I used Windows 95 (first poor edition), Windows 98 SE, XP Professional, Vista Home Premium 64-bit and now I have installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (MSDN AA).

I installed Windows 7 because I could download it for free from MSDN AA and I really don't know why people love it so much and hate Vista so much. They are one and the same OS.

I'm no programmer and looking from a gamers perspective I don't see any improvements in Windows 7 and Vista runs faster in my case so my favorite Windows is Vista Home Premium 64-bit.

8

Have used 3.11, 95, 98, NT 4.0, Millenium, XP, Server 2003 and 2008, Vista and 7.
Find 7 to be the best.
Millenium the worst... It was like an eldritch horror right out of Lovecraft's imagination.

I have experience with:

Windows 3.1 and 3.11 (basically same thing)
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Windowx XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7

My favorite out of memories and nostalgia is Windows 2000 Professional. My favorite for ease of use is Windows 7, closely followed by XP. Vista was ok but should have been released in the state 7 was released in.

I say XP cause if XP wasn't released ever, 7 might of been nothing. My point is, XP introduced Media Player and other programs and XP was and is still AWESOME. XP FOR THE WIN.

I've been using Windows since Windows/286. I've used every version to come out since then as time went by. I like Windows 7 alright. They've come a long way but I'd rather be driving an iMac and plan to in the near future. :-)

Honestly, XP sucks and 7 is passable. I can understand your confusion as one assumes there to be a rose somewhere amongst the thorns, but with Windows, there's bad, poor and mediocre.

But, that being said, 7 is definitely the most competent OS that MS has ever produced. Nothing spectacular, but given MS' history, that's saying something nice about them.

Now it sucks but the legacy continues...

I 'wonder' which OS you would define as a good one.

BSD, right?

Every OS is good in its own way.

Having spent literally thousands of hours over the years working around the bugs and generally shitty implementation of the various MS OSes, I can assure you that Windows has been substandard long enough that claims of it's goodness are probably not doing anything particularly interesting with it. Pretty much anybody can create an OS that handles the internet and email. If you go much beyond that you start to realize just how shitty their QA process is.

Having used nearly all of Windows releases, I have to point out that the only saving grace with Windows has been driver support and the size of the library. Which is to say that it's reason for being popular is because it's popular. It doesn't bring anything particularly compelling to the market and you pretty much have to buy a copy if you buy a computer from most vendors that aren't Apple.

Same for me however I really liked XP

Still much better than Linux. Last time I did a serious effort to try Linux, about two years ago, it was hell even getting it to install. Some of it was probably drivers, some of it stupid bugs like wrong disk numbering on a two disk system. Even when installed, things like the inability to install OS updates and use the software installation tool at the same time due to a pipe conflict, software silently failing to run (it wrote an error, but it was only visible when running from an xterm)... And of course drivers are their own little hell. It's too much effort to do anything beyond the basics in Linux. Windows works a whole lot more smoothly.

*co-signs* Same

Depends what is the question you are answering to.

Many people seem to take the original question as "Which Windows version is technically the most advanced?". Well, duh, Win7 of course, being the newest and all.

I, on the other hand, answered the question as "Which Windows version were you the most happy with overall, in its time?", especially looking into it from a PC gamer's point of view.

As said, Win9x were a remarkable milestone for me in that they moved PC gaming ahead from DOS (no more strict HW compatibility requirements for graphics/audio, better game controllers, and better online gaming), yet at the same time they retained full backwards compatibility. I don't think there was even one DOS game I couldn't run on my Win9x machines (compared to that same system running only MS-DOS 6.x), even if it meant letting the game boot out of Win9x into real DOS mode.

On the other hand, Win2000 and WinXP caused some backwards compatibility issues with early Win9x games (let alone DOS games, but fortunately DOSBox came along much later, and there was VDMSound before too...), so moving to 2000/XP meant saying bye bye to some of your PC games. Unless you made a double-boot system, or kept old PC around. But at the same time, they certainly brought lots of great things to home users, like at last getting rid of the sh*tty FAT filesystem etc.

Pretty much the same with Win7 64bit. It's backwards compatibility with older games is pretty good overall, but problems with e.g. 16bit installers and updates on old Windows games, the well-known 256-color problems, not being able to select your MIDI devices anymore for DOSBox (Munt emulator) etc. Little retro-gaming annoyances like that here and there.

And also, I still dislike many features of Win7 Aero, the completely useless transparency sh*t, default colors which make reading even the digital clock hurt my eyes etc., which also lowers its standing a bit in my book.

But as said, if someone asked which Windows I would use as my primary Windows OS today, Win7 of course! Silly question, the older Windows versions don't have the latest IE or security features, and the official support from MS has already ended or near ending.

Even if I end up disliking Win8 and Metro, I'm probably forced to say "Win8" or "Win9" sometime in the future as well, if not for any other reason but MS eventually dropping support for Win7.

Have experienced all from 3.1 to XP with SP3. I stood there, my GOP (Good Old PC ^_^) would gain nothing from newer OS...