The 10 Worst Operating Systems of All Time

PC World: "I love old technology as much as the next techno-geezer, but come on, it wasn't all wonder and goodness. After we're done reminiscing about the good old days of operating systems, let's reflect on the bad old days of operating systems as well. After all, the bad times are still with us -- even in 2009, there are still some wretched operating systems out there.

In historical order, from oldest to newest, here's my own personal list of the top (bottom?) 10 OS stinkers."

[GiantEnemyCrab]

Your going to put Vista into the same list with Windows 1.0 and Lindows?? WOW! The hate for Vista is strong. I run it on my media server and it runs great after just minor tweaking and it runs 24/7.

Yet no mention of Warp? Netware? I can think of many more deserving of the worst operating system of all time label.

[bym051d]

Warp and Netware were both fine OSes.

I agree with you on Vista. It's not that bad.

[singhjeet29]

Most would think that 6 years after XP, MS would be able to shove something decent in our face ... that isn't the case with Vista.

Vista was a step in the wrong direction, lets just hope they fix all the annoyances of Vista with 7. And I honestly wish the Vista team hadn't stolen Aero from the 7 guys, thats just gonna hurt the initial image of 7, because it looks so much like vista.

[TheAntiFanboy]

Vista isn't that bad. People are just butthurt that their computers couldn't run it when it first came out.

The backend is vastly superior and much less susceptible to explosions, and it's filled to the brim with the TINIEST tweaks that all add up to create an improved package.

It's not worth the full price to upgrade from XP to Vista unless you get a new computer, but IF you get a new computer, then it's waaay better than XP.

JUST MAKE SURE TO TURN OFF UAC. So many people say that kills it for them but don't even realize that it's something you can easily disable with a few mouse clicks.

[Theoneneo81]

I agree i think the fact that Windows 7 looks alot like vista feels like vista will hurt the sales even though its a 100x better than vista i just think winodws may have another miss in there next os and thats only cause Vista has been such a Epic failure.

[blind-reaper]

I agree Vista is one of the most hated but it is not in the top 10 worst.

[PirateThom]

I think Vista gets so much hate because it was coming off XP, which I consider to be the greatest OS I've ever used. Everything just works with it.

[KingKionic]

well yeah ive had some problems with games ,but usually theres a patch for the game to improve the problems. other then that its pretty good.

[Bnet343]

Anything is better than Mac.

[Erocal]

Yet non of "Macs" OS's were on the list except once and they were praising it.

[meatnormous]

I remember hating on xp after I upgraded from win 98. I am running Vista 64-bit on 2 pcs and it really isn't that bad.

[evrfighter]

"Yet non of "Macs" OS's were on the list except once and they were praising it."

when you stick a stable OS on a list such as this along with comments such as..

"It was also slow, unstable and insecure. OK, so those are all traits of Windows in general,"

Do you even have to try and guess what He was using to type this up? This is an opinion piece and I'm not gonna bash him for it. But please don't act as if it's fact

[callahan09]

Damn. Nearly half of the 10 (four to be exact) are by Microsoft. I dunno, I owned ME and ran it until Vista came out without a hitch. I've been running Vista since it came out without a hitch. I've seen better OS's, but they do their job reasonably well as long as you know what you're doing anyway.

[somekindofmike]

I ran Windows ME as well, and as far as I can remember it was just your average Windows OS. Not perfect but not terrible, obviously these were just my experiences, and may not reflect the overall opinion of it.

I've got tired of Windows & moved to Mac OS X (mainly because I don't game on PC & I work in design industry so mac is industry standard, makes it easier to work from home) but I don't have a hate for windows, & I'm really curious to try out the new Windows 7 when it launches. although the price of it will probably put me off trying it just to please my curiosity.

[crazy25000]

.....windows is meant to work with almost any combination of hardware but macs only work for certain types of hardware....so windows does a good job for being diverse and mac does a good job for just a few type of hardware

[Theoneneo81]

thats why its so bad i mean i can run Windows xp on a very minimal requirement machine i put windows XP on my very first pc it was 1.GHz intel d chip and 512mbs of ram and it ran well. and heck i can run leopard on my sisters G3 power book.

[somekindofmike]

@ Theoneneo81 I tend to agree with you more,

I would question why is vista so demanding on hardware? I've had OS X Leopard running on a powermac G4 which was manufactured like 10 years ago.

in my opinion an should be invisible in the background, it should be as functional as possible while using as little resources as possible.

the conspiracy lover in me, can't help but wonder if Vista was only such a bloated OS to help push hardware sales? or is it just that MS were in cable of making the OS as 'good' as Vista run on lower specs?

[crazy25000]

ive been using the beta ever since it came out and its really nice and efficient

[indysurfn]

Only thing worse the Windows ME was IBMs OS360, now that sucked! Of course I doubt too many of you got to PROGRAM on that machine. (you luck bastards). I got to do some System administration programs on it. But it sucked....HARD. But for everyday use Windows ME really sucked....HARD.

I think that because VISTA is recent, and current the stickiness is fresh in the human mind. But it was no where NEAR Windows ME's smell. At least I could surf the internet with that OS and version of IE. And could play games as long as I do not have a Nvidia graphics card.

I think absence of Windows ME from their lives has made the judges hearts grow fonder of ME.

[Theoneneo81]

I love how mac is not mention but i will say the only bad os mac made was the original OS X great interface but several key features were missing mainly a DVD Software player but when 10.1 came along it started a great line of the best OSes in the market. Macs are simply a great easy Stable OS.

[Gameplay999]

Mac OS 9 was fast although it had some major problems with extensions and crashed a lot. Its saving grace was its speed but I can't tell you how many times I had to restart my now very dated iMac DVSE 600Mhz G3, 40G HDD, 1 gig of SDRAM.... it was my first Mac and boy was OS 9 a learning experience.

Funny thing is Theoneneo81, is that that iMac is still running OS 10.1.

[hatchimatchi]

vista is an annoyance

i haven't had too many problems with it, but xp is so much better, it's faster, it's smoother. Vista takes years to do the most simplest of tasks. Why does it take 30 seconds to empty my recycle bin or 5 mins to copy a gig worth of files to another folder? It's a mess.

[cpuchess]

Takes me seconds to empty mine and I can do a search for files far faster than I could with XP.

[Eiffel]

Hell I'm still running XP, I'll try Windows 7 because it feels like the brother of XP.

[cpuchess]

This article seems like just an excuse to slam Vista. Vista gets a bad rap because people insist on buying bargain basement PC's and then can't understand why it's so slow.

[Viper7]

why would you use operating system that takes far more resources than older one and gives nothing for it?

The basic fact is that vista offers nothing but requares more. Why should ppl calmly accept this?

for me operating systems should advance in direction of becoming lighter to run while offering more. By this lighter I dont always mean that requariments should be less than with the older version but the fact it should be as minimal as bossible.

My 8 year old compaq has better desktop effects than my few years old vista machine? not to mention it starts faster, shuts down faster and its more secure.
Why do the competive operating systems requare only a partion of the vistas requariments while still givin better and faster desktop enviroment?

Windows 7 is a step in to the right direction, but will it be enough?