Wait for windows 8

Dark_Angel · 22 May 2011 at 12:28

Tute said:
The only version of Windows that was properly crap was Me.

I certainly didn't have any problems with 98 or Vista? Sadly Vista's problem was that it had to follow XP, and people rejected it out of hand simply because of that.

I'd agree.

HangTime · 22 May 2011 at 22:56

Aod said:
the fact that NT4 came out in 1996 and was superior in stability (though not functionality) to ME which was released four years later left a sour taste in peoples mouths.

The thing is though NT4 was very much viewed as a corporate OS and ME was supposed to be the successor to Win9x in the same way that Win2k was to take over from NT. So your comments about ME being (pardon the pun) window dressing for a 16bit shell were applicable to it's direct predecessor as well. So it doesn't explain why ME got so much bad press compared to Win98 which also came out after NT4.

I don't know how much NT4 Workstation cost, but I only ever knew one person who used it as a home OS (that's not to say it was rare, but certainly dwarfed by comparison with your typical home user setup of Win9x). In fact I suspect many OEMs catering for the consumer market never even provided the option of NT4, you got Win95/98/98se/ME (depending on the year) or maybe Win2kpro if you stumped up some extra cash.

Burnsy2023 · 23 May 2011 at 12:07

The issue with NT4 was driver compatibility which was poor in the early days. It took until Win 2000 for driver support to become mainstream.

Masterdog · 23 May 2011 at 20:47

XP wasn't terrific out of the box either, certainly not as good as 7 or even Vista (in my unpopular opinion). It took a couple of service packs to make it the rock-solid beast it became. Using it now, however, shows how refined Windows 7 has become - there's so many little features I miss.

linktoinsanity · 24 May 2011 at 07:56

kylew said:
Windows 7 is pretty much Windows Vista with a new interface and ever so slight tweaks, the thing that's changed is the base level of hardware has increased a lot since Vista came out, that in itself has given the illusion of 7 being a lot better than Vista upon release, as the hardware requirements for both were pretty much the same.

Although I agree that a lot of dislikes for Vista are unjust, and most of your post the bit highlighted in bold I do not agree with. Vista runs poorly on lower end hardware yes, whilst on the SAME hardware, 7 runs fine. Vista was more secure than XP, had some nice features, but was very bloated, slow on older hardware and had an annoyingly intrusive UAC. I turned it off on the occasion that I used Vista, 7 I see no need to.

Basicly Windows 7 tweaked Vista very well and was essentially what Vista should have been.

I agree it was different enough from XP that it was doomed to be hated by the numerous users used to XP though so was often unfairly dismissed for that reason.

I also found some software compatability issues myself and still dual boot Windows 7 with XP for that same reason.

bledd · 24 May 2011 at 08:14

Most of the issues are driver problems in the early stages of an OS

7 was such a hit because most of its drivers are shared with Vista

Burnsy2023 · 24 May 2011 at 10:04

bledd. said:
Most of the issues are driver problems in the early stages of an OS

7 was such a hit because most of its drivers are shared with Vista

The driver model, especially graphics, changed significantly for Vista from XP. As people probably remember, it took ATI and Nvidia a long time to get a stable driver available.

stoofa · 24 May 2011 at 11:25

Aod said:
Be serious here, Windows ME was awful. Microsoft had dragged the GUI-over-DOS system too far by the time ME came out, when i used it, it was so incredibly unstable, sometimes it'd crash just sitting there.

not to mention that, with DOS at it's creaky-beating heart, ME was essentially 16-bit with a 32-bit emulator providing enhanced functionality, but this isn't exactly ideal and the system really did tend to fall over if you asked too much of it. imagine you were writing a word document and hadn't saved in a while, and you open up paint to edit an image for the document, but your hard-drive's busy and paint doesn't load properly... *BAM* windows falls over and you lose your document. fantastic...

the fact that NT4 came out in 1996 and was superior in stability (though not functionality) to ME which was released four years later left a sour taste in peoples mouths.

You need to understand that until XP we had two distinct lines of Microsoft OS.
You had the NT line aimed at workstations and the corporate desktop and you had the 9x line aimed at the home user.

There is a good reason that the NT line was much more stable, one of the major features was a HAL which meant that applications could not speak directly to hardware and instead had o go through the HAL.
This alone made the OS very stable - however made life difficult for programmers of games for example.

What many people don't realise about Windows 2000 is that for most of its development it was called NT 5.
I still have a CD at home with NT 5 Pre-beta release on it.

It was only later in its development that it was decided that it might be the bridging product between the two OS lines and so was renammed 2000.
Right at the end of development it was decided that maybe the home user wasn't quite ready for something built on NT and that is why it was advised for 2000 for the corporate environment only.

ME wasn't "that bad" when compared to the rest of the 9x line.
At the time of its release I supported many different OS's and we didn't have any major issues with ME that we hadn't already seen in 95 or 98.
However when you compared it to the OS's built on the NT platform it was nowhere near as good.

Along came WinXP - the true bridging product and the rest is history, the death of the 9x line of OS's.