ransomware pushed me back to Linux Mint.
There are so many sins that have been committed in the name of progress.
Most of the early Windows games won’t even run anymore. There’s been more lost than we can reasonably understand.
My journey took me through to Windows 2000 pro (as opposed to server) for a while there. I eventually moved over to XP, then Vista, then 7.
I was one of the first people I knew of that ran Vista 64 bit. Most didn’t have the hardware for it, but the core 2 duo in my mobile computer was capable, so I jumped ship as soon as I could.
I’m both unsurprised and disappointed that itanium, Intel’s first attempt at 64 bit CPUs, failed. Starting new with an instruction set that was built from the ground up for modern applications was both very ambitious and presented a fairly unique opportunity for the industry, but they just couldn’t move enough units, and AMD saw the writing on the wall, and created the 64 bit extension for the x86 instruction set.
Oh well. Another opportunity lost.
We have another one with the whole ARM processor race that Apple kicked off with the M1. I’m only sad that it went to arm and not RISC V. That would have been quite the change.
Oh well. Maybe RISC V will see another opportunity soon, since NASA commissioned a new generation of radiation hardened processors for spaceflight computers, and they’re RISC V… Who knows.
I’m off on a tangent. Weeeee