SHITTIEST WINDOWS POLL

note to self: do a follow up to this poll for SHITTIEST COMPUTER CABLE OR ADAPTER POLL

further reflections: true, yes, 3.x was not necessarily better than just staying in DOS most of the time. but i was also a kid, mainly interested in games, so for a while Windows was only something to open on the way to opening Chip's Challenge or MS Paint. maybe to some extent, little icon shorcuts to EXE files replaced the MENUSYS.bat text menu system by which we'd organized all our applications and games. but word processing was the only area where I experienced the jump to the GUI (replacing Word Perfect with Ami Pro) as a total revolution in user experience.

i always forget that Microsoft Bob was not a hilariously dumbed-down OS in its own right, but like a weird skin/toolkit to be installed over top of 3.x and 95. weird. but i guess the era was full of hoonja-doonjas for putterers and tinkerers, little add-ons that today would either be built into the monopoly OS, or just not bothered with at all. After Dark for your screensavers! Wired For Sound Pro for linking goofy sound effects to system events! Icon-Do-It for customizing the icons! and so on...

Boring: that was 8, so bad that they skipped doing a 9 (was there some other rationale attempted?). It gets my vote easily since I managed to skip running ME and Vista. The running joke is that only every other version is "good".... anyway going to wait and see with 11 for a bit.

+1 on Linux desktop not being the ordeal it used to be.

do not accept any version of Windows which does not support sheep.exe

What would Clippy do

i was told they skipped 9 because of concerns that it might cause issues with old programs that searched for "9*" to identify 95/98. don't know if thats actually true though

sarahell you only need one option which is external SCSI. Maybe micro SCSI as well.

yeah i was gonna say

windows sucks

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/14/article-2559753-1B7CAA7300000578-337_634x434.jpg

Windows 8/8.1 because it, unlike every other versh, refused to fucking work wiht any of my external device drivers (midi controllers, ps4 contollers, mice, etc)

And also that tile thing was stupid.

It’s Me by a longshot

I wanted to say ME but I never used or saw it in the field I dont think!!

btw WINDOWS 3.1 ruled at the time, and it had that Skiing game where the yeti would come and eat you.

Did 3.1 have Chip's Challenge?

probably, those were both part of the same 'windows entertainment pack'

the Entertainment Packs are hard to keep track of. some of the software was shovelware/ports, some of it was made to round out the "packs," and some was re-packed in a "best of" title, etc. Minesweeper and some of the other basic card/puzzle games eventually got bundled in with the OS. Wiki says SkiFree was made for pack #3, and Chip's Challenge was a port of an Atari Lynx game (!) from three years earlier, for #4. Pipe Dream was an old LucasArts title for the Amiga... etc.

but generally yes, all those things were available in the 3.x era!

I don't think I know the skiing game. I loved Jezball (possibly a bit later?)

https://i.imgur.com/wHff4DS.png

SHITTIEST COMPUTER CABLE OR ADAPTER POLL

I get the hate for external SCSI, but it has to be USB C.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

oh man i had a really good one for the worst cables/adapters topic, a week or two ago, but couldn't remember which thread that came up in

I still have 8 on my old laptop, and yeah it's a fucking travesty

"Me" is probably the correct answer but I have no first hand experience with it. 95 was pretty bad in retrospect I guess, but it seemed like such a huge step up from Windows 3.1 that it didn't seem so bad (I only really used Windows for Word or similar programs back then, almost all games were still under DOS).

The start menu tile thing in Windows 8/8.1 is enough to make me vote for that.

8 looked bad, but I never had to use it. ME is definitely the worst one I had to use regularly for a bit.

voted Vista, but really a cointoss with that & ME, both were nightmares

The early versions of XP deserve more hate for being incredibly vulnerable to viruses for a mass-market system bought by grandmas. But ME went wrong all the time all by itself so that wins the prize.

I was a field technician for a 3rd party IT support company when ME came out. It was terrible, to the point where Vista actually seemed good (it wasn't).

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wow! Windows 8 beats out all the Mac/Linux ilxors!

I'm of the opinion that the people who voted 8 never used Windows Me

^^^ my Win 8 laptop was way better than any machine running ME (at least until I upgraded it to Win 10 and then it ground to a halt in continuous updates).

I think not that many people have experience with Windows Me? I remember everybody saying to stay away pretty much as soon as it was released and since for many this was still in the days of desktops where you installed the (pirated) OS yourself, it was pretty easy to avoid.

A lot of our clients were small businesses who bought their own PCs from PC World or wherever. The number of times I arrived at someone's office to be confronted with a WinME PC in a box.

I think not that many people have experience with Windows Me?

you gloriously lucky people

I missed most of the terrible versions, went 3.1 -> NT -> 95 -> 98 -> XP -> 7 -> 10.

Probably going to skip 11 and finally go to Linux now I've got pretty much everything I use working.

> 98 -> XP -> 7 -> 10

this was a solid run -- I did the same

I think not that many people have experience with Windows Me?

you gloriously lucky people

― talkin' about his flat tire (DJP), Friday, October 1, 2021 12:51 PM (seven hours ago)

Heh instead I was troubleshooting the classic "turning things off and on to see why different software crashes" in OS9.x

there was a particular thing that always had to be turned off -- like -- I think I got to the point where I would always have it disabled because it made just about everything crash or freeze -- anyone remember?

RAMdoubler?

(sorry, I should have put a trigger warning on that post)

oooh maybe? ... I want to say it was a TWAIN thing