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[SHA]

If it's about the games I pick 90s oses easily, what's the point of os besides everyday use like in every house if games are garbage anyway?

 

[PaintTinJr]

I got into PCs, at a very late age. I had used them in school and friends house years before. But I only bought my first PC at 18, after working a whole summer and saving up.
My family never really cared about technology. My father died without having ever used a PC. My mother is alive, but never touched one.

My Windows 2000 was well configured. The results I had were in line with what I was seeing with benchmarks from Anandtech and Techreport.
Mind you, it was not a huge difference. Maybe 5% at worst.

Windows ME ran very well for me. I'm always a bit surprised when people say they hate this OS.
It wasn't perfect, but it was the best OS with the 9x kernel. By far.
Though I knew what I was doing with updating drivers and configuring the OS.

Sorry to hear about your Dad - by me making a wrong assumption.

IMO, the fastest 9x OS I used for gaming, and always had a multi-boot on systems to check against 98, was Win95 OG + IE4 service pack, but then my copy of Win95 was taken from my IBM PC installer that had an embedded Zip file password ("magic") that I discovered opening the installer as text and finding the string in the binary, allowing me to unpack just the OEM optimised OS CAB files and install the leanest copy of the OS... probably explains why when I said I was getting 60fps out of a Voodoo + matrox G100 with quake3 in the other Dreamcast powerful thread, others saying I was misremembering probably weren't using a lean OS, and probably weren't sticking with a 2GB FAT16 partition for the C drive and another 2GB FAT16 partition for the pagefile on a D drive, and fixing its size at 2.5x the ram size. or using beta glide drivers for their voodoo and hunking more megs in their q3config.cfg file, etc.

The file manager option to enable "Launch Windows folders in a separate process" made NT/2000 versus OSR2/98/ME on Pentium or newer class hardware a day and night difference IMO, and is still an option I enable today on 10 and 11 for responsiveness/performance. and to avoid non-Microsoft programs locking the system and potentially crashing others. Even the choice between FAT32 and NTFS for 2000 Pro install could have performance implications when file indexing and auto file compressing was enabled by default on the C drive IIRC. disabling indexing on NTFS was another good win for my mileage with gaming, but again using two HDDs and placing the pagefile on another SCSI or EIDE channel was far more effective on lean win95 OG and NT4 onwards. The IO capabilities on all Pro OSes scaled really well, and was even better with the lesser abstraction of SCSI by some margin from what I recall. Intensive data processing on identical 2000 pro Dell workstations except for SCSI vs EIDE differed by one taking 8hrs and the other taking closer to a full 24hrs.

 

[ljubomir]

 

[Doctor Hades]

I've been using Windows since Windows 95 (at that time for work only) before getting my first PC with Windows 98 installed in, I believe, late 1998. In my experience, they all sucked until Windows 7 which was when Windows finally became a stable platform that didn't constantly crash due to dodgy drivers or require a complete reinstall every few months. Windows Me was notably bad and Windows Vista was horrible too due to Microsoft dropping the Start button for a tiled tablet interface (what a mistake that was!).

That said, Windows 11 is easily my favourite version of Windows to date. It's 100% stable for me with very few issues and I'm in the Release Preview program too so currently on Windows 11 Pro 24H2. It's great for games in opinion. A big part of that is the hardware it's running on too, 32 GB of memory is fantastic for Windows as are super-fast NVMe SSDs which, of course, I never had back in the days of Windows 7.

 

[Diddy X]

I have no issues with 11 except it's ugly.

 

[winjer]

Sorry to hear about your Dad - by me making a wrong assumption.

IMO, the fastest 9x OS I used for gaming, and always had a multi-boot on systems to check against 98, was Win95 OG + IE4 service pack, but then my copy of Win95 was taken from my IBM PC installer that had an embedded Zip file password ("magic") that I discovered opening the installer as text and finding the string in the binary, allowing me to unpack just the OEM optimised OS CAB files and install the leanest copy of the OS... probably explains why when I said I was getting 60fps out of a Voodoo + matrox G100 with quake3 in the other Dreamcast powerful thread, others saying I was misremembering probably weren't using a lean OS, and probably weren't sticking with a 2GB FAT16 partition for the C drive and another 2GB FAT16 partition for the pagefile on a D drive, and fixing its size at 2.5x the ram size. or using beta glide drivers for their voodoo and hunking more megs in their q3config.cfg file, etc.

The file manager option to enable "Launch Windows folders in a separate process" made NT/2000 versus OSR2/98/ME on Pentium or newer class hardware a day and night difference IMO, and is still an option I enable today on 10 and 11 for responsiveness/performance. and to avoid non-Microsoft programs locking the system and potentially crashing others. Even the choice between FAT32 and NTFS for 2000 Pro install could have performance implications when file indexing and auto file compressing was enabled by default on the C drive IIRC. disabling indexing on NTFS was another good win for my mileage with gaming, but again using two HDDs and placing the pagefile on another SCSI or EIDE channel was far more effective on lean win95 OG and NT4 onwards. The IO capabilities on all Pro OSes scaled really well, and was even better with the lesser abstraction of SCSI by some margin from what I recall. Intensive data processing on identical 2000 pro Dell workstations except for SCSI vs EIDE differed by one taking 8hrs and the other taking closer to a full 24hrs.

My experience with Win95 was limited. But I had a friend who updated to Win98 and soon after was regretting it dearly.
Mostly because performance dropped, over Win95. So I trust you, when you say that it was the fastest OS for gaming.

It was around the time of Windows ME and 2000 that I started to learn about tweaking an OS.
It was by then that I started disabling unnecessary services, disabling file indexing, disabling certain UI effects, configuring page file, etc.
I never had a SCSI on my own PCs, but one time at work, I was given one work PC with one. And holly crap, it was fast.
That PC had the fastest drive I had ever used. Only years later did I experiment something faster, with an SSD.

 

[Valedix]

Windows 7 the goat.

 

[raduque]

Windows ME: the best of the 9x kernel OS. Much more stable than 98

I've never had a Windows version crash during the install except for Windows Millenium Edition. I had a friend ask me to fix their PC, but the install was just so messed I had to re-install. This was using an actual WindowsME retail disk. Tried to install it 3 times from scratch to a new, empty HDD and it crashed 2 times. It got installed and just was not stable. I eventually rolled it back to 98SE and the computer was rock-solid.

(and yes, it's Arch, just had to make sure to note it)

How do you ask somebody if they use Arch? You don't, they'll tell you.

 

[winjer]

I've never had a Windows version crash during the install except for Windows Millenium Edition. I had a friend ask me to fix their PC, but the install was just so messed I had to re-install. This was using an actual WindowsME retail disk. Tried to install it 3 times from scratch to a new, empty HDD and it crashed 2 times. It got installed and just was not stable. I eventually rolled it back to 98SE and the computer was rock-solid.

Probably lack of a compatible driver. Which could be sideloaded during installation.

 

[Thabass]

Top 3 Windows versions to me are:

Windows 7
Windows XP
Windows 11

Yes, I like Windows 11 more than 10, which would be #4.

 

[Drew1440]

Windows Vista because it came 5 years after XP, if felt like a new chapter in computing. 7 wasn't much of a change and felt like a rebrand.
Windows 98/ME had a lot of charm to them (who remembers the wacky screensavers and themes) but were just too unstable, plus malware could easily nuke your install.

 

[CGNoire]

Best = 7

Nostalgic = XP

Prettiest = Vista hands down.

 

[adamsapple]

Windows XP was such a transformative experience back in the day.

 

[nikos]

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

 

[nowhat]

How do you ask somebody if they use Arch? You don't, they'll tell you.

That's kinda, you know, the joke. Insert Simpsons meme here.

(having said that, Arch rocks)

 

[raduque]

Probably lack of a compatible driver. Which could be sideloaded during installation.

The friggin system shipped with WindowsME and 98SE installed without issue.

Windows Vista because it came 5 years after XP, if felt like a new chapter in computing. 7 wasn't much of a change and felt like a rebrand.
Windows 98/ME had a lot of charm to them (who remembers the wacky screensavers and themes) but were just too unstable, plus malware could easily nuke your install.

You didn't even need malware to crash Windows 98. You just needed to send that DPC net message or whatever it was. Me and my friends on IRC used to do that to each other all the time.

 

[RagnarokIV]

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

Did you know that prick Bin Laden was using that key? We couldn't have him using our beautiful Windows XP, so we sent out best boy Tim Kennedy to fuck him up.

https://www.cia.gov/library/abbotta...27A2ECCBE2B3269A5589A7F518_serial.txt.doc.pdf

The rest is history.

 

[nikos]

Did you know that prick Bin Laden was using that key? We couldn't have him using our beautiful Windows XP, so we sent out best boy Tim Kennedy to fuck him up.

https://www.cia.gov/library/abbotta...27A2ECCBE2B3269A5589A7F518_serial.txt.doc.pdf

The rest is history.

That key being stored on CIA's site is fucking wild LOL.

 

[Nydius]

Windows 98 did have a great startup sound, which was good since you’d get to hear it a lot because it would crash from just looking at it wrong.

Win Millennium and Win 98/98SE are, by far, the two most unstable OS’s I’ve ever had the misfortune of managing.

However, let’s take a moment and reflect on the real GOAT of the late 90s Windows OS’s:

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

Best are definitely 3.1, 98 and XP. The order can differ, but top 3.

 

[Zathalus]

I started on 3.0, voted XP for nostalgia, loved 7 from the start (vista wasn’t bad either), and Win10/11 have been alright. I really only didn’t like original 98, ME, and 8.

 

[I'm nobody]

In my bedroom the woman across the street has a huge rack

 

[Yerd]

I'm partial to bay windows.

Which was the last version to have normal settings windows? Win7? Not these stupid pages they have now. I hate it.