I booted into Windows for the first time in a while a few days ago. I was reminded that last time I logged out I was forced to install an upgrade.
I was met with a screen forcing me to connect my user account with my Microsoft account. No way out of the process. I didn't know the password to my Microsoft account since I never use it for anything. I couldn't reset the password because my computer was locked and demanding a Microsoft account. I don't have any email access on my phone because it's so hard to secure. Had to shut down the computer and boot into Debian to reset my Microsoft password. Then I booted back into Windows, signed in, went into the control panel and signed out again.
What the actual fuck. Who thought this process was a good idea?
Windows 7 was basically Vista with a few service packs, and Vista wasn't really that bad. Once the rough edges were off and it was renamed "Windows 7" it was liked well enough.
Vista->7 was certainly a smaller change than XP->Vista but more than service pack level. For instance, one big one is that DWM in Vista keeps a copy of each window (at least old GDI windows, maybe not DirectX ones) in both CPU and GPU memory, which both consumes unnecessary space and generally slows rendering down. In Windows 7, they're only on the GPU.
It's a classic example of something changing significantly under the hood but not being very visually obvious.
I always jokingly called windows 7 vista service pack 3. Vista added in windows defender, really ramped up how aggressive superfetch was, and search indexing. Turn those 3 things off and vista worked decently as it was too much for most CPUs/HD of the time. They fixed most of that in sp2 of vista. But win7 is when everyone really got most of the fixes. One dude I know managed to 'fix' Windows ME. He figured out it was the plug and play system aggressively scanning the inf files. He narrowed them down to just the ones that were needed for his hardware and it worked pretty good for him.
You needed an upgrade CD ordered from Microsoft to update, so I count those.
if 98SE was a service pack it would be the largest feature increase in a service pack of any Windows service pack, iirc it brought native USB printer+storage support and firewire support to the OS.
Though I was a kid at the time (barely 10 years old), I just remember 98 and 98SE disks floating about and people not upgrading their windows 95 machines until SE came out.
The wisdom used to be to wait a couple of service packs before installing a new version of windows. It seems that is still true. Windows 2000 was quite usable a few service packs in. Windows XP took a few as well to become usable.
ME was the last version of the Dos based windows versions. Versions 1 and 2 most people barely remember. Version 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 were pretty close together and the first versions that were more widely used. Then windows 95 was obviously the big one in that series but quite buggy as well initially thus necessitating service packs. 98 and 98SE were relatively minor upgrades to that and thus quite alright. ME was an attempt to bridge the gap to the much delayed XP and as such quite pointless since it was buggy and would have also included a lot of misguided stuff around internet explorer that has since been long forgotten and that obviously was omitted for XP. Somehow MS got into their heads that the browser was the OS, which in MS land meant stuff like active desktop, which as I recall was horribly slow even if you could get to run it at all (no in my case). And when you did there was a "and now what ... " moment as well.
XP was the successor to Windows NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, and 2000 Each of which were pretty OK. To complicate things further they started doing separate releases for servers as well from 3.1. I use NT 3.1 for development work at some point. Pretty nice machine as I remember. Never gave me much trouble.
XP was where they cut loose from DOS mostly and by then nobody, including MS, had appetite for yet more releases. So, they doubled down with service packs and fixed bugs only for quite a few years. Nevertheless, in terms of stability XP was a huge upgrade from the dos based varieties in terms of stability which is why people remember it fondly. But especially before service pack 2, many people were sticking with windows 2000 in companies. I had a nice windows 2000 desktop for quite some time at work.
By the time they released Vista, it was so horrible that many opted to not upgrade since there was no big need. Especially enterprises said thanks but no thanks and kept on defaulting to XP right until MS pulled the plug on that many years later. They had the same issue with windows 7 and 8. Which is why they made windows 10 a longer term thing and made an effort to get companies upgrading. I predict that this will be an issue with windows 11 as well. Most enterprises like uniform environments and they don't want to have to support multiple versions of windows. So, windows 10 is going to be here for a while.
This listing makes no sense. Some of these operating systems were targeted at completely different markets and shouldn't be lumped together. Also you have lumped all the versions of Windows NT together as one operating system when there were 4 different versions of Windows NT. Windows 95 came after 3 of those versions had been released but doesn't appear on this list at all. Also Windows 98 is not generally considered a bad operating system for the time.
I lumped them together according to Microsoft versioning. I only named the Windows i've used as a consumer (hence no 2003). Following just the initial release of the major versions it holds. I know 8.1 is a completely different OS to 8, but according to Microsoft it's not :)
Most Windows were fixed later though with service packs etc. So this list should be taken with a grain of salt of course
Windows NT good
Windows 98 bad
Windows 2000 good
Windows Me bad
Windows XP good
Windows Vista bad
Windows 7 good
Windows 8 bad
Windows 10 good
Windows 11 bad