My Love and Hate Relationship with Windows

Anyone remember when Windows 3.11 came out in 1992? It was the best thing ever (back then). Most importantly it featured native networking support and endless fun with Minesweeper (we used to make contests for it).

Then, Windows 95 came out (you guessed it, in 1995) and wow, people lined up in the streets to get a first glimpse of the new face lift. I hated Win95 because I found it too fancy, whereas all the programs we used at the University were mainly for Windows 3.11 and weren't compatible with Win95 yet. So, by necessity, we couldn't upgrade so were happily using Win 3.11 for a while. The biggest features in Win 95 were 32-bit applications and the introduction of Plug-n-Play (PnP) to automate device detection and configuration. Of course, the process was still in its infancy and was buggy like hell. Ask anyone who tried to setup a modem under Win 95... However, tech savvy users like myself often had to fall back to manual configuration, something we learned to do in Win 3.11 (along with DOS 6.22 config.sys and autoexec.bat). So yeah, even when the software got upgraded to run on Win 95, I still hated it, it just didn't work as I was used to. But as time went by and Windows 98 came out (in 1998) things got a little bit better with USB devices. And finally the Win9x saga ended with Windows ME (Millenium) in 2000, which nobody gave a shit about. All the Win9x lineage was MS-DOS-based, so the skills I learned in Win 3.11 always came in handy when building computers for my friends.

In 2000, Windows 2000 was released (thank you Microsoft for letting us know the years of your releases). But Win 2k was different, it was based on NT (New Technology). It was the successor to NT 4.0 which was used for servers. And boy did I love Windows 2k! This OS was stable like a rock. Hardly any crashes or BSOD's, the GUI was simple and efficient. This was it for me, finally something I can work with without having to worry about DOS configurations, device detection and crashes. Why? Because NT doesn't rely on DOS anymore, as simple as that. As a matter of fact, all the future versions of Windows would be NT-based.

The next major version of Windows NT, Windows XP, was released in 2001. And Microsoft was at it again, trying to sell more by adding more fanciness to the GUI. And you guessed it, I hated Win XP. I remained loyal to Win 2k for years, before I moved to Win XP. And even after I did, I reconfigured the GUI to look exactly the same as Win 2k. My productivity relied on a simple and efficient environment.

In 2006, Windows Vista came out... nobody gave a shit. Things were already running smoothly with Win XP SP1, SP2 and SP3 (many service packs bringing more stability and improvements) why settle for a shitty OS (again).

The OS that ruled them all came in 2009, Windows 7 (Hmmm I wonder why M$ didn't call that one Windows 2009). At first I had some reservations before upgrading to Win 7, because all my production was setup and customized under Win XP, I really didn't have time to reinstall and reconfigure everything. Besides, M$ had a long history of messing up with new OS's, so I waited a while before making the leap. Which I finally did, and again, I set up my Win 7 GUI to look like Win 2k, simple and efficient.

In 2012, Windows 8 came out... nobody gave a shit.

The major factor to upgrading was the way papa Bill forced users to upgrade. Dropped support for older hardware, introduction of DirectX versions that do not run on older OS's and are embedded so users couldn't install them on the previous OS's! So if you wanted to buy a new computer and play cool new games on it, you had to use the latest Windows! And this is still true today with Windows 10 (embedded DX12) which released in 2015 because nobody gave a shit about Win 8, hell, they even skipped Windows 9!

Win 10 is the pinnacle of M$ arrogance and disregard for its customers. They morphed a god damn PC OS to look like a cellphone, and I thought Michael Jackson looked ugly after his 1000 surgeries! WTF is that about? And forget your privacy, because M$ insidiously added a thousand tracking and telemetry mechanisms to spy on its users, and that cannot be disabled easily. And even if you did, some of the telemetry features will reinitialize themselves when you do updates, so you have to disable them again.

So here I was, been using Win 7 for the last 7 years (magic number). I upgraded my PC hardware this week and I'm forced to use Win 10 because the motherboard companies aren't supporting Win 7 for their latest processor chipsets. Trying to configure Win 10 to look like Win 2k is a daunting task. The results aren't perfect, but close enough, no choice anyways. Windows has been a love and hate relationship for decades, I can honestly speak for many when I say that. Some of the releases were fantastic, some were utter crap. Right now we're in the crap phase and we have no choice but to swallow and get used to it.

Thank you M$ for ruining my desire to cling to old working things.
Goodbye Windows 7, I already miss you... In the meantime, I'll reinstall my old CPU+DDR3+mobo+Win7 in another PC case and visit it when I feel nostalgic.