Windows XP nostalgia

[sinetheo]

 

Anyone remember this?

The stable OS that changed the world. I had an instant flashback.

 

https://youtu.be/w6lYYjIFvks

 

[Anibal P]

Stable? You must be drunk or got hit in the head

[sinetheo]

Stable? You must be drunk or got hit in the head

Compared to Win me and Windows98 it had an NT kernel. Protected memory. It was impossible to crash unless something ran as a device driver or ran as administrator and tampered with another memory stack somewhere.

WINDOWS 98 had no concept of memory management for most apps. BSOD galore.

In 2001 XP was simply amazing

[Anibal P]

Compared to Win me and Windows98 it had an NT kernel. Protected memory. It was impossible to crash unless something ran as a device driver or ran as administrator and tampered with another memory stack somewhere.

WINDOWS 98 had no concept of memory management for most apps. BSOD galore.

In 2001 XP was simply amazing

 

It was still a crashy mess, BSODs were a common thing till vista really 

[sinetheo]

I never had one ... ok I had one Irq not less than or equal to due to a crappy via driver that I fixed.

People aren't afraid to leave that os because they are stubborn. They remember the horrors of daily reboots before XP.

With good hardware and drivers XP was great for it's time. True insecure and terribly outdated today but that commercial brought a flash black to me in my link

[binaryzero]

?? Nostalgia, there's still companies using it...

 

XP wasn't good until SP1.

 

 

Here's nostalgia - 

[sinetheo]

?? Nostalgia, there's still companies using it...

 

XP wasn't good until SP1.

 

It was good pre SP1. I used it day 1

 

Compared to WindowsME it was a MUST. The issue with SP 1 was some older chipsets and security bug. I used blackICE before the built in firewall with XP SP 1 and just built a blazing 700 MHz Pentium III with a solid intel board. No problems at all. Yes it was slower at the time but I had a HUGE 384 megs of ram to handle it. Yes I could only do 5 tabs in Mozilla before it ran out of ram. :-)

 

Yes the companies are idiots. To this day I refuse to work for anyone running XP unless it is in a VM or some piece of non networked equipment. Someone who does not value IT that much will fire you when their own incompetence hits and does not assign value to your role. Bad combo.

?? Nostalgia, there's still companies using it...

 

XP wasn't good until SP1.

 

 

Here's nostalgia - 

 

Wow voice recognition was truly aweful in that link. He had to talk like a robot in slow mode. I am used to GoogleNow today

[Rigby]

Stable? You must be drunk or got hit in the head

 

It was very stable, what are you talking about?

[binaryzero]

Companies aren't idiots, not all companies put IT as their number 1 priority.

 

Good luck missing out on money if you're refusing jobs, that's just stupid. I know my local mechanic probably doesn't like working on some of the ###### boxes customers bring in, but he won't refuse to fix hem. 

 

Windows 2000 was used up until XP SP2 in a lot of companies. 

[Auditor]

XP  was still better than this whole tablet infestation MS is following in this decade. 

[blank]

XP  was still better than this whole tablet infestation MS is following in this decade. 

 

Sounds like you're just afraid of change </sarcasm.

 

I think microsoft realized the tablet thing didn't take off like everyone thought it would.  Still need our sexy pcs.

The idea of what they're doing with 10 is interesting, and might just work.

 

 

I hated windows 8 and 81. But 10 is nice.

 

Looking at windows xp now, man that thing was ugly. Looked so sexy at the time, ha. funny how things can change like that.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

XP wasn't good until SP2 (That's when they started doubling down on security, that was the whole point of SP2), and these days anything short of SP3 is basically broken.

Of course, even XP SP3 is still broken, no version of IE is secure on XP, anybody still using it on the internet needs to be using Firefox or Chrome.

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

It was very nice of MS to let a 3 year old with crayons design the interface, though.

 

Anyway, XP was way more stable than 9x, but not nearly as stable as what followed. So.... progress?

[sinetheo]

Sadly I prefer Luna of XP over 10/8.1 anyday.

At least XP gave you classic which I used back then

[PNWDweller]

I didn't listen to the commerce, but that was fine.  I remember though when Microsoft was about to release it, they had to change the slogan from what you see in the video due to the Sept 11, attacks. 

 

https://www.neowin.net/news/yes-you-can-new-windows-xp-slogan

 

I have logged into Windows XP systems lately, and I have to admit, that while I have some nostalgia, I am glad they have moved on.

[Dot Matrix]

This is all I remember about XP:

 

Oh, and this:

 

[sinetheo]

This is all I remember about XP:

 

Oh, and this:

 

 

YIKES OMG. I am so glad the infections with IE 6 especially pre-SP 2 are gone. Yes people still get infected more than ever but I see bonzia buddy which I complete forgotten about and the miltion different toolbars and everyone and their brother installing auto-starts to make their programs load faster slowing bootup time. Ok Dot I do not miss that about XP you win hands down.

 

But my BSOD drastically went away with XP expect when I bought a few shady boards with poor drivers. Windows 98 based on DOS just let programs run wild stealing and over writing ram addresses and causing constant crashes. It was defective by design and I was a Windows hater back then as a result. Truly awful.

[Max Norris]

Don't forget this.. I so don't miss the pre-DWM days.

 

Mostly skipped XP myself.. didn't get passable till SP2 but that period (and most of Vista, till the last service pack) was where I spent most of my desktop computing time on other operating systems. The last time I literally saw a BSOD on my own hardware, barring one cooling failure which isn't the OS's fault, was with XP.  Fairly regular occurrence, never mind Explorer itself taking a dive just because it felt like it.  Was a nice improvement to 95 sure but certainly don't find myself ever missing the thing.  Terrible x64 support.  Don't get me started on "Documents and Settings".. like nobody ever uses a console? Sheesh.

[binaryzero]

And I thought this week there wouldn't be a thread relating to XP...

 

Let go of the past, really there's been enough discussion about this. Move on.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Stable? You must be drunk or got hit in the head

 

It was stable.  Obviously not as stable as Vista, 7 or 8x...but more so than its predecessors.  Progress does that.

 

This is all I remember about XP:

 

 

Oh, and this:

 

 

 

haha...guess you never got work done since you maintained an infected computer (if that is all you remember your XP looking like) 

[AtomR]

Don't forget this.. I so don't miss the pre-DWM days.

 

 

 

I do remember this, lol... It was used to occur mostly in full-screen games. Roadrash game always gave me this glitch. 

[conna]

Windows 10 would have no problem taking XP users from XP if they just offered a windows XP mode. Whether it was a graphical interface (dare I say theme) or the options to sandbox the old apps (OS) into a XP mode.  10 should offer a secondary host OS option  to just plug in the old XP drive and continue from there. 

[sinetheo]

Windows 10 would have no problem taking XP users from XP if they just offered a windows XP mode. Whether it was a graphical interface (dare I say theme) or the options to sandbox the old apps (OS) into a XP mode. 10 should offer a secondary host OS option to just plug in the old XP drive and continue from there.

My point was the XP commercial with Madonnas ray of light gave nostalgia. Not still live in 2001

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

I do remember this, lol... It was used to occur mostly in full-screen games. Roadrash game always gave me this glitch. 

It's not actually a glitch, it's a side effect of how Windows handled rendering things to the screen pre-DWM. Back then, every application rendered directly to the screen framebuffer, in a back to front fashion (Wallpaper then taskbar, etc.). Because of that, every single time a window moved, Windows would tell the applications behind it to repaint the contents of their windows to the framebuffer, and the application in front of it would then overwrite it with their contents (Which is really really dumb, lots of work done for content that's never seen, that's why moving windows around caused CPU usage spikes in random applications below the moving one). The problem happens when one of those background applications locked up, so it stopped repainting the window contents, so when you moved a window that was above the hung application, the hung app couldn't repaint its window and the contents of the moving window would be left in the framebuffer in that area (Similar to the winning animation in Solitaire, it moved the cards without clearing the previous frame)

The DWM changed everything, instead of rendering directly to the screen framebuffer, each application actually renders to a separate buffer in memory, and every time something changes the DWM comes along and re-composites those buffers to the screen. Downside is, you've got increased memory usage due to each application having separate buffers rather than sharing them (But they're on the GPU so who cares), upside is that now when a application hangs, the DWM still has a complete copy of the window contents, and can apply snazzy effects like desaturating it to show it's hung. And because each buffer is separate, Windows doesn't have to inform applications that a window is covering them, so no more random CPU usage spikes in background applications when you move a window around.

You've got the ability in Vista and 7 to disable the DWM though (Which people did because they thought it helped performance ), so the pitfalls still exist there. It wasn't until 8 that Microsoft actually enforced the DWM as the one true rendering pipeline, even on crap systems without a working GPU, thanks to WARP. Also the implementation of the buffer sharing in Vista disabled GDI hardware acceleration (GDI being the Windows 3 graphics API), that was apparently a problem at the time, but when Microsoft fixed it in 7 nobody cared.

[simonlang]

never been a windows fan - especially now since i really know and understand linux and it's endless advantages - but one thing has to be said:

win xp was an amazing step from win 9x, much more stable, better structured, finally a new desktop theme (it was not THAT bad back in 2001) and soon lots of customization was possible. all in all probably the windows i used for most of the time and the one overall i liked most.

then came win vista, again lot's of visual changes i loved, bought the ultimate edition to get all ultimate extras. they never arrived, and things started to go downhill ever since.