• as old as time_t

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I miss the Intel Atom, not because I wanted to use it, but because of the positive impact it had on big tech and software bloat. I wish we could bring it back, but it seems nowadays, even Chromebooks have 16 GB of RAM and an i5.

Those 2 in 1 baytrail laptops were so underpowered, but damn, they're so cool

I actually really liked 8.1, preferred it to 7 once I got used to the Start Screen. Surprisingly well designed, actually found myself preferring the menu over 7's

10 had the best start menu in my opinion, but the quality was just an ever advancing downward spiral.

Now, I can't even stand it, deal with it at work as much as I have to, but at home, the only Windows machine left is only still on it because simulator peripherals are a pain to get working right on Linux sometimes, so my dedicated simulator machine still uses that, but it's used for nothing else

all the Vista bloat that had started with Windows 7

The fuck?? Vista predates Win7, that sentence makes no sense

I agree, 8.1 with Classic Shell was good. I also liked Windows Media Center.

I hung on through 10, but last year, as I learned more about Win 11, I decided to finally bite the bullet and figure how to switch to Linux.

Yeah I think Windows 8 in general is just what happens when you don't have proper user testing and go entirely based on what the shareholders think the next big thing in computing is going to be.

At the time everyone thought that touchscreens and tablets were going to take over everything, at this point though it's become pretty clear that tablets are for media consumption and some creative work. For productivity they just aren't as good as a full on desktop environment.

Oh, true, but back then game companies would sell you those single disks you needed. My copy of Baldur's Gate 2 was missing one that I was able to replace for a few bucks.

In hindsight, I kinda miss the awesome customer service that used to exist.

Idk a tiny almost imperceptible scratch causing you to retry installing 3 or 4 times might a contender. At least the missing disk is a clear error.

There's a circle in hell for game publishers that only wrote "disc 1" on a CD or DVD (or floppy, back in the day) and not "disc 1 of 3". I think it's the one where they have to wade forever in shit.

Windows 98 came on 28 floppy disks.. We definitely felt the pain prior to 2007...

And before that, there were games that spanned multiple floppies. Plus, floppies were less reliable, so there was a higher chance one of the disks would fail to read, leading to the Retry, Fail, Abort menu.

They were only 1.44MB so a 50GB game would take like 40k floppies.

At the end of its life, Vista was quite competent.

But during the early years, the added animations and transparent features really tanked the performance on the hardware of that time. Combined with the issues any new OS has, it received much hate. Only after much optimization became it somewhat stable.

I remember her as a sip of fresh air. No other OS was this appealing

Short answer, no, there were artificial limitations to ensure compatibility. Plenty of long-form answers if you care to search.

It was 3.2GB and afaik it wasn't a bug, but 800MB was reserved for hardware IO

7 was about the last time that it felt like Microsoft was trying to make a good product that was useful for its customers. They've always been anticompetitive sniveling greedy little shits that would buy out or otherwise kill competition, but used to be they'd try to sell new versions of Windows or Office on features they could reasonably expect customers to want. "It does spell check in real time now! We've included USB plug-and-play! Your PC with a modem is also a fax machine now! We made a 3D graphics library for gaming enthusiasts! We ship or OS with a media player that can play DVDs and MP3s out of the box! Here's a free video editor!"

I...don't remember that happening after Windows 7. Windows 8 was an attempt to cash in on the mobile craze, they're gonna make Windows a tablet product now! Except a lot of computers didn't have tablet controls, and a lot of desktop PC software doesn't work with tablet controls. They made a confusing annoying buggy hell mess. Win 10...I remember people hating it when it came out, they REALLY preferred 7, I was on Linux by that time and didn't care that much, and Win 10 was almost a rolling release; it changed a lot over its lifetime. They'd go all in on something, pack Win 10 full of features, and then the fad would fade and they'd pull it back out. 3D, AR, a couple other things. And now we've got the openly user hostile Windows 11. "It Harms Your Family!^(R)^"

Was that Windows 8.1, or Windows RT?

I think their main issue lies with Tomshardware, not the medium of an article