I guess I'm a bit of a Microsoft enthusiast, having used and even enjoyed, for the most part, everything from DOS 5 to Windows 11. I even remember firing up Vista Beta 2 for the first time and thinking: THIS, this right here, is the freakin' bomb -- a notion I still agree with to this day.

So it almost hurt when I tried Windows 8 and couldn't quite get behind it; didn't quite understand Microsoft's vision for the future. It just seemed to be a step backwards in every way, from appearance to core system functionality. Metro and the redesigned desktop environment were ugly as all get-out. Initially, you couldn't have multiple Store apps onscreen at once. You couldn't even window the bloody things to share valuable screen real estate with your regular Win32 apps! Then there was that Charms bar malarkey... jeez-o-pete! I mean, I never even liked the cereal, yet there it was on my computer, ready to rear its ugly head whenever I moused too close to the edge of the screen. It even gobbled up my shut down & restart buttons, presumably as a final FU.

Speaking of Windows shut down, it took me ages to find out why 8 seemed to progressively get less and less friendly with my Bluetooth headset: fast startup was enabled by default, which basically hibernated the OS every time I clicked shut down. Indeed, the one thing that Windows 8 seemed to do better than Win7 -- its ability to start up, like, hella quick dude -- was basically a lie.

At the time, I worked extensively with music/audio editing software, so I quickly realized that Win8 increased the occurrence of deferred procedure calls on my system. At times, this made working with audio software quite a tightrope walk. If I remember correctly, early builds of Windows 10 from 2015 to 2017 were largely based off of Windows 8 and had the same problem with DPCs, at least on my machine. I eventually decided to downgrade and slum it with Windows 7 for a few more years. By the time I had built up the courage to try Windows 10 again (build 1903 this time), all of the issues I faced earlier had fortunately been eradicated. High DPCs were a thing of the past, and the OS itself had finally become as fast and reliable as the Win7 I knew and loved.

I seem to recall Microsoft (or perhaps someone else) saying that a lot of the Win8 gunk had been removed from Win10's core for a 2018 build. Though at the moment I can't find anything that confirms this, it does explain why 1903 felt so much cleaner, like less of a kludge, than the earlier versions.

I am glad that Windows 8 is finally gone--not only from the computing public but from the guts of Win10 as well (that is, if it was ever there to begin with. Perhaps I subconsciously enjoy blaming Windows 8 for Win10's initial shortcomings). Whatever. I'm just happy that, since 2019, I've been able to appreciate Windows again.

Windows Vista Ultimate with all the updates behaves essentially like Windows 7, its a rock solid OS on appropriate hardware, I cant really fault it.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-12, 06:58:

Windows Vista Ultimate with all the updates behaves essentially like Windows 7, its a rock solid OS on appropriate hardware, I cant really fault it.

Windows Vista was literally majestic.
It had much more flying colors than Windows 7.

Unfortunately, together with the sophisticated hardware requirements of the time, Vista left a bitter aftertaste to many users, so to say.

I mean, many PCs had lousy RAM configurations that were inadequate for Windows XP, even.

Likely because those weak XP PCs were previously Windows 98 PCs themselves.

Back then when I saw how horrible these PC suffered running Windows and how the HDDs rattled due to the excessive swap-file usage,
I sometimes directly criticized people for being so stubborn and simple-minded for not investing in a proper amount of RAM.

Of course, looking back I realize that this behavior of mine was wrong.
- I was way too nice. I should have gently stomped on their feet, too. 😂

Edit: There's one thing that Windows 7 did right, though.
It reintroduced GDI acceleration. Vista didn't support this due to its driver model and the Composition Manager.

Back in the day when windows 8.x recently came out, I had no love for that OS since the user interface was clunky, second thing, I had XP and 7 running flawlessly on my computers. Only once, I had to reinstall a notebook for 8.x for a friend of a friend.

Cheers,

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-01-12, 06:14:

At the time, I worked extensively with music/audio editing software, so I quickly realized that Win8 increased the occurrence of deferred procedure calls on my system. At times, this made working with audio software quite a tightrope walk. If I remember correctly, early builds of Windows 10 from 2015 to 2017 were largely based off of Windows 8 and had the same problem with DPCs, at least on my machine. I eventually decided to downgrade and slum it with Windows 7 for a few more years. By the time I had built up the courage to try Windows 10 again (build 1903 this time), all of the issues I faced earlier had fortunately been eradicated. High DPCs were a thing of the past, and the OS itself had finally become as fast and reliable as the Win7 I knew and loved.

For me DPC on Win8/8.1 was okay, comparable to that of Win7. Occasionaly there are some spikes but no real disturbances for my use cases.

Early Win10 builds got it worse. System freezes once in a while with DPC measuring software reporting latency values as high as in millions. The network stack was flawed to the core. With onboard ethernet the DPC spikes come from ndis.sys. When I disabled the onboard ethernet and used a USB one, then it would be tcpip.sys causing the DPC spikes. Same phenomena in both cases, freezing the system once in a while.

Not to mention these massive DPC spikes also had an impact to the system RTC. Keep Win10 running for a day and the system's RTC would fall behind by about 1 minute, so I ended up having to make time syncing more often. From what I remember, time syncing occurs once a week by default, which is enough under normal circumstances.

I'm not sure when the DPC freeze issue was addressed, but it wasn't until 1607 did I start trying Win10 again and I didn't recall having any more freezes caused by DPC from that point on. However, at this point I've already gotten myself familiar with using Ubuntu/Linux Mint, and later on Arch Linux.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-12, 01:40:

I find this odd ...Windows 10 professional has never thrown adds at me, don't even have them in my start menu, Ive run Windows 10 for Workstations previously and same there. (Win8 and 11 also never had adds though 8 did have the stupid candy crush shit but its not hard to get rid of)

Must be just the Home version that does this, or perhaps its just a US thing where MS can get away with stupid adds . .not even sure why people buy the home version. (Home = non professional)

Sorry, I should've mentioned I was using the "Pro" version of Windows 10. It has the same amount of ads as the Home version in my experience to the point where Microsoft should've called it "Home Premium" instead of "Pro".
And no, my copy of Windows 10 "Pro" didn't get downgraded to Home by an update, as I took a screenshot of the About screen in Settings just before I went back to 8.1. Also, I wasn't using a pirated copy, I was using an official ISO download fresh from Microsoft.

KCompRoom2000 wrote on 2023-01-13, 08:22:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-12, 01:40:

I find this odd ...Windows 10 professional has never thrown adds at me, don't even have them in my start menu, Ive run Windows 10 for Workstations previously and same there. (Win8 and 11 also never had adds though 8 did have the stupid candy crush shit but its not hard to get rid of)

Must be just the Home version that does this, or perhaps its just a US thing where MS can get away with stupid adds . .not even sure why people buy the home version. (Home = non professional)

Sorry, I should've mentioned I was using the "Pro" version of Windows 10. It has the same amount of ads as the Home version in my experience to the point where Microsoft should've called it "Home Premium" instead of "Pro".
And no, my copy of Windows 10 "Pro" didn't get downgraded to Home by an update, as I took a screenshot of the About screen in Settings just before I went back to 8.1. Also, I wasn't using a pirated copy, I was using an official ISO download fresh from Microsoft.

Yeah I'm in Australia and we don't get the adds here, we get the occasional push for Edge and Office 365 but its very very rare and only ever at certain points. There seems to be this thing where they are allowed to spam US users with adds but other countries have rather strict laws against such bull shittery.

I guess its a lot like how Steam fell afoul of Aussie consumer protection laws and got bitch slapped for it and were forced to change their refund policy to meet the Australian laws. These changes actually improved Steam for all users as they had to make the new refund policy available to their entire user base.

The biggest difference between Home and Pro is the fact Pro lets you manage updates better. Home version is garabge which no one should be using.

Windows 8.1 was the first that got me into dual booting Linux. For a good while I used W8.1 for gaming and Linux for everything else, then as time progressed the inconvenience of rebooting won out and booted up Linux less. Briefly updated to Windows 10, but hated it, then Proton came around and when it matured enough, I switched completely to Linux and it's my main platform on modern PCs and laptops for the past 3 or 4 years.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-12, 06:58:

Windows Vista Ultimate with all the updates behaves essentially like Windows 7, its a rock solid OS on appropriate hardware, I cant really fault it.

Except with far far far less software support. And no, I don't want to resort to hacks (KernelEx-equivalents and the like). I would much rather do an in-place upgrade to Win7 (which I did). 😀

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-13, 09:21:

The biggest difference between Home and Pro is the fact Pro lets you manage updates better. Home version is garabge which no one should be using.

Yes. Windows Pro actually gives control to the user. Windows Home controls the user instead.

dr_st wrote on 2023-01-13, 10:53:

Except with far far far less software support. And no, I don't want to resort to hacks (KernelEx-equivalents and the like). I wo […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-12, 06:58:

Windows Vista Ultimate with all the updates behaves essentially like Windows 7, its a rock solid OS on appropriate hardware, I cant really fault it.

Except with far far far less software support. And no, I don't want to resort to hacks (KernelEx-equivalents and the like). I would much rather do an in-place upgrade to Win7 (which I did). 😀

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-13, 09:21:

The biggest difference between Home and Pro is the fact Pro lets you manage updates better. Home version is garabge which no one should be using.

Yes. Windows Pro actually gives control to the user. Windows Home controls the user instead.

And if you want 100% user control then there is Windows10 for Workstations which is pretty much the production environment version which lets you turn off all telemetry, adds, updates and an assortment of other junk even Pro wont let you touch.

You do have to pay extra for it but for Multi core production workstations where 100% stability is required with long periods of uptime its worth that extra cost.

I like 8, certainly better than 10 when it comes to supported color depth if you know what I mean 😜

Fullscreen start is fine (both the "traditional" view and the select-your-own-tiles), and you don't have to use anything else Metro except for configuring fingerprint login*, while there's a lot of stuff that's only available as UWP the newer you go.

* which only requires a password to be set, not a "PIN" (= password but in a different and crippled way) as in 10...

Still can't beat "Windows Classic" or whatever it's called, 9x/2000 in 800x600 on all defaults can fit give or take as many desktop icons/toolbars/window frames as Vista+ with their huge elements can fit in 1280x1024, but then they wouldn't be an iOS7+ wannabe then right!?

And if you want 100% user control

Use scripts like Windows 10 Ameliorated. You can't trust Microsoft with that, not after they retroactively showed that crap into Windows 7. Also Windows 10 for Workstations still requires telemetry to function officially. Only Enterprise/LTSC can function without it (but not really).

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-01-13, 15:10:

And if you want 100% user control

Use scripts like Windows 10 Ameliorated. You can't trust Microsoft with that, not after they retroactively showed that crap into Windows 7. Also Windows 10 for Workstations still requires telemetry to function officially. Only Enterprise/LTSC can function without it (but not really).

Indeed, since Win10, M$ is no longer the MS I used to know. While I did feel concerned about the Secure Boot thing when it came out with Win8, M$ was still mostly sane during the Win8/8.1 period from what I know.

I recall during early Win8/8.1 days, it had a habit of overriding your vendor-provided drivers with a generic one from Windows Update (if the latter is technically newer in terms of version), often causing unexpected breakages. It can be annoying sometimes, but as time went such issues became less often.

PS: If you want 100% user control then DON'T EVER USE Windows on such systems where it matters. Windows, to be precise, Windows NT, was never designed to allow users to alter everything as they please since day one, and over time they put more and more restrictions "in the name of security".

Linux is kinda the opposite. You can control almost all system parameters to the extent that it takes only some one-liners as root to turn it into a brick, and it's all your own responsibility.

Windows 7 was the pinnacle of technology, the last true desktop OS.

After that, stagnation followed, then degeneration.

What we have today may have been updated in terms of features, but the whole paradigm is different.

It's a mobile-/social media-/software-as-a-service hybrid.

And its internals are rotting, too.

Most if not all of the original NT developers must be already fired, retired or gone by now.

That's why no one really dares to further develop the Windows NT line, I think.
Why changes are mainly of cosmetic nature.
Their gurus are nolonger available.
It was them who understood the Native API and related things like the interprocess communication the best.

That's also why MS desperately tries to integrate Linux, I think.
That Windows Sub-System for Linux (WSL), which should be called Linux Sub-System for Windows really (it's serving Windows, not the other way round!) is a good example, I think.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-14, 07:31:

Windows 7 was the pinnacle of technology, the last true desktop OS.

Windows 7 was the pinnacle of Microsoft's technology, the last true desktop Windows.

There, I fixed it for you. I get a bad itch when people imply Windows = OS and not Windows ∈ OS.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-14, 07:31:

That's also why MS desperately tries to integrate Linux, I think.
That Windows Sub-System for Linux (WSL), which should be called Linux Sub-System for Windows really (it's serving Windows, not the other way round!) is a good example, I think.

I think it's much more malicious than that. I think it's just their embrace-extend-extinguish policy again.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_an … inguish?lang=en

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-14, 07:31:

Windows 7 was the pinnacle of technology, the last true desktop OS. […]
Show full quote

Windows 7 was the pinnacle of technology, the last true desktop OS.

After that, stagnation followed, then degeneration.

What we have today may have been updated in terms of features, but the whole paradigm is different.

It's a mobile-/social media-/software-as-a-service hybrid.

And its internals are rotting, too.

Most if not all of the original NT developers must be already fired, retired or gone by now.

That's why no one really dares to further develop the Windows NT line, I think.
Why changes are mainly of cosmetic nature.
Their gurus are nolonger available.
It was them who understood the Native API and related things like the interprocess communication the best.

That's also why MS desperately tries to integrate Linux, I think.
That Windows Sub-System for Linux (WSL), which should be called Linux Sub-System for Windows really (it's serving Windows, not the other way round!) is a good example, I think.

During Vista - 7 era, the rotting internals would get fixed in time. Now the people working on it almost have no idea on what those things are.

Windows 8.1 fixed a lot of the things they did wrong on Windows 8. However it was a clear sign that SaaS is being pushed more, with newer devs having newer ideas. One of the reason why exclusive fullscreen and Ramp no longer works, people don't know what they are, and if some did, they don't have the authority.

Modernisation is required, but wouldn't one feel betrayed when their 20-year old program purchased from 'hard earned money' stops working just to make sure they receive the same quality of service with latest Windows? Life would work on that principle, but non-living things can avoid that, right? Windows 8-11 with updates fixed the early performance issues, but it was always met with technical changes and compromises.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-14, 08:06:

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-14, 07:31:

That's also why MS desperately tries to integrate Linux, I think.
That Windows Sub-System for Linux (WSL), which should be called Linux Sub-System for Windows really (it's serving Windows, not the other way round!) is a good example, I think.

I think it's much more malicious than that. I think it's just their embrace-extend-extinguish policy again.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_an … inguish?lang=en

By the time I get to know the new WSL I already got myself familiar with using Linux as main OS, so it didn't really get me. The ability to install some Linux distros like Ubuntu directly from Windows Store might have prevented some hesitating users from really switching to Linux, though.

On the other hand, take a look at Win11's WSA and ARM64EC. Imagine future ARM64-powered devices that can run almost everything from x64 to ARM64, from Win32 to Android, all using Windows 11 alone.

EDIT: Okay... EEE may not be the appropriate word to use here...

WSL is an evolution of the posix subsystem [a goverment requirement) and sfu (1999) which have been in NT or available for NT for a looong time. So there isn't any way the three e's apply to that, now it's possible the push for wsl being so could be but multiple parts come into play like the purchase of vpc which led to the hypervisor which wsl uses so you would definitely need to do alot of research before jumping to conclusions or just be like everyone else and assume the three e's because why not?

DosFreak wrote on 2023-01-14, 12:37:

WSL is an evolution of the posix subsystem [a goverment requirement) and sfu (1999) which have been in NT or available for NT for a looong time. So there isn't any way the three e's apply to that, now it's possible the push for wsl being so could be but multiple parts come into play like the purchase of vpc which led to the hypervisor which wsl uses so you would definitely need to do alot of research before jumping to conclusions or just be like everyone else and assume the three e's because why not?

I'm aware of the POSIX/UNIX subsystem that existed since early NT but I'm not sure about the extent. I think it's not really about command line tools (so as to make shell scripts portable), as common commands one would encounter in Linux certainly didn't exist for WinNT from what I know. WSL isn't the only subsystem for Linux stuffs, though. There were Cygwin and maybe MSYS before it, though these were separate software and not really part of Windows.

I once read that WSL can talk with video cards through DirectX, something that a real Linux cannot. This may be a potential EEE candidate, but at the moment I haven't seen anything that explicitly required WSL not a real Linux for this reason.

Personally, if Win10 weren't that flawed (namely the DPC spike issues), and that I got to know about WSL's existence sooner, I don't think I would become as familiar with Linux as I am now.

LSS10999 wrote on 2023-01-14, 16:14:

I'm aware of the POSIX/UNIX subsystem that existed since early NT but I'm not sure about the extent. I think it's not really about command line tools (so as to make shell scripts portable), as common commands one would encounter in Linux certainly didn't exist for WinNT from what I know. WSL isn't the only subsystem for Linux stuffs, though.

The POSIX system mainly was a dummy, to satisfy the government (?) requirements in the US, or so I heard.
However, with a bit of work it could run Unix like applications.

Edit: There's a video, entitled "How NOT To Implement the POSIX Standard, Featuring Windows NT ..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOeku3hDzrM

The OS/2 sub system really worked, though.
With an add-on, OS/2 Presentation Manager for NT, it could run Presentation Manager applications (OS/2 v1.3 level).
Sadly, this sub system was removed after NT4/2000.

Microsoft also had a real Unix, XENIX, in the 80s.
My dad has an old copy of it on 5,25" diskettes, I believe.

MS-DOS also had certain Unix features planned at some point.
Please have a look at XeDOS, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo8NG8T4rWs

LSS10999 wrote on 2023-01-14, 16:14:

There were Cygwin and maybe MSYS before it, though these were separate software and not really part of Windows.

I remember them. I used them in the 2000s to compile DOSBox on Windows XP, I vaguely remember.
They were useful for compiling *nix software on Windows, in general.

Another project I fondly remember is CoLinux/AndLinux.
It can run WINE, even. Still works on XP SP3. Merely the URLs for repositories must be updated.
http://www.colinux.org/