Windows
I’m not someone who used to hate Windows. I mean, 3.11 and even 95 failed to do much for me, being just various layers over DOS, but 98 was none too shabby. I played with BSDs and Linuxes, but they required a lot more investment in learning to get running well, plus I was SOL on games, which was, and largely is, the only reason to own a computer at all.
NT is dookie. If you don’t agree, then you’re wrong. 100% wrong. You probably like the Phunk Junkees, that’s how wrong you are.
Anyway. 2000 was, and is, pretty good. Didn’t have a lot of game support when it first spun around, so I never ran it at home, but I worked (and still work) with it a lot, and it’s not bad. Not as good as something designed for the jobs it takes on, but not bad. 2003, more of the same, with a delicate balance of oddball limitations and administrative candy. Not enough for me to separate it out from 2k in this bitch session though.
ME… see the NT comments.
Along rolled XP into my life. It was pretty, the start menu was pretty ok, the common tasks thing was nice, and compared to 98 it was pretty stable. I rolled XP for a long, long time. Since it came out, to whenever the hell I switched to Ubuntu this year. Over time XP just got weird. Every patch and update added some little hellish thing. SP1 fixed a lot of stuff, but dicked with a bunch of little things, that didn’t seem related. After SP1, I had to specify a DNS or Unreal Tournament would run slow. I’m not kidding. SP2 did marginally fewer fixes and changed the rules on a lot of drivers, boning a lot of people. Security center bugs the crap out of me, and it should bother anyone that isn’t a slack jaw. Suddenly a lot of my older games wouldn’t run, or would run poorly after days of screwing with settings. UPnP would slow down network access until totally disabled, and would do so on other Windows machines on the network. MS Messenger had its own version of UPnP that had to be disabled separately, which was fun. The QoS stuff in the TCP stack, so far as I know, has never been implemented, making you wonder why the hell it’s even listed. But hey, progress, right? A lot of this stuff is resolved by now, right? You’d think so. Then I see stuff that’s been a problem since, I believe NT, like vanishing optical devices, both real and virtual. Caused by a truly retarded mechanism where cd burning software can hook into the cd driver directly, as a layered service provider. What’s that mean? Means if you uninstall the software, or the software flakes out, your optical drives all disappear. That’s the official story, but truly I’ve seen it happen on stock installs too. Not for a while though, so I thought it fixed, so today I slammed my head against this until finally calling a truce until tomorrow. The fix? Delete a registry value. Specifically Upper and Lower filters.
So. Yeah.
Now, I know, what about Vista? I keep saying I’ll install it on a machine to test it out, but that’s not going to happen. I have to work on a few Vista machines, and that’s all the contact I want with the thing. It’s slow to do most anything, the majority of the menus and panels are irritating, and the MS idea of an accelerated desktop is laughable. Oh, and most of your programs won’t work, or will half assedly. Most may be an exaggeration, but it’s pretty bad.
I regard Windows users now the same way I do people that still use OS 9 or earlier, which is to say “What the hell are you running that for??”.