SHITTIEST WINDOWS POLL

Me and Vista both were trash and never were any good, most of their others usually got ok by the second big update pack.

Seems I recall NT even though the 'pro' OS had a couple of really basic things not included that were a pain in the a$$ but I cannot remember what it was.

oh yeah ME and vista were both godawful, what was up with that

Has to be 8. This shit:

https://i.imgur.com/wPMTv7K.png

Playing with 1.0 on my low-end PC clone was fun for an hour or two, but mainly it made me wish I could afford a Macintosh Plus or SE.

3.1 was the first version I had to use in a workplace. Any value it might have offered over character-based DOS was offset by its constant crashes and general incapacity. It could grudgingly run early web browsers and ftp clients, so it had that going for it. By this time I had access to Macs, so I didn't have to depend on 3.1 for anything important.

95 and 98 caused me the most misery because I was supervising people who were trying to work with them. The gap between what we needed to do and what Windows allowed was probably at its widest with 95.

XP rarely drew much attention to itself as long as we stayed in our lanes with Word, Excel, Outlook, and browsers. At the time that seemed like a huge improvement.

Since then I've had to tinker with 7 and 10 occasionally in non-work settings. 10 feels quite usable, almost comparable to MacOS since Apple has let that platform slide.

they all suck but i'm voting for the one i have to use now, 10. i hate how it constantly nags me about setting up a microsoft cloud account. at one point it wouldn't let me log in at all and i thought it had brickwalled my laptop but somehow i got around it. old man yells at cloud, lol.

xp was ok iirc.

never used most of them but this has to be 8, which barely even offered the advantages of the titular "windows"

Remembered what it was, NT did not have a built in drive de-fragmentation app, which was kinda needed considering the era.

Corp IT pretty much ignored Me, Vista & 8 for the most part, at least where I worked.

Win 7 was really stable after SP2. It's scrap now, especially the 32bit version as there are is horde of people trying to find the new exploits. That said, ye olde BSOD's are a lot less common than they used to be.

The stuff that cracks me up is more the cheapniz in licensing like W10 not having a built in DVD-movie CODEC - but some of that is that they get sued if they include their own product or license one, so they said fxxk it and left it out in the current version.

The gap between what we needed to do and what Windows allowed was probably at its widest with 95.

voted for 95 because of this. ... 98 and 7 were actually ok ... having to make peace with 10, which reminds me of when Mac went from 9.2 to OSX which was really annoying at the beginning, like super fucking annoying with the dual boot bullshit, and also because I had felt like my knowledge of handling the extensions manager was valuable and then it became obsolete.

Windows 10 managed to fuck up solitaire. Seriously, I had to re-install solitaire. It has ads now for those of you non-Windows people lurking on this poll

Windows Me is probably the stupidest -- a DOS-based system where it was impossible to access the command prompt. And this was released after Windows 2000 had already gotten rid of DOS!

XP after service pack 2 was decent. The biggest problem was that if you used it regularly, then the registry would get clogged up and the system would get slower. Fixed in 7+.

I used Windows 1 on my pc in the late 80s and it was the most useless piece of software I had.

8 was a fucking abomination, made even worse by the number of extended conversations I had to have with my computer illiterate dad trying to navigate him around the fucker

I look back on my time working with Windows as I might on a toxic and abusive relationship. And now my IT department tells me I won't be able to replace my macOS laptop with a macOS laptop because "we can't deploy our standard environment on it". I use the Office suite and occasional Adobe stuff. Guess I will have to buy my own laptop.

At work I've used 3.1, 95, NT4, XP, 7, 10 on my own computers and minimal amount of Server 2003, 2008 and 2016.

At home I've used 98, XP, 7 and 10.

So I've skipped most of the worst versions. 7 was probably the best, maybe XP.

My laptop running 10 is buggy as fuck at the moment, File Explorer keeps hanging opening folders and I am sick to death of it, am actually going through the process of finding equivalents to everything I use on Linux before I finally ditch this shit.

is everyone else having these problems with 10?

* large folders take a long time to load
* deleting or moving a file means the whole folder needs to be refreshed
* picture viewer takes upwards of a minute to open (I've taken to opening pictures in paint instead)
* setting timer for updates doesn't work, the updates don't install overnight unless you manually start them

*yes
*no
*yes
*never tried

to be fair the second one doesn't always happen, just whenever I'm busy and need to find some files.

yes to the first 3 - folders are getting worse and worse - now when I open a folder, even if it only has a few files in it, File Explorer will verrry slooowwwly paint each file one at a time, it just shows the icons with blank file names, and the file names appear about 5-10 seconds at a time. It's near unusable.

restarting fixes that, for a while, then it starts happening again. I've even replaced the hard drive recently but that made no difference

also the search is awful now, just the fucking worst. someone at some point decided that there should be a single box for searching for files, searching for programmes / settings and - for some reason! - searching the internet, of course it does none of these effectively, I have taken to naming documents with a string of keywords if I ever want to find them again.

I had them problems with picture viewer and slow files with my last pc. My latest one has 16 gb of ram and this doesn't happen anymore.

yeah my desktop's getting on and i'm inclined to give it some of the blame

unfortunately this laptop also has 16GB of RAM, and File Explorer is only using 90MB anyway, so I think that is irrelevant.

My first thought was they're all shit and endlessly irritating... apart from 7, and I see there are others 7 stans itt, yet I don't actually know what I'm basing that on.

yeah I just presumed more ram equals faster processing power, but perhaps the slowing down problem is just an aging pc thing.

I still don't get Apple being some panacea or anything. They just have everything so locked down, you can't really DO much of anything if they are screwing up. I think their phones are nice devices from a functional standpoint, but when they screw up and often in some damn peculiar ways, they can be pretty much 'get a new one' or wipe to scratch. I hate supporting them.

They were good for some stuff that Windows could not do 20 years ago but even then they were shit for trying to hook into a network and talk to other things. Apple's stuff is ridiculously overpriced if you want something with a decent sized hard drive. I'd price systems out and just never could pull the trigger myself.

Going to a Linux laptop instead of Windows...unless you are an enthusiast that loves digging in, have fun brother. Good boxes if you want it lean and mean to do just certain types of things and it might be to the point you could use one for a basic web box - but you better be 'into' Linux still do do so.

I was very intrigued by the title of this thread, but what a disappointment it turned out to be

I sacked off my window cleaner years ago, so my windows are indeed quite shitty!

https://i.redd.it/nlr2pwazhf0z.jpg

Going to a Linux laptop instead of Windows...unless you are an enthusiast that loves digging in, have fun brother.

this might've been the case 10 years ago, but not really nowadays. OK it helps that I am OK using a command line, but apart from typing "sudo apt install" I haven't had to do much. I've stuck Linux Mint on my old laptop and so far have either found some Linux equivalent of programs I use on Windows or I can just run the actual Windows programs with wine. The only thing I might have issues with is games and some of those will run on wine or a Steam compatibility thing.

Some of the Windows programs actually run faster via wine on my 9 year old laptop (that overheats if I run Windows on it) than they do on this 2.5 year old laptop!

Definitely ME for, er, me. But how much of that was down to the ineptly-built Fujitsu-Siemens desktop it was running on, I'm not sure. Within a year I'd had to replace the soundcard, and both disk drives. But it was endlessly crashy.

3.1, XP, Server 2012 R2, 7 and 10 for work - 7 and 10 have been fine.
95, ME, XP and 8.1 at home - XP best by a long way.

I'm Mac for non-work now, but that's another thread...

8 before the 8.1 update was pretty bad iirc

I had to take a Windows 95 test to get my job at this company 16.5 years ago.

I was hired in 2004.

We didn't use Windows 95 at the company then. it didn't make any sense. but i had no problem because it was pretty familiar still.

I remember everybody hating on it, but 8 was the goofy one because they wanted everything to be so tile-y.

so that.

folders taking long to load is usually windows trying to make custom thumbnail pictures. i can't remember the steps to disable it.

yeah if you have a folder full of images with thumbnails as the view it takes forever for them all to render, which is annoying because i have a couple folders full of random png icons that i have multiple copies of in different colors and i can't tell what any of them are until the thumbnails decide to show up.

Which was the one that wanted you to “swipe” even if you had a desktop with a mouse? That was horrible. 8? 9?

xxp don't think that's my problem, it does this in folders with no images in. there seems to be some corruption that happens to folders that have a lot of changes to them - it gets much worse in temp folders that I use for scripts, even things like renaming a folder can take 30 seconds. if I remember I open a CMD prompt to rename folders because File Explorer is so unusable. I'm talking about a folder that has nothing in it but other folders! but renaming a subfolder causes Explorer to hang, it's ridiculously shit

my other current beef is I sometimes rip vinyl/cassettes to my laptop, and even if I shut down every single other program (including shutting down things like Chrome running in the background) while using the audio editor, some fucking MSOFUCK.svc or WindowsUpdateMangler will run (looking at Task Manager) and my audio editor will have buffer underruns and can't save the audio fast enough. it's fucking absurd, when my old crappy laptop from 2012 can run Cool Edit Pro through Wine and can keep up absolutely fine.

Voted Windows 3.0. I once installed it on a 386SX laptop with 1MB of RAM, and after the installation procedure completed, I rebooted the laptop and it said '

Windows 3.0 requires 4MB of memory to run

I turn off thumbnails whenever I can because of this loading/rendering problem -- unless I am working with pictures. ... which I do sometimes for work.

There definitely is "a thing" with Windows 10 where after a year/18 months things get slow and crash-y and I seriously contemplate spending $4k on a mac that runs windows as whatever their VM thing is now (I remember doing this with my 2003 powerbook and it just got too slow so I bought a $200 Dell and now, almost 15 years later ... )

All the dumb background processes

also -- since many of you are smart people -- is there a way I can change Windows 10 from defaulting to wanting to save to stupid OneDrive ... (see map's annoyance upthread)

I wish I could vote for Vista 100x

I think there was something really shitty about windows 2000 but I forget what it was ... I think I only had to work with it briefly at a job I didn't last too long at

note to self: do a follow up to this poll for SHITTIEST COMPUTER CABLE OR ADAPTER POLL

further reflections: true, yes, 3.x was not necessarily better than just staying in DOS most of the time. but i was also a kid, mainly interested in games, so for a while Windows was only something to open on the way to opening Chip's Challenge or MS Paint. maybe to some extent, little icon shorcuts to EXE files replaced the MENUSYS.bat text menu system by which we'd organized all our applications and games. but word processing was the only area where I experienced the jump to the GUI (replacing Word Perfect with Ami Pro) as a total revolution in user experience.

i always forget that Microsoft Bob was not a hilariously dumbed-down OS in its own right, but like a weird skin/toolkit to be installed over top of 3.x and 95. weird. but i guess the era was full of hoonja-doonjas for putterers and tinkerers, little add-ons that today would either be built into the monopoly OS, or just not bothered with at all. After Dark for your screensavers! Wired For Sound Pro for linking goofy sound effects to system events! Icon-Do-It for customizing the icons! and so on...

Boring: that was 8, so bad that they skipped doing a 9 (was there some other rationale attempted?). It gets my vote easily since I managed to skip running ME and Vista. The running joke is that only every other version is "good".... anyway going to wait and see with 11 for a bit.

+1 on Linux desktop not being the ordeal it used to be.

do not accept any version of Windows which does not support sheep.exe

What would Clippy do

i was told they skipped 9 because of concerns that it might cause issues with old programs that searched for "9*" to identify 95/98. don't know if thats actually true though

sarahell you only need one option which is external SCSI. Maybe micro SCSI as well.

yeah i was gonna say

windows sucks

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/14/article-2559753-1B7CAA7300000578-337_634x434.jpg

Windows 8/8.1 because it, unlike every other versh, refused to fucking work wiht any of my external device drivers (midi controllers, ps4 contollers, mice, etc)

And also that tile thing was stupid.

It’s Me by a longshot

I wanted to say ME but I never used or saw it in the field I dont think!!

btw WINDOWS 3.1 ruled at the time, and it had that Skiing game where the yeti would come and eat you.

Did 3.1 have Chip's Challenge?

probably, those were both part of the same 'windows entertainment pack'

the Entertainment Packs are hard to keep track of. some of the software was shovelware/ports, some of it was made to round out the "packs," and some was re-packed in a "best of" title, etc. Minesweeper and some of the other basic card/puzzle games eventually got bundled in with the OS. Wiki says SkiFree was made for pack #3, and Chip's Challenge was a port of an Atari Lynx game (!) from three years earlier, for #4. Pipe Dream was an old LucasArts title for the Amiga... etc.

but generally yes, all those things were available in the 3.x era!

I don't think I know the skiing game. I loved Jezball (possibly a bit later?)

https://i.imgur.com/wHff4DS.png

SHITTIEST COMPUTER CABLE OR ADAPTER POLL

I get the hate for external SCSI, but it has to be USB C.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

oh man i had a really good one for the worst cables/adapters topic, a week or two ago, but couldn't remember which thread that came up in

I still have 8 on my old laptop, and yeah it's a fucking travesty

"Me" is probably the correct answer but I have no first hand experience with it. 95 was pretty bad in retrospect I guess, but it seemed like such a huge step up from Windows 3.1 that it didn't seem so bad (I only really used Windows for Word or similar programs back then, almost all games were still under DOS).

The start menu tile thing in Windows 8/8.1 is enough to make me vote for that.

8 looked bad, but I never had to use it. ME is definitely the worst one I had to use regularly for a bit.

voted Vista, but really a cointoss with that & ME, both were nightmares

The early versions of XP deserve more hate for being incredibly vulnerable to viruses for a mass-market system bought by grandmas. But ME went wrong all the time all by itself so that wins the prize.

I was a field technician for a 3rd party IT support company when ME came out. It was terrible, to the point where Vista actually seemed good (it wasn't).

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wow! Windows 8 beats out all the Mac/Linux ilxors!

I'm of the opinion that the people who voted 8 never used Windows Me

^^^ my Win 8 laptop was way better than any machine running ME (at least until I upgraded it to Win 10 and then it ground to a halt in continuous updates).

I think not that many people have experience with Windows Me? I remember everybody saying to stay away pretty much as soon as it was released and since for many this was still in the days of desktops where you installed the (pirated) OS yourself, it was pretty easy to avoid.

A lot of our clients were small businesses who bought their own PCs from PC World or wherever. The number of times I arrived at someone's office to be confronted with a WinME PC in a box.

I think not that many people have experience with Windows Me?

you gloriously lucky people

I missed most of the terrible versions, went 3.1 -> NT -> 95 -> 98 -> XP -> 7 -> 10.

Probably going to skip 11 and finally go to Linux now I've got pretty much everything I use working.

> 98 -> XP -> 7 -> 10

this was a solid run -- I did the same

I think not that many people have experience with Windows Me?

you gloriously lucky people

― talkin' about his flat tire (DJP), Friday, October 1, 2021 12:51 PM (seven hours ago)

Heh instead I was troubleshooting the classic "turning things off and on to see why different software crashes" in OS9.x

there was a particular thing that always had to be turned off -- like -- I think I got to the point where I would always have it disabled because it made just about everything crash or freeze -- anyone remember?

RAMdoubler?

(sorry, I should have put a trigger warning on that post)

oooh maybe? ... I want to say it was a TWAIN thing