Intel might have slipped that Windows 12 is indeed coming next year | Company CFO sees benefits of a coming “Windows Refresh”::undefined
Intel might have slipped that Windows 12 is indeed coming next year | Company CFO sees benefits of a coming “Windows Refresh”::undefined
Then xp to vista happened and it looked pretty but was unusable. Then 7 came out and it solved all the BS and was a relief. Then 8 came out and it looked pretty but was unusable. Nobody is quite sure what happened with 9 but 10 was ok I guess, better than 8. Then I started using Linux because I was sick of the bullshit.
9 was skipped because there was concern with old/lazily coded programs running in compatibility mode for Windows 9x versions.
Basically, when the windows versions went from Win95/98/ME to 2000 and XP, some lazy programmers went “well by the time Windows 2090 rolls around I’ll be dead” and just had their programs check the windows version for a 9 when deciding whether or not to run in compatibility mode. If it detected a 9, then it would run in compatibility for 95/98/ME.
Microsoft wanted to avoid this potential issue, so they just skipped version 9 altogether and jumped straight to 10.
Unrelated but didn’t a lot of things about that time skip a few versions to land at 10? Like I don’t think there was an iPhone 9 and so on.
Marketing isn’t a joke, who said that
They also didn’t want to appear to be “behind” OS X.
Regarding why they just jumped to 10, I subscribe to the theory that enough software that required XP or greater checked for OS compatibility by looking for the string “Windows 9*” to catch both 95 and 98
Funny thing. The reputation of Vista is universal, so I don’t doubt it at all. However, I ran Vista starting from beta and never had a problem with it. I must have had the magic hardware combination that worked. My least favourite Windows release was 8.
As someone who was stuck on vista as a teen towards the end of its life is wasn’t a bad OS, but it did deserve the hate early on for being a buggy OS that was poorly optimised for the average hardware of the time. But then I moved to 7 and fell in love with it( or at least I thought it was great).
Then I upgraded to 10 and hated it. I switched to Mac for a couple of years and started liking unix but missed the hardware of PCs and didn’t like the 10.15+ direction of MacOS.
So I switched to Linux( which I had messed with on an old laptop on and off as a teen, but at the time liked all my proprietary crap I was used too) and have never looked back.
I was one of the few people who bought the original Surface and I actually loved Windows 8 on that thing. I even used Internet Explorer because the touch interface was fantastic. It all got taken away though.
Vista was more stable and usable for me than xp ever was.
I got a laptop with Vista when it was new and though I’m wasn’t really a Windows fan, I never really had a problem with it. I suppose I had never used XP though.
Vista became pretty good after tons of upgrades.
The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.
Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.
W7 was really just a vista service pack, but they had to rebrand it to make people want it.
I was running an it services business at the time, so got to see a broad number of machines and peoples complaints.
I think the massive jump in ram required was a huge problem, it went from most people having 128mb to 256mb, to a minimum of 512, but a reality of 2gb required.
Plus the indexer was relentless and just smashed HDDs.
Drivers were a problem too but people understood they would need to be have upgrades for their fancy new system.
I’ll second the issues with the indexer. I disabled it for every disk I had because the additional I/O load for disks was ridiculous. I remember benchmarking game launches with it enabled and disabled to see how much of a difference there would be, and I saw some games take a full minute less to load into a playable state.
I don’t know if I just had more files than the average consumer or what, but they didn’t anticipate the load under certain scenarios.
I finally jumped onto the linux train after the rumour that windows 11 was going to have ads right in windows explorer. I’m glad it never happened but now that i’m on linux for my main PC… i see no reason to go back.