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Best/worst Windows version ever?

I have some almost fond memories of Win 3.1 as I spent a lot of time wrestling with both it and the DOS sitting underneath to try to get things to work. Obviously it was a buggy pile of rubbish but I learned a lot from it. Since then, my favourite has been W2K, which I've found to be stable, reliable and not too much of a resource hog: XP is pretty but I've ended up turning lots of things off so I can get some work done.
 
Pretty unanimous that the Myalgic Encephalitis version (post viral fatigue syndrome)was the runt of the litter.

I would say XP Pro Service Pack 1 gave me fewest problems - and still does on the home PC. Trying to fix the numerous faults created by SP2 was jusy too much trouble.

Pre Win 3.1 - Yes, I played with Windows 3.0, briefly, before retreating to DOS and XTREE GOLD. That was a sweet file manager.
 
I used to run that windows 3.1 . It was like running a BASIC program , very slow . We used Dosshell instead .
I don't find Windows XP any better than Win98 , indeed I had to reinstall part of this system when my computer failed to boot . This something I never had to do with win 98 . Also I seem to get the blue screen of death more often . Frankly it's all been downhill since IBM asked for a D(isc)O(perating)S(ystem) from you know who .
Interestingly enough I had a very early 6502 based computer which had a BASIC interpreter written by an outfit called microsoft , I wonder what became of them?
This BASIC had a few bugs in it I recall , but was better than the later Sinclair machines .
 
Yep, XP=good, but I preferred ME to 95 (though maybe it was hardware faults as well as buggy Windows that used to crash all the time, who can say?)

I still miss Workbench.
 
homer said:
I used to run that windows 3.1 . It was like running a BASIC program , very slow . We used Dosshell instead .
I don't find Windows XP any better than Win98 , indeed I had to reinstall part of this system when my computer failed to boot . This something I never had to do with win 98 . Also I seem to get the blue screen of death more often . Frankly it's all been downhill since IBM asked for a D(isc)O(perating)S(ystem) from you know who .
Interestingly enough I had a very early 6502 based computer which had a BASIC interpreter written by an outfit called microsoft , I wonder what became of them?
This BASIC had a few bugs in it I recall , but was better than the later Sinclair machines .
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I have an old copy of Dr Dobbs. It was called Micro Soft.
 
Worst == ME
Best == Win2k

I had problems with XP on my home workstation for a while and downgraded to 2k. No problems at all. Although I'm working on XP on my current job, performs OK so far.

(But at home... Still Linux).
 
Let me get this straight. There are actually people claiming that Windows ME is worse than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 or 3.0 or older? Put down the crackpipe and come back to reality. Or is it just that we have 16 year olds here who have never used those versions?

Sure Windows ME wasn't great, but not because it didn't work (in my experience, it worked fine) but because it did almost nothing new compared to the previous incarnation (Windows 98). Windows 98 SE was the height of the Win9X family and Windows ME was just a completely unnecessary solution to a problem no one had.

But worse than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1? Puhleeze. I sense elitism.

So far, I'd have to say that Windows XP Pro is the most stable Windows version I've ever used on a home computer or workstation, and Windows 2003 pretty much rocks in terms of stability and security. Sure, it has holes, but I have never had an XP or 2003 machine get pwned in any way. That might be because I actually work in network security too :)

(crossing my fingers that this thread won't get hijacked by the Mac or Linux fanatics)
 
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Red Siegfried said:
But worse than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1? Puhleeze. I sense elitism.
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I was never able to figure out quite what it was but while 95 and 3.11 could fall back to DOS without any issues Me couldn't.
 
Red Siegfried said:
But worse than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1? Puhleeze.
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Well, that's trivially correct of course. But ME is subjectively worse, at least for me, as it represents such a setback and completely dead end. Of course it is a better system than, say, 3.1 just as me being better programmer than 8 years ago doeas stop application Y written 3 years ago being the worst thing I've written.
 
El Greco said:
Besides, when messing with asm programming I'm pretty sure I can freeze pretty much every OS.
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Yes, if you write a kernel mode device driver. If you're just writing a user-mode program (which is all a restricted user would be able to launch), there's nothing special about assembly that would allow you to muck with the system.

Also I agree with the last poster, Me was the worst because of the date it was released. If Me and 3.1 were somehow released side-by-side, then yes, 3.1 is worse. Timeliness is of course a factor in how good or bad an OS seems to us.
 
geni said:
I was never able to figure out quite what it was but while 95 and 3.11 could fall back to DOS without any issues Me couldn't.
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Yeah, I guess MS in its infinite wisdom figured that if people wanted to run DOS apps with Windows ME they could always just fire up a boot disk anyway. And in a way, I can almost understand a point of view like this since Windows 9Xs DOS mode rarely worked reliably for anything that required DOS drivers or EMS or XMS.

But to say ME is worse because of that feature, is like saying you can't see the trees because of all the forest in the way.
 
Ian Osborne said:
Anyone have any experience of pre-3.1 Windows, which I'm told barely functioned?
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Even with Windows 3.11 I used Dashboard. It kind of gave that version a lot of the GUI features that came along later in 95. But Windows 3.0 was the first version I used and I thought it was okay. It just didn't work well for me at the time because of my slow comp and the fact that I couldn't play lots of games on it ... :)
 
Red Siegfried said:
Yeah, I guess MS in its infinite wisdom figured that if people wanted to run DOS apps with Windows ME they could always just fire up a boot disk anyway. And in a way, I can almost understand a point of view like this since Windows 9Xs DOS mode rarely worked reliably for anything that required DOS drivers or EMS or XMS.

But to say ME is worse because of that feature, is like saying you can't see the trees because of all the forest in the way.
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It means that all the other windows systems had something that while rather old at least tended to work to fall back on. With ME it was ME or nothing.
 
me .. i like the birth of jesus OS ...

1) it's stable ...
2) comes with some decent goodies ... gold, frankincense and myrrh ...
3) a great help system ... just ask the angel above ... not some stupid paperclip !!!
4) you don't need to rely on Jobs, Gates, Torvald ... you just get three wise men ...
5) the **** is provided by the cattle ... not any application that you might wanna run on it..
6) upgrades come only every couple of thousand years ...
7) it's a virgin OS, which alot of geek can associate with ...
 
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