For me, every Windows that came after Windows XP was the worst Windows ever, until finally Windows 7 came out (which was maybe the biggest positive surprise about software that I've had in my life).

So... Vista then?

'cos that was the only version of Windows between XP and 7.

Yeah, I should have said "before and after".

Windows XP (Professional) was just about perfect for its time, apart from some minor annoyances that you could work around. Windows 7 was truly great with almost everything working well and working as expected (Vista and the fact that Win7 at first glance looks just-like-Vista was what held me back buying Win7 for almost 2 years, which I regret). In fact, Windows 7 was what once upon a time used to be the Macintosh (but at the fraction of the price, and working with hardware from other vendors). You plug the ethernet cable into your HP Laserjet, and two seconds later Windows 7 tells you that it just found a printer, and it's ready to use. Fucking awesome.

Although honestly, I don't really have that many bad things to say about Win98SE, it just wasn't a, well, a ... serious OS. It was more a "single user, home computer" Fisher-Price type of OS. Still, for a "home computer", and at its time, that was OK. It just wasn't a real operating system. But it worked quite well for everyday tasks like writing letters and printing them on your 24-pin (oh, the good old Nec P6... I still regret throwing him away after serving faithfully for 15 or so years, such a darn cool printer), or receiving electronic mail and such, anyway.

Now Windows 8 on the other hand just tries to fucking get in your way all the time, no matter what you are trying to do. Windows 10 does seem a bit less obnoxious (but then, why not just stay with Windows 7, which isn't obnoxious at all).

I miss windows 3.11

At that time, I used System 7. That was before Apple and Motorola became total crap.

Windows XP (Professional) was just about perfect for its time, apart from some minor annoyances that you could work around.

Yes, apart from the terrible drivers, horrible UI and a multitude of other things (which fortunately time has dulled the memory of) which kept many people away from it (myself included) and in the land of Win98SE or Win2K until we were forced to update.

XP was held up as 'the worst thing ever' when it came out; decried by everyone as a horrible UI, performance hog, bloated and all manner of things. Gamers, for example, swore up and down they would stick with Win98/2K until MS did something right!
Fast forward N years and suddenly XP was the best thing ever!

Oh how quick people are to forget the past...

Frankly the XP UI was the worst thing MS have done; the Win8 flat UI (desktop window scheme, not metro) is much better and, personally, I don't miss the glass effect at all from Win7 and didn't from day 1.

I actually hated XP so much that I upgraded to Vista, and liked it. ;)
After Win2K, XP was a bloated mess with an interface that looked like it was taken from Fisher Price's garbage dump..

Windows 7 was a true godsend

I have no reason to upgrade from that, to be honest.
However, my current machine doesn't live forever..

For me, every Windows that came after Windows XP was the worst Windows ever, until finally Windows 7 came out (which was maybe the biggest positive surprise about software that I've had in my life).

So... Vista then?

'cos that was the only version of Windows between XP and 7.

Yeah, I should have said "before and after".

Windows XP (Professional) was just about perfect for its time, apart from some minor annoyances that you could work around. Windows 7 was truly great with almost everything working well and working as expected (Vista and the fact that Win7 at first glance looks just-like-Vista was what held me back buying Win7 for almost 2 years, which I regret). In fact, Windows 7 was what once upon a time used to be the Macintosh (but at the fraction of the price, and working with hardware from other vendors). You plug the ethernet cable into your HP Laserjet, and two seconds later Windows 7 tells you that it just found a printer, and it's ready to use. Fucking awesome.

Although honestly, I don't really have that many bad things to say about Win98SE, it just wasn't a, well, a ... serious OS. It was more a "single user, home computer" Fisher-Price type of OS. Still, for a "home computer", and at its time, that was OK. It just wasn't a real operating system. But it worked quite well for everyday tasks like writing letters and printing them on your 24-pin (oh, the good old Nec P6... I still regret throwing him away after serving faithfully for 15 or so years, such a darn cool printer), or receiving electronic mail and such, anyway.

Now Windows 8 on the other hand just tries to fucking get in your way all the time, no matter what you are trying to do. Windows 10 does seem a bit less obnoxious (but then, why not just stay with Windows 7, which isn't obnoxious at all).

I miss windows 3.11

At that time, I used System 7. That was before Apple and Motorola became total crap.

I find that windows 8 really has never gotten in the way for me ever once. And I actually noticed that windows 8 booted faster than my windows 7 install on the same hardware which I liked a lot. I hope they have some similar speed upgrades in win10.

I feel like the only person on the site who doesn't have strong feelings one way or the other :)

I do hope the new start menu works out okay. I've been running StartIsGone on my laptop since 8.1. Shudder.

No (there's no message, just disconnected random and often-unsubstantiated whining) and no (there's nothing wrong with the state of PC gaming, and nothing that Windows 10 will do to improve things in any way).

I agree there's no unified message, but I disagree that Windows 10 won't do anything to improve PC gaming.

Three big things with Win10 are going to benefit gamers quite a bit: DirectX12, Windows core unified with XBox (and other devices, less importantly), and that Windows 10 is a free upgrade for everyone running Windows 7 or newer. And as a side benefit, the Unified Windows store will be pretty beneficial too.

I think the potential unleashed by D3D12 is going to bring a mini-renesance to PC gaming, since PCs will be able to just do what consoles do (with a closer-to-metal API), but a lot more of it. We'll see some games that will only be possible on PCs, but without employing all the arcane batch management and other hacks that have been done to get around draw call limitations before.

Direct3D12 + Windows core on Xbox means less porting effort and hopefully more games crossing that boundary in a direction they wouldn't have before.

The PC gaming market is pretty fragmented right now. We have a lot of gamers still on 7 (XP even, especially in China/South Korea) and if they've bought a new GPU in the past ~4 years, its D3D12-capable. I think Win10 is going to defragment the market and make people's GPUs a lot more capable while its at it.

The PC gaming market is pretty fragmented right now. We have a lot of gamers still on 7 (XP even, especially in China/South Korea) and if they've bought a new GPU in the past ~4 years, its D3D12-capable.

I don't think that will go away with Windows 10, at least as far as graphics go.

It will take time for market adoption before big studios will invest in the new tech as a requirement.

While the whole "xbox on windows 10" initiative I see that more as a marketing gimmick that will be mostly mocked or used for spamming. I don't see that as a driving factor for migrating the products. I don't see games using it any more than they already do, which is almost non-existent.

Consider a game company who would launch a DX12 game when Windows 10 launches will have very few customers. If they wait a few months there will be a little more market penetration, but it won't be until late 2016 or even 2017 before it starts to hit critical mass. Then there is also lead time to get the software out. The Windows 7 install base is enormous, meaning DX11 is the primary target and will remain so until it shrinks to a smaller share.

I cannot imagine game studios putting significant finances behind Windows 10 / DX12 features until the adoption hits around 30% and trending strongly up, and Windows 7 is around 20% and dropping. Even today with nearly 30% on Win8.1/DX11.2, the studios out there are not in any rush to move over, the Win7/DX11 market share is still too big.

Even if Win7 represented 30% of the market and was trending down, that's still an enormous amount of money for big studios to walk away from. Do you REALLY want to abandon 1/3 of your potential revenue? Are you comfortable abandoning 25% of your potential revenue? 20%? If your product is expected to be a AAA blockbuster, excluding them is a lot of money being left on the table. Even games like Titanfall were criticized for requiring a 64-bit OS, which was around 70% adoption at that point. Gamers laughed at those still on 32-bit OSes, but the suits had a harder time accepting that they abandoned that much of their potential paying target market. That was also the most frequent headline for the game when it hit. Not the disk requirements (which were big), not the graphics card requirements, but the 64-bit OS. Clicky. Another. Another. And there were many discussion on many boards of people wanting to fake out the OS to report being 64-bit.

Leaving 30%, 25%, even 20% of the marketplace out of a mainstream game is a HUGE number. If your product is at all risky --- and almost every video game is a huge risk --- dropping another quarter of your revenue is not necessarily a wise decision.

Frob, do you think the fact that Windows 10 will be a free upgrade from 7 will make a difference?

Or in the case of one company I worked at the IT security guys simply don't trust anything new. The company moved nearly all of its production over to Trello and had been using it for everything for a year and a half before security found out. When they found out Trello was being used security didn't check what it was for and just deleted the accounts and all the work then blocked it. This being a large financial trading company the loss of work cost them tens of millions. ITs response? You should only be using office.

That's completely the correct course of action, besides not letting you guys take backups on your internal network.

As the CTO for a company that handles sensitive data, we get attacked on every foreign service we use. We had a situation where someone played a phone game at work, using 4g. They hacked their phone, stole their wifi password to our network, and tried to grab files.

Similar situations with people using skype at work.

The day you check the news and see "Popular communication tool Trello hacked!" you'll understand.

Besides, your company most likely has a clause that says they won't use Non-security audited (Microsoft) tools, and that's a requirement to keep their business insurance.

Or in the case of one company I worked at the IT security guys simply don't trust anything new. The company moved nearly all of its production over to Trello and had been using it for everything for a year and a half before security found out. When they found out Trello was being used security didn't check what it was for and just deleted the accounts and all the work then blocked it. This being a large financial trading company the loss of work cost them tens of millions. ITs response? You should only be using office.

That's completely the correct course of action, besides not letting you guys take backups on your internal network.

As the CTO for a company that handles sensitive data, we get attacked on every foreign service we use. We had a situation where someone played a phone game at work, using 4g. They hacked their phone, stole their wifi password to our network, and tried to grab files.

Similar situations with people using skype at work.

The day you check the news and see "Popular communication tool Trello hacked!" you'll understand.

Besides, your company most likely has a clause that says they won't use Non-security audited (Microsoft) tools, and that's a requirement to keep their business insurance.

Hey it wasn't me that was using Trello it was IT product management. I'm just a lowly software engineer. As for weather or not they did the right thing the whole company is split down the middle using separate data centres and separate communication flows for client data and IT WifI only for personal use completely blocked from work networks. The company already encourages open source for IT development. The department is about 70% Linux, 25% MAC and 5% Windows (To use office it usually involves removing in to a terminal server). We use Dropbox, Github and lots of other cloud based solutions. The reason IT took the decision is because the Trello users were middle management (project managers, IT managers, CTO) and assumed if they aren't developers or devops then they don't know what they are doing.

Back on Topic

As for weather or not windows 10 will improve PC gaming I dunno. On the one hand we have DirectX12 but on the other we have the introduction of Android and iOS apps being quickly ported to windows (They demod Candy Crush at Build) and they have said that they are planning on reimplementing all of Apples APIs in Windows. This is good news for iOS and Android developers but, bad news for PC gamers who expect a certain amount of quality from their gaming stores which may now end up being flooded with low quality iOS ports.