Windows 9 is now Windows 10

[cwathen]

Hopefully Windows 11 will finally see all the remaining control panel options merged into the settings menu. Whilst the number of items in the Control Panel has reduced in the past few years / redirects to a setting option there's still quite a few items that still haven't been migrated across after all this time.

It's certainly been a long time coming. Almost a decade since the PC Settings app first appeared in Windows 8 and they've still not got the job done. That said, I'm not sure what's actually supposed to be wrong with Control Panel which required it to be changed into an app...especially since the app has evolved to not be that different to Control Panel in category view anyway.

I think I'm right in saying that it is still the case that only Control Panel is extensible in that icons can be added to it by the installation of specific drivers/software. That is functionality that has existed since Windows 3.1, is very useful to have, and I don't believe there is any equivalent in the settings app. Until/unless that changes I don't see how Control Panel is ever going to be killed off completely.

[WillPS]

I'm sure it has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple finally incrementing the primary version number of MacOS to 11 and Microsoft not wanting to appear to be a version behind...

Indeed, and I think a few things going on over on the Apple side of the fence has got more than a few of the big Wintel OEMs rattled.

Apple's developer conferences are always polished and they revealed some nice features which only Apple can do (like 'Universal' control) which gets people hyped up, but the other thing, Apple Silcon really does have the big Intel OEMs worried - most 1K-ish Windows laptops are just shite, horrible plastic build quality, and first boot you have to spend 3 hours removing all the crapware they bundle with it.

I purchased a M1 MBP a few months ago, I have an Intel I7 something or other as my work laptop - and the first thing you notice is how the fan is on all the time with an Intel machine, whilst with my M1, I never hear it, and I really do get all day battery life and some... to the point that I'm now using my personal laptop in the place of my work laptop as I'm more productive.

I have a 4 year old Lenovo Yoga (original cost £850), my fiancée has an 18 month old Lenovo IdeaPad (original cost £450) and work gave me a new Surface Pro 7 when I joined last year. All are Intel i5/i7, and on all 3 the fan is only audible when you put your ear right against the case. Similarly the bloatware you refer to on the two Lenovo's amounted to an install of McAffe which was removed in 5 minutes. My Surface came with the organisation's standard image on it but I understand there is no bloatware at all on them if you buy them yourself.

I'm not a Windows fan at all, I try to use Ubuntu wherever I can, but I think a lot of the problem here is people buying crap laptops and comparing them to devices that cost 2-4x as much.

[bilky asko]

Indeed, I think Dr Lobster is writing from the year 2006. The talk of plastic build quality intrigued me, as the laptop I got in 2013 was much less than £1,000 and had a mostly aluminium construction.

So I looked at Currys at four laptops at random just less than £1,000. Three were all aluminium construction (one was specifically mentioned as being machined from two blocks of aluminium), and one was plastic reinforced with carbon fibre and magnesium.

[cwathen]

One thing I'm pleased to see is that even though the installed footprint looks about the same, Microsoft are now stating a 64GB storage device as the minimum to run it. Hopefully this will put an end to those nasty low end netbooks with nonupgradeable 32GB eMMCs that can never be updated or have much of anything installed on them through lack of space.

[barcode]

When is this thread getting renamed .. Soon to be windows 11.

[Sput]

When is this thread getting renamed .. Soon to be windows 11.

Please stay on topic. This is a dedicated Windows 10 thread.

[Nick Harvey]

In the drivers ini files, identifying windows 95 and windows 98 was refered to Win9x . Having Win9 caused issues during the alpha phase of Windows 10. They decided to skip Win9 to save time and hardship..

Really? I'd never have guessed!

[cwathen]

Wow! This is rather an old debate. TBH I never bought the compatibility argument as to missing out Windows 9. I totally get the logic of the 'if productname.contains "9" then call sub Windows9x else...' argument, but it doesn't stand up to closer examination

*Windows ME was part of the Win9x family but doesn't have a 9 in the product name. Didn't prevent it being detected as such.
*98SE introduced changes to the driver model. Although a 95/original 98 driver would also work on 98SE/ME, the reverse was not necessarily true. That is why a lot of hardware released late in the 9x era specifically requires 98SE as a minimum to use with 9x. Having a 9 in the product name of 95/98/98SE did not prevent detection of what version was in use and whether a given driver would work with that version.
*If we are going on the internal version numbers rather than the product name as being where the test is done, both 95 RTM and NT4 report as being version 4.0 even though they both need different drivers (and there are other similar examples) Having the same internal version number did not prevent the correct product being detected.

Windows 7/8 were just brand names, you need to be *very* selective in your history to claim them as truly being the 7th and 8th major releases of Windows (indeed their internal version numbers were in the 6.x series). The decision to skip 9 and go to 10 was almost certainly just a marketing decision, '10' sounds like much more of a milestone than 9 (which would have been particularly important at the time given they intended to stay at version 10 forever), and it put them on the same major version number as MacOS. I really doubt it goes any deeper than that.

[JAS84]

If the Win9x thing really was an issue, they could've used the roman numeral. Windows IX.

[Philip]

I recently came across these fascinating videos by Jensen Harris, formerly of Microsoft, and thought it might be worth sharing them here:





Unfortunately he hasn't made any more since last year.

[cdd]

Relatedly, the mystery of that Windows XP OOBE (title.wma) theme came from - which I must have Googled every year since 2001 - was solved a couple of years ago, with this upload.

It wasn't written for Windows XP at all, and rather was just a track they had lying around since Windows 98.