"Only Microsoft OS has that super quality User Friendly Interfaces with click Start to Shutdown..."
Why do people constantly quote this like it means something? Nobody seems to have a problem with the phrase "I think I'll start to shut down the machine now", or "I think I'll start to close all my programs" and yet having a menu heirarchy ordered after it is somehow a user interface faux paus? It's an operation, and like any operation, you have to start it.
Windows 3.1
used DOS 6 and windows 3.1 for the better part of 2 years. Aside from not being able to find video drivers for my Trident 8900c (well, actually, I never actually looked, but the point is, the included drivers on the win 3.1 disks were for a very limited set of hardware, such as video 7, orchid, and a few others that no longer exist today), so I was using the standard VGA driver. (well, before that, the hercules monochrome driver on my 286, but after upgrading to a Server oriented 386 machine, I was able to run with VGA.
Windows 95 (a or b)
So no love for OSR2?
Whatever the case, on the whole I probably had the "worst" experience with windows 95. Not necessarily because of the OS but more because I was used to configuring things via DOS and the various windows INI files, as well as having the "safety net" of being able to do useful things in DOS most of the time. With windows 95, the configuration details shifted from system.ini to the system registry, which makes sense since there is no way you could fit all the information in the registry's driver data into a INI file that was less then 64K. This paired with the fact that the installation of windows 95 was actually on a hard drive from a 486 and therefore everything was configured for the 486 rather then the Pentium machine that I put the drive into made things even more difficult. I never did actually get that machine working well, the heatsink for the integrated graphics card fell off and it stopped working a while after (I thought the heatsink was decorative, since I hadn't seen a heatsink before then- with a 286 and 386 the CPU just sat in the slot, no heatsink at all). I had windows 95 running for a short time back on the 486, but eventually I got in a reboot loop where windwos 95 would state that my registry was corrupt and that it had to restore from a backup and I would have to reboot to fix it, but regardless it would say that every time I started. Being far less familiar with computers (and windows 95 in general) I ended up simply reformatting and going back (yet again) to windows 3.1.
I was given (by the same person who was giving me these PCs, actually) a copy of windows 98, and proceeded to install it on ther 486. It went as smoothly as could be expected on a 133Mhz DX2 with 24MB of RAM; I can't remember what video card I used but there was no video driver available and/or I was unable to find one, so I spent the next 6 or so months literally working in 640x480 with 16-color (the vgasafe driver).
I eventually acquired a more capable Pentium-2 class machine, which at that time featured a 350Mhz AMD k6-2 CPU, 32MB of RAM, and an 8MB graphics card (ATI Rage Pro). (as a sidebar that same machine is actually right behind me as I type this, serving as a sturdy but vastly underutilized table, it now has a 500Mhz K6-2, 512MB of RAM, and a 64MB graphics card).
First, I simply moved the hard drive from the 486 to the K6-2 machine. Things went alright, but for whatever reason I decided to do a complete reformat/install.
the 98SE setup process went so smoothly I was astounded. it even recognized and installed drivers for my ATI Rage Pro 8MB card, where previously getting a video card to work properly with windows 3.1 was often like trying to wrestle with a greasy snake. for the first time I was able to run windows in 1024x768x24-bit, which for me at the time was a super mega high resolution (considering I was used to 640x480 with 16 colours, at least until I discovered the 800x600 generic windows 3.1 SVGA driver worked with most of the video cards I used).
Over time I upgraded this machine and eventually I upgraded it to windows XP. it ran it alright, and there weren't any notable issues once I disabled Luna themes (the 8MB graphics card was a little taxed otherwise with the vast number of bitmaps that Luna brought to the table).
I eventually bought an overpriced used 1.6Ghz P4 and installed XP on that. smooth as butter, for the most part. it did get infected with virut once, but I needed a fresh start by that point anyway. While I had this machine I purchased my Toshiba Laptop, which served as my first hands on experience with Vista.
the only problem I had initially was not with Vista, but rather with the HUGE AMOUNT OF CRAP that Toshiba thought I wanted. Seriously? Norton 360? And even more helpfully the "registration" dialogs during setup were almost all modal, so I could either register Norton 360 or close down the machine. nice.
After finally dealing with and succumbing to this awful and terrible bastardization of software by Toshiba, as well as the over 50 extra processes Toshiba decided I needed in the background for tasks that are perfectly well done by built in drivers, I decided that the only way to <properly> see Vista and rate it based on itself rather then the cruft that manufacturers throw at you as they always have is to do a clean install of it, which is what I did.
It ran smoothly. perfectly. Aero Glass, which barely ran in the original installation, ran with absolutely zero hitches whatsoever after a nice clean install. the stuttery ness and constant drive access I was experiencing with the OEM install no longer occured. everything suddenly started working even before I installed most of my drivers. (I think this might have been a SP1 integrated Install disc). I had also installed XP 32-bit and XP 64-bit, both of which (not surprisingly) needed a number of extra tasks to be performed to get them to work with my SATA hard drive, and even then neither one was able to hibernate the machine- well, they were, but when it woke up only one CPU groggily raised it's eyebrow and allowed me to use the machine at the equivalent of about 16 mhz. The Start->Shutdown routine took about 15 minutes to <start> shutting down (note the wording, whereby I use the word "start" to signify that I was starting the operation of shutting down, much as is the very point of the arrangement of Shut down on the start menu).
Next on the list was my new build. which I installed Vista on with no problems either. SP2 was released, upgraded with no issues. upgraded the laptop to windows 7 with no problems either, and then later the desktop, so they are both running windows 7.
unparalleled, of course, is the various attempts to use a Linux OS more prevalently. my first attempt was with the P4, where I wanted to dual boot between the currently installed XP and Ubuntu. the install worked fine, until it came GRUBs turn to start the boot loader, where it gave me a very descriptive out-of-range error relating to the partition that Ubuntu was on and hung the machine. This was of course after going through about a bajillion different screens just to get Linux installed "where do you want to swap file"? how big do you want the swap partition? Should we use the Reiser-FS or the ext3 file system? What kind of questions are these for a OS that is supposed to be for "beginners"? I can understand the fact that say, Slackware or Debian has them, but Ubuntu is touted as the "easy to use" Linux distro so I find it weird that it would ask questions that it's main target user would have no clue how to answer. I did manage to get Linux Mint working from a Flash drive just fine though, including the DWM equivalent, which disabled itself for nearly every program I ran. Which brings me to another sidebar- I find it interesting how so many Linux users/programmers/zealots, when originally told about the Desktop Composition feature, were rather quick to do a search through the various available Linux packages and come to the conclusion "nya nya, we had it in 2003"
the funny part is, in 2003, nobody cared. in 2004, nobody cared. The Compiz project was pretty much just a curious little applet, cool, but not useful.
Then when Vista was released, BAM! Linux devs flocked to it and started to complete it, only making it "usable" to any real extend long after Vista's DWM was released. Sure, it's a remarkable acheivement, but it wasn't done until <after> Vista's DWM, it doesn't matter that the project was started in 2003- it wasn't public-ready until after they invested a significant portion of time on it. And brings me to one thing that I find I dislike about Linux distro's in particular- it seems that they have "everything", but it's all only half-finished until Microsoft implements something similar into one of their operating systems, and then <poof> OH! we had this first!
If Linux is as great as all the linux lovers claim, and completely free of charge, then why hasn't it displaced any Windows sales in over a decade of seriously trying? That includes on the desktop, but also on the server where Linux had such a huge head-start out of the gate that (all else being equal) Windows Server sales should be in the single digits of market share right now. This is made especially ironic because OS X has had absolutely no problem displacing Windows desktop sales in the same amount of time... proving that Microsoft is not some unstoppable juggernaut, but that the Linux community is doing something wrong.
The only open source project that's made a lot of headway in recent years is Firefox. If somehow Ubuntu could make the same headway then it would probably have about 30% of the total market share.
Well, perhaps because Ubuntu gets released with moronic bugs that cause my laptop to blast out a 120 dB square-wave ear-rape at random intervals. Perhaps it's because after a decade of trying, power management still does not work right. Perhaps it's because Linux has never been "out in front" of any technological innovation from a rival in all the time I've been aware of it.
*Linux's greatest success is blame-shifting. Where PHP gets the blame for DB insertion errors on Linux, but Windows (not ASP) gets the blame in Windows. Or how Linux can shovel out the old: "well hardware support would be better of OEMs gave us their spec sheets!" Or: "we can't ship working code because of patents in the US!" Undoubtedly true, but where does the buck stop? You have a problem, solve it. Microsoft manages to solve it. Apple manages to solve it. Linux just whines and whines and whines.
*) This is the point where some will likely claim that Linux "had GPU-accelerated windows first", forgetting that 1. It didn't OS-X did by any reasonable metric; and 2. The only half-decent implementation, Compiz, was a buggy piece of crap that everybody ignored until Microsoft announced they were putting the same feature in Vista-- suddenly it becomes priority number 1. (Despite that, it still never shipped on any mainstream distros before Vista did, so see number 1.)
What makes the entire thing so futile is that Linux users/devs/zealots can always claim to be ahead of the pack, because there are so many thousands of skunkworks projects in Linux implementing various ideas. None of these projects develop past pre-Alpha stage, or end up in any distros, until a competitor announces that they're adding the same feature-- then all of a sudden, that useless buggy skunkworks project was started in 2005, so linux had it first! It doesn't matter that it was unusable, or that no distributions included it!
Is this bad? Not entirely. the fact that they base <what> buggy skunkworks projects they will work on and make into something viable based entirely on what their competition is doing sort of is. Why do they care what Microsoft does? this sort of logic is especially inescapable when you follow the common theme that "Whatever Microsoft does is wrong". If it's wrong, why follow them? IMO, the only company that has actually made anything even remotely Linux related viable in the desktop market is Apple. Some may say "what about Ubuntu". No. not really. that's all marketing mumbo-jumbo. Compare Ubuntu to Fedora or Mepis or any number of other distros. they are nearly exactly the same- Ubuntu isn't any more "user-friendly" then any of them, only their marketing is.
And my all time favourite thing about Linux users is their attitude. Look, Linux is fine. I have no problem with it, it's great for all sorts of purposes, and it <CAN> do a lot of what most people need, but whenever you approach a topic with the attitude that everyone you're addressing is a moron whose current opinion does not matter, you lose. It doesn't matter if everyone you're addressing *is* a moron. Very few people can keep an open mind about a topic after you've insulted them.
my vote is split between Vista and 7, both for an extremely poor UI.
ahh, I take it your referring to the over-application of the stuff they did with XP, like the *shudder* control panel. Good, now we can click a bajillion times to get to the display applet. In all fairness, as far as the default options go, I agree. I hate the default configuration of the control panel in XP, Vista, as well as 7. I also hated their start menus but I've since found the start->Search feature so valuable I feel almost like I'm missing a limb in XP. (but not in mint! cuz mint has a similar search feature, which I found immensely cool, wonder if there is a way to get the windows key to activate the menu though, then I wouldn't have to shift paradigms at all), personally, I actually like the display control panel (and other related control panels) better as sizable panels rather then unresizable panels with a bajillion (hyperbole) tabs at the top. It takes a bit of learning to get around, but it's no more difficult to navigate after a some effort then XP or earlier was.(ok, that's a lie, sometimes I can only remember "I know that option was in a lefthand panel somewhere" but can't for the life of me remember where it was, so I end up looking through all sorts of various dialogs trying to find this mystical option, wasting all sorts of time, but I discount this as part of learning it, since once I have "remembered" it, I no longer need to go hunting, much as how a person might learn in windows 98 that they use the display control panel option to change the resolution, not "Themes" or "appearance".) I think the main reason it's so reviled by so many is simply because the "tabbed dialog" interfaces used for almost all control panel applets had been in use since windows 95. That much muscle memory isn't easy to shake. Heck, the tabbed interface that we'd grown so accustomed to was itself reviled as a "disgusting change" from the simpler times of windows 3.1. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess, heh.
and the UI has changed fairly significantly between them.
Again, not quite true. For example, almost all control panel options, as well as the control panel itself, have remained nearly unchanged through out windows NT 3.1 through to XP. The biggest change between NT 3.1 and XP was simply the switch to using the windows 95 Shell with NT4> think about it- the tabs on the Display control panel in Windows NT4 through to Windows XP All had a set of common tabs- the settings tab would always change your resolution- appearance for icons, themes (well, this wasn't always there, but it was consistent amongst those versions that had it (95 with Plus! and higher IIRC).
Even the "System properties" dialog is still accessed by nearly the exact same method it has always been since windows 95, and the vast majority of options are still the same as they always were. the biggest shift between NT 3.1 and XP was that XP SP2 rearranged the "hardware" tab as well as a few other minor adjustments). That is of course excepting things like Luna which for all intents and purposely changed the look but didn't change the feel regardless of what the propaganda said.
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