Even after all these years, the fuckup that was Windows ME is still legendary.
Win XP was released to the public in August 2001, and a shitload of people are upset that MS is about to pull the plug on support for this OS.
Win ME was released less than a year earlier - September 2000 - and Microsoft ended support for it in July 2006. I wonder if anyone even noticed.
I agree that if you didn’t vote for ME, you must have never used it. Vista was pretty bad as far as resource management and security went, but ME was rarely even stable or usable. ME offered nothing useful over 98SE that XP didn’t do better by 100 times just a year or two later.
You can’t have lists per se, but you can have a compact grid of small tiles that can be arranged logically in a narrow area. Tiles are touch friendly replacement for lists and folders, some of the compactness and information density of a folder tree and menu list is sacrificed. I feel that live tiles and the touch ability are worth the sacrifice and high information density can lead to program/file bloat. The paired back start menu with glancable tiles are a bit liberating, you may feel different.
That said I use Win7 for work and Win8 for play so that may play a role in my perception.
I happen to agree with you. On reflection, my use of the Start menu in XP was horribly inefficient - I had a large number of software utilities and applications installed, and although I thought I had these organised into a folder hierarchy on the Start menu, it was actually a nightmare to navigate - three, four or five levels deep, and some submenus occupied multiple columns on the screen.
Now, with Win8, I have:
[ul]
[li]A grid of compact tiles for my most commonly used applications (replacing the start menu)[/li][li]The Power Menu for all the admin stuff[/li][li]Search for everything else that is too small or infrequently used to need a tile on the Start screen (hitting the windows key and typing the first two or three letters of the application name is definitely quicker and easier than navigating my hugely-nested Start menu in XP)[/li][/ul]
I go back to DOS. DOS what? It was unnumbered. It used only single-sided 5 1/4" floppies, 8 sectors/track (you could also used audio cassettes, although I never tried that) and stored 160K. The whole OS took something like 5K. Since you could buy a 16K machine, it had to be that small. Then DOS 1.05 came out that used 9 sectors/track and gave 180 K storage. Also support for double-sided diskettes, so if your diskette reader could read both sides (mine couldn’t) you got 360K on a disk. Of the DOS’s I used, I remember 3.1 as being pretty good. DOS 6.1 was excellent. I tried Win 3.1 but was not impressed. Win 95 was the first one I really liked. Win 98 was also good. But then I got XT and was impressed. My son was a programmer for XT and it was really a new start. I never had the pleasure of ME, but it was the last gasp of the old windows. All subsequent editions, including Win 2000 were based on XT, but with support for DOS based programs. I think my favorite was and will always remain Win-XP. I skipped Vista and now use Win 7. I have mostly gotten used to it, but I will not forgive them failing to support “old” 16 bit programs. I have to run an older computer in order to use my excellent spell-checker (no update for sale). I haven’t tried 8, but it might make me choose Mac after all these years. I can’t imagine what corporate strategy has caused them to abandon all the users like me. You want to get into the tablet business, fine, but there is a base of Win 7 and Win XP users that you are telling to fuck off. I look at Costco and local computer stores and no one is even offering a Win 7 machine. Do they hate their customers so?
I didn’t vote but the one I like least of the ones I have used is Win 7.
I’ve used everything from 3.1 to 7, so I can’t comment on 8, but ME was awful. it looked fine, but it would constantly crash. It wasn’t an upgrade that I had either, it was a factory installed version.
I don’t understand the hate for Vista. I can’t really even tell a difference between it and 7, just from daily use.
After a lifetime of swearing I never would, I switched to Mac, all because of Windows 8.
When it comes to my folders and lists in the Start, I’m perhaps a little more demanding than some people. I don’t just let program put their icons anywhere in the Start Menu - I have things grouped by function. So, for example, all of my web browsers are in one folder of the Start menu.
Before the Start menu, I just created my own folders of short-cuts, and it took me many years to even put those folders in the Start menu. I could always go back to that in Win8, I suppose… but I really would prefer that over using the Metro interface.
As for live tiles - I actually loathe even the idea for daily use. It might be nice for entertainment value at home, but when I’m trying to work, I do not want temperatures and stock quotes and news distracting me.
3.0 needed weekly reinstalls from floppies, but 3.1 was nice and stable. With WinCE it was summed up in its name; I don’t know what it’s like these days but it was slow and stupid and hateful before. I can’t even get Solitaire to run on Win7–the Solitaire that COMES with Win7–and that’s on two computers. It looks like they finally rewrote it for 64 bit instead of recompiling it and something fucked up.
And they’ll have to pry XP out of my cold dead hands. Unless I find something I like better.
You can group tiles (and place titles on the groups) in the Windows 8 Start screen.
You don’t have to have live tiles - options include:
[ul]
[li]Uninstall the app (use something else for news or whatever app it was - such as standard browser)[/li][li]Move the tile to the far right, so it’s not visible in the default Start screen view[/li][li]Unpin the tile from the Start screen (the app is still installed and can easily be found and launched)[/li][li]Resize the tile to the smallest size, which is just a static icon with no Live data.[/li][/ul]
I went with Windows 2000. While it was fine for server use, it was terrible for consumer use (and I know of some consumers who wanted to use it) since it didn’t support a lot of peripheral devices.