Re:Gmail, We Need to Talk
by Nullabillity on Wednesday November 11, 2015 @05:44AM
(#10545919)
> The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually become more reliable over the years.
Pretty sure that happened in Vista, actually.
My brother actually managed to play through a good portion of Bioshock on Windows Vista with a broken graphics card that faulted every couple minutes. The screen would just flicker black for a fraction of a second as Windows restarted the driver. I was rather impressed.
Ah - thanks, that's the only version of Windows (apart from ME) I've not used.
No doubt that Windows 7 or 10 are much more stable. They could have achieved that without making massive changes to the UI. My point was more about the UI capabilities. the general capabilities visible to a user haven't changed much between Windows 2000 and Windows 10 but they have made massive UI changes at least 4 times requiring the user to re-learn how to do the same thing.
Uh, Windows 2000 was good on supported hardware but had really poor support for typical consumer PCs. XP was a security nightmare, although XP SP2 did improve things. Hardly a "peak". Newer versions of Windows, with malware protection enabled by default, do a much better job of protecting customers.
The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually became more reliable over the years.