What Was the Best and Worst Windows OS For You?

[izy]

Win Xp , 7 , 10 did the job great.
Win 11 pretty sucks for work, i cant deal with combined taskbar , the new context menu etc.. and i dont want to use tweaks , i reverted back to win10.
I remember using win3.1 but i wasnt doing too much at that point so i cant say if it was good or bad but it was fun.
Win 98 and Win ME most blue screens if i remember right, back then saying that Win95 was more stable or something but it was long time ago

 

[BlackSun59]

Best was XP, no contest. The only OS that never coughed up a BSOD and beautifully ran every piece of cruddy software I threw at it.
Worst was Vista. Even 95C ran better for me.

 

[caroline!]

Best 2000.
Worst 8 and beyond.

I didn't like XP, and it didn't work on my old computer anyway, I agree with the cronies who said it looked "made by Fisher Price" when talking about the visuals. 2000 was simple but very powerful, every setting was available at a glance, menus were organised and not the arbitrary mess that ended up being afterwards and even today. I dual boot W10 LTSC with my Arch Linux and hate how messy everything is, the file explorer was so bad I replaced it with Total Commander, I know it's not *the best* replacement but it works for me, plus it's been around since the 95 days I believe, so it's got a rep behind the name.
Oh and the horrible AV you cannot ever uninstall or disable, I don't even have an internet connection active on it, I *should* be able to uninstall it, but it's built into the core so I can't. And the fact that even if you're admin, you're not, and you can't mod permissions for certain folders or files, somehow I ended up with a music file that can't be hidden, moved or deleted in any way because it belongs to another, now dead, user account, it's hilarious. I might be able to delete it from Arch but I keep it for the lulz, it's the only file on the music folder.

 

[R-T-B]

TBH, Windows XP was the one I got the most joy out of. Win95 the least.

But the OS I enjoyed the most relative to it's peers during it's launch timeframe? That doesn't belong to windows, in honestly. That belongs to OS/2 warp. It was out when 9x was on the market, and very much kicked it's butt. It was very impressive at it's launch time and even today, still has some features yet to be replicated.

 

[bobbybluz]

So far best is Win 7 Enterprise & 10 Enterprise LTSC.
After much customizing I like Win 11 Pro so far. I need it for my two Alder Lake rigs.
Worst was Vista (and I was a MS beta tester back then). I even threw the RTM disc MS sent me away.

 

[erocker]

10 and 11 have been the same experience for me.. That experience is good I guess? No real complaints. Windows XP will always be my favorite. Worst is Vista.

 

[Bones]

I'll express it as simply as I can.

Best:
Any Win OS from the time of Win 7 and older.

Worst:
Anything beyond Win 7.

You're welcome.

 

[AsRock]

Best: Win XP and Win 7
Worst: Win 98 and Win Me

Same here although i had no issue's with XP64 either i was on that for so long haha.

 

[KainXS]

Best
XP and 2000 by a landslide, there are so many diagnostic tools that still use them its no contest. They were just perfectly reliable and predictable and then I'd say Windows 7 was also not that bad.

Worst
Windows ME . . . . . it was basically Windows 98 with a Windows 2000 skin

Windows Vista was a rushjob after microsoft started dumping Windows Longhorn features left and right leading up to the Longhorn Reset. It did lay the groundwork for 7 though but its development was a mess.

 

[amd64skater]

Best: 98 SE Service pack 3
Good: Windows 7 / Win XP
Worst: Win 95 / Win 8 / Win Me

 

[64K]

Best
XP and 2000 by a landslide, there are so many diagnostic tools that still use them its no contest. They were just perfectly reliable and predictable and then I'd say Windows 7 was also not that bad.

Worst
Windows ME . . . . . it was basically Windows 98 with a Windows 2000 skin

Windows Vista was a rushjob after microsoft started dumping Windows Longhorn features left and right leading up to the Longhorn Reset. It did lay the groundwork for 7 though but its development was a mess.

Vista was a flop because it was rushed as you said but it was also just too different from XP. Also it needed more RAM than XP did. I remember seeing PCs for sale with 512 MB RAM that had a Vista ready sticker on them. Of course it would run Vista but it ran slow. Then there was the UAC issue. People didn't understand why they needed to give the OS permission to run a program that they clicked on to run.

The final nail in the coffin was that some manufacturers were slow to get drivers out for their hardware for Vista.

Eventually Vista wasn't bad but if you were an early adopter then you would have thought it sucked. Most never gave it a second chance and just went back to XP if they could until Win 7 came out.

 

[Calenhad]

Let me see, top three worst: Windows ME, Windows ME, Windows 8

Windows XP and 7 were great. 10 ain't so bad except for the increased snooping. But I have given up on that front by now. Even your doorbell is snooping on you these days.

 

[Sithaer]

I liked XP/7 and 10 about the same, never really had serious issues with them.
Yet to try 11, most likely I won't switch until 10 is not supported anymore.

Older OS I either skiped or don't remember much, as a kid I did not really care what was running on the PC as long as I could play some games.

 

[AusWolf]

Best: Windows 7, although Windows 10 is very close.
Worst: Windows 8.

 

[Shihab]

If judging each by their era, I equally appreciated ME, XP, Vista and 7.

Worst would be... 7 and Vista.
Or rather the "Starter" editions. I despise 8 and 10, but I cannot forget the pain of working with damned starter edition netbooks!
Disregarding the hardware limitation (and subsequent software ones), 8 and 10 equally earn that title.

 

[QuietBob]

7 is definitely my all time favorite Windows version. I still use it on older machines, with the latest ESU updates aided by a third party AV solution. It will happily run on a dual core system with 4 GB of RAM and can be comfortably used in most typical scenarios even today.

As an experiment, I have also successfully installed Windows 7 on the slowest 64-bit single core CPUs from 2004, with 2 GB of single channel DDR1 RAM. While certainly not the config you'd want as a daily driver, they are testament to the longevity and endurance of the OS.

XP would have to be my favorite retro OS, I have a dedicated machine running it. Amazingly, it can still be used for modern web browsing, and it will play a plethora of older games at 1080p.

10 is OK for modern use, though nowhere near as flexible and enthusiast friendly as 7 IMO. I haven't tried 11 yet and have no intention to.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Worst out of the box 8 and 11
Best vista and 7

 

[birdie]

Best: Windows XP, the second best Windows 7.
Worst: Windows 95/95OSR/98/98SE/ME - they are the same to me, the second worst Windows Vista, and lastly the consumer editions of Windows 10 and 11.
OK: Windows NT 4.0, 2000, Windows 8/8.1 with ClassicShell (never ran it, jumped straight from 7 to Windows 10 LTSB), Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC with OpenShell.

Recently I've installed Vista SP2 (the latest available version) in a VM running on a HDD in RAM and it still was slow as hell. It's beautiful, I'll give it that but it's just maddenly slow.

I've also used Windows 3.(1(1)) but it was basically a launcher for MS-DOS programs. Can't say anything about NT 3.51 - I used it very briefly. Can't say anything about Windows 1 and 2 - as I didn't see a single PC running them in our country.

 

[amit_talkin]

tbh,

Best : Win10 and now Win11
Worst : Win8/8.1

 

[P4-630]

XP was the snappiest OS imo.

 

[ThrashZone]

XP was the snappiest OS imo.

Hi,
Yep amazing what it was like on shit hardware.

Not to mention stand by screen animations to

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

Best: 7
Worst: ME

 

[ixi]

Best: Windows Vista.
Worst: None.

 

[pavle]

Best: Windows 2000, Windows XP.
Worst: everything after XP mostly because of all kinds of inconsistencies. I mean they work, but it's just not the same feeling, ya know?

 

[OkieDan]

Win ME worst... it had potential to be decent by building on top of 98SE and adding System Restore, unfortunately it required you to either use System Restore or reinstall Windows on a fairly frequent basis. Neither 98 nor ME should have been released based on Win95, they should have been built on top of NT4 instead.

XP was is often praised but I think that's due to being the first consumer version built on Win2k, ME being terrible, Vista not being all that great, and Win7 not releasing until 8 years after XP.

I like Win7 the best, certainly more than Win8 that wanted me to use my desktop as a tablet and Win 10 constantly making UI changes.

Win95 is not my favorite but it was a game changer for sure. I hated doing tech support for it when support for USB devices started rolling out in OEM releases for sure.