appiah4 wrote:

Since you dumped MS-DOS in with Windows I guess I can come out and say OS/2 Warp 3?

Errius wrote:

Has anyone used Windows XP Professional 64-bit version? What's it like?

I tried it out of curiosity and for home/gaming use it was pure shit.

Ehh, I used XP 64-bit back in the day. It was fine for games and home use once there were drivers for my hardware.

I used XP as my main OS from 2001 to 2012, so I think I'll have to go with that...

Windows 10 (except for v1809, which is giving me headaches on old hardware).

Even after this many years I still love the UI of Windows 3.x... something which is kinda hard to bring back on modern OSes... But still, there's no denying that Windows 3.x brings back many good memories (games, apps, etc.). There's Windows NT 3.51 as its NT counterpart, but given the very limited support of hardware I could hardly get it working on real systems (it could still be something fun to play with using a VM, though).

Not sure if ReactOS could one day get a theme capable of imitating it when it matures, but you can actually get a near-perfect imitation of it via this theme on Linux XFCE. Unfortunately, since XFCE doesn't have good HiDPI support (as my current PC monitor at home has 4K 60Hz) I can only use it on my working laptop which is uses a 1080p monitor and it fits very well with it.

For other versions of Windows, I still recommend Windows XP/2003 since it's relatively lightweight to run, provided your hardware are still supported. Use Windows 7/8.1 for newer hardware, but beware that Windows 8/8.1 has a much lower usage share than Windows 7 that some manufacturers (like AMD) have ditched support for them while retaining support for Windows 7.

I'm not quite a fan of Windows 10, given how complicated the ecosystem has become (and how hard to get rid of those unwanted stuffs), but with Windows 7 support ending next year and some manufacturers already ditched Windows 8/8.1 support (even though its extended support isn't ending anytime soon), we'll soon have no other choices...

cyclone3d wrote:

Ehh, I used XP 64-bit back in the day. It was fine for games and home use once there were drivers for my hardware.

I had an ATI card back then, and the driver experience was pretty terrible for me.

Windows 3.11 is probably the version I find most nostalgic, loved the clean interface. Still my choice for retro builds on systems below a 486 DX2 66. (But also seems to be a lot of peoples choice for an OS install on anything below 1GHz if YouTube and eBay is anything to go by)

Windows 95C with the plus pack is probably my favourite, if we're still talking systems from the 90s era.

Fast forward to the present day and we're talking Windows 7 and for me still has something over Windows 10. Sadly as mentioned I've had a few systems pass through my hands which didn't support anything below Windows 10.

WinNT 4.0 Workstation remains my all-time favorite release, it had all the fundamentals of a proper modern operating system (protected memory, fault-tolerant filesystem, multiprocessing, support for 3D accelerators, etc) but it was still lean and efficient. A minimal installation used about 16MB of RAM at startup, and with networking & OpenGL it still used less than 32MB. There was even a build that ran on MIPS workstations. I used it for years on all kinds of systems and still have it installed on a few of my vintage PCs.

I think that for me, I actually like all versions of Windows except the few ones I never used, or hardly ever used.

My favorites of all time would be WinME, WinXP (both Home and Pro) and Win7.
But I also liked 95 and 98SE (didn't like 98FE), but not as much as the first 3 I named.
I just never got the hang of Win2k. It kinda worked just fine, but I saw little reason to keep using it.
I also liked Neptune btw 😜
I was never a fan of 8 and 10. Vista seemed like a nice GUI, but other than that I don't really miss it. I am for sure gonna build a Vista rig at some time though, I'm too curious not to 😜

appiah4 wrote:

Errius wrote:

Has anyone used Windows XP Professional 64-bit version? What's it like?

I tried it out of curiosity and for home/gaming use it was pure shit.

appiah4 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Ehh, I used XP 64-bit back in the day. It was fine for games and home use once there were drivers for my hardware.

I had an ATI card back then, and the driver experience was pretty terrible for me.

It seems rather harsh to me to judge an OS to be "pure shit", just because you had some issues installing a driver for a single graphics card 🤣

People assumed that WinME was pure shit for a long time, but they were wrong.
But I do understand that the relatively limited flexibility of XP 64bit will make it more of a challenge to use 😜

I'd have to say that the technology pre-releases were the best versions. So much promise and hype before the usual letdown that was RTM.

Anyone else fondly recall playing around with Windows Longhorn?

oeuvre wrote:

Anyone else fondly recall playing around with Windows Longhorn?

I remember enjoying playing around with it a million times more than I enjoyed using Vista, which I used for an entirety of three days at most.

I used pretty much every pre-release version of Windows 7 too, and somehow that one had a fairly nice RTM..

Windows 2000 Professional 😎

I also like Vista (with Aero interface), Windows 7 and to a lesser extent 98SE.

Oh yes, everybody loved W2K back in the day. It may sound surprising now but there was a time when XP was widely hated (bloat, activation) and a lot of people stuck with W2K until XP-exclusive games became common.

At the time I was ready to drop 95 in the wastepaper basket when 98 came out. But I still have a fondness for 95 - especially now that I've had time to carefully install and set it up. I like 95c quite a lot now and install it in preference to 98 on most of my 95-1999 retro builds.

I stuck with 98se way past the sell-by day, skipping ME and 2K, and when I finally moved to XP I was really blown away. XP is probably my overall favorite even if I'll only rarely ever use it again. BUT - after clinging to it way past the release of W7, when I moved to 7 I was really struck by it speed and stability and didn't think about XP much after that. Gave W7 another good ride.

I moved to W10 just this last October, and to be honest - W10 made me forget *entirely* about W7. As much as I liked 7 I don't forsee ever installing it again in any 'retro' application. I was comfortable with 10 right off the bat - the shortest burn-in time by a long shot.

My 'antique' builds are based around: W95a (pure vanilla), W95c (upgraded explorer navigation & USB), W98se and XP. While I appreciate DOS/W3.1 I am old enough to have not grown up with PCs as a kid. And the last thing I wanted to do in my 20s and early 30s was waste time indoors "playing games". It wasn't until I was well into my 30s that the CD phenomina and accessible W95 interface made a enough of a big splash that I decided to buy: (a) had the cash (adult!) and (b) there was a burgeoning class of beguiling point & click adventure games that intruiged me, and flight simulators had become graphically pretty impressive.

It's a little bit of an irony that people much younger than me are devoted to the earliest era of computing, while older guys like me that didn't bother to get involved until much later for basically "night life" reasons, are more in with the second generation stuff.

I actually used to like Windows XP quite a lot, but because you can't activate it anymore and you will end up in an activation loop, it's now a useless POS. I don't have it installed on any old pc.

Errius wrote:

Oh yes, everybody loved W2K back in the day. It may sound surprising now but there was a time when XP was widely hated (bloat, activation) and a lot of people stuck with W2K until XP-exclusive games became common.

I stuck with Windows 2K and did not move to Windows XP until late 2005/early 2006.

oeuvre wrote:

Anyone else fondly recall playing around with Windows Longhorn?

No, I only play with my long horn.

SpectriaForce wrote:

I actually used to like Windows XP quite a lot, but because you can't activate it anymore and you will end up in an activation loop, it's now a useless POS. I don't have it installed on any old pc.

Windows XP does not need activation if you use a proper VLK/OEM.

dr_st wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Anyone else fondly recall playing around with Windows Longhorn?

No, I only play with my long horn.

I have no favourite, I just use it because of necessity to run software (games mostly).

SpectriaForce wrote:

I actually used to like Windows XP quite a lot, but because you can't activate it anymore and you will end up in an activation loop, it's now a useless POS. I don't have it installed on any old pc.

Well as dr_st you do not have to, if you have the right OEM or VLK, but again there are ways around bypassing the XP activation.