Over the years I’ve seen many flavours of Windows come and go on my various PCs and laptops. Given I’m determined to drop Windows in favour of Linux, now seems a good time to look back at them all.
This won’t be an exhaustive list of all Windows versions. Simply the ones I have used on my personal computers. I have also used Server releases, but we’ll stick to workstation releases for sake of simplicity… and because Windows Server 2008 R2 at top of the list might be confusing for some. 😉
From 2000 to 8.1 I used the Professional editions of Windows, save for Vista, which was Home Premium. Windows 10 and 11 I have both Enterprise and Professional editions.
Windows 7
It had to be, didn’t it? As if my choice of post image hadn’t given it away, anyway. This was peak Microsoft. Fixed a lot of issues with Vista. Worked better on lower power hardware. Wasn’t filled with adware or telemetry. Didn’t have a stupid tile menu screen. The driver issues, introduced with Vista, had been resolved by this point so most things just worked. The only Window release to be great, on day one, without a service pack needed to fix things. MS actually nailed it with this one. The fact there is nothing to complain about makes for a boring paragraph, doesn’t it?. Okay, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Aero Glass. Better?
Windows 2000
This was my first introduction to the NT codebase. 2000 was essentially Windows NT5 but, as was the style at the time, anything released back then had to have 2000 tacked on the end of it. I remember getting a copy of this and replacing either 98 or Me with it. Good god, I suddenly had a stable, power user friendly, network ready, operating system. I ditched the Windows 9x codebase and never looked back. Sure, as it wasn’t an official ‘home’ operating system, some games took some effort to get running, but I did not care. This was a proper OS on my PC at last. I could share the internet connection around the house with ease (well, back then it was any room we had an ethernet cable running to it). Sure, XP was an improvement in many ways, as you would expect from a later version, but no other Windows has given me the wow factor, and experience upgrade, that 2000 did.
Windows XP
For the most part, this was 2000 reskinned (2000 was NT 5, XP was NT 5.1, in terms of kernel versions anyway), with a few extra bells and whistles, ready for home use. De-themed from it’s cartoonish UI, there was very little to tell 2000 and XP apart. Naturally, there were plenty of tweaks and additions under the hood, though. I believe Microsoft initially wanted 2000 to be the OS that bridged the divide between their home and business offerings, but that wouldn’t happen until XP. The 9x codebase was ditched and home users finally got a taste of a decent operating system with, of course, it’s now iconic default wallpaper. I used to either de-theme it or use the nicer on the eyes Royale Noir theme, which was a separate download. As per usual, XP wasn’t perfect out the box, although it was decent. Service Pack 2 helped solidify its status.
Windows XP also introduced 64-bit computing to homes and workstations. Windows-on-Windows (WoW64) allowed for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications to seamlessly co-exist on the same install. However, both XP and Vista would mostly be used in 32-bit at home, with 64-bit not taking hold until Windows 7, where systems with more than 4GB became more common.
XP was supposed to be succeeded by the Longhorn project (ultimately Vista). However, lengthy delays to that meant many of the upcoming OS’s superior security features, such as the built in firewall and other enhancements, were also backported into XP via service pack 2, due to an increasingly online world. This was an unusual precedent which increased XP’s lifespan for many more years, and perhaps also hobbled Vista’s uptake.
Windows 8 / 8.1
If you’ve read my article Was Windows 8 Really Bad? you’ll understand my love/hate relationship with 8. It should have been a home run; take an extremely well received release, in 7, and evolve that. Nope. Not MS. Someone at MS head office had decided that the future of the desktop was a phone like experience, with touch screens replacing keyboards (fast forward some 13 years and it still isn’t). Sigh. With that, it somewhat pains me that this isn’t top of the list. Stick a Start Menu replacement on it, and it was almost perfect. However, it is the out-of-the-box experience that counts, and Metro was a horrid change that nobody asked for. Booting to that, rather than the desktop was also stupid. Trying to change settings in Metro was horribly jarring. The charms bar was also needless. Take those cosmetics to one side, and the rest of it was a fantastic evolution of the NT family. The control panel you knew and loved was still under there. There were some extra features for power users, especially in the task manager. It could have been great.
8.1 fixed some of the above but not in a satisfying way. Yes, you could now boot to desktop, and, hey, the start button is back but…. what’s this? The start button didn’t load a start menu, the hated Metro UI was still in use. Utterly tone-deaf from MS. As I said, with a start menu replacement, this was a solid OS and a better experience than 7. Bar the start menu coming back, 10 or 11 have only gone downhill from here, in my opinion.
Windows Vista
Whilst considered a disaster, Vista was also a necessity. The world was changing and PCs needed to be more secure out of the box. Okay, MS went a bit too deep on the technical requirements – even dual core CPUs with 4GB ram would find themselves struggling, plus the hard drive could be heard grinding away almost constantly. But it also changed a lot of the core of Windows in the driver and security areas, with the former causing a lot of hardware compatibility issues. Pre-Vista, Windows was VERY lax about letting you run whatever on your system without any kind of warning. A lot of accounts were set up as an administrator, even for users who probably shouldn’t have that kind of power. UAC at least would give notice about allowing software to do whatever it wanted, or before being installed. And yes, MS did go too hard with it, initially, to the point most people found it more a hindrance than help.
I will shout from the rooftops that Vista, with service pack 2, was pretty good to use, and I might even prefer to it 7. But as with most thing MS, once the initial damage is done, with those perceptions set, it is very difficult to recover from. Most people stuck with XP and/or waited for 7.
Windows 10
I might have people questioning this one, and I did consider putting it above Vista. But I do feel Windows 10 had many flaws to begin with. Okay, we got the start menu back… of sorts anyway. It wasn’t quite what we had in 7, but at least it wasn’t a full screen mess. But it was a mess in many other areas particularly the haphazard new settings. Were you supposed to use that, or the control panel? Some of the settings loaded up the control panel GUI anyway. Ultimately, did it matter? The very early releases of 10 were somewhat jarring, to say the least. I stayed on Windows 8 (or 7 on some machines) for as long as I could, until support for those was dropped.
Windows 10, the ‘last version of Windows’, certainly improved as time went on, with MS ditching service packs in favour of yearly/bi-yearly releases, that were built on the same Windows 10 core but added and changed things on a whim. So, unlike most previous Windows versions, the Windows 10 you started with probably didn’t look or feel the same as the one you finished on. One of the releases (I think maybe 1809) introduced dark mode to Windows explorer. Much better for those of us with light sensitive eyes.
And of course, this is where telemetry started increasing. Not all telemetry is bad; as a developer some of it can be very useful to see why something has crashed. But with the best of intentions come the people that see the $$$ signs (usually the higher ups), and telemetry is a back door to snooping on more than just crash reports.
Windows 11
Get this thing away from me. Yes, I recently advocating upgrading to it over 10 (mostly just for security). And, yes, it’s still a solid NT OS at its core, but we’re at the stage where MS are determined to shove all kinds of crap on top, throwing in adverts, AI, online accounts. Enshittification is in full swing; 11 could be the biggest misstep from MS in Window’s history. Whilst Vista was considered a disaster, people either stayed on XP or moved to Vista’s successor, 7. Microsoft wasn’t losing users (maybe a small percentage went to Mac). With 11, users are not liking Microsoft’s strategy and it’s seeing a growth spurt in Linux take-up; people are leaving the Windows ecosystem in search of a more private life. The problem here is that, unless MS row back on this, we can assume it’ll only get worse with 12, 13 and so on, so it makes sense to jump ship now.
Windows 98
The first Windows OS installed on my first IBM compatible PC. It did a job. It wasn’t great. It blue screened way more than I care to think about. The whole thing felt like it was being held together with sticky tape and glue, and could come apart at any moment. Not an OS for power users. Some people have fond memories of the 9x codebase days. I do not.
Windows Me
Ugh. I was gifted this as an ‘upgrade’. Which, in my ignorance, I happily did, hoping I’d get a better experience than 98. I was wrong. Crashed even more times than that. I can’t remember if I trashed the install and went back to 98, or if it was this that prompted me to get 2000. Either way, it didn’t last long on my PC.
