The cracks were probably because you were part of a botnet for using an insecure OS for years lol

Get this set it to 2000, not even your great grand kids will have to worry about it.

Surely NT (No Time) would be better?

For 90% of what I want to do it’s fine. I mainly code in c# so it’s actually better supported on windows then anywhere else.

Everything else I have WSL setup.

Yup, it was a very solid OS. It’s similar to how people remember XP, but what they really remember is XP Service Pack 2 which was the rock solid version.

I used 8.1 all the way until around 2019, when I finally relented and switched to 10 (on 11 now). Take Windows 7 and 10, and do a “greatest hits” edition, and you have 8.1. It was basically 7 with some features that went into 10 mixed in. A fine OS for daily driving.

I would have used it for longer; only upgraded because you’d run into random little issues and bugs with various programs cause no one used it.

deleted by creator

I didn’t conceptually hate the UI there was just so much room for improvement in implementation, if I recall correctly. I was only using a Windows machine for a short time during that era though.

I had already uninstalled and replaced it with 7.

Then it’s an example of a previous time Microsoft made the same dumb decision it made with Windows 11; setting hardware requirements too high for a large enough subset of your customer base that it will be noticed and cause part of that subset to drop your product instead of purchase compatible hardware. I did use Vista for about a year back when it was the latest Windows version, but even with a laptop that had it pre-installed, it lagged like crazy and eventually straight-up died irrecoverably. Installed Linux on that laptop, it worked fine, and have only really used Windows for work at my job I have to use it for since. If you control an almost monopolistic market share like MS does and you want to keep that market share, you have to keep in mind any types of hardware that a reasonably large portion of your userbase uses and make sure your product works solidly on that hardware. You can certainly drop support for really old or rare stuff, you have to move along SOME innovation, but the whole incompatibility problem with 11 shows that MS didn’t quite fully learn their lesson from Vista.

Yeah, I’ve used windows from prior to 3 (when it was more of a shell to navigate DOS apps) to 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, XP SP2, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (and probably NT via school). The only ones I’d describe as awful are the < 3 version (mostly because I was already using 95 at the time), 95 (unstable mess), ME (even more unstable mess), and 8 (UI screamed “we need to make our OS more appealing for the tablet market”). Vista might be the one I spent the most time on, now that I think of it.

Vista was a terrible OS. You can’t just ignore the hike in hardware requirements as if it wasn’t one of the defining parts of the Vista experience. It’s not just that people didn’t have the hardware to run Vista; people bought new hardware with Vista preinstalled that ran like dogshit! In other words, people essentially paid to have a downgrade. An OS that doesn’t run well is bad and no amount of features can change that.

It was during this time the transition to 64 bit systems became necessary to deal with needing to have more than 4GB of memory which was not helped by Vista using 2GB just to run, iirc. If you ran Vista 32 bit you had memory problems. If you ran Vista 64 bit you had major compatibility problems. It wasn’t until the end of Vista’s life did 64 bit go mainstream.