Windows 7 is older than Windows XP was when 7 was released. Think about that.
It's a mess from a UI perspective, and from any other perspective, it's basically the same OS it has always been.
Don't Windows 10 have a similar tool? I've heard from IT folks that Win10Pro does a better job as an OS on CPU/RAM management, and that once you cut out all the crapware (enhance privacy/stop services/use firewall/etc).. doesn't this make it "better"?
I am thinking to run Win10Pro on VM to see if I can make it half-decent. As another writer mentioned above, it won't be far that we won't be able to find hardware that runs in previous Win versions.
I haven't tried it as I have memories of Windowblinds from the days of XP ... it was fragile and flaky. They might have fixed that, but I'm wary.
I really dislike that modern OS's decided theming is verboten, and all must wear the party uniform.
I actually don't have a problem with the UI, since I only use the start menu and the good old file explorer. Feck those UWP apps.
[0] https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu [1] https://geekuninstaller.com/ [2] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
...yeah, well, might as well use Linux then, if I'm going to spend the same time configuring both. At least with Linux, I'm fighting a shortage of developers and a lack of official support, and not the OS itself.
They have spoiled the configuration dialogs - finding where to tweak something would be hard if I couldn't just Google it, but you just configure it once and forget it.
Mysteriously it has also never shown any ads to me although I didn't do anything for this.
Windows 10 is not great but it's ok.
And I totally love the option to enable keyboard input autocomlpletion (if only I could also enable this on Linux and Mac) - that's amazing when you have to write in foreign languages.
I use Linux for all server stuff but man, macOS spoiled me for desktop.
I also use lots of proprietary software that won't run in Linux (for audio and gfx work) - especially for audio, linux audio stack is and has always been a mess. That said, even if all those software ran comfortably, the desktop experience alone is a dealbreaker for me personally. With macOS, I have a unix and a solid very well thought out desktop experience so I get the best of both worlds. Also with hackintosh, hardware is also cheap (use good old PCs I assemble myself) so overall it is the best of all worlds for me.
Software shouldn't be developed for development's sake.
Probably new training contracts are a good incentive to change things every now and then. Win8 and beyond UIs is the best possible example of a bullet meeting a foot: for the first time I found actually easy to convert some non tech people to use Linux, which in the XP era was at least for common users next to impossible. Messing up the UI wasn't an error, they planned it, but in the end the change was so radical that it could bite them in the butt one day.
Point being by the time you actually make XP into something modern it turns into the thing you think you hate.
Well said.
I prefer Windows 2000 myself, but other than that, couldn't agree more.