> Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.
Is that what I did? Maybe. If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista, I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item -- the same dialog where you'd set border widths, background colours, and menu fonts since Windows 95 (or possibly a sub-dialog thereof, "Advanced" or something) -- to click "use [Classic | Windows 2000 | NT4 | Windows 95 | whatever] look", and then customise it from there, just like in W95. This latter is the only bit I recall with any certainty.
> > the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start -- but then after some diffuse amount of time got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility. Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(
I don't know! The 2 part thing is necessary if you want the performance back. If you only care about it looking like older versions, and don't object to wasting a few hundred MB and a few % of CPU, you don't need to disable the service.
My guide on this is a blind friend of mine, and he is super extra fussy plus plus about system responsiveness and wants the maximum possible performance. :-)
> If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista
There are 2 different things.
XP introduced themes, but they are effectively 2D textures on the old GDI display server.
Vista replaced the GDI with Aero, a compositing window manager that uses a 3D card to render textures onto flat window objects -- a method taken from Apple's Quartz Extreme display server, and also now used in most Linuxes as well. That's how come Vista brought transparency effects in: it's the GPU compositor doing that.
Side-effect: console windows can no longer be toggled to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. Which was very useful for cleaning up screen corruption, but is rarely needed any more.
> I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item
[Nod]
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
[Wiggles head]
SP3 was a big one and the OS at least got a fair bit less insecure after it. That's when the Windows Firewall appeared, IIRC.
> So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start
Yeah, but it was just a point-release of Vista, really.
There isn't a lot of difference between Vista + SP1 and Win7. But it had its bad reputation before the SP and never lost it.
> got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility
Oh, my, yes, agreed.
> Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
Fair.
> So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(
Nope. But I think a community will try to keep 10 alive as long as it can.
W11 feels to me like "Windows for people who don't really know how to use Windows", but then, Office 2007 and all successive versions felt the same: Office for people who don't know how to use Office.
I do know Office. Especially Word, to a less extent Excel. 2007 broke it and it's never got any better.
So I stopped using Office, except for old versions of Word, because LibreOffice doesn't have an outliner.
Is that what I did? Maybe. If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista, I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item -- the same dialog where you'd set border widths, background colours, and menu fonts since Windows 95 (or possibly a sub-dialog thereof, "Advanced" or something) -- to click "use [Classic | Windows 2000 | NT4 | Windows 95 | whatever] look", and then customise it from there, just like in W95. This latter is the only bit I recall with any certainty.
> > the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start -- but then after some diffuse amount of time got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility. Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(