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Ditched XP for 7 when I had to reinstall and it had no built-in driver for my SATA drives. Never looked back since, even after upgrading my hardware.

It has been a very good run for XP though.
 
ok. which one of you guys threw a curse on me?!?

5 minutes after posting in this thread the tech dep comes around and tells me i'm being migrated to W7 ..

not that i dont like W7; but i'm virtualized over a VM on a single core @2Ghz. although i have all the ram i can eat, i'm not sure this si gonna be an improvement.

also, i'll probably have zero of my settings preserved ..
 
mmntech said:
My Dad finally got rid of his Windows XP computer shortly before Christmas. He somehow managed to find a current brand name desktop that runs Windows 7. So he's happy now.

I haven't run XP myself since 2009. I don't miss it. It wasn't nearly as good an OS as people seem to think it was. Especially in those early days. Huge security flaws, and I had big stability issues as well which forced me to do clean installs every so often. It's what forced me to learn computers.

XP sticks around though because it was still kicking strong when Vista flopped. That was about the time even budget computers reached the cusp of being "good enough" for what most people used them for. So people bought Core 2 machines running XP and they're still perfectly usable today. People see little reason to upgrade.

There's still an awful lot of mission critical hardware still running it. I wonder how long businesses and governments are going to keep forking out the cash for custom support. Probably be cheaper in the long run just to upgrade. Won't make the IT boys happy migrating all that stuff over though, but that's what they're paid for.

Speaking of old ass computers, I think work still had a system running Windows 3.1, which was used for updating the weather ticker on TV. They finally got rid of it recently.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing you're young and never had to deal with windows 95 or 98. XP was almost perfect compared to those. I never had to reinstall XP once in the 9 years I used it, but would sometimes have to reinstall 98 every month or so.
 
Don't understand the complaints about 8 tbh. I have it on my laptop and although it was a pain in the ass the first thirty minutes getting used to some of the layout changes, it otherwise doesn't seem much different from 7 for ordinary day-to-day usage.

ElFenix said:
lolwut

were you even there, bro?
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I've noticed this attitude a lot recently. A lot of newbs that confuse 2000 with Millennium. 2000 was awesome, I stuck with it until 2006 when I upgraded to XP.
 
Yeah it was, in 1999. This is the future now. We have self-driving cars and large hadrons, we don't need to cling to 15 y/o OSes.
 
ElFenix said:
lolwut

were you even there, bro?
Click to expand...
are you kidding me? i'm from '72, yes i was there. we've had W3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, and finally XP. i remember the BSODs happening randomly, for no reason, several times a day, on every single system before XP.

2000 and 98se were not good OS. they would crash. they had no Plug&Play. installing them was horrible, they supported zero applications out of the box and had compatibility issues with just about anything.
sure they were better than what came before, but nowhere near "easy to live with".
 
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DigDog said:
2000 and 98se were not good OS. they would crash. they had no Plug&Play. installing them was horrible, they supported zero applications out of the box and had compatibility issues with just about anything.
sure they were better than what came before, but nowhere near "easy to live with".
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i don't think we're even talking about the same thing. 2000 is just xp without the jolly rancher start button.
 
windows xp should have been killed with fire years ago. I just remember having to jump through hoops installing drivers all the time. with windows 7 installing from scratch was made much easier. xp was great for it's time but it's time has long gone
 
ElFenix said:
i don't think we're even talking about the same thing. 2000 is just xp without the jolly rancher start button.
Click to expand...

Not really.

2000 was the culmination of the previous Windows NT family effort, with an administration and enterprise focus.

It was also around for a little while prior to taking the NT kernel and throwing it into a consumer OS. At that time, they had also improved the kernel and I do believe released updates for 2000 that were basically born from improving the kernel and OS for consumers.

I never interacted with 2000 prior to XP's availability, so I don't know what it was like.

I understand why people hated Vista at first, but I jumped the XP ship immediately and, while I had some issues, it was overall a vastly superior product. I couldn't stand XP.
Drivers, especially from Creative, sucked hard at the start of Vista, and it caused a major shakeup for drivers in general with the new kernel stack (that have produced lasting changes through today's 8.1)...
XP was basically the consumer-friendly version of 2000/NT5.0. Vista was the proper sequel. 7 and 8 are actually on the same major kernel revision, and while they have continued to produce sometimes significant performance improvements, no OS was as a significant jump ahead as Vista. That said, Microsoft helped clean it up and 7 was Vista on steroids, and more importantly, hardware providers got their drivers in order and overall helped make everything as stable as it should be.

Once a few problem drivers were taken care of, I found Vista to be amazing and vastly superior and FAR more stable than XP ever was. Which was interesting, because 7 was just as significant a leap in terms of both performance and stability.
 
I am typing this on my work XP machine (a well-used Dell Optiplex 360 with an E5300), but it's probably on its last day of service - I have a new 27" iMac coming tomorrow to replace it.
 
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HamburgerBoy said:
I've noticed this attitude a lot recently. A lot of newbs that confuse 2000 with Millennium. 2000 was awesome, I stuck with it until 2006 when I upgraded to XP.
Click to expand...

That was me too, I ran 2000 for quite a while until I finally built a new machine and moved to XP around 2006 or 2007.
 
BoberFett said:
Wrong.
Click to expand...

Well, it's basically true.

With the latest update, it now defaults to the desktop.
Yes, the visual appearance of the "start menu" is entirely different from before... but it serves the same function.

That said, they are answering the demands of all those who refuse to adapt to change:
http://techreport.com/news/26292/here-the-new-windows-8-1-start-menu-in-action

You can see the new menu in action there - essentially, now a true start menu with the modern touches, instead of going all-in with the start screen.
Window-style WinRT apps is what I'm looking forward to. I do like that as of the latest update to 8.1, the WinRT apps do show up on the taskbar and can be pinned.

In whole, whenever they release the new interface updates, I'd say Windows 8 will make everyone happy. I absolutely love the base OS, the performance and stability is golden. I was always happy with Windows 8, I found I could adapt just fine... the start menu/screen is largely keyboard controlled for me anyway.
And right-click on the start button provided enough quick-access to what I truly needed, I felt my needs were addressed. They're just going for the kill now, and I cannot imagine anyone being unhappy after they make those upcoming changes. It's functional for me as it is, but it'll only get better.
 
destrekor said:
no OS was as a significant jump ahead as Vista.
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Agreed. I tell people all the time that the reason Vista was so hated and 7 so loved has nothing to do with the actual OSes.

Vista required breaking many things in Windowsland in order to upgrade the overall experience, so we hated it for the friction it created.

Meanwhile 7 came along after those changes smoothed everything out, and collectively we appreciated the advancements the changes brought.

Vista never had a chance to be popular, it was the sacrificial lamb of an OS.
 
I still have my discs for XP (and I believe Win 3.1 and WFW3.11). I don't run anything less than Windows 7 now, mostly 8.1.
 
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