After more than three decades of Microsoft Windows success, there have been a few obvious failures along the way. With that in mind, we picked the six worst versions of Windows. All of this made us want to stick with older and better versions of Windows, or use alternatives like Mac or Linux instead.
Classification criteria
Most of us know a bad version of Windows when we see it. Perhaps we experienced personal pain while battling its bugs, or wasted time reinstalling it over and over again, or heard stories about how often it crashed.
When putting together this list, we took into account the following parameters: how much people hated each version (appearances on other worst lists), how much it sold, how quickly it was adopted, how bad its reviews were, how long it was in the market, and our own personal experiences with the software. For fun, we also googled “Windows [x] Sucks ”, and counted the results.
Honestly, there isn’t any solid science to this, so you might not agree with our exact ranking, but we can confidently predict it: if you’ve run at least one of these builds. Windows you wanted to upgrade.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick with the full desktop versions of Windows (with the slight exception of an ARM-based detour), so more obscure server and PDA versions will be spared (for now ).
# 6: Windows 1.01 (1985)
Windows 1.0 might rank high in terms of importance (for, well, being the very first version of Windows), but it was a stench in the market. Unlike Macs that were built from the ground up with hardware optimized to use a mouse and graphical interface, IBM PCs had to rely on kludgy software tricks to even start doing the same.
As a result, Windows 1.0 pushed the capabilities of a typical 1985 PC back to the time, making it too slow to use memory. In 1986, The New York Times reviewed Windows 1.0 and wrote that “running Windows on a PC with 512KB of memory is like pouring molasses in the Arctic.” Add some poor third-party support, and you’ve had a real dud.
Luckily for Microsoft, things got better: the average PC became powerful enough to run Windows smoothly in the early 1990s.
RELATED:35 Years of Microsoft Windows: Remembering Windows 1.0
# 5: Windows XP (initial version, 2001)
Of course, after all the fixes, Windows XP was one of the best versions of Windows ever. But some of you may remember what XP was like before the 2004 Service Pack 2 release: a buggy mess with driver issues and huge security holes.
There were also growing challenges with the all new Windows XP Activation System, which was a first for Windows at the time. To prevent piracy, Microsoft asked customers who had built their own machines or upgraded to activate their copy of Windows XP over the Internet or over the phone. If you made any significant changes to your computer’s hardware (like installing a new hard drive or graphics card), Windows XP would need to be reactivated, which was sure to be a headache for some people. a time when the always connected Internet was not a given. .
Fortunately, Microsoft continued to refine XP for years to come, and it eventually grew into a solid, stable operating system that many were reluctant to give up. The release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 was a pivotal moment that made the operating system much more secure.
RELATED:Windows XP users: here are your upgrade options
# 4: Windows RT (2012)
Microsoft designed Windows RT as an ARM-based version of Windows that would run on a new class of lighter, more power-efficient machines like the Surface RT. There was only one problem: it couldn’t run millions of Windows apps designed for the traditional Windows x86 architecture. And most of the Windows 8-specific apps in the Windows Store at the time weren’t very good.
Worse yet, it teased full desktop support with a desktop mode that would only allow Microsoft desktop apps like Microsoft Office. Third-party applications were prohibited, even if recompiled for ARM. In the end, RT was more than just an embarrassment: the failure of Windows RT and the Surface RT hardware that came with it resulted in a loss of $ 900 million for Microsoft in 2013.
RELATED:What is Windows RT and how is it different from Windows 8?
# 3: Windows 8 (2012)
Windows 8 was a bold move on Microsoft’s part. He saw the challenge posed to PCs by Apple’s iPhone and iPad (year-over-year PC sales started falling in 2011) and decided to tackle it head-on with a crossover operating system capable of handling both touch screens and desktop PCs.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has grown a little too enthusiastic with its new strategy, forcing its core clientele of desktop PC users to compromise their productivity for a new touchscreen interface called Metro. It was a great interface for tablets, but not for desktops.
In fact, Windows 8 treated the desktop windows experience as an afterthought: the operating system booted into the Start screen by default and hid the “Desktop” behind an icon. Once you got to the desktop, there was no start menu, and there were boring hot spots. If you leave your mouse in the upper right corner of the screen for a while, an icon bar will appear.
In the end, Windows 8 was a total bet on mobile first that didn’t pay off. Reviews about it were dismal, and Microsoft backed down, first with Windows 8.1, then with Windows 10. All the while, many users have just hung on to Windows 7 or even ditched Macs.
RELATED:Why I’m still using Windows 7 after a year of trying to love Windows 8
# 2: Windows Vista (2006)
After the great success of Windows XP, Windows Vista was a fiasco. The shiny new operating system comes in six confusing editions (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate), slicing the market apart and confusing customers.
One of the first complaints about Vista was that it ran slowly on machines that worked fine with XP. He was also a memory pig. Part of that was thanks to its flashy, translucent new Aero interface and constantly running gadgets, which taxed graphics capabilities, memory, and processor power.
Then there was some puzzling trouble that had been meant to help, but actually just got in the way. Case in point: the dreaded User Account Control (UAC) prompts that popped up every few minutes to cover the screen whenever you were actually trying to do something with your computer. Fortunately, it was possible to disable them with some tinkering, but what was Microsoft thinking?
In the end, we can thank Vista’s many failures for the glory of Windows 7, which fixed Vista’s issues while still maintaining its advancements.
RELATED:4 Ways to Make UAC Less Boring on Windows 7 / Vista
# 1: Windows Millennium Edition (2000)
Initially, Microsoft wanted Windows 98 to be the last operating system based on the old MS-DOS kernel, but the company realized that it did not have time to finish preparing a Windows NT for consumers. The result was Windows Millennium Edition, or “Windows Me” for short.
What was wrong with Windows Me? Well, the main problem was that a lot of people found it crashed – and crashed a lot. To our knowledge, no one has ever explained exactly why Moi was more unstable than the already unstable Windows 98, but we suspect this was due to bugs that were introduced when Microsoft hastily added new features to Me without testing. appropriate.
There were other issues as well: Programs running on Me tended to leak memory a lot, which could also cause crashes. The included System Restore utility did not work correctly at first. And Me removed MS-DOS Real mode, which was necessary for some legacy programs to work, especially MS-DOS games from the late 1990s, which many PC users were still playing at the time.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft already had the answer up its sleeve: Windows 2000, which was stable and glorious. Of course, it lacked the flashy consumer bells and whistles, but it could have done the trick. Instead, Microsoft kicked the ball with me and didn’t start bouncing back with Windows XP until 2001 (which initially had its own share of issues, as we saw above).
RELATED:Windows Me, 20 Years Later: Was It Really That Bad?
Honorable mention: Windows 10 (2015)
It’s been a tough road for Windows 10. Some of its issues include built-in advertising, freemium games, forced updates, data collection and privacy issues, and a Frankenstein skin that merges elements from four generations of Windows into one. product, which Microsoft is still working on refining.
Windows 10 gets high marks for providing a competent desktop experience, but it somehow makes a worse touchscreen than Windows 8. And speaking of Windows 8, Microsoft overlaps two software architectures: UWP and the legacy Win32 platform. Torn between wanting to ditch legacy Win32 apps – that Windows 10 performs poorly in high DPI modes – but retaining its massive install base, Windows 10 is neither here nor there.
With Windows 10, the sometimes impenetrable updates never stop. Microsoft is continually fiddling with new features, turning them off and back on while orphaned applications and utilities. And there are still at least two different ways (Control Panel and Settings) to configure the system. Windows 10 looks like pieces of code bolted here and there, with no great vision uniting them.
We’ve gotten enough reviews about Windows 10 over the years to know that a lot of people really, really don’t like a lot of its aspects.
So while Windows 10 is one of the best versions of Windows ever in many ways, you could argue that it is also one of the worst in other ways too. If there’s ever a Windows 11, let’s hope it can get a fresh start without breaking everything (like Vista and Windows 8 before it). The future awaits you!
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