5 ms·

Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they a

Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are still bugs. But, all things considered it without a doubt the strongest OS Microsoft has ever built, and it is moving forward...where I feel like OSX is finally moving backward.

riffraff 7y ago
People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.
- rnd0 7y ago
  I think it's a mix of both? I "loved" XP once two things happened: I got a computer with more than 256mb of ram, and I installed SP2. After that it ran really well and yes, so much better than Windows 98 did.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  Don’t forget Windows ME which was truly a turd in a class of its own.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I still don't completely understand why they didn't make Win2k into a "consumer" product. A lot of techies here who installed Windows themselves in that era probably skipped ME and went to that. But all the consumer PCs shipped with 98 or ME. I remembering hearing at the time that this was about hardware support and/or app compatibility. But my cynical side just thinks they wanted to justify charging more for a workstation SKU for another release cycle.
    - TheKarateKid 7y ago
      Actually, ME was the result of a development disaster similar to the one which resulted in Vista. Microsoft was planning on building an entirely new Internet-focused consumer version of NT. It was too ambitious for its time, so to meet deadlines, most of it was scrapped and some UI elements were backported into an updated Windows 98 which became ME. This is why Explorer for both ME and 2000 look similar despite having little else in common. Other elements of the scrapped project made its way into XP, but barely compared to what it was supposed to be. I think XP’s fancy login screen was one of them. If anyone’s interested I’ll try to find where I read all of this. It might’ve been on Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite or another site that collected Windows betas.
      - Lammy 7y ago
        Windows codename Neptune: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Neptune https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Neptune It’s interesting to see twenty year old experiments with flat UI designs considering how dominant that style is today with Android 5, iOS 7, Windows 8, etc.
        TheKarateKid 7y ago
        Indeed. Ironically, I think I remember reading that the Neptune apps’ UI was HTML-based, since Microsoft wanted IE to power everything. And now many apps use HTML/JS/CSS for styling and rendering.
        garaetjjte 7y ago
        These apps looks like they are made in IE6-era Electron..
        Lammy 7y ago
        They are! The same tech powered Active Desktop and the "smart" Explorer sidebars in Windows XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
    - 7y ago
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Rapzid 7y ago
  Not to mention plug-and-play finally started coming into its own. XP started the trend of having the massive generic driver repository so you could actually get your NIC to work so you could DL your other drivers without needing the CD/floppy with the NIC drivers :) Oh man, XP was great.
- DayDollar 7y ago
  I loved that with XP, that you could actually turn the gui back into something WIN98 like- which ment, it was boring, grey and minimal. And thats how i want my gui to be. I dont want some fashionfacista to redesign it to his/her whims. I dont want it to grab my attention for unimportant crap. I want it laying there in the sun, grey, damp and featureless like a new born island. My work has enough excitment and new stuff to focus on- i dont want to be bothered by what other people consider important- security center rages, advertisements and by bothering i ment to be reminded of there existence in any way (that includes gobbling huge amounts of system ressources) - so in XP you could still shut the worst offenders down permanently. It is, and it was for the user who took time to settle in, the perfect system. Everything that came after, is a lovecraftian horror that trys way to much to please a preconcived user- who wants nothing more then to strangle all this unpleasant attempts of servitude.
jdnenej 7y ago
It's not the bugs that are an issue with 10. It's the mountains of nagware, spyware and advertisements built in to it.
- Spearchucker 7y ago
  I use 10 daily and see no ads. Where does windows 10 show ads?
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    IIRC, start tiles, explorer bar, stub shortcuts.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    In the start menu.
  - monkeydreams 7y ago
    If you turn them off you dont see them. It's a dark pattern but not completely black.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Also the logon screen that is now delightful except someone has sold on the idea that they should add clickbait ads for msn and bing - even on pro and enterprise Windows..! I imagine management in Microsoft is like a fight in the wheelhouse: Someone trying to make the best OS there is. Others trying to do ads everywhere like Google. Some trying to be a reaponsible reliable company, others somehow managing to to crazy price hikes. Some trying to be friends with open source, others pushing Edge really hard (but, in fairness, still not as ugly as Google was pushing Chrome at its worst.) Etc etc
  - AlexDragusin 7y ago
    I have yet to see ads also, but I do turn off all the unnecessary stuff at installation time. There is this option on Lock Screen settings called Get fun facts, tips, tricks and more on your lock screen and Show more tiles on the Start settings that can bring stuff out and probably some other more spread around, of course they won't make it nicely like Opt out of all ads across Windows just because.
pfranz 7y ago
I grew up with Windows. My jobs used Unix/Linux and I switched to Mac at home before Vista came out. I got a job using Windows during the Windows 8-10 transition. During that 10 year gap I'd help friends and family setup printers and stuff. I was aghast at the things that hadn't changed in the 10+ years. I really wished I had written it up because I fell back into things quickly. One thing I still remember is how often you get updates requiring a reboot--in macOS it's a few times a year and in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Clicking around. For example, setting your computer’s IP or gateway. Control panel -> Network -> right-click on the “IP interfaces” among a list of 5 abscon names -> Details -> Advanced -> Details -> And you can’t freely type the new IP, you have to use their fields with 4 numbers separated by dots. Everything was like this. Installing Maven? You need to set a system property, it’s 15 clicks including 6 on a “Details” or “Advanced settings” button. They wanted to hide complexity behind “Advanced” buttons but they hid the wrong things, because each dialog was full of info you’d never use, and what you wanted was inevitably under the “Advanced” button. Installing new software? Welcome to the installation assistant. We’ll guide you through the 20 clicks, including the mass-unticking of additional software we’ll inevitably select by default, notably the Ask Toolbar when you install Java. If you’re setting up a dev machine you had a dozen programs to set up, each of them requiring a dozen steps of a dozen clicks.
  - MikusR 7y ago
    Windows+x => powershell => ipconfig
- stinos 7y ago
  in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated Fair enugh, but depending on what distro you run that seems to be fairly often as well. Like, more than 'a few times' a year. Then again if you dont run a server for which downtime is a true loss, or something alike, is rebooting that much of a problem (honest question)?
2ion 7y ago
Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were all fine. I just enabled the classic design and things largely worked and looked the same in key UX aspects. I'm still only using 7 (virtualized) and what I've seen from 10 on colleagues' computers looks much worse and more complicated UI than what xp-v-7 ever did. Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual -- which would be the sucessor to 7, if any. I sure won't ever touch a consumer version of 10...even if it's called (pseudo) pro.
- MikusR 7y ago
  Getting LTSC is as simple as getting Windows Embeded that it replaced.
- thrower123 7y ago
  > Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual This is really a damn shame, because it is far away the best Windows distribution ever. If I didn't have access to it through MSDN, I'd pay a couple hundred bucks for a license.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
XP had a bad start due to relative slowness on the hardware on release (just like Vista). But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS. When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse. 8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...) With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP. And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.
Shorel 7y ago
> People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. I still boot an XP partition from time to time. To play old games that simply run with issues in more modern Windows. The issue is XP had the right APIs for game development, and then MS deprecated some great technologies in favour of XBox centered ones. In new games I still miss the hardware accelerated positional audio XP has.

riffraff 7y ago

People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.

rnd0 7y ago
I think it's a mix of both? I "loved" XP once two things happened: I got a computer with more than 256mb of ram, and I installed SP2. After that it ran really well and yes, so much better than Windows 98 did.
tinus_hn 7y ago
Don’t forget Windows ME which was truly a turd in a class of its own.
- asveikau 7y ago
  I still don't completely understand why they didn't make Win2k into a "consumer" product. A lot of techies here who installed Windows themselves in that era probably skipped ME and went to that. But all the consumer PCs shipped with 98 or ME. I remembering hearing at the time that this was about hardware support and/or app compatibility. But my cynical side just thinks they wanted to justify charging more for a workstation SKU for another release cycle.
  - TheKarateKid 7y ago
    Actually, ME was the result of a development disaster similar to the one which resulted in Vista. Microsoft was planning on building an entirely new Internet-focused consumer version of NT. It was too ambitious for its time, so to meet deadlines, most of it was scrapped and some UI elements were backported into an updated Windows 98 which became ME. This is why Explorer for both ME and 2000 look similar despite having little else in common. Other elements of the scrapped project made its way into XP, but barely compared to what it was supposed to be. I think XP’s fancy login screen was one of them. If anyone’s interested I’ll try to find where I read all of this. It might’ve been on Paul Thurrott’s Windows Supersite or another site that collected Windows betas.
    - Lammy 7y ago
      Windows codename Neptune: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Neptune https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Neptune It’s interesting to see twenty year old experiments with flat UI designs considering how dominant that style is today with Android 5, iOS 7, Windows 8, etc.
      - TheKarateKid 7y ago
        Indeed. Ironically, I think I remember reading that the Neptune apps’ UI was HTML-based, since Microsoft wanted IE to power everything. And now many apps use HTML/JS/CSS for styling and rendering.
      - garaetjjte 7y ago
        These apps looks like they are made in IE6-era Electron..
        Lammy 7y ago
        They are! The same tech powered Active Desktop and the "smart" Explorer sidebars in Windows XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
  - 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Rapzid 7y ago
Not to mention plug-and-play finally started coming into its own. XP started the trend of having the massive generic driver repository so you could actually get your NIC to work so you could DL your other drivers without needing the CD/floppy with the NIC drivers :) Oh man, XP was great.
DayDollar 7y ago
I loved that with XP, that you could actually turn the gui back into something WIN98 like- which ment, it was boring, grey and minimal. And thats how i want my gui to be. I dont want some fashionfacista to redesign it to his/her whims. I dont want it to grab my attention for unimportant crap. I want it laying there in the sun, grey, damp and featureless like a new born island. My work has enough excitment and new stuff to focus on- i dont want to be bothered by what other people consider important- security center rages, advertisements and by bothering i ment to be reminded of there existence in any way (that includes gobbling huge amounts of system ressources) - so in XP you could still shut the worst offenders down permanently. It is, and it was for the user who took time to settle in, the perfect system. Everything that came after, is a lovecraftian horror that trys way to much to please a preconcived user- who wants nothing more then to strangle all this unpleasant attempts of servitude.

jdnenej 7y ago

It's not the bugs that are an issue with 10. It's the mountains of nagware, spyware and advertisements built in to it.

Spearchucker 7y ago
I use 10 daily and see no ads. Where does windows 10 show ads?
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  IIRC, start tiles, explorer bar, stub shortcuts.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  In the start menu.
- monkeydreams 7y ago
  If you turn them off you dont see them. It's a dark pattern but not completely black.
- eitland 7y ago
  Also the logon screen that is now delightful except someone has sold on the idea that they should add clickbait ads for msn and bing - even on pro and enterprise Windows..! I imagine management in Microsoft is like a fight in the wheelhouse: Someone trying to make the best OS there is. Others trying to do ads everywhere like Google. Some trying to be a reaponsible reliable company, others somehow managing to to crazy price hikes. Some trying to be friends with open source, others pushing Edge really hard (but, in fairness, still not as ugly as Google was pushing Chrome at its worst.) Etc etc
- AlexDragusin 7y ago
  I have yet to see ads also, but I do turn off all the unnecessary stuff at installation time. There is this option on Lock Screen settings called Get fun facts, tips, tricks and more on your lock screen and Show more tiles on the Start settings that can bring stuff out and probably some other more spread around, of course they won't make it nicely like Opt out of all ads across Windows just because.

pfranz 7y ago

I grew up with Windows. My jobs used Unix/Linux and I switched to Mac at home before Vista came out. I got a job using Windows during the Windows 8-10 transition. During that 10 year gap I'd help friends and family setup printers and stuff. I was aghast at the things that hadn't changed in the 10+ years. I really wished I had written it up because I fell back into things quickly. One thing I still remember is how often you get updates requiring a reboot--in macOS it's a few times a year and in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated.

alexis_fr 7y ago
Clicking around. For example, setting your computer’s IP or gateway. Control panel -> Network -> right-click on the “IP interfaces” among a list of 5 abscon names -> Details -> Advanced -> Details -> And you can’t freely type the new IP, you have to use their fields with 4 numbers separated by dots. Everything was like this. Installing Maven? You need to set a system property, it’s 15 clicks including 6 on a “Details” or “Advanced settings” button. They wanted to hide complexity behind “Advanced” buttons but they hid the wrong things, because each dialog was full of info you’d never use, and what you wanted was inevitably under the “Advanced” button. Installing new software? Welcome to the installation assistant. We’ll guide you through the 20 clicks, including the mass-unticking of additional software we’ll inevitably select by default, notably the Ask Toolbar when you install Java. If you’re setting up a dev machine you had a dozen programs to set up, each of them requiring a dozen steps of a dozen clicks.
- MikusR 7y ago
  Windows+x => powershell => ipconfig
stinos 7y ago
in Linux it's only when a specific component (like the kernel) gets updated Fair enugh, but depending on what distro you run that seems to be fairly often as well. Like, more than 'a few times' a year. Then again if you dont run a server for which downtime is a true loss, or something alike, is rebooting that much of a problem (honest question)?

2ion 7y ago

Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were all fine. I just enabled the classic design and things largely worked and looked the same in key UX aspects. I'm still only using 7 (virtualized) and what I've seen from 10 on colleagues' computers looks much worse and more complicated UI than what xp-v-7 ever did. Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual -- which would be the sucessor to 7, if any. I sure won't ever touch a consumer version of 10...even if it's called (pseudo) pro.

MikusR 7y ago
Getting LTSC is as simple as getting Windows Embeded that it replaced.
thrower123 7y ago
> Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual This is really a damn shame, because it is far away the best Windows distribution ever. If I didn't have access to it through MSDN, I'd pay a couple hundred bucks for a license.

iforgotpassword 7y ago

XP had a bad start due to relative slowness on the hardware on release (just like Vista). But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS. When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse. 8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...) With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP. And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.

Shorel 7y ago

> People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. I still boot an XP partition from time to time. To play old games that simply run with issues in more modern Windows. The issue is XP had the right APIs for game development, and then MS deprecated some great technologies in favour of XBox centered ones. In new games I still miss the hardware accelerated positional audio XP has.