this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Windows 98 wasn't bad. It was a big improvement in stability over 95. Windows ME/2000 were two completely separate products. Win 2000 was based on NT which always got better until maybe Vista. Vista itself wasn't bad. The problem was end users not liking security. Vista made it easier than sudo to temporarily elevate security and everyone still complained. So they backed off on 7 which was less secure because it didn't enforce security elevation as much.
You also can't list 98SE and ignore Win 8.1. 8.1 was a bandaid fix for the start menu of 8 but was still a bad. Not to mention that there was also Win95 OSR1 and Win95 OSR2.
There's no significant difference between 10 and 11 to claim one is good and the other is bad. All the spyware and advertising garbage in 11 was also in 10.
We can all agree that ME was a complete clusterfuck, though. "What if your desktop was also a Webpage and what if it crashed about every hour?"
I think it was every N cpu cycles it bluescreened.. So on a 233mhz you might get 8h.. 1.4ghz yes every hour..
ME is when I switched to Linux just sometimes I also have a windows machine.. Like the win10 gaming laptop that is really end of life.. (If you don't want gaming sure it could be fine on Linux but it's wasn't intended to live this long so a good gaming machine before the year of win10 extended support ends is likely in my future.. And will likely run Linux)
Active Desktop. That actually started with Windows 98, or at least that's when it came bundled with. You had to install it on purpose on Windows 95 and NT4.
You could do some interesting tricks with this if you wrote your own local content for it. Different wallpaper images on different monitors, interactive wallpaper effects, and so forth. I have no idea what its actual intended use case was nor what anyone at Microsoft was smoking when they made this available by default. Parking anything on there that accessed external web content always struck me as rather a bad idea.
*backed off on 7 ?
I think you're also overlooking that the driver model changed for Vista, so tons of hardware listed as supporting Vista was just extremely unstable at release until hardware vendors figured out the new driver model
If its drivers, then XP was really bad. It was so bad it didn't even support HD's bigger than 128GB at release despite Win2k supporting the larger drives.