Microsoft is ruining Windows. It just keeps getting worse. Whether it be their insistence on AI and cloud garbage, or just a general sense of incompetence, I can’t help but feel like the operating system has seen better days.
Normally I wouldn’t care too much, big tech ruins another thing, whatever.
But the problem is Microsoft has such a dominant market share that you can’t really escape them.
I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.
Vista’s problem was just the terrible third party drivers and the fact that it was preinstalled on machines it had no business running on. 7 didn’t improve much on it (except fixing the UAC prompt so that it no longer made you feel like you’re using Linux with misconfigured sudo timeout), but it had the benefit of already having working drivers from Vista and proper hardware capable of running Vista/7.
7 was actually surprisingly well optimized. It ran OK on an office PC with 512 MB of RAM and a 512 MHz CPU.
You wouldn’t use it like that because by that time apps like browsers and office were starting to feel restricted by that little RAM to the point you could only run either or. But the OS itself stayed out of the way as much as possible, and if you gave it just a little more RAM (like 1 GB) suddenly you had a usable office machine.
I ran 7 on a Dell netbook for a few years, and it worked great (though, naturally, not as great as XP)