That was the idea, but then, they settled for 4.

I still think 6-7 would have been better, because, there is absolutely no reason why a business owner should have a bunch of stuff in his Windows installation, he only needs his stupid Windows Forms application to be running for a few hours, and Starter Edition really worked for this purpose, very well.

Now businesses will have to pay a lot more (assuming the price cut isn't very large), or deploy Thin Clients (I doubt many small businesses would want to deal with servers, storage pools, database pools, and similar stuff).

Only if you want a good reason to hate yourself.

And that's a good thing. A simple IIS web and database server wouldn't need the $xxxx priced features.

you forgot windows 95 the os that gave windows its form we all know and love (like the start menu)

[url=http://www.eightforums.com/chillout-room/5689-aol-1996-windows-8-2012-lol.html ]This really says it all [/url]

And remember, whenever MS tried to be "hip and modern" they created something that not even Gandalf was able to sent back to the hells it came from. "Clippy" anybody. Or that Dog, that dreadful dog...

It really does say it all, doesn't it? Now we know what the developers grew up with.

At least you could turn that bloody dog off though. Although even then they made you watch him bugger the fuck off.

The only annoying thing I've found in 7 is that Flicks thing, which is harder to disable.

Well Win95 was something really different, they really took the whole GUI thing to the next level with it, and it's been the core (in some form or another) of all Windows OS's since. But was it GOOD? For the time, sure. But it bluescreened any time you tried to mess with the memory, it wasn't compatible with a lot of DOS games (remember the fun times of figuring out whether you were in "MS-DOS mode" or whether you'd actually quit WIndows?) and the drivers left a lot to be desired. And who could forget the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen? It was buggy and crash-prone, and it had as many negatives for it as it had positives. Plus games designed for it (and only it) are some of the WORST to get working on modern systems due to some of its quirks, though that's usually the devs' fault.

It's an important piece of history, but in terms of performance (rather than impact) I'd say it was "average."

For servers and enterprise applications that is a good thing. For home users having 3 options is greedy. Apple has gone the other way and only offers one version of OSX to cover both.

Although, I believe that they do charge for addons to turn it into a proper server OS.

Depends on the use of the OS. Most people around here, business related, want either the Starter edition, or Home Basic (if they cannot find the Starter edition).

Mention Professional (talking about 7, of course), that is supposed to be used in business environments, and they'll just walk away, happy to keep using their XP (which is pirated, but more importantly, free).

At least around here, businesses aren't ready for Thin Clients, they want the data to be locally kept on their PCs too.

So do most staff tbf theres nothing like the ringing of phones in a helldesk 2 seconds after the file server hiccups -.-

There's a reason why people moved away from thin clients. Despite what Ellison might think, the fact is that they have some severe disadvantages.

The problem I have with the different versions of Windows is that it's confusing and that MS undercharges for the basic version. The basic version is the one that costs MS the most to produce, yet it's the cheapest one.

Also, I'm still annoyed with MS' incompetence on the issue with regards to the help files. It's often not clear from the help files until you scroll all the way down that it doesn't apply to your version. And even the included help files inexplicably include information for other versions of windows. Worse is that the options are often times still there, but greyed out.

Related...

Windows Server 8 will officially be called Windows Server 2012.

Unless you had manually exited Windows, I think a mere "exit" would suffice in both cases. Ie. if you were running the DOS app from within Win95, it would simply exit the DOS "window". If you were in real DOS mode with a special config/autoexec, it would automatically boot you back to Windows (or even already when you exited the DOS game itself).

The most important thing was that there was a way to get all DOS games running on a Win9x system, without having to resort to dual-boots or anything (ie. a MS-DOS/Win3.x partition, and a separate Win9x partition).

Some games (like those with fancy Origin Voodoo or JEMM memory managers) wouldn't run straight from Win9x desktop, but for those you could either just exit from Win9x to DOS, or even boot the machine with a specific config.sys/autoexec.bat for that particular game (which you'd put into the game shortcut properties directly). No more separate DOS boot disks or extra entries in the boot loader for the most demanding games that needed some special config.sys/autoexec.bat to run well, or at all. I remember I used to have such specific boot-options for many games, for example Ultima 7.

Many DOS games were actually easier to run from Win9x than from real DOS, because from Win9x you didn't have to try to figure out yourself how to load mouse drivers, hard disk cache memory etc. high, because they were available already, without consuming any conventional memory.

Frankly, I have hard time thinking how they could have made Win9x any (considerably) better, without breaking gaming backwards compatibility. Certainly they could have gone straight with the NT core and NTFS already then, but then the gamers (we) would have disliked it a lot.

It's the same as if Win7 wouldn't have been able to run most of your WinXP games. How many PC gamers would have wanted to migrate to Win7 then?

Technically Win9x letf a lot to be desired. But for what it was meant for, I still think it was brilliant.

Win 95 was horribly unstable and had little to no support for networking.

It was what it was largely because MS didn't have the staffing to rewrite the code properly and they made some astonishingly poor decisions which haunt Windows to the current day. The registry, I can imagine people thinking that was a good idea, and completely failing to realize what a big deal having a single point of failure that large was.

They released it primarily because they needed to have a graphical OS to compete with Mac OS. Remember that was the first version of Windows that was an OS.

OS X isn't a proper server OS, even with those add-ons (and the "server editions" before weren't either), of course, they lowered the price to peanuts compared to other paid solutions, which I believe reflects a similar realisation. Just like Windows XP isn't a proper server OS just because someone installs IIS on it.