Seriously, it's not original for me to say it, but 3.11 was the best overall, even without strong multitasking. It was fast and light, it was simple, it was easy to customize at considerable depth -- it was easy to alter menus and hotkeys, FFS, or to get swappable third-party desktop shells for. When something went wrong, it was easy to restart.
edit: Also, I think 3.11 was the last version that had a fully functional version of Paint. This is minor, but also symptomatic. MS could never bother to fix, say, the color eraser on later versions of Paint, even though they still included the color eraser with later versions of Paint.

Of the post-95 versions, XP is still the only one I found truly tolerable.
My ancient ThinkPad is finally starting to really die.

Not sure how I'll replace it. It was under $200, it's worked flawlessly for I think six years (except the DVD drive, which became untrustworthy after about two years), it has a terrific keyboard, and it runs my Linux install perfectly. I've never asked anything more difficult of it than streaming video, and it was my Netflix machine for years. I mostly use it for writing.
I dunno. Part of it is just that I'm so sick of farking around with uncooperative PCs, trying to get them to usable. I start reading articles on how to Linux a used Chromebook or some damned thing, and my brain starts to throw up.
