To relive the experience again, I just tried installing a VM from a 98SE retail ISO and besides installing rather quickly and booting up in around 5 seconds from power-on to desktop, the whole experience felt very serene in comparison to installing anything Win8 or later --- no continuous disk activity from a hundred background processes, no in-your-face adverts or notifications pestering you the first time you see the desktop, and no attempts at being cutesy or infantilising. You get one "Welcome to Windows" app that you can easily close (and it's a regular window, not a full-screen horrorshow) and elect to not show again, and the closest thing to an advert is a single "Setup MSN Internet Access" icon on the desktop. It doesn't do anything else until you tell it to. The OS behaves more like a tool, instead of treating you like one.
More amusingly, the IE5 icon looks remarkably close to the Legacy Edge one --- it's just as flat --- and the VM shuts down in around 1 second.
That's because the computers at the time simply couldn't handle that kind of load. Things like telemetry and feature-usage tracking would have been things in the mid-1990s if we had the spare computing overhead space and persistent Internet connections, which we didn't - but now we do - so we have them.
> the IE5 icon looks remarkably close to the Legacy Edge one --- it's just as flat --- and the VM shuts down in around 1 second.
That's because you're likely in 16-color or 256-color mode instead of high-color (16-bit) or true-color (24/32-bit) modes - the desktop IE logo has never been flat-colored, though the logo itself is flat-colored in many places in Windows 98, also lets agree that the IE 7 logo is the worst IE logo ever.
> and the VM shuts down in around 1 second.
That's because it's a VM on modern hardware - on period-correct hardware it will still take Windows a while to boot and to shut-down.
Though while Windows 9x does shut-down rather quickly, there's a reason for that: it doesn't have the same OS and filesystem consistency protections that Windows XP and later had: there's a reason we all typically reinstalled Windows 98 every 6 months or so: things break easily - whereas my current laptop hasn't had Windows reinstalled ever in the 4 years I've had it.
But yes, a mainstream Windows user pays for a Windows license, either through a direct license purchase, or through the baked in price of a machine.
Most users did not pay to upgrade machines from 7/8/8.1 to 10, but that was a bargain with the devil, as it made it easier on the decision-makers at Microsoft to find other ways to make money off of Windows 10 users.
https://winaero.com/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data-collec...
It probably won't be long before the Windows 11 version is here.
Bargain with the devil? Most users didn't pay to upgrade machines from 7/8 to 10 because they had nothing to gain from the upgrade. You only bargain to get things that you want.
Look at the number of people who upgraded from 7 to 8.
It's not surprising they're trying to add adverts. Sucks though.
If you paid 30 bucks you paid for a stolen or otherwise illegally sold license.
> You've been able to upgrade for free for at least 10 years
Actually it's 6 years. There were no free upgrades before Windows 10 as far as I'm aware.
Citation needed.
https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/get-windows-10-free-...
> Now, let's address the elephant in the room. While we can't vouch for all of them, websites selling lower-priced Windows keys are likely selling legitimate codes. One popular site, Kinguin, has 37 merchants worldwide selling Windows keys. Mark Jordan, Kinguin’s VP of communications, told Tom's Hardware in 2019 that Kinguin's merchants acquire the codes from wholesalers who have surplus copies of Windows they don't need.
> "It's not a gray market. It would be like buying Adidas or Puma or Nike from a discounter, from TJ Maxx," Jordan said. "There are no legal issues with buying it from us. It's just another marketplace."
> According to Jordan, Kinguin's merchants have sold “several hundred thousand” keys and are not one-time sellers posting listings for codes they don’t want. As part of its fraud protection, a Kinguin employee randomly buys a key “every now and then” to make sure they’re legitimate, he said. Jordan added that it’s rare for a customer to get a key that’s been resold, but if they did, customer support would help them get a new one for free.
Windows 7 was released in 2009. If you bought it then you've had free upgrades for 12 years.
But it expanded from there - there are ads in Settings encouraging browser choice and discouraging changes to default applications.
Ads all over your first-run experience.
Ads in the taskbar encouraging you to use Edge and Teams.
The ad system is heavily integrated into Explorer / taskbar. Which is how poorly constructed ads can break such vital operating machinery.