An operating system is the most personal part of a “personal” computer, and it used to be that as a Windows user I didn’t feel like I was renting my computer from Microsoft, but in recent years that feeling has all but evaporated. To me, Windows feels cheaper and more commercial than ever, and that’s not a recipe for a good user experience.

The first version of Windows I ever used, coming from MS-DOS, was Windows 3.1. While Windows 3.1 might look incredibly primitive today, it’s hard to explain just how big of a leap this was for a kid who had to memorize the Command Line instructions just to play some games. Things didn’t really kick off for me until Windows 95 and our first taste of the internet, but even then, 99% of my Windows time up until Windows 7 was spent disconnected from the net.

In retrospect, this was actually a good thing in some ways, because it meant that Microsoft couldn’t remotely mess with my Windows installation. Patches and updates came in the form of Windows service packs, and those were on actual physical floppy disks or CD-ROMs. If my computer worked yesterday, and I didn’t change anything myself, it would almost certainly keep working until I inadvertently broke it myself.

Now that Windows is almost always online, my “personal” computer experience is feeling quite a bit less personal.

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How-to Geek
June 21, 2024