I recently published a post about the collection of Mac OS screenshots I have accumulated over the past 20+ years taken from the various Macs I have owned during that time. While Macs have been my primary computers, I have also had the occasional PC running Windows and even installed Windows 7 on my first Intel-based MacBook to try out BootCamp.
Fortunately, I took screenshots of some of those desktops too. They aren’t as thorough as the Mac screenshots, but they do reflect how I’ve used Windows over the years pretty well. My first PC had DOS and Windows 3.1, then Windows 95. Later, we got a new PC capable of running Windows 98.
I don’t have any screenshots of those early installs of Windows, but I did upgrade the Windows 98 machine to Windows 2000 in late 1999 and the screenshots below are from that machine. All of the screenshots here are from computers I owned and were taken at the time when I was actually using the OS on a day-to-day basis.
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is still my favorite release of Windows. It was the first NT-based version of Windows I used and as such also the most stable up to that point. I enjoyed its interface and believe it is still the peak of Windows’s UI design. Compared to newer versions of Windows, it felt incredibly lightweight and yet had pretty much everything you needed for your computing needs.
Windows XP
I was never a fan of XP’s toy-like interface which, although there was classic mode, still reared its ugly head with all the icons. It felt incongruent which is why I ended up sticking with the Luna theme. I like blue, so I used the default blue rather than the silver or olive-green versions.
In the first screenshot below, you can see an icon for 1st Page 2000 on the desktop which is one of the code editors I used at the time.
Windows 7
I never used Vista other than to help my mom out with her PC, but I did use Windows 7. The screenshot below is from the first Intel-based MacBook I had at the time running with BootCamp. I never really did much with it other than play games that didn’t work on the Mac.
I did, however, use Windows 7 a lot at work a few years later. They gave me a PC with Windows 7 at a time when Windows 8 was already out and Windows 10 was already on the horizon. I didn’t take any screenshots of it though and gave a huge sigh of relief when I was finally able to turn that beast of a laptop back into IT.
Windows 11
I was one of the lucky ones who avoided having to use Windows 8, but I did use Windows 10 for quite a while on the first desktop PC I bought for myself in years. However, I never did take any screenshots of it. So instead, you get a couple of screenshots of the Windows 11 PC I’m currently writing this on. They were taken just a few minutes before writing this.
Conclusion
I’ve actually been surprisingly happy with Windows 11 on my PC. Although I’ve also dabbled in desktop Linux on my PC, I still keep coming back to Windows because of the games and other programs I use on it that don’t run on Linux.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still think Windows 2000 was the peak of the Windows interface design and I enjoy the experience of going back to it every once in a while in a virtual machine. I still even have the original, holographic install disks for Windows 2000.
In the end, I’m still primarily a Mac user but have learned to appreciate the variety of experiences Windows, Linux and macOS have to offer.
