[drooopy]

I've lived through every evolution of Windows from 3.1 up to 11 and Millenium/2000 still remains my favourite and I will always consider it the most 'get-shit-done' UI that Microsoft has ever built. Up until W10 removed the feature, I used to turn off the Themes service so that I could get the classic UI back.

And I also completely agree with your point that everything else since then has felt like a poorly placed theme on top of something else.

[irishcoffee]

Wait a sec. Windows 2000 was probably their best operating system. Windows ME was absolutely their worst. They were so different I’m not sure the entire company wasn’t swapped into the set of Severance (tv show) or something of that ilk.

[ch_123]

They were developed by completely different teams.

As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade from 98SE for sure, but I don't remember it being the same level of performance and reliability degradation that I saw going from XP to Vista pre-SP2.

[lachiflippi]

Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping.

My ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.

[Uncle_Brumpus]

My first (and only) experience with Vista was with a stripped-back Toshiba Satellite A135 my mom bought my brother and I during some Black Friday sale. It had one single 512MB RAM stick. I still have a screenshot kicking around somewhere of the "Windows Experience Index" of 1.0 or 1.5 or something (1.0 was the lowest) that also shows the RAM amount. We made it work, though. Many good memories of recoding Xbox360 footage using some Lexar capture box that only accepted analog RCA in as the laptop cooked itself alive sitting on the carpet in front of the TV.

[ConceptJunkie]

I bought a machine with similar capability for my wife that shipped with Vista and it was literally unusable. I think I ended up "upgrading" it to XP.

[ch_123]

I had a big problem with BSODs caused by Nvidia drivers. Of course, you could argue that this was Nvidia's fault, not Vista's, but this was somewhat academic. I moved back to XP (and also started using Linux) and all these problems went away, and I got a lot more out of my RAM to boot.

[drooopy]

Vista was an absolute dumpster fire but in no way compares to the awfulness of ME.

[irishcoffee]

The whole reason I responded to you was because you said "Millennium/2000"

Millennium _was_ Windows ME, millennium edition. Windows 2000 was completely different. :)

[bigstrat2003]

Vista wasn't remotely a dumpster fire. I used it for almost its entire lifetime, it was totally fine.

[schlauerfox]

Yeah, Vista Ultimate had animated desktops, it was stable for what I did, used ReadyBoost SD card for increased performance and the HP Pavilion convertable pen/touch screen was awesome. Not everyone had the same experience.

[bflesch]

People did all the XP customization with compositor 3d effects and matrix screensavers. Then they hyped up Longhorn with all the magazines and delivered the Vista dumpster fire.

IIRC ME would just randomly crash explorer.exe with task bar disappearing but you could recover some of it. On Vista it was just overall sluggish and laggy visual experience.

[ConceptJunkie]

I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back.

I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME.

Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the "Classic" Windows 2000 theme, but with all the under-the-hood improvements. I've gotten used to the Windows 10/11 UI, but I've never liked it and just wish I could go back to the way it looked when Microsoft cared about usability, as opposed to trying to make everything look like a phone.

[shin_lao]

Windows 2000 is based on the NT kernel which is a complete different operation system. ME is Windows 3.x with a 32-bit hack on top of MS-DOS.