18 ms·

Nostalgia is, it seems, a hell of a drug.

asveikau 6y ago
In early Windows XP days everybody said it was crap compared to Win2k. XP was the first one with product activation as well. And people called the Luna theme childish. Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.
- xyproto 6y ago
  Then Windows 7 came along and nobody said Vista was the good one.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    i think the consensus is that windows 95, XP, 7 were the least troublesome versions. I still think 7 > 10
    - shp0ngle 6y ago
      10 has tons of under-the-hood improvements that are great, honestly. However, it also has a ton of advertisments everywhere, and those annoying auto-installing apps.
      - bayindirh 6y ago
        I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it. When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
        beagle3 6y ago
        I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable. I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
        bayindirh 6y ago
        > I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit. Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical. [0]: https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron-description https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron...
      - stjohnswarts 6y ago
        I really don't know what people are talking about ads? My win 10 has zero ads on it. I turned off all telemetry (i think) with a couple of programs dedicated to doing that. Maybe my pi-hole is blocking the ads?
    - Flockster 6y ago
      And all forget that 8 even existed.
      - alpaca128 6y ago
        Although I find 8.1 still better than 10. Some of its preinstalled apps and UI were just weird, but at least it wasn't anti-user by design. Both are a clear downgrade to Windows 7 though.
      - FractalParadigm 6y ago
        Personal experience would indicate that a lot of people hated Windows 8, not just because it took something they were familiar with and threw the biggest curveball at it possible, but because they actively made the UI/UX significantly more difficult to use. For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other. IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
        square_usual 6y ago
        I think the biggest change that killed 8 was the lack of the start menu. Having to go to the start screen - pulling you away from your entire desktop just to launch an app - was awful. I know Win 8.1 got it back, but for the time between 8 and 8.1 Classic Shell was almost necessary to use Windows 8. All that for no discernible benefit over using 7.
      - 6y ago
    - ObscureScience 6y ago
      To me it's always been win2k, win 7, win 10, win 98. In tthat order. I've been using win2k rather than windows xp when I need legacy application support, though you might need to jump through some hoops for XP compatibility and drivers. Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.
      - Joeri 6y ago
        8 was the first version that hibernates the kernel on shutdown so it can reload it from snapshot on boot. That’s why all windows versions since 8 boot so fast.
        ObscureScience 6y ago
        Still Windows 8 boots faster for me. A clean installation is 2 seconds from bios to login (not hibernated, but "fast startup"), and perhaps 5-6 seconds for windows 10 (also with fast startup enabled, which it is on both on a default install).
    - buran77 6y ago
      The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7. And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.
      - taneq 6y ago
        This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.
        noisem4ker 6y ago
        I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.
        taneq 6y ago
        Yeah, actually let’s not talk about Windows ME. :P
        asddubs 6y ago
        i think it was the only still dos-based windows to automaticall install usb drivers for mice and usb sticks and things. we had a sony laptop running ME for a long time because it was too slow to run XP, but had a USB port already
        unilynx 6y ago
        What was the new tech in ME ?
      - memsom 6y ago
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      > I still think 7 > 10 Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished. The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB of memory just to get the system up and running. This was when 4GB of machine was considered 'huge'. By the time 7 came out they had fixed both of those services and a 'crappy' machine had 4GB. Dumping it on a box that 512MB of memory and it struggled badly (512-1024 was the sweet spot for XP). 8GB for Vista and up and for proper use of that, you need the 64bit ver.
    - speeder 6y ago
      Windows 7 STILL does this in fact. I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others). The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot. Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...
      - sumtechguy 6y ago
        I use the indexer setup to ignore parts of my system. That works pretty good. Especially if you are doing any work with nodejs. Also defragging just the index file helps a lot. That thing can end up with thousands of bits all over the drive. Even with SSD it is not great as random seek on many SSDs are fairly terrible and contig read is amazing. One trick I also do is pre-allocate my swap file (I usually pin it to 4GB). As the default is to grow/shrink.. That can do the same thing as the indexing file. Something also changed around sp2 with 7 and file writes. Files get fragmented very quickly now even when there is plenty of space not to do so. I usually would only end up with systems badly fragmented in XP if the drive is full (much like ext4) now it just does it as a matter of course and is acting like the old DOS alg of find the next free spot. You can still turn off the readyboost/superfetch cache service (not sure where it is win10). If you have an SSD you should not notice much difference on or off but it can happen. Turning those off makes your free RAM act more like in linux where it just caches recently read items and gives it up right away if needed.
- hrktb 6y ago
  Funny enough win2k was the first to have a somewhat decent multi-language management, in particular you didn’t need a dedicated CJK version. So that’s where the nostalgia loop would stop for a lot of us (and it was buggy as hell, of course)
- kasabali 6y ago
  That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.
    - lou1306 6y ago
      They also made a pretty big push toward formal verification of drivers, which were often the culprit for insecure/unstable machines. Their SLAM model checker [0] was avant-garde (in industry terms, at least). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project
    - ThrowawayB7 6y ago
      Yep, the whole Trustworthy Computing initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing There was a huge investment in training, tools, and creating security specialists. It took a long time to turn the ship around but security issues started trending down a few years after that.
  - kasabali 6y ago
    ... I'm sorry about typos with 1+ year -> with 1+ year of bug fixes giving bugs -> fixing bugs
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    It's worth mentioning that WPA2 for WiFi doesn't work in XP unless you install SP3, regardless of the WiFi drivers you use. As this leak is only XP SP1, it will be missing a lot of the bugfixes and upgrades that XP added by SP3 (and beyond).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Don't forget Windows 2003 Server in that list. That, to me, was the ultimate Windows. Had the XP stuff, but with the ugly theme disabled by default. Was super stable even compared to Windows 2000. Was lightweight. Only annoying thing was it came with sound disabled, but a few clicks in the Control Panel after installing, and you were golden.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    That theme was wonderful in gray/olive variant if you ask me. It looked polished.
  - garaetjjte 6y ago
    And contrary to consumer versions, free trial was available!
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      And, you could also get a free license through university (MSDN AA). That's how I got to run mine.
  - ThrowawayB7 6y ago
    Amen. Windows 2003 Server was perfect.
- stuaxo 6y ago
  XP was a bit crap in the early days, but by SP2 it was a lot better and by SP3 it was really solid.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    It is quite sad that we might never experience that stability and usuability of commercial big apps/os anymore in the age of penny squeezing and spyware. I had my Win XP, Photoshop and MS Office with ever lasting licsenses. You need FOSS today for that. As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general. That is so true! I buy'd a Lifetime License for Insync and Jaikoz, Insync's lifetime was 4 Years (then they changed the license for updates) and Jaikoz "Lifetime" was 6 Years, change the name of the Software and split it in two different product and the 'old' one was not maintained anymore.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Windows XP SP3 was solid as hell. It was easy to change the theme, which I always did along with the brain dead "hide extensions and system files" and ridiculous swap file settings that guaranteed you'd always be resizing incessantly
pizza234 6y ago
I personally tried to use Windows XP (for my Windows systems, which is mostly VMs nowadays) for as long as I could. First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS. Second, it was lightweight (in relative terms) in terms of UX and, somewhat consequently, engineering. With Windows Vista (but in particular, Windows 8), MS started to add complexity on every layer. Nowadays, I'm really afraid to update Windows. I don't know what new services and programs are going to be added. I don't know if the tweaks still work. I don't know if I'm imposed some new behavior. I don't know where certain settings (even entire setting domains) are going to be located, and how they're going to be named. In a way, Windows XP is the Windows equivalent of the Linux XFCE/LXDE desktop environments.
- ygra 6y ago
  For me that actually was Windows 2000. Never really saw a need to switch to XP, and instead switched to Vista and later 7, eventually.
- m463 6y ago
  I think a lot of people have sort of backed their chair away from the table like you. I remember reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and it talked about trade. Basically it said with trust, trade is unlimited. But what's been happening with computers and software is that trust been going downhill so quickly that many people don't install anything ever anymore. Privacy, dark patterns, monetization, form over function, qa by customer, and just a general lack of empathy, respect and common sense. It's a shame.
  - kmlx 6y ago
    i think you are onto something, but i don't think the market cares that much about privacy, dark patterns etc also see how software has stabilised over the years, both as a product and as a marketplace. there are now clearly defined best in class software that will take years to be disrupted. but one of the major aspects against computer software has come from mobile. lots of development time has gone to browsers and mobile than desktop.
  - 6y ago
tinus_hn 6y ago
Always amazing to hear people sing praise of Windows XP when you remember how everyone was praising Windows 2000 when they were calling out Windows XPs insanely ugly themes and designs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
I still have an XP laptop at work because it happens to have a serial port. Every time I use it I'm briefly shocked at how responsive everything is. That's on period hardware. God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Not entirely. There's still Alpine, Gentoo, Void, Debian/Devuan -- All of which still run on reasonably low specced hardware, and can be loaded with XFCE/Tiling WM's for a lightweight UX. Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    You say that as though everything above the Linux kernel isn't a nightmarish hodge-podge of software with interconnections ever increasing in complexity that creates conflicts so readily it needs third parties to carefully maintain specialized builds of each component to keep it all from blowing up.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      There's also the FL/OSS BSD's, although I don't know how viable they are for desktops outside of ThinkPad's.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        They suffer from the same problem of requiring third party maintainers to keep software working.
        Shared404 6y ago
        I guess I've just given up on having a sole first party maintaining a sane system. It makes more sense to me to have something like Linux/BSD vs a first party system that falls apart worse while still being closed, despite being a consistent maintainer. Which I guess brings me back around to where you started.
jki275 6y ago
I would disagree. XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense. But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it. Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.
drudru11 6y ago
Not a single person got the watchmen reference

In early Windows XP days everybody said it was crap compared to Win2k. XP was the first one with product activation as well. And people called the Luna theme childish. Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.

xyproto 6y ago
Then Windows 7 came along and nobody said Vista was the good one.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  i think the consensus is that windows 95, XP, 7 were the least troublesome versions. I still think 7 > 10
  - shp0ngle 6y ago
    10 has tons of under-the-hood improvements that are great, honestly. However, it also has a ton of advertisments everywhere, and those annoying auto-installing apps.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it. When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
      - beagle3 6y ago
        I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable. I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
        bayindirh 6y ago
        > I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit. Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical. [0]: https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron-description https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#full-tron...
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      I really don't know what people are talking about ads? My win 10 has zero ads on it. I turned off all telemetry (i think) with a couple of programs dedicated to doing that. Maybe my pi-hole is blocking the ads?
  - Flockster 6y ago
    And all forget that 8 even existed.
    - alpaca128 6y ago
      Although I find 8.1 still better than 10. Some of its preinstalled apps and UI were just weird, but at least it wasn't anti-user by design. Both are a clear downgrade to Windows 7 though.
    - FractalParadigm 6y ago
      Personal experience would indicate that a lot of people hated Windows 8, not just because it took something they were familiar with and threw the biggest curveball at it possible, but because they actively made the UI/UX significantly more difficult to use. For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other. IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
      - square_usual 6y ago
        I think the biggest change that killed 8 was the lack of the start menu. Having to go to the start screen - pulling you away from your entire desktop just to launch an app - was awful. I know Win 8.1 got it back, but for the time between 8 and 8.1 Classic Shell was almost necessary to use Windows 8. All that for no discernible benefit over using 7.
    - 6y ago
  - ObscureScience 6y ago
    To me it's always been win2k, win 7, win 10, win 98. In tthat order. I've been using win2k rather than windows xp when I need legacy application support, though you might need to jump through some hoops for XP compatibility and drivers. Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.
    - Joeri 6y ago
      8 was the first version that hibernates the kernel on shutdown so it can reload it from snapshot on boot. That’s why all windows versions since 8 boot so fast.
      - ObscureScience 6y ago
        Still Windows 8 boots faster for me. A clean installation is 2 seconds from bios to login (not hibernated, but "fast startup"), and perhaps 5-6 seconds for windows 10 (also with fast startup enabled, which it is on both on a default install).
  - buran77 6y ago
    The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7. And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.
    - taneq 6y ago
      This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.
      - noisem4ker 6y ago
        I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.
        taneq 6y ago
        Yeah, actually let’s not talk about Windows ME. :P
        asddubs 6y ago
        i think it was the only still dos-based windows to automaticall install usb drivers for mice and usb sticks and things. we had a sony laptop running ME for a long time because it was too slow to run XP, but had a USB port already
      - unilynx 6y ago
        What was the new tech in ME ?
    - memsom 6y ago
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > I still think 7 > 10 Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006 Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished. The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB of memory just to get the system up and running. This was when 4GB of machine was considered 'huge'. By the time 7 came out they had fixed both of those services and a 'crappy' machine had 4GB. Dumping it on a box that 512MB of memory and it struggled badly (512-1024 was the sweet spot for XP). 8GB for Vista and up and for proper use of that, you need the 64bit ver.
  - speeder 6y ago
    Windows 7 STILL does this in fact. I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others). The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot. Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...
    - sumtechguy 6y ago
      I use the indexer setup to ignore parts of my system. That works pretty good. Especially if you are doing any work with nodejs. Also defragging just the index file helps a lot. That thing can end up with thousands of bits all over the drive. Even with SSD it is not great as random seek on many SSDs are fairly terrible and contig read is amazing. One trick I also do is pre-allocate my swap file (I usually pin it to 4GB). As the default is to grow/shrink.. That can do the same thing as the indexing file. Something also changed around sp2 with 7 and file writes. Files get fragmented very quickly now even when there is plenty of space not to do so. I usually would only end up with systems badly fragmented in XP if the drive is full (much like ext4) now it just does it as a matter of course and is acting like the old DOS alg of find the next free spot. You can still turn off the readyboost/superfetch cache service (not sure where it is win10). If you have an SSD you should not notice much difference on or off but it can happen. Turning those off makes your free RAM act more like in linux where it just caches recently read items and gives it up right away if needed.
hrktb 6y ago
Funny enough win2k was the first to have a somewhat decent multi-language management, in particular you didn’t need a dedicated CJK version. So that’s where the nostalgia loop would stop for a lot of us (and it was buggy as hell, of course)
kasabali 6y ago
That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.
  - lou1306 6y ago
    They also made a pretty big push toward formal verification of drivers, which were often the culprit for insecure/unstable machines. Their SLAM model checker [0] was avant-garde (in industry terms, at least). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project
  - ThrowawayB7 6y ago
    Yep, the whole Trustworthy Computing initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing There was a huge investment in training, tools, and creating security specialists. It took a long time to turn the ship around but security issues started trending down a few years after that.
- kasabali 6y ago
  ... I'm sorry about typos with 1+ year -> with 1+ year of bug fixes giving bugs -> fixing bugs
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  It's worth mentioning that WPA2 for WiFi doesn't work in XP unless you install SP3, regardless of the WiFi drivers you use. As this leak is only XP SP1, it will be missing a lot of the bugfixes and upgrades that XP added by SP3 (and beyond).
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Don't forget Windows 2003 Server in that list. That, to me, was the ultimate Windows. Had the XP stuff, but with the ugly theme disabled by default. Was super stable even compared to Windows 2000. Was lightweight. Only annoying thing was it came with sound disabled, but a few clicks in the Control Panel after installing, and you were golden.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  That theme was wonderful in gray/olive variant if you ask me. It looked polished.
- garaetjjte 6y ago
  And contrary to consumer versions, free trial was available!
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    And, you could also get a free license through university (MSDN AA). That's how I got to run mine.
- ThrowawayB7 6y ago
  Amen. Windows 2003 Server was perfect.
stuaxo 6y ago
XP was a bit crap in the early days, but by SP2 it was a lot better and by SP3 it was really solid.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  It is quite sad that we might never experience that stability and usuability of commercial big apps/os anymore in the age of penny squeezing and spyware. I had my Win XP, Photoshop and MS Office with ever lasting licsenses. You need FOSS today for that. As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general. That is so true! I buy'd a Lifetime License for Insync and Jaikoz, Insync's lifetime was 4 Years (then they changed the license for updates) and Jaikoz "Lifetime" was 6 Years, change the name of the Software and split it in two different product and the 'old' one was not maintained anymore.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Windows XP SP3 was solid as hell. It was easy to change the theme, which I always did along with the brain dead "hide extensions and system files" and ridiculous swap file settings that guaranteed you'd always be resizing incessantly

pizza234 6y ago

I personally tried to use Windows XP (for my Windows systems, which is mostly VMs nowadays) for as long as I could. First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS. Second, it was lightweight (in relative terms) in terms of UX and, somewhat consequently, engineering. With Windows Vista (but in particular, Windows 8), MS started to add complexity on every layer. Nowadays, I'm really afraid to update Windows. I don't know what new services and programs are going to be added. I don't know if the tweaks still work. I don't know if I'm imposed some new behavior. I don't know where certain settings (even entire setting domains) are going to be located, and how they're going to be named. In a way, Windows XP is the Windows equivalent of the Linux XFCE/LXDE desktop environments.

ygra 6y ago
For me that actually was Windows 2000. Never really saw a need to switch to XP, and instead switched to Vista and later 7, eventually.
m463 6y ago
I think a lot of people have sort of backed their chair away from the table like you. I remember reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and it talked about trade. Basically it said with trust, trade is unlimited. But what's been happening with computers and software is that trust been going downhill so quickly that many people don't install anything ever anymore. Privacy, dark patterns, monetization, form over function, qa by customer, and just a general lack of empathy, respect and common sense. It's a shame.
- kmlx 6y ago
  i think you are onto something, but i don't think the market cares that much about privacy, dark patterns etc also see how software has stabilised over the years, both as a product and as a marketplace. there are now clearly defined best in class software that will take years to be disrupted. but one of the major aspects against computer software has come from mobile. lots of development time has gone to browsers and mobile than desktop.
- 6y ago

tinus_hn 6y ago

Always amazing to hear people sing praise of Windows XP when you remember how everyone was praising Windows 2000 when they were calling out Windows XPs insanely ugly themes and designs.

deleted 6y ago

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AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

I still have an XP laptop at work because it happens to have a serial port. Every time I use it I'm briefly shocked at how responsive everything is. That's on period hardware. God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.

Shared404 6y ago
Not entirely. There's still Alpine, Gentoo, Void, Debian/Devuan -- All of which still run on reasonably low specced hardware, and can be loaded with XFCE/Tiling WM's for a lightweight UX. Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  You say that as though everything above the Linux kernel isn't a nightmarish hodge-podge of software with interconnections ever increasing in complexity that creates conflicts so readily it needs third parties to carefully maintain specialized builds of each component to keep it all from blowing up.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    There's also the FL/OSS BSD's, although I don't know how viable they are for desktops outside of ThinkPad's.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      They suffer from the same problem of requiring third party maintainers to keep software working.
      - Shared404 6y ago
        I guess I've just given up on having a sole first party maintaining a sane system. It makes more sense to me to have something like Linux/BSD vs a first party system that falls apart worse while still being closed, despite being a consistent maintainer. Which I guess brings me back around to where you started.

jki275 6y ago

I would disagree. XP is certainly not the proper OS to be running today, it's been passed by especially in a security sense. But when it was released, it was the first really truly stable and consumer focused operating system MS had released. The NT series prior had been stable (to a point), and was good for business uses, but try gaming or doing much that a home desktop user wanted to do and it really fell down there. XP picked up the mantle of being the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and it really did a great job of it. Was it perfect? Of course not. But it did a job and did it better than anything else in its time for its specific uses.

drudru11 6y ago

Not a single person got the watchmen reference