At the time this thread came out I was in high school and I'm pretty sure I was using a computer I had put together from spare parts recovered from several old and broken computers that I'd managed to gather from various places. That machine had Ubuntu on it. I later built a brand-new PC with Windows on it, but for most of the past thirteen years I've had a Linux partition hanging around.

My parents had a newer pre-built computer they had picked up at Wal-Mart. It had Vista on it and we never really had a problem out of it, from what I remember, though it was primarily used for schoolwork, playing Halo CE, and later my brother used it to play an incredible amount of Minecraft at 20FPS. That PC later got upgraded to 7 and I gave my brother my old HD7770 and that became an OK-ish gaming PC.

So there were a variety of OS's to choose from for me, but primarily I was using Ubuntu in my room for browsing the internet, typing stuff up for school, and emulating GBA/SNES games. These days my PC primarily has Windows 10 on it, but I have some free time next week I'm going to use to go back to some flavor of Linux, likely Mint or Ubuntu, and keep a Windows partition around for the handful of games I play that need it.

I remember working in PC shop and the lad that worked with us (and I guess supervised us whilst we played Worms Armageddon) made a suggestion Microsoft should've sold copies of XP for £10. It was the last operating system any of us would ever need.

My Windows XP desktop: A Sony Vaio that was technically the family computer, but I mainly used it for school work and Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2. It still runs, though the last thing I used it for was to install Far Cry 1 via the CD release. That version doesn't work with 64-bit systems, and the Vaio is the only working 32-bit system that I have these days. It was mainly in service between 2001 and 2008. It did get a cheap Nvidia GPU upgrade when Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 came out, but it wasn't enough to get the game running well, if at all.

My Vista laptop: An HP Pavilion from 2008. It was a high school graduation present. Can't say that I look at my online misadventures with much nostalgia, but it was good enough to run those earlier versions of Photoshop, which did plant the seeds for the artist that I am today. I did have to retire it in 2012 due to a dying cooling fan among other issues that I was nowhere near capable of fixing in terms of know-how and spare cash for parts. It was replaced with a Lenovo T410 which I could get working again with a new battery, AC adapter and RAM that doesn't have mismatched timings, but I digress since that ran Windows 7 and I might have upgraded it to 10 until retiring it in 2016.

I remember that I ended up skipping over Vista. But that was pretty much just luck of the draw, whatever computer I had at the time lasted long enough that when I bought my next one it was two generations on, that's all. My brother had Vista and I don't remember him having any major complaints about it.

It does remind me that Windows 10 did sort of kill my last machine indirectly, though. In that sense it's actually the Windows version I've had the most concrete problem with.

It was an Asus tower that I bought in 2013. It had come loaded with Windows 8 (bleh), and I upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as I could. But at some point Windows 10 started pushing an update that would kill my internet every time. I have no idea why--I assume it was creating some incompatibility with the network adapter somehow. Tried everything under the sun to fix it, but I never figured it out and always had to revert to the previous Windows version to get internet back. That would work for about six months before Windows would force me to update again.

But then came a point somewhere near the end of 2020 when Windows started forcing me to update every week, breaking my internet every time, and requiring me to roll back the update every time. That's what forced me to buy my current machine two years ago, otherwise I might still be using that Asus.

On the bright side, after seven years it was probably time anyway, and my graphics card went from a 750ti to a 1080, which is something like five times the power. I'm mostly a console guy anyway, but it's nice to be able to play some stuff on my PC with settings that aren't all on low.

Man that avatar.

Different time.

@shindig:

It was a great OS back then. A true competitor to OS X on Mac. Which I thought was hot shit and sexy as fuck in 2002

Ah XP, I still have an XP mini desktop in a WinX(?) case I use for old games. Barely touched Vista.

It's strange, I never had any real issues with Vista. But the moment Win7 RC1 was available I was all over it. If it was 2008 I had a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4gb of Ram and I think that was the year I replaced my 7900 GS with a 4870, I got that card a few weeks after it launched. I remember I was kind of miffed that Brad chose a GTX 260 for the office PC and not a 4870...they were strange times.