The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[Second Sun]

I recommend Atlas OS for anyone being forced off 7 or 10. Allows you to strip out a ton of the bullshit in 11.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I recommend not using any patch set or tweak script that calls itself an "OS". (Same goes with Nobara on the Linux side of things)

 

[Slav Power]

I recommend Atlas OS for anyone being forced off 7 or 10. Allows you to strip out a ton of the bullshit in 11.

I recommend avoiding it as it's too invasive, and the only people buy into such invasive debloaters is because they've been conditioned to believe that 10/11 is bloat and needs to be purged to the point where you also remove crucial components needed for the system to function and stay secure because it's considered "bloat" by some nerd that doesn't know any better.

The only debloater you need is WinUtil from Chris Titus. It's an open source Powershell script and Chris has actual decades long IT industry experience so he has the two brain cells needed to know that no, you shouldn't rip out absolutely everything from Windows.

AtlasOS is made by some nerd that has zero idea what he's doing and AFAIK it's closed source executables. Never use AtlasOS or any massive guide on how to "debloat" and "optimize" Windows because it's all made by retards who got overly emotional over the Win10/11 hate while having zero idea on how Win10/11 works.

 

[Second Sun]

AtlasOS is made by some nerd that has zero idea what he's doing

What are you basing that on?

 

[BirdUp]

I recommend avoiding it as it's too invasive, and the only people buy into such invasive debloaters is because they've been conditioned to believe that 10/11 is bloat and needs to be purged to the point where you also remove crucial components needed for the system to function and stay secure because it's considered "bloat" by some nerd that doesn't know any better.

AtlasOS is made by some nerd that has zero idea what he's doing and AFAIK it's closed source executables. Never use AtlasOS or any massive guide on how to "debloat" and "optimize" Windows because it's all made by retards who got overly emotional over the Win10/11 hate while having zero idea on how Win10/11 works.

works fine for me because i dont use those "crucial components" at all
ive run into zero technical issues since i research what i'm uninstalling or fucking with, which is what everyone should be doing

 

[Gargamel]

I recommend not using any patch set or tweak script that calls itself an "OS". (Same goes with Nobara on the Linux side of things)

The whole concept of "Windows distributions" is so dumb, and so are the people who download a prebuilt ISO and install it thinking they're doing themselves a favor.

Best to strip things out yourself. At least then when you get the inevitable weird issues that can't be reproduced on full bloat Windows, you know exactly what's been done (because you did it yourself) and can probably work out which of your modifications are causing the problem.

they've been conditioned to believe that 10/11 is bloat

It is bloat, even on a godbox.

There is absolutely no reason for half of the shit running in the background to be there. This has been the case going all the way back to Windows XP, but it is at it's worst in modern Windows.

 

[SilentDuck]

linux users were like this 10 years ago, when they were all losers using shitty core 2 duo laptops
they are actually more of dishonest faggots now than before, constantly switching between "old hardware runs better on linux" and "your hardware sucks, buy something better" in order to defend their beloved OS when shit inevitably goes wrong

Just rescued a core2duo Thinkpad from recycling on account of its physical condition and having enough ddr2 ram to max it out sitting in a box. Runs debian variants silky smooth like a wet dream. Is this real? Sure, it weighs in at 6 pounds, smells like cancer and needs a new battery that will cost the same as the Windows Chromebook variant I got that is faster and more compatible than my state of the art bullshit corpo laptop but I'm not about to abandon that at the library when the feds start a fake domestic disturbance.

Anyone remember the ASUS Eee PC? The epitomy of dogshit slow and Linux. Even I wouldn't use one, even when they were new.

EEEbuntu and it's variants. You know at the point of spending all week and all weekend for months trying to make that bullshit actually do something useful without breaking and stay updated I should have been able to figure out that every motherfucker involved in a linux variant like that is iredeemably autistic including myself. But you know... autism.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

can modern hardware run windows xp
i dont mean emulation i mean installing it as an os

Depends on what you mean by "modern hardware". It is possible to install it on a modern PC (as long as your PC has CSM support), but ACPI won't work (you can install it without ACPI by holding F7 during the initialization step of installation), and drivers are a problem, so at the very least you'll need a SATA controller with drivers for XP, and, as @Slav Power mentioned, an era-appropriate video card. There's no way around this.
But hey, at least you can still buy a new GT 730 in retail, that should be good enough for pretty much everything from XP era.

There are some repackaged versions that already come prepackaged with necessary drivers, such as Windows XP Integral Edition, so at least you won't have to spend an unreasonable amount of time hunting them down.

Here's Windows XP running on my machine:

Anyone remember the ASUS Eee PC? The epitomy of dogshit slow and Linux. Even I wouldn't use one, even when they were new.

I do have an EEE 1000H. The key to making it faster was removing XP that came with them and installing Windows 2000 instead. It got pretty snappy then.
Installing a modded BIOS with AHCI support also helped speed things up a bit.

 

[Gargamel]

Depends on what you mean by "modern hardware". It is possible to install it on a modern PC (as long as your PC has CSM support), but ACPI won't work (you can install it without ACPI by holding F7 during the initialization step of installation), and drivers are a problem, so at the very least you'll need at least a SATA controller with drivers for XP, and, as @Slav Power mentioned, an era-appropriate video card. There's no way around this.
But hey, at least you can still buy a new GT 730 in retail, that should be good enough for pretty much everything from XP era.

There are some repackaged versions that already come prepackaged with necessary drivers, such as Windows XP Integral Edition, so at least you won't have to spend an unreasonable amount of time hunting them down.

Here's Windows XP running on my machine:

Cool stuff. I think the amd64 edition of XP is capable of booting on UEFI without CSM, but it won't do that without extensive modding.

It is too bad the motherboard manufacturers finally broke IBM compatibility by removing CSM. I guess 40 years was long enough though.

I do have an EEE 1000H. The key to making it faster was removing XP that came with them and installing Windows 2000 instead. It got pretty snappy then.
Installing a modded BIOS with AHCI support also helped speed things up a bit.

I've got a ton of experience with 2000 and XP on low spec hardware, specifically Pentium through Pentium III and what I've found is XP can be almost as fast, close enough to not make a difference when you turn off a bunch of useless services and trim down the components. I believe it is possible to revert to the Win2k Explorer for a small performance boost as well, similar in concept to reverting to the OG Win95 Explorer (removing IE) on 98. I think XP was both the first real sign of bloat on Windows, and the last version you could properly debloat, as Windows 2000 was pretty trim and Windows 98 could be installed as a bare bones system (except the mandatory IE), and every version after was heavier and slower than the last.

It's surprising how they managed to go from trim to bloat in 2 years. I'm talking useless things on by default like the Windows Help and Support service, Windows Error Reporting Service, Wireless Zero Configuration on computers without wifi, Remote Registry (who the fuck used it?), file and print servers when you're not using them, the Windows Firewall in cases when you don't actually need it (and it was a piece of shit too) Fast User Switching (who's using that with 128 megs of RAM?) plus some things they added in service packs like Security Center. Now its real easy to disable all of that and then some, and if you're real slick you could strip a lot of it out of your install media and save yourself the disk space too.

Sure you can still do that in newer versions, to an increasingly lesser extent, with a lot more effort. And it's not just bloat, but bloat that actively spies on you. And people retards love to brag about how Win10 isn't bloated.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I think XP was both the first real sign of bloat on Windows, and the last version you could properly debloat, as Windows 2000 was pretty trim and Windows 98 could be installed as a bare bones system (except the mandatory IE), and every version after was heavier and slower than the last.

I used to run Windows 98 on a 486. I promise you, no matter how much you cut it down, Windows 95 is faster.

 

[Gargamel]

I used to run Windows 98 on a 486. I promise you, no matter how much you cut it down, Windows 95 is faster.

I ran Windows 98 on a Pentium 200 MMX, and I can tell you it was not noticeably slower than Windows 95, especially with IE ripped out.

I ran Windows 95 on a 386SX-16 with 16 megs of RAM and a super early, super sluggish 2.5 inch 80 meg IDE drive, with DriveSpace on top of that, and it was definitely slower than Windows 3.1, but not so bad that I couldn't use it comfortably for Office 97, MSPaint, Solitaire, and Space Invaders.

You expect some increase in weight going version to version, usually commensurate with increased capabilities and useful features. XP was the beginning of the end for that trend.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

It is too bad the motherboard manufacturers finally broke IBM compatibility by removing CSM.

Not all of them removed it actually, at least not yet. I know at least Gigabyte boards still have CSM support, even for the latest Intel and AMD sockets.
It's true that CSM support is no longer universal across vendors however, so that's another thing to check for before buying. Also it is completely gone on laptops, which is disheartening.

I think XP was both the first real sign of bloat on Windows, and the last version you could properly debloat, as Windows 2000 was pretty trim and Windows 98 could be installed as a bare bones system (except the mandatory IE), and every version after was heavier and slower than the last.

Oh yeah, my own first PC (AMD K6-2 450 MHz) had 64 MB of RAM. Which was pretty good for Windows 98, no problems there. But when I upgraded to XP, dear God was it slow. In its default configuration it took it minutes just to load. The installation process took two whole hours!
Looking back on it. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs would've probably been a better fit, but it wasn't out at the time.

 

[Gargamel]

Not all of them removed it actually, at least not yet. I know at least Gigabyte boards still have CSM support, even for the latest Intel and AMD sockets.

My Supermicro WRX80 board does not have it. Nor my ASUS X570 and X670 boards. I'm guessing this is less about a desire to drop support and more about cramming support for newer CPUs in a limited size flash ROM. Some socket AM4 boards got BIOS updates that drop support for older CPUs to make room for newer ones. AM4 arguably lived too long, but for a lot of people it sure was nice to be able to slap a new chip in an old board.

Newer Intel iGPUs (Alder Lake?) are completely incompatible with CSM even though some boards have it, so if you're not using dedicated graphics on these boards, you need to disable CSM or it won't boot. For this reason alone you will never see a new Intel laptop with CSM.

It's true that CSM support is no longer universal across vendors however, so that's another thing to check for before buying. Also it is completely gone on laptops, which is disheartening.

It is cool to have, but it's definitely way down the list of things I'm looking for in a motherboard. Usually top priority is having as many PCIe lanes broken out into slots as I can get given the platform.

Oh yeah, my own first PC (AMD K6-2 450 MHz) had 64 MB of RAM. Which was pretty good for Windows 98, no problems there. But when I upgraded to XP, dear God was it slow. In its default configuration it took it minutes just to load. The installation process took two whole hours!
Looking back on it. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs would've probably been a better fit, but it wasn't out at the time.

XP really struggles with 64MB memory. It really needs 128MB just for itself, plus however many megabytes your programs need, to run well.

I for a time ran XP on a laptop that maxxed out at 96MB. That was tough. I used to use a program called FreeRAM XP Pro that could force things out of memory on command, either completely out of memory or to the pagefile. I also used a tiny program called Homer that would serve any request to 127.0.0.1 a 1x1 spaceball. That combined with a large hosts file was a really efficient way of blocking ads, therefore saving memory.

I remember in the spring of 2009, back when I was beta testing Windows 7, I had gotten my hands on WinFLP and was installing it on a bunch of old computers that were being given away to people who needed one. Looking back at it, it wasn't really much better than stock XP, especially if you knew how to trim down XP.

Around that time a system with a K6-2 350MHz came across my bench. I had never really seen a Super Socket 7 before, so I played around with it. Put Windows XP on it and to my surprise it ran really well. Like a lot better than I thought it would given the clock speed. I even had an early version of Google Chrome running on it. Though, it did have 384MB of memory and a not-dogshit hard drive. I don't remember what happened to that computer. I wish I kept it. I don't have anything like it in my collection now.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

Around that time a system with a K6-2 350MHz came across my bench. I had never really seen a Super Socket 7 before, so I played around with it. Put Windows XP on it and to my surprise it ran really well. Like a lot better than I thought it would given the clock speed. I even had an early version of Google Chrome running on it. Though, it did have 384MB of memory and a not-dogshit hard drive. I don't remember what happened to that computer. I wish I kept it. I don't have anything like it in my collection now.

Oh, absolutely. All my woes ended once I bought an additional 256 MB stick of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive.
I'd go as far as to say that Super Socket 7 platform is one of the most versatile retro gaming platforms - you can overclock it and play some early 2000s stuff, but you can also downclock it (and disable CPU caches) to a 386DX level for DOS games that may require it.
Super Socket 7 is backwards compatible with Socket 7 (and even Socket 5 in some cases), meaning lots of CPUs are available - anything from Pentium 75 MHz to AMD-K6-III 550MHz.
It has AGP, PCI and ISA, so lots of hardware options are available too.

Holding onto sockets for a long time and squeezing every bit of performance out of them seems to be a running theme with AMD in general (although at the time it was done out of necessity - they were stalling for time while developing their own first socket).

 

[Gargamel]

Oh, absolutely. All my woes ended once I bought an additional 256MB stick of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive.
I'd go as far as to say that Super Socket 7 platform is one of the most versatile retro gaming platforms - you can overclock it and play early 2000s stuff, but you can also downclock it (and disable L2 and L3 caches) to a 386DX level for DOS games that may require it.
Super Socket 7 is backwards compatible with Socket 7 (and even Socket 5 in some cases), meaning lots of CPUs are available - anything from Pentium 75 MHz to AMD-K6-III 550MHz.
It has AGP, PCI and ISA, so lots of hardware options are available too.

They seem pretty versatile. I've got a few regular Socket 7 boards, one of them MIGHT have AGP, and a few Slot 1. I also have an IBM PS/2 Server 95 with what I believe is a Socket 4 CPU Complex (fancy word for CPU, cache, and chipset on an expansion card) containing a Pentium 66, which was the highest spec that machine was offered with.

Holding onto sockets for a long time and squeezing every bit of performance out of them seems to be a running theme with AMD in general (although at the time it was done out of necessity - they were stalling for time while developing their own first socket).

They're abandoning WRX80 after two generations, unfortunately.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I'd go as far as to say that Super Socket 7 platform is one of the most versatile retro gaming platforms - you can overclock it and play some early 2000s stuff, but you can also downclock it (and disable CPU caches) to a 386DX level for DOS games that may require it.
Super Socket 7 is backwards compatible with Socket 7 (and even Socket 5 in some cases), meaning lots of CPUs are available - anything from Pentium 75 MHz to AMD-K6-III 550MHz.
It has AGP, PCI and ISA, so lots of hardware options are available too.

I have a K6-III+ build and honestly you really don't want to run Unreal Engine games on it. It'll do something like Tiberian Sun OK but its not a powerful CPU even at full overclock.

So you can do the trick with setmul or other tools to reduce speed on specific CPUs but you can also do that with a lot of other setups, depends on the CPU and chipset what you can get out of it. For example with a Pentium 2 or 3 you can disable CPU cache from DOS/Windows and with just that get most incompatible older DOS games to run, as long as you aren't looking to play the handful of games that need a very specific speed processor like Wing Commander that's more than enough.

And then if you do use a Pentium 3 you really can run circa 2000 titles well and also use a motherboard that has a 440bx chipset and not have to deal with an unreliable VIA chipset. My fav retro PC has a 1GHz Slot 1 PIII, a 440bx chipset motherboard, a Voodoo 3, a Yamaha ISA sound card, and an external Yamaha MU-80 & Roland MT-32 attached for good measure. Or if that's too rich for your blood a K8 era Athlon 64 build with some care with the right PCI sound card can be pretty reliable and flexible the same way.

So why did they keep using Socket 7 so long? Probably they didn't have better options. Their K6 era offerings were notoriously poor for their day, made up for by the price.

 

[Gargamel]

So why did they keep using Socket 7 so long? Probably they didn't have better options.

In that era AMD was all about cheap computers for the masses. Socket 7 was an established platform with a widespread existing userbase and a wide variety of motherboards on the market. They extended it sort-of and made cheap yet relatively performant CPUs for it. They weren't going to nessecarily beat Intel but they didn't have to either. They just had to be cheaper and good value for the money.

Before this they had their low voltage AM5x86 486 clones, some of which came on interposer boards so they would work in older motherboards. They overclocked really well and represented the absolute best 486-class CPU you could get. They cost less than an Intel 486DX4, too.

Even after they introduced a proper competitor for Intel's Pentium III, the Athlon, they were still thinking of the cheap computer market. With the next generation came the Athlon XP, and also the Duron. Now they had both cheap and high end chips to sell.

Athlon 64 was good value for the money, mostly, and gave you features in normal desktop parts that Intel only offered in their most premium parts, such as hardware virtualization support. They were even 64-bit, using AMD's x86-backwards compatible amd64 archetecture. Best Intel had at the time was the 32-bit unscalable dead end Pentium 4, and the 64-bit only, x86-incompatible dogshit slow Titanic Itanium. These AMD parts were good value, but if this was too much money for you there was also the new cheap option, the Sempron. Laptops got the Turion 64, a mobile version of the Athlon 64. Some people ran Turion 64s in their desktops, too, because the sockets were shared. All of these were cheaper than comparable Intel offerings, and Intel desktop chips by this point were dogshit anyway, at least until Core 2 came out. The only thing Intel made that was worth a damn at this time was the Pentium M, which was a modernized Pentium III, and the later the Core Duo which was two Pentium M cores on one die.

Then AMD went to shit and Intel came up with something that wasn't shit, and AMD became known for being the thing inside poor people computers. I got a laptop with a Core 2 Duo around 2010, and not even a fast one, and it was noticably better than my desktop AM2+ Athlon 64x2, which was surprising to me at the time.

Thankfully Intel got lazy and AMD a-Ryzened to the top once more, They still have cheap reasonably performant chips for the masses, and they're competitve with Intel in the high end.

 

[mlanguishi]

Win 11 isn't that bad, it's just a reskin of 10, like 8 was of 10. And actually 10 was of 7. And 7 was of Vista. And Vista was of XP. And XP was of 2000. And 2000 was of NT 4. Which was a reskin of NT 3.1. The last original NT code was basically NTFS and Win NT 3.1 That was 1993.

Linux isn't much better, all kludges of mid 90s tech. I couldn't find an OS/2 thread, but this is interesting cause fought with OS/2 2.0 and Warp retards for ages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3DZJ_LD7F4

 

[Baraka Obama]

Win 11 isn't that bad, it's just a reskin of 10, like 8 was of 10. And actually 10 was of 7. And 7 was of Vista. And Vista was of XP. And XP was of 2000. And 2000 was of NT 4. Which was a reskin of NT 3.1. The last original NT code was basically NTFS and Win NT 3.1 That was 1993.

Linux isn't much better, all kludges of mid 90s tech. I couldn't find an OS/2 thread, but this is interesting cause fought with OS/2 2.0 and Warp retards for ages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3DZJ_LD7F4

I installed Windows 7 in a VM solely to use a non retarded file explorer. I don't know what Win11 Explorer is constantly "working on" but the same piece of software from 2009 in a constricted VM environment runs circles around it and immediately loads large folders while Win11 genuinely freezes. I had similar issues with Windows 10 explorer but it seems to have only gotten worse.

The actual OS stuff is fine in Windows 11 its the shell and the forced BS thats the problem.

 

[NaggotFigger]

I installed Windows 7 in a VM solely to use a non retarded file explorer. I don't know what Win11 Explorer is constantly "working on" but the same piece of software from 2009 in a constricted VM environment runs circles around it and immediately loads large folders while Win11 genuinely freezes. I had similar issues with Windows 10 explorer but it seems to have only gotten worse.

The actual OS stuff is fine in Windows 11 its the shell and the forced BS thats the problem.

Try tweaking. Give Winaero a try.