FrankForum (Frankness IS Forum)

By Woody Leonhard, . Since it's soooo annoying now to comment in Infoworld or Computerworld, seems like this forum would be a better place.

Personally, I hated Windows until Win95. Had Win3 on 386-486 machines I got or purchased in retail stores so couldn't get rid of them. XP finally made sense, but only with SP3.

After that, all downhill. Notice in slide 11 of the retrospective, it turns out Sinofsky -- the guy who KILLED MS Office, so that we still use pre-2007 versions to this day -- Sinofsky, was the guy who next wrecked what became Windows 7 with its inability to search, the horrific 'Library' structure and oh -- the RIBBON! So of course we stayed on XP. But that doesn't stop the false claims that oh, 500 million machines had it, within 2 years! Yeah, but by 2 years, then Win8 came out, and that made 7 look good. So it's the true Windows Last. And you can always install XP over it. I did, in June. Works fine on i5 Dell from 2010, and even 2012. (Dell doesn't require proprietary drivers.)

Everything Woody lists as a good innovation, most of us consider I hope I'm never walking within 10 feet of Sinofsky. Will be too tempted to remember and use, my old karate chop.

Your experience?

I don't understand why they put "goodnight DOS" on the Windows 9x section. Windows 9x had the best MS-DOS support and restart in MS-DOS mode if the virtual machine didn't cut it.

I'll have to agree that Windows 3x (and anything prior) is total garbage, are they even proper operating systems? I don't think so: awkwardly designed interfaces. I have a 486SLC (technically a souped up 386SX) running Windows 95 on 12 MB of RAM without issue. Of course on my Pentium 60 computer wehn I increased the RAM from 64 MB to 128 MB, 95 refuses to start since Microsoft programmed it very poorly to handle more than 64 MB. *sigh*
Microsoft is worse than intel with poor foresight and deliberate limitations when there doesn't need to be.

Office 2007 actually happens to be my favourite edition out of the offices, the ribbon made sense (to me). Unfortunately after everyone's complaints they were forced to redesign it slightly (and Office 2013 changed things up even more, they munged the interface to the point where I can't stand it). The ribbon technology is used in other programs such as 3DSMax, which requires *many* buttons and sub-categories.

If you haven't tried Office 2013, you'll be *praising* Office 2007.

The article doesn't seem to mention Vista (which was sorely needed after years of XP 32-bit and a broken 64-bit edition). Vista did have some serious memory leaks in its first release. I know because my crappy Hewlett-Packard needed to run 24/7 since it had problems starting up if you shut it down. So after running for a few weeks the RAM usage would soar and start paging up to 8 GB. But other than that Vista was miles ahead of XP. I still haven't gotten over the fact that XP completely broke *all* of my DOS software and games. That's from when I only had one computer back in the day.

, this one by MS8-10 fanboy Brad Chacos.

They can't bring themselves to admit the problems in Win10. Chirping praise. Oh well, the article comments are worth reading, especially since PC World is impossible to comment in now (unless you enable cookies and disable Adblocker).

MUST READ: Dark side of the 30 years, this slideshow article just out, also by Woody Leonhard in Infoworld: http://www.infoworld.com/article/300683 ... nders.html

What's important about this article is the timing. It, coupled with the latest Ed Bott articles and , suddenly become openly critical. Both of these authors are Win fanboys. Look to see if Thurott follows suit. If so, the editorial tide has turned.

When I was in college 30+ years prior, my Russian intelligence courses taught us how to read newspapers for clues of underlying policy changes (mostly in Pravda, but also in other mags which were openly used to telecast government policy without being 'official'). I'm applying that same technique here.