The Windows Tier List

let's categorize all the versions of Windows and I've been a Windows user for over 30 years have over 10 professional Windows certifications and have supported it and I kind of know a lot about each version of them save for a couple which I'll mention in this video so let's get right into it um I'm going to start with the ones I've never tried which is Windows one and two as I was born in the early 80s I never really got an opportunity to do one and two I was mainly just hanging out in DOS these weren't entirely like super popular back when they first released and I've installed them but I never really used them the very first one I used was Windows 3.11 which right here it's it's 3.1 is what they're saying I would say that one is probably good but it's not really an operating system I don't really view it as a full-blown Windows because you launched into dos which was 6.22 and and you did most your commands and a lot of times when you launch programs like I think the original Doom you'd launch it in DOS mode a lot of these were it was more of a wrapper than an actual fully blown operating system so 3-1-1 worked well and it was good for the time and it was really an Innovative with a lot of the using the GUI instead of just doing commands through your CLI but uh overall I I had a decent experience with it and I was pretty young when I used this as well because I think 311 came out in the early 90s but the first like really big innovation was obviously 95 it was excellent for the Innovation but just absolutely terrible for uh the bugs you got with 95. I would kind of toss uh so I'd probably split the difference and just put it in the good realm where it was nah I'm gonna say average actually well I love the start menu and a lot of things with 95 there was a lot of problems a lot of bugs with it from what I recall a lot of compatibility issues where things needed to run in DOS that you're bringing over to 95 and the Dos compatibility mode was a little bit hacky and how 95 was structured kind of used a bastardized version of Dos and then kind of launched it through like autoexec.bat files and other things so it was very uh weird at the time but really Innovative I appreciate 95 for what it was but uh not a great product at the end of the day it was okay and then came like uh just a bad product which was 98. now before you like run to the comments and go what are you saying 98 was bad the first version of 98 was pretty awful like 95 was ahead of the first version of 98. it wasn't until I would say 98 SE came about that it was like kind of got to a stable spot and it was actually really good I love 98 SE I thought it was I ran that for many years actually I would say all the way even past 2000 a little bit uh just because the next operating system on the list was so terrible but uh I would say 98 SC ran for a good bit it was a more polished version of 95 and 98 kind of taking all those things and it really didn't push the envelope on anything but kind of refined things and got it to a less buggy state and then came the worst the absolute worst on this entire video Emmy Emmy started off awful and you're like oh well I kind of like some of this design but there was so many bugs so many blue screens of death you patched it it got worse it never found a stable spot uh Microsoft never fixed Emmy it just started off bad and then just went downhill from there so it's by far the worst operating system they've ever launched hands down by a mile and no one can no one that's from that air that actually used it for any period of time uh would disagree with me and then came I think probably the best operating system they ever launched at the same time as me was 2000 professional which is kind of Bonkers but it makes sense when you look that this was a business team and this was a residential team because at the time they were splitting stuff there was a business side and then there was a residential side and it wasn't until they standardized it in these XP and onward before they Consolidated these teams so 2000 professional was really rock solid and I actually pirated 2000 professional just because uh Emmy was so broken and I paid for Emmy and I felt cheated so I didn't mind it although the 2000 professional while I I praise it so much I I downloaded a bad copy with viruses and everything in it and it still worked way better than Emmy I learned how to clean up a lot of the windows viruses from the 2000 professional era and that's kind of when I started a lot of my I.T career was around here so I have just such fond memories of 2000 professional and the fact it was just so solid even when I downloaded a broken version of it it still worked just fantastic and it was it was great from the start all the way to the end uh so I loved 2000 professional and if you want to kind of go back in time check out remix OS it's a free version reverse engineered based on 2000 professionals so very cool and this one's gonna be the first like I think everyone can pretty much agree with my tier structure this is gonna be the one that's um I would put XP probably in the bad possibly average if you include like sp3 and SP2 maybe but when it launched XP was just a virus magnet if you were an I.T at that time you were cleaning computers non-stop if you just plugged it up to the Internet and put a standard user on it it was going to get infected that was like xp's Legacy everyone has rose-colored glasses looking back at the XPR and so it was so good because it used minimal processes but possibly the most vulnerable just virus ridden operating system of every ever introduced by Microsoft so it's kind of insane to put this anywhere in here so the people out there going I loved XP well I mean I get it if you're like an I.T professional and you could keep it clean and you knew what not to do but for the standard user it was bad and I would say after Service Pack 2 and ask for Service Pack 3 it went from bad to average where it didn't quite get infected as much but it was still just a terrible operating system and I know a lot of people are just mad at that but it's the truth and I and no hate on Microsoft I made a ton of money I was making over a thousand dollars a day just repairing computers during the XP era so thank you Microsoft for making something so terrible as XP but I'd be remissed to say for the average user uh XP was just awful and then came Vista Vista obviously launched everyone's gonna probably put it like the absolute worst for some people or bad on launch because Vista did a whole bunch of things differently um however I liked Vista better than XP at the end of it after Service Pack 2 Vista was in a really good state but the problem with Vista and why so many people hated Vista was because one it introduced and why they put it down here there's a lot of compatibility issues so when it launched at 64-bit was added and so many programs just did not work uh properly you know it was like okay there's two versions of Microsoft Office there's 64-bit and 32-bit there was all these issues with the conversion from here also going from XP to Vista when you put it up side by side Vista was a huge hog of resources and it was a big jump so if you had an older computer and you upgraded from XP to Vista it just ran like dog water it was just awful and then I would say probably the next thing too going from XP to Vista Vistas when they really started cracking down and putting UAC and trying to start to protect the end user uh maybe of a Band-Aid starting off but what it did was it pissed everybody off because it was asking for elevation and there's constant prompts do you sure you want to run this and it made everybody mad because everybody's so used to just running his admin from Windows XP era so while everyone has bad memories and would put it here Vista for me goes into the good realm above XP I know blasphemy but that's where that's that's my tier list and I just cannot in any realm put XP above Vista because it it was frankly better than XP for the average user next up is Windows 7 and this one oh man you almost want to just immediately put a nest here because everyone has good memories of seven from when it launched but I would say it started out in this tier and seven on launch was just great they removed the crap from like Vista the terrible widgets most people were so used to X you know the the UAC and a lot of the security at this point so seven kind of started off in the excellent tier But as time went on seven became extremely bloated there was main some fundamental flaws with Windows 7 that were very problematic and there's really two things and anytime past about 2015 when Windows 10 came out or really Windows 8 was the start of it 2012 is when they started kind of bloating it down starting add some Telemetry so it started running a little bit slower and then you also had with Windows 7 problems with update management the big issue with Windows 7 update man management was it just never really did a good job of cleaning up so after running it for three or four years Windows 7 update that that Windows folder would bloat up to 30 40 gigs would not be uncommon so it did just a terrible job with management of that and then as time went on even past the Windows 10 era some people use Windows 10 past about 2016 2017 which is blasphemy in my opinion uh Only Fools or people that just didn't really use their computer very much used it past that time because it was just so it had the same shortcomings as XP and this is why Windows 7 goes down to a great for me because of telemetry being added to it a lot of the problems existed after three or four years of using seven that really started to knock it down with it Windows folder bloating up and and then thirdly the Eternal blue exploit if you're unfamiliar with eternal blue you probably remember wannacry and those uh nasty screens I'll put one up here but uh the the problem was of all the back doors in seven and the huge vulnerabilities which were kind of patched but still Windows 7 to this day uh if you're I don't think anybody's using it in 2023 hopefully not um but in 2020 I was like everyone should be removing it honestly once the Eternal blue patches came out and said hey that was all public and everyone was hacking Windows 7 like left and right script kitties could open up met up sploit and get in to Windows 7 with remote execution and just completely just run rampant uh doing ransomware and a whole bunch of other stuff so Windows 7 really went downhill and it kind of blemished it its Legacy of being such a great OS on release but because of back doors that were introduced and a lot of the exploits from ransomware in the Eternal blue NSA tool leaks Windows 7 kind of gets taken down a notch for me now is a Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 eight uh was just bad the start screen was crazy to me uh it was they're trying to innovate but nobody liked the start screen unless you're like on a tablet and they tried like other stuff like Windows RT and some other uh versions during this era so they tried to really experiment in This Server realm I really liked the fact they were introducing like Nano server or I think it's called Windows Server core now those were really interesting products to me bought on its head uh Windows 8 was not a great launch very few people used it and those that did use it uh you know kind of were punished for after like many you know AMD I think stopped supporting any modern cards in 2018 and stopped reproducing drivers so Windows 8 kind of fell to the Wayside they tried to fix it with 8.1 which was better they added back the start menu but still a very average OS and not very consistent this is like the intro a Metro UI it was not a great one but I never really installed it I kind of hung with seven until Windows 10 came out now Windows 10 uh most people would think I'd put it like down in here but really I would put Windows 10 almost in a great tier because when it launched honestly it was close to excellent tier because it didn't launch with like a huge amount of stuff that couldn't be removed so if you were deep loading Windows 10 it was actually an excellent experience all the way through version 1709 so uh probably up to like 2017 2018 era and then 1803 came out and they started bloating down with a lot of Microsoft store dependencies and then they just continuous tacked on stuff and it kind of brought it down into probably the good tier now where Windows 10 could have been excellent but Microsoft just keeps kind of tacking stuff onto it that makes it worse and I hate that I just hate that where Windows 10 once was just such a solid product you can still de-load it obviously I have a huge debloat script and everything for it and it does make a decent operating system but but I kind of put it up there in this tier it's annoying to me that I have to do it and after optimizing it it's okay it's it's good I would say and then comes windows 11. I would say honestly much like to say Microsoft has a tendency of starting off on this great tier on launch Windows 11 really wasn't great on launch though if we're being honest they had problems with AMD CPUs where it gimped them and in Intel CPUs were better you also had issues with TPM and requirements where a lot of regular like up-to-date systems that can totally run Windows 11 weren't able to upgrade to it because of artificial limits now obviously we can get past that heck Rufus has a tool that just you just click hey remove TPM requirements and you can install Windows 11 on every anything now so Windows 11 I was good and I'd say and when I look at it I'm obviously using Windows 11 I like a lot of the aesthetic of Windows 11. after I customized it and everything but it's one that I would never put in business yet and it's still unproven and I put it kind of down here because I've run into more bugs than not on a lot of updates and it's just not a great system yet I could see this moving back up and honestly 10 can move down and up it these are still kind of moving for me I'd put them in the good tier because they're very functional it's just annoying to use them because of things that Microsoft does that just bloats them down and makes them less than uh and takes them out of that excellent and great tier for me I'm curious to see where these end up I'd say the final tier list right now looks like this uh Windows 11 I think they'll make it back into the good tier as long as they don't do anything else to really screw it up but it's Microsoft now let's see let me know your experiences what would you change I'm sure I'm gonna hear a lot on the XP era thing but uh I gave you my rationale so I still say I'm right I'm right and putting XP in that in that tier of average because it was an average operating system all right y'all have a great one and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 119,772

Keywords: chris titus tech

Id: 5xwB6pWypuk

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023