My primary machine is still running Win7; every time I say this here I get a lot of flak, the only result of which is that every time, I'm a little more afraid to confess it; but I will not move to a more recent version of Windows.
Everything works fine and fast; Office 2003 was peak Office (last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated, which, for such a brilliant idea supposed to revolutionize productivity applications, is a bit strange?); browsers won't update to Manifest V3 so uBlock Origin runs along smoothly; most VST plugins released recently, are compatible with Win7 and those that aren't, usually are bad and bloated.
Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
I have a much newer PC running Ubuntu, but it's just not as good — lots of little annoying details; and a bit unstable.
> Office 2003 was peak Office (last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated, which, for such a brilliant idea supposed to revolutionize productivity applications, is a bit strange?)
Apparently I'm not alone ;)
I still find the classic menus (with full menus always on) easier to quickly parse than looking at all those icons stretching through the entire width of the window.
Edit: also if you're looking for a lightweight note taking app, try OneNote 2003/2007. Uses 8-32 MB of RAM which was a lot back then but today isn't nothing.
> Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
This is a crazy irrelevant example. Why would you expect any other OS to act differently? CPU fans connect with a 4-pin header, it's not like switching out a major component of your system.
Ok, you're right, it's irrelevant to a discussion about the OS; the point I was trying to make is that this old machine is robust, it can be taken apart, completely, and screwed back together, and still work fine. Not all machines can do that.
But that's not inherently some property of it being an old machine. One could have an ancient machine where that's nearly impossible to do with proprietary fan sizes and headers and have a machine built yesterday which is easy to do.
My primary machine isn't Windows 7 anymore, but I have a Windows 7 machine I keep around for a particular kind of work. I access it with Remote Desktop and keep it in an isolated network segment.
I've kept the various versions of other software on the machine static, along with the OS. For what I use it for it's very pleasant to use. Muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts that I've built-up over the nearly 15 years I've been using the machine isn't disrespected by developers introducing change for change's sake. Nothing moves around on its own. Nothing changes without my approval. I really like it.
(The physical machine itself is a Ship of Theseus. It's a Dell laptop that has had some combination of donor screens, keyboards, motherboards, batteries, and disks over the years. I really appreciate that, too. The Latitude machines of its era are really easily disassembled and serviced.)
> the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated
Other than, I dunno, Explorer, Paint, WordPad, Visual Studio, Dynamics, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Live Writer, SQL Server Report Builder, Mathematics, and then some.
What other applications were you expecting them to add it to?
I've seen a number of applications especially around that time move to ribbon or ribbon-like UIs. Pretty much all of Corel's apps moved to a ribbon. Redgate tools. Solidworks. AutoCAD. Foxit PDF. NitroPDF. Lots of healthcare apps like Epic. I dunno, I've probably seen several dozens more odd domain specific software suites with it over the decades. I've also seen a lot of in-house custom apps made with the ribbon UI toolkit.
I am entertaining an idea to acquire the same setup for recreational game development using older tools and libraries. Have you followed any guides or do you have any recommendations where to start? Also how reliable those older mobos? I have heard that capacitors are usually close to a malfunction stage, have you had any issues with hardware so far? Thanks.
I use win64devkit on Windows Vista. Modern and up to date devkit and at the same time very lean, portable and practical. https://nullprogram.com/blog/2021/03/11/
I support a lot of different manufacturing places and so see a wide, wide, variety of hardware.
You don't know how terrible Windows 11 is until you start going backwards, peeling off layers of the onion. Once you're back to XP/2000, you're like..oh shit. People spent years thinking about how this would all work. And it's crazy fast. Windows snap into place almost instantly. Sure, search doesn't work, but search doesn't work on Windows 11 reliably either.
Everything you actually need to work? Works better and faster in the old stuff. When I remote into those machines even the remote session feels faster. How does a Windows XP machine running on a 733mhz machine from the last century feel faster at navigating windows and settings and launching programs than my 3k dollar workstation from last year?
Office 2003 on spinning rust launches and completes tasks faster than modern Office on brand new machines with NVME drives.
On that 733mhz machine with Office 2003, Excel will be open within a few seconds if I double click on it--if you move up to a 1ghz+ machine it opens up so fast it might as well be instant.
Someone up thread mentioned that there's a WinXP image available that has a ton of back ported drivers and things baked in for NVME support and modern chipsets. So...pretty darn modern I think!
I'll split hairs and go w/ Windows Server 2003. It has all the XP kernel improvements, very little bloat, but sticks with a mostly Windows 2000 visual style. I ran it as a daily driver on a Thinkpad back in the 2004 - 2010 timeframe and really enjoyed it.
If you haven't heard about it already I think you'd be interested in the [ReactOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Development) project which has been working on building an OS that is binary compatible with Windows Server 2003 while being GPL licensed. It's far from daily drivable but it's a fascinating little project.
YES, Windows Server 2003R2 was the best version of Windows ever. I worked with it professionally for about 8 years, if you just used MS software on it (exchange sql server etc) that thing NEVER crashed, when we deployed a 2003R2 (as opposed to a 2008/2008R2) we referred to it as deploying the VMS (openVMS).
BTW: However, i never used the 2003 64-bit version.
