Weekend Question: Do you have a favorite version of Windows?

[ipman]

That was my first thought, I need Linux

I try to keep PC set up so it's resources all go to PC gaming. I think I've got it down, well the CPU is running at 1% until I load games.

I think my point about Edge is just a personal perspective, just don't like it being forced on me. Firefox suits me at the moment.

Thanks for the decrapifier links, I'll probably need the W11 one at some time.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I immediately switched to Windows 11, had very minor problems for a few weeks, and I haven't had a problem since. It's easily my favorite version of Windows, and now I have a little button on my taskbar to pull up a pretty good AI.

I needed a logo the other day for a cybersecurity newsletter (long story), so I just hit the button and told it to make a logo and what I wanted in it, and a moment later I had 4 good ones to choose from. Name any other OS, past or present, that is that helpful. A lot of people use computers to design logos. Mine did it for me. Hasn't that always been the long-term goal of computers, to do work for us? That's being realized like never before right now in Windows 11.

 

[Colif]

You can set it to update out of operational hours—my update always happens when I'm ready for it.

its a virtual machine I only run occasionally so its update policy would basically say it needs to run now. Whenever I start it. Even if I set a time... I would then need to start it myself to let it run... its funny, I had started it up on Friday to let it update... it didn't want to, so next day I start it up to run something, thats when it needed an update.

I hid co pilot a few days ago. It needs more work before its useful.

 

[Reola]

There are a few ways, CMD command. Powershell or Registry key. the former 2 might not work though, depends.

can you tell me how to do it through Pavershell?

 

[Reola]

I immediately switched to Windows 11, had very minor problems for a few weeks, and I haven't had a problem since. It's easily my favorite version of Windows, and now I have a little button on my taskbar to pull up a pretty good AI.

I needed a logo the other day for a cybersecurity newsletter (long story), so I just hit the button and told it to make a logo and what I wanted in it, and a moment later I had 4 good ones to choose from. Name any other OS, past or present, that is that helpful. A lot of people use computers to design logos. Mine did it for me. Hasn't that always been the long-term goal of computers, to do work for us? That's being realized like never before right now in Windows 11.

Yes, Windows 11 is good, but it very often performs poorly after updates. The developers fix it after two weeks with a new update. But why not make everything normal right away?

 

[Colif]

the licence key recorded by almost all windows 10 machines is a dumby one. They use about 10 different ones, but its not your actual licence key. It might be aon a laptop as in some cases its stored in the bios.

Most cases, if you want to install windows 10 or 11 on a PC its already been on, you run the installer as normal and when you reach screen asking for licence key, you click "I don't have one" and windows will continue the install process until you get to desktop and then it will check with Activation servers to confirm that PC has a licence to run Win 10 or 11.

You don't need to know it. It can be linked to an email address and then its not associated with the hardware at all.

 

[mjs warlord]

I started pc use in 2003 with xp i think was really good , it was a packard bell pc and had a free pre installed copy program that that could copy anything .

Next was vista ... what a mess that was , so many logs to look at you could actually convince yourself you had a problem even if you did not.

Then i got 7 and the shop guy said basically its vista with all the crap removed .

Since 2016 i have been on windows 10 and i think its the best system.

FOOTNOTE ...... how many of you remember something called Longhorn .. it was delayed for so long that its release name became vista in the hope that users would have forgot the name Longhorn.

 

[JarlBSoD]

Yes, Windows 11 is good, but it very often performs poorly after updates. The developers fix it after two weeks with a new update. But why not make everything normal right away?

Can't say i noticed that in any more regular occurance than windows 7 or 10 ever did. Some of the updates they release are supercomplex so they are bound to have a hickup from time to time

 

[JarlBSoD]

can you tell me how to do it through Pavershell?

you can try this one but it dosn't allways work. You are probably better of finding it in the Registry but you would have to google that one because I don't remember the path on the top of my head.

(Get-WmiObject -query ‘select * from SoftwareLicensingService’).OA3xOriginalProductKey

 

[Reola]

the licence key recorded by almost all windows 10 machines is a dumby one. They use about 10 different ones, but its not your actual licence key. It might be aon a laptop as in some cases its stored in the bios.

Most cases, if you want to install windows 10 or 11 on a PC its already been on, you run the installer as normal and when you reach screen asking for licence key, you click "I don't have one" and windows will continue the install process until you get to desktop and then it will check with Activation servers to confirm that PC has a licence to run Win 10 or 11.

You don't need to know it. It can be linked to an email address and then its not associated with the hardware at all.

Was that really possible? Or is this the one where Windows keeps asking you to activate?

 

[Reola]

Well, you must be lucky, I work at my computer almost 24/7 and unfortunately I often notice some errors or just system slowdown after updates, but at least they fix it quickly and you don't have to roll back to the previous version as it was with 7 or 10.

 

[Colif]

Or is this the one where Windows keeps asking you to activate?

the only reason it would ask you to activate at that stage is if you had never installed windows on PC. As it will auto connect to activation servers after install.

 

[Reola]

the only reason it would ask you to activate at that stage is if you had never installed windows on PC. As it will auto connect to activation servers after install.

Where were you a month ago? I was just reinstalling my system. I had to do it over again with a random key.

 

[Colif]

i may have been playing a game, its hard to tell.

 

[JarlBSoD]

Well, you must be lucky, I work at my computer almost 24/7 and unfortunately I often notice some errors or just system slowdown after updates, but at least they fix it quickly and you don't have to roll back to the previous version as it was with 7 or 10.

Well im not lucky, i work with 1000s of Windows 10 and 11 PCs everyday (Intune Admin at a large consultant company) And even though there for sure are issues with Win 11 updates, they are no more frequent and no more problematic than they are for Win 10 in my experience. That dosn't mean you don't experiense problems though since there are allways some that do

I can allso tell you stuff like Dell docking stations fail allot more often currently than HP docking stations and that Lenovo PCs generally Avoido most of the time compared to HP or Dell

 

[Colif]

Since win 10 release in 2015, I have yet needed to reinstall windows because of a problem with windows.
I reinstalled win 10 twice but both times I was trying to figure out a problem, and both ended up being hardware.
Windows 11... I have had to do a repair install once as windows update broke itself... it had been 18 months since I had installed it, windows generally gets a new version every 12 months, so it was stressing out the updater.
I have yet needed to reinstall win 11.

thats not bad, 8 years. No windows problems that required drastic action. Not to say it was all clear sailing, windows updates would sometimes mess up but they would fix it as well.

Win 11 so much like win 10 I had to go looking for what was different after installing it. Apart from start menu being in wrong place for 2 minutes until I moved it, it doesn't feel any different.

Main difference between every version is its User Interface. So really, its not... do you have a fav version of windows, its... which UI do you like most? So far I just go with flow, they haven't messed it up too much since Win 8

 

[Brian Boru]

Got Win10 mid-2016, still on it. Had to reinstall via disk images twice in 2016, but it's been plain sailing since then—so that's 7 years. It's a fine OS.

Main difference between every version is its User Interface

There's usually also a security update, that's a main item for Win11, to the extent it required fairly modern hardware to get Win11 at all.

I often notice some errors or just system slowdown after updates

There are trillions of possible different configs for Windows systems with all the hardware and software out there, and their many versions. So you may be unlucky to have some unusual feature in yours which causes problems.

However, since it occurs after more than one update and fixes itself soon after, I recommend you do an extra Restart after the update has completed—it is very likely that restarting your PC is what causes the fix, MS are very unlikely to identify a problem, identify a fix, test it, and ship it out within a couple of weeks..

 

[Colif]

MS are very unlikely to identify a problem, identify a fix, test it, and ship it out within a couple of weeks..

that depends how many people get problem and what it does. There were updates that deleted a small amount of peoples data, but the odds of it happening were slim. Media always makes the problems out to be much bigger than they are. People always worry about things that probably won't happen.

There's usually also a security update, that's a main item for Win11, to the extent it required fairly modern hardware to get Win11 at all.

TPM is main thing stopping people getting win 11.

But before win 11, the biggest observable difference between windows versions before that was what it looked like. Vista asked more of PC than XP did, but by time people got their saviour... win 7, they had newer pc capable of running it. If your PC was brand new when Vista was released, it wasn't that bad... I used Vista for 5 years and only stopped when I had hardware problems resulting in 2 new GPU in one week and windows deciding enough changes had been made, it wanted a new licence... so I bought win 7 instead.

 

[VillainousVelKoz]

Windows 10 for me, but I guess that's mainly because I have been using it for several years and I have grown super comfortable with it. And I hate change haha.
Two things that I find/found unlikeable in both versions, 10 and 11, are definitely Edge, as others have pointed out, and Cortana. Did anybody actually use Cortana?? Glad they got rid of it.

 

[Colif]

i only see edge when I open the weather app in win 11. Every time it wants me to swap to it being default and I ignore it.

I never used Cortana, just as I don't use Co Pilot now.

 

[Zimbaly]

Well to answer the question it's a tie for me. Windows 95 and windows XP.
Windows 95 was a nice jump from 3.1 so it left a good impression and if I'm not mistaken 95c had usb support implemented in it??? It's been so long I'm probably wrong or off about that.
As for XP I just found that it built up windows to the next level and basically influenced all Windows releases after that, even to this day I feel it's had an impact on the modern versions, but even then we wouldn't have gotten there without 95.

Also shout out to Norton Commander. The only way I would run stuff back in the day. I didn't mind DOS at all, but Norton Commander just had great functionality for back then.

 

[Brian Boru]

the biggest observable difference between windows versions before that was what it looked like

There were a lot more than UI changes in older Win. Networking, printing, plug & play, RAM handling, disk handling, multi-monitor, architecture, security, multi-tasking, kernel changes, folder & file names, backwards compatibility, etc—a lot of key advancements we take for granted today.

I used Vista for 5 years

I skipped Vista, mainly due to widely reported issues with DRM, compatibility and slowness—I recall neither Tom's nor AnandTech were impressed. Besides, XP had solved its early messed-up situation by then with 3 extensive Service Packs, and there was little in Vista I wanted—the Sidebar yes, but Defender was in early days and not up to task.

Did anybody actually use Cortana?

Big hit with fans of Microsoft Bob and Clippy—plus of course anyone who types in Comic Sans

if I'm not mistaken 95c had usb support

Yep.

XP I just found that it built up windows to the next level and basically influenced all Windows releases after that

In 90s you had 2 distinct strands of Win, 9x and NT. XP was the marriage of both of these—essentially a consumer-level UI on top of NT 'engine'—but Win2000 was the first implementation of NT in the consumer space. I used 2000 for a few years, until the early XP mess was largely sorted by the first Service Pack—2000 was very good, and is unjustly forgotten and underrated.

Norton Commander

Many people loved that, but not my thing. I must've tried 20 diff file managers before eventually finding the superb but expensive Directory Opus.

 

[DavidClock]

XP - my best memory, fewest reinstalls (total opposite of W98 in this case, so much so that I remember the serial number. It was on my hardware for the longest time (more than 10 years in total) and I have a great deal of fondness for it, in fact I still use it on one piece of hardware to this day.

 

[Brian Boru]

Welcome to the forum

reinstalls … so much so that I remember the serial number

Haha yeah, I remember those days—I used to freak friends out by reciting their 25-char numbers [which I memorized via usual mnemonics just beforehand, just to mess with 'em]

 

[JarlBSoD]

Not sure i actually answered the question that was asked. I am not sure which is my favorite. Maybe DOS. Maybe win 98. Why ? Well even thogh I had computors before DOS like the c64 and Atari ST (got an amiga later) It was the first operating system where i actually started to take interest in what an OS does and how you can manupulate it (read totally bork your pc). 98, well 95 was definetly a bigger milestone in the history of Microsoft but i feel 98 was an overall better fleshed out version of 95. Don't get me wrong, i love Win 95 but 98 has a bit more of that, fuzzy experiment with stuff feel to me