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| ▲ | steve1977 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family. I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini. | | |
| ▲ | rbanffy 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu. | | |
| ▲ | lproven 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I decided the same, but for myself. I liked Windows 2000. XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X. 10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop. | | |
| ▲ | rbanffy 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed. From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue. |
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| ▲ | BirAdam 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network. | |
| ▲ | BeFlatXIII 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 7 was basically a Vista service pack but after the hardware vendors had time to cure some cerebral rectitis and give proper hardware. |
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| ▲ | FirmwareBurner 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >Vista was an enhancement of XP. It really wasn't. You can say XP was an enhancement of 2000, but Vista was it's own thing, they reworked a lot of the NT Kernel and moved stuff like audio and video drivers from kernel space to user space, which brough increased security and stability, but broke compatibility on hardware that didn't bring updated drivers which pissed off a lot of early adopters of vista. | | |
| ▲ | finaard 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Funny thing is that NT originally had video drivers in user space exactly for security/stability reasons, but moved it into kernel space with NT4 for performance reasons. | |
| ▲ | EvanAnderson 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Vista was, arguably, the unofficial beta for Windows 7. Just about everything they tried and failed to execute properly in Vista worked well in 7. (Similar story for 8 vs 8.1-- or more appropriately Server 2012 vs. 2012 R2.) | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I’d already switched away, but 7 seemed like the peak in an absolute sense. XP might have been the biggest relative improvement or the best normalized to the competition, but Windows 7 was the last version before development started going backwards. | | |
| ▲ | anonymars 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I actually preferred Vista - there were a bunch of things I thought 7 made worse: - in explorer, Vista could show column headers in all views (not just details) making it easy to sort/group - you could use the headers to set grouping - grouping still showed all the files - the left tree became buggy in Windows 7, it doesn't always scroll to the current folder (I think it's broken to this day) - the "quick access" shortcuts in explorer (the top list) was its own section (so you could always click it) -- in 7 and later it is part of the tree so you have to scroll back up to use it - dragging files into a folder in 7+ instantly sorts them in the view, rather than keeping them together until hitting F5 - windows media player got rid of "find in library", "recently added" playlist, "play all", the taskbar miniplayer - Vista had peak taskbar tray. instead of the current all-or-nothing overflow thing, overflow icons would automatically show themselves and then hide again - can't run Explorer as administrator anymore to temporarily access protected files - movie maker gone, dvd maker gone, sidebar gone |
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| ▲ | kasabali 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | XP has had shadow copies. File history tab in explorer was first available in Server 2003, but AFAIK there was a hack to enable it in XP, too. | | |
| ▲ | justin66 5 days ago | parent [-] | | All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume shadow copy. | | |
| ▲ | anonymars 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh | | |
| ▲ | justin66 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I always turned it off. I've literally never experienced a moment of "wow, I wish I had a shadow copy in place so I could help solve this problem." Conversely, there were plenty of times when volume shadow copy running was the problem. Talking about my use of home PCs, of course. | | |
| ▲ | anonymars 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You've never wished you (or some process) hadn't just overwritten a file? | | |
| ▲ | justin66 5 days ago | parent [-] | | That's not what I wrote. What I wrote: I've literally never experienced a moment of "wow, I wish I had a shadow copy in place so I could help solve this problem." I guess my backup solutions are more primitive, but certainly more predictable in terms of their effect on the system. I didn't turn off volume shadow copy for my own amusement, I turned it off because it was freezing some devices' availability for I/O while it did its work. | | |
| ▲ | anonymars 5 days ago | parent [-] | | My context was that, independent of any actual backup solution, in Vista and 7 shadow copy gave you file history across pretty much the whole drive (this was separate from "System Restore"). This made it trivial to deal with restoring some previous version of a file or folder even days later. If you ever had that problem, shadow copy would have solved it* * I think it was not in Home Edition, so yes, thumbs down on that |
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| ▲ | lproven 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is all true, but the price was too high for me. > WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing It made it more stable, I don't care about tearing and stuff, but it robbed me of full-screen DOS windows and the ability to toggle a window to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. I used that a lot. > Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive) But it's no use if the OS isn't stable enough to trust. So I kept my important stuff on servers, so lost this. The same applies to openSUSE today. > No more running with full admin privileges all the time. A small win, for standalone machines. > Bitlocker was introduced https://xkcd.com/538/ Life is too short. > yes it required good hardware to run well. Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB. > With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. Nah. Not as bad as generally held, but not great. > I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now I did: https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w... It was glorious. | | |
| ▲ | anonymars 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I want to point out about Bitlocker, it makes it easier to get rid of old drives safely and less problematic to lose a laptop. $5 wrench doesn't apply | | | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB. That's an exaggeration. I didn't have the highest-end premium kit. I had good hardware (I was a gamer after all), but I doubt very much if I had more than 2 GB memory and I ran Vista with zero performance issues whatsoever. | |
| ▲ | Anthony-G 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > https://xkcd.com/538/ I’m a big fan of XKCD but, in reality, what most people (and employers) worry about is unauthorised third-party access to private data in the event a laptop is lost or stolen (most often by opportunist theft). Bitlocker — and other Full Disk Encryption technology — provide an effective mitigation for this situation. | | |
| ▲ | lproven 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Well, yes, we know that. I mean, that is the reason for doing it. But what is much more rarely discussed are the costs. There are multiple penalties. It hurts performance. It impedes dual-boot. It impedes setup in general; you lose most of the nice friendly GUI tools, replaced by clunky harder CLI tools. It makes data recovery vastly harder, which is one of those things people discount until they need it and then realise how critical it is. It makes troubleshooting OS problems vastly harder. Many it simply prevents: the answer becomes, reinstall your OS and restore from backup. If you have no backups, tough. It's inconvenient, unless you use modern TPM-backed systems, in which case it dramatically reduces the security benefits, while also severely reducing OS compatibility. It adds a new vital credential people don't know they have and don't know they need to keep secure backups of. It generally makes everything worse, to fix a threat that most people simply do not have. The 2 employers I personally had who insisted on it published all the company info on my machines to Github anyway, making it not even security theatre. More like security pantomime: an act of pretending to pretend to do something. The answer to all this is, in my experience as tech support type: don't do it. Conduct a proper analysis of who has what secrets and what they need to keep, and use other better-targeted tools just for them. Because without that, it causes problems for no good reason. It's treated as a panacea but it isn't -- it fixes nothing for 99% of users -- and the very real problems and issues it causes are ignored. This _may_ be worth it for some companies and organisations but it's not for anyone else. I can see its worth for governments and military forces but few others. | | |
| ▲ | Anthony-G 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Fair points. Thankfully, I haven't had any of those issues. I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN. Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often. For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need. | | |
| ▲ | lproven 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Thanks for that! If it's a Win11 machine with Secure Boot then there is a high chance it has Bitlocker on by default. You should probably check and disable it if you don't want it. It'll be a little faster, and easier to recover if anything goes wrong. | | |
| ▲ | Anthony-G 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I bought her the laptop a few years ago from a local, independent retailer who also specialise repairs as I try to support local trade and retailers as much as possible. It came with Windows 10 and the retailers had configured it with local user account authentication (no microsoft.com account), removed the advertising and other annoyances and without Bitlocker. She has since upgraded to Windows 11 but it works mostly the same (without obnoxious advertising and distractions). |
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