What's the last great Microsoft Operating System?

[bjornredtail]

So, which of those will be remembered as the 'Last Great Microsoft Operating System'? I'm going to say Windows 2000 out of the lot. Mind you, I'm comparing it to what else was available at the, not with what's around today, and I'm not saying it was the best OS of it's time. Only the best Microsoft OS of its time.

[windhound]

Server 2003 is beautiful. 
Its lean, comes with zero fluff, no random services running in the background.  Its a good, solid OS.
I have not tried Server 2008, I'm hopeing they trimmed the heck outta Vista and made a decent OS, who knows. 
My main 'server' MiG is running CentOS 5.2 and I've no want to mess with her, uptime of 85 odd days no issues before I shut her down over break.  I dont believe there's an option to run Windows without the gui either...  not that I'd really want to, mind.  Windows was made with the gui in mind.

Windows XP will probably remain the best Microsoft desktop OS for a while.  They spent, what, 7 years on it.  Fully patched it can be rock solid and run on a variety of hardware.  I use it at work on a P3 400mhz Dell workstation.  It flies.  It boots fast, opens applications quickly and just runs well in general. 

[Gen. Volkov]

Fully patched XP for sure, for desktop anyway. It was buggy when it first came out, but by now it's a rock solid OS.

[windhound]

Ah...  wrong option guys ;)
I doubt any of you are using Windows XP embedded .  I suspect nev included it  for completeness sake

Windows XP is NT 5.1
where
NT 3.1    Windows NT 3.1
NT 4.0    Windows NT 4.0
NT 5.0    Windows 2000
NT 5.1    Windows XP
NT 6.0    Windows Vista    
NT 7.0    Windows 7  (wikipedia calls it 6.1 (which is probably more accurate), but I suspect Microsoft will call it NT 7, as it is Windows 7)

[Peace Alliance]

XP for sure. I'm not sure if they ever will (or should) success it. Vista is a flop, and XP is the reason nobody wants vista. Why not just keep upgrading XP? If they need to rob the world of more money, then start a subscriber line of updates and make the free one just essentials.

Or whatever, I'm sure i donno half as much about it as i should before i make an opinion. All i know is that XP is my fav. I like to find a good hacked up pirate version, where all the crap is taken out. Then i load it, mess with the registry and style it and make it feel nice.

[Shadow]

Windows is like an onion - they never remake anything, they just add another layer on top and call it a new OS. Some of the code in the current ones has been around since the beginning. At this point, it's too messy. If they want to stay competitive, they need to strip it down and rebuild it from the bottom up.

[Gorak]

more like they need to throw it all out and start over

I much prefer OS/10.X, but do to compatibility issues as well as pricing, I'm sticking with XP, and my next desktop will likely have XP64

[Ashyra Nightwing]

I like XP. Vista's too slow.

[Sharptooh]

  I know nothing about all the code involved in operating systems so I can't really comment on that side of Vista, however I think it seems ok (wait's for critisism) it just looks a bit different (better) and uses more RAM than xp, I admit it seems to use a lot, compared to other os, maybe they can improve on that with Windows 9.

  XP for me, it works well and doesn't give me any problems.

[Shadow]

Vista is all shiny graphics and no functionality. It also has a lot of blatant code errors.

[Gorak]

I used Vista only once
that was enough

I couldn't handle the constant,  are you sure you want to this? and windows needs your permission to continue, screens popping up every time I click something

[Firetooth]

I used Vista only once
that was enough

I couldn't handle the constant,  are you sure you want to this? and windows needs your permission to continue, screens popping up every time I click something

  I find that annoying too, it asked me about 4 times if I wanted to go through with what I was doing and then once the confirmations stopped it came up with an error messaging saying it couldn't do what I wanted it to  ???

[windhound]

Vista needs to be trained Gorak
The barrage of click-throughs goes away after the first few days
Be sure to install the updates as well, as the UAC has been refined a bit since release.
Still a massive step forward from users running as full administrator in XP (which is bad)

As far as resource intensive, Vista actually makes use of idle resources.  Crazy I know.  If you have unused ram Vista tries to guess based on your history what you'll use next and goes ahead and loads it.  If that ram is later needed it gives it up.  If your computer is sitting idle it'll index your hdd or defrag. 

There are some inexcusable bugs, like Vista cutting network performance by up to 90% when a sound file is played.  Also the significant slowdown and stability issues when playing games vs. XP

But part of the reason that people dont like it is that it breaks a lot of old hardware and software.  People have come to expect Microsoft to keep proper backwards compatibility, which is a major problem for Microsoft.  They cut away some layers with Vista which broke a decent amount of stuff.

If you have the hardware to run Vista it runs alright.  Its not nearly as good as it should be after so many years of development, but eh.  Where they've got it now is where it should have been on release, and then maybe it wouldnt have gotten so much bad press. 
I think its nice how much people are scared of Vista, I'd rather them buy Macs anyways. 

[Shadow]

Bah, I'd rather Vista than a Mac, macs become obsolete so fast its not worth buying one.

However, i suspect that Windows 7 will be -excellent-. Microsoft is in a bad place, and Windows 7 will probbaly make or break them, so it had better be. If they put the graphics on Vista into something with a performance upgrade over XP, they would have quite a winning formula there.

[windhound]

Owch Shadow
That's so incredibly untrue its not funny

The mac-mini hasnt had a refresh in a darn long time.  The rest of the models are slowly refreshed, I think between a year and six months.  That's not very fast imho.

OS X 10.5, the very newest, runs quite happily on a machine made in 2003.  It needs an 866mhz G4 and 512mb ram.  Please compare this to Vista.
OS X 10.6 will phase out PPC, so only machines made after 2005 will beable to run it.  That's still 4 years old!

I have a 600mhz G3 imac that I adore (made in 2001).  It runs 10.4 and boots faster than my 2GHz Core Duo, Vista or Fedora 10.  Its a very nice spunky box that is able to surf the internet, email, and wordprocess with ease.  It doesnt do flash very well though, and that's Adobe's fault.

Macs also have insane resale value.  Go look.
There are many reasons not to like Macs, but please do some research before spouting off.  They're very good, very well made boxes.

Windows 7 will be Windows Vista SP2.  Businesses have told Microsoft they dont want Vista and will wait till the next version.  So Microsoft is giving them a new version.