The Windows XP tour was peak Luna and peak Microsoft and represents the high point of all human technology.
It should have been represented in this article and it wasn't. Truly that's a crime against those who have not had the opportunity to experience it.
I have the Windows XP tour music. I keep it in my library and listen to it. You can find WAV files if you know where to look. I keep the OOBE music in the same album (both the original and remastered versions).
Through this incredible multimedia presentation I had the opportunity to learn about wizards and how Windows XP is best for business. I think there was also something in there about how to open a window. Also, it had that beautiful compass icon and those unmarked Luna-style colored buttons that were used to select each section of the tour. They were my favorite part.
I modified the WMA file that played during the XP OOBE on an image that was rolling out to one of my Customers. I knew who would be deploying most of the PCs. At a point about halfway thru the piece, when it gets kind of quiet and the melodic instruments fall away (right before the chanting bit, if I remember correctly) I mixed my voice quietly whispering the deployment person's name a couple of times. Sadly, I never heard of they noticed their name in the music or not. People moved on and I never got a chance to ask before they left.
What makes it so surreal is the intro starts out almost as an extension of the intimately familiar Windows XP startup sound (of course, the same person, Bill Brown, composed The Tour music). If you've never heard it before, or are only just young enough to be familiar with the startup sound, it might seem like some lost never-was artifact, an extension of the Windows XP branding you never knew about.
However that would also make you an ignorant fool for failing to be alive or aware of the majesty of The Tour at the time it was released. Thankfully I was blessed by god and his son, William Gates III, with the privilege of being an XP user shortly after it was released. To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand The Windows XP Tour.
I think I may have seen this site before; I know I've seen The Tour online before.
In any case as you can see, experiencing this is like seeing the image of God on earth, like stepping into the holy of holies, the innermost part of the temple where God's presence on Earth is present. The Windows XP Tour was handed down by God to Moses and kept in a great ark, and it was lost when the second temple was ransacked. Then in the year 1999, Microsoft employees found it while on holiday and brought it back to the states. The rest is history.
I keep an XP VM in case I need to commune with The Tour.
Windows XP pro splash screen makes me feel fuzzy and warm. For me that time was peak for gaming, peak for internet communities and peak for nerds coming together online.
I hope commercializing reddit, fb, twitter and internet as whole will push people to join smaller forums again.
Neat. That spot on Route 12/121† is one of my favorite places to take people when they visit the Bay Area. My pic from a few months ago: https://i.imgur.com/e2jbdkx.jpeg
One thing that puzzles me though is how the story is always told that Charles O'Rear was on his way from Napa to San Francisco, i.e. westbound on the highway, but having been there it feels like it could only have been the other way around due to the angle of the POV compared to the road and the fact that when you're eastbound there's a big left-hand curve which commands your sightline to the left so it's easy to keep looking past the road and straight into Bliss: https://www.vintag.es/2022/08/bliss.html
Encarta even led the charge on Windows 3.1, where Encarta 94 had the now-classic _ [] X buttons at the top, with custom titlebars, instead of the ^ v classic Windows 3.1 pair.
I think it actually started for Encarta in 95, but that was ironically for Mac. It wasn’t quite as polished and consistent. I don’t remember having Encarta 96, but it appears to have had it too.
MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows has never recovered from there.
Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs.
Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.
Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.
I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network.
XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X.
10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.
Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed.
From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.
Vista was an enhancement of XP. We got search in the start menu and made it a first class part of the OS with the indexer
WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing
Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)
No more running with full admin privileges all the time. Bitlocker was introduced
Yes, compatibility issues affected people to various degrees, and yes it required good hardware to run well. Intel's onboard graphics / 5400 rpm drives we're not kind to it. And there were too many editions
With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going
Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup
It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI
I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
I've literally never experienced a moment of "wow, I wish I had a shadow copy in place so I could help solve this problem."
I guess my backup solutions are more primitive, but certainly more predictable in terms of their effect on the system. I didn't turn off volume shadow copy for my own amusement, I turned it off because it was freezing some devices' availability for I/O while it did its work.
My context was that, independent of any actual backup solution, in Vista and 7 shadow copy gave you file history across pretty much the whole drive (this was separate from "System Restore"). This made it trivial to deal with restoring some previous version of a file or folder even days later. If you ever had that problem, shadow copy would have solved it*
* I think it was not in Home Edition, so yes, thumbs down on that
It really wasn't. You can say XP was an enhancement of 2000, but Vista was it's own thing, they reworked a lot of the NT Kernel and moved stuff like audio and video drivers from kernel space to user space, which brough increased security and stability, but broke compatibility on hardware that didn't bring updated drivers which pissed off a lot of early adopters of vista.
Funny thing is that NT originally had video drivers in user space exactly for security/stability reasons, but moved it into kernel space with NT4 for performance reasons.
Vista was, arguably, the unofficial beta for Windows 7. Just about everything they tried and failed to execute properly in Vista worked well in 7. (Similar story for 8 vs 8.1-- or more appropriately Server 2012 vs. 2012 R2.)
I’d already switched away, but 7 seemed like the peak in an absolute sense. XP might have been the biggest relative improvement or the best normalized to the competition, but Windows 7 was the last version before development started going backwards.
I actually preferred Vista - there were a bunch of things I thought 7 made worse:
- in explorer, Vista could show column headers in all views (not just details) making it easy to sort/group
- you could use the headers to set grouping
- grouping still showed all the files
- the left tree became buggy in Windows 7, it doesn't always scroll to the current folder (I think it's broken to this day)
- the "quick access" shortcuts in explorer (the top list) was its own section (so you could always click it) -- in 7 and later it is part of the tree so you have to scroll back up to use it
- dragging files into a folder in 7+ instantly sorts them in the view, rather than keeping them together until hitting F5
- windows media player got rid of "find in library", "recently added" playlist, "play all", the taskbar miniplayer
- Vista had peak taskbar tray. instead of the current all-or-nothing overflow thing, overflow icons would automatically show themselves and then hide again
- can't run Explorer as administrator anymore to temporarily access protected files
This is all true, but the price was too high for me.
> WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing
It made it more stable, I don't care about tearing and stuff, but it robbed me of full-screen DOS windows and the ability to toggle a window to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. I used that a lot.
> Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)
But it's no use if the OS isn't stable enough to trust. So I kept my important stuff on servers, so lost this.
The same applies to openSUSE today.
> No more running with full admin privileges all the time.
Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB.
> With good hardware Vista was peak Windows.
Nah. Not as bad as generally held, but not great.
> I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
> Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB.
That's an exaggeration. I didn't have the highest-end premium kit. I had good hardware (I was a gamer after all), but I doubt very much if I had more than 2 GB memory and I ran Vista with zero performance issues whatsoever.
I’m a big fan of XKCD but, in reality, what most people (and employers) worry about is unauthorised third-party access to private data in the event a laptop is lost or stolen (most often by opportunist theft). Bitlocker — and other Full Disk Encryption technology — provide an effective mitigation for this situation.
Well, yes, we know that. I mean, that is the reason for doing it.
But what is much more rarely discussed are the costs. There are multiple penalties.
It hurts performance.
It impedes dual-boot.
It impedes setup in general; you lose most of the nice friendly GUI tools, replaced by clunky harder CLI tools.
It makes data recovery vastly harder, which is one of those things people discount until they need it and then realise how critical it is.
It makes troubleshooting OS problems vastly harder. Many it simply prevents: the answer becomes, reinstall your OS and restore from backup. If you have no backups, tough.
It's inconvenient, unless you use modern TPM-backed systems, in which case it dramatically reduces the security benefits, while also severely reducing OS compatibility.
It adds a new vital credential people don't know they have and don't know they need to keep secure backups of.
It generally makes everything worse, to fix a threat that most people simply do not have.
The 2 employers I personally had who insisted on it published all the company info on my machines to Github anyway, making it not even security theatre. More like security pantomime: an act of pretending to pretend to do something.
The answer to all this is, in my experience as tech support type: don't do it. Conduct a proper analysis of who has what secrets and what they need to keep, and use other better-targeted tools just for them.
Because without that, it causes problems for no good reason. It's treated as a panacea but it isn't -- it fixes nothing for 99% of users -- and the very real problems and issues it causes are ignored.
This _may_ be worth it for some companies and organisations but it's not for anyone else. I can see its worth for governments and military forces but few others.
Fair points. Thankfully, I haven't had any of those issues.
I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN.
Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often.
For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need.
Certainly better than where we are now but I never really loved it. It was to heavy for me, the search doesn't find files that are there reliably and the update system system sucked. Windows 7 always developed disk sucking WinSxS folder cancer, a particularly fatal disease during the early SSD era where space became a premium again.
It did have faster file copying though. I'd say it had 64-bit for more memory addressing but that was actually available with XP as well.
Peak Windows XP was Server 2003. I ran it as a daily driver on a ThinkPad. It could do pretty much everything XP could but had a closer UI to Windows 2000.
Server 2003 had the NT 5.2 kernel. There were some minor improvements and it felt more stable to me than XP. The x64 version of Windows XP was based on the Server 2003 x64 build.
Hot take but XP is only remembered fondly in this community because it was the dominant operating system from 2001 through 2011 on consumer devices that were likely purchased as first or second generation home computers for millenials that are approaching their first 25 year retrospective.
I mean, among "younger" American HNers (those who went to middle or HS in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s), MacOS X Leopard or Windows 7 was probably a much more foundational desktop OS - most of our school computer labs used one or the other, as did our families.
I could make a similar argument for Win7 and the indie gaming scene.
Nah, Windows 7 RTM was ~a month before most school years started back up in 2009 so relatively few schools even considered starting to roll it out until at least 2010 (usually upgrades are done by then, not just beginning). E.g. I was class of 2012 and it wasn't until my senior year the rollout started (it was about less than half complete that year). Meanwhile they had us doing Microsoft Office classes twice a week on XP since 2003.
Can't say for Macs, the district hadn't used those since the iMac G3. After I graduated it was only a couple of years (maybe 2015?) before they rolled out Chromebooks, so 7 didn't even have much staying power.
No way. I'm in that group, and not only did every school computer lab I encountered run Windows, everyone I knew had Windows at home. Macs simply are not as common as you're thinking.
If you'd been using Windows 9x you'd appreciate XP just because the install didn't rot itself to pieces every 6 months from DLL hell. But the rise of internet downloaded crapware and malware managed to keep your reinstall skills sharp during that era for another reason.
Absolutely loathed moving from 98 to XP. The stability wasn't much better, the resources were hogged more, and the default toys-r-us theme was an incredible eyesore (thank god for UX hacks). It was overall so much pain but Vista was even worse in many respects so I kinda weathered it until 7 came along, and that one was insanely good.
Windows 98 (from my memory) was not very stable and horribly insecure.
I recall a handful of tools that anyone could use (I was 10-11 and could figure it out) to break and bluescreen Win 98 computers remotely.
10-11 year old me liked the XP theme, the icons were so “fresh”, nearly everything that came before was grey and boring (and the beige boxes didn’t make that better) so it was a welcome change to me at the time.
Now I’m old, I see the joy of grey high contrast consistent UI: what I am doing is more important than the shell around what I am doing.
I remember our Windows 98 SE machine crashing two or three times a day just in normal use (and this was mostly light use by us kids, we were primary students at the time - I imagine it was worse if you were using it in an office eight hours a day). Moving to XP was a big stability improvement as far as I can remember.
From what I can tell, Windows Me was the most stable version of 9x for computers that were made with Windows Me in mind while older hardware with old drivers upgrading from 9x to Me was a minefield.
Windows XP forced driver development to a more modern standard that made things more stable. Still not stable enough (Windows Vista and up enforced that more and more in their APIs) but with XP the days of drivers assuming they could take complete control of the CPU and various buses were over.
Of course the companies that made shitty drivers for 9x also made shitty drivers for XP, so old hardware and hardware with shitty drivers was still less stable than other new hardware available, but things were moving forward.
These days, it's rare to see a full BSOD in Windows on any hardware but the very shittiest, especially with Windows 11 thanks to its artificial hardware support cutoff.
One correction that I can't leave on the actual article (subscriber only!) is that I'm certain multi-screen support worked on Windows 98. Excellent article as usual though!
>up to a year after release, many gamers still recommended Windows 98. Why? Mostly due to compatibility where things a Voodoo card and a Soundblaster running in MS-DOS were preferable for many titles, and this is something that simply wasn’t on offer with XP.
Actually, mostly since Wxp was slow as a dog compared to W98, because W9x still had direct control of the hardware rather than the sluggishness-inducing Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that NT has always had inserted between the OS and the devices.
W95 was noticeably faster than W98 was too, and both of course move like lightning-speed compared to W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit, and W11 is more embarrassing as it continues to further slow with each update (almost every month now rather than only once per year), which makes W10 seem like it was a quite a bit less encumbered than W11.
95 and 98 were roughly the same speed; any differences would likely be due to drivers. The main difference between the 9x and NT lineage is the former is actually a hypervisor for DOS VMs (and the GUI itself can be considered a DPMI application, running in its own VM) while the latter is a "full" OS with a very limited DOS emulator.
When people bought a new W98 PC, which was often the first computer for so many consumers, it really did perform quite similarly to earlier-adopters' W95 PC's that were already in action.
The specs on the newer hardware were so much better which made up for it, and progressive sluggishness of Windows was swept under the rug for mainstream consumers, continuing to an extent today. You know, like a snail without a shell ;)
This is why in the '90's when Grove was running Intel and Gates was running Microsoft, professional geeks coined the phrase: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." They didn't wait until WindowsME to say this.
It wasn't really worth it for mainstream apps, but if you had a challenging Office 97 workload, with or without VBA, something like live "real-time" data acquisition, or god forbid any type of ML or simulation, the best improvement you could get was to wipe W98 off the HDD and start fresh with W95. It always has seemed like there was some uncalled-for obstacle to prevent easily installing a previous version of Windows on a new PC though.
Even now this still works to an extent, buy a new mainstream W11 consumer PC, install W10 in a regular ordinary Microsoft dual-boot configuration and see for yourself.
Most people would have so much SSD space left over they could even try a triple boot, how about that W10 ISO from 2015 if you really want to emphasize the difference in how much less sluggish things could have been now. Woo hoo. Plan to stay off the internet when booted to this one, in Device Manager you could even pre-emptively disable the ethernet & wifi.
Of course try it on a HDD if you haven't done that in a while, to see how that feels compared to earlier Windows when you were using nothing but HDDs.
Windows 8.0 is also still fairly installable in new PC's if you want to see what it was like when they had one of their many brilliant engineers taking focused responsibility to achieve faster boot times in particular.
IIRC the largest speed difference was caused by Active Desktop. Windows 98 burned a "lot" of memory and clock cycles in order to view dynamic content inside Explorer.
Back in the day there used to be custom builds of Windows 98 that had Internet Explorer completely stripped out. Those were much closer to Win95's performance.
Also the fact that pre-SP2, Windows XP actually crashed (and permanently broke in "interesting" ways) more than Windows 98 in practice, theory be damned. I became so familiar with how to install Windows during this time ...
Yes, SP1 wasn't horrible if you could get it (but who can download something that big on dial-up?), but it still was not great.
I know you can run microbenchmarks to show the increased pointer size of 64 bit Windows can cause a few percentage points of performance difference in certain scenarios but that doesn't jive with the statement "W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit".
If one advertises they drove 2 trims of the same car model to the airport back to back and found cars with 2" smaller wheels are lightning fast because it took 30 minutes longer in the other car then people are, rightfully, going to doubt the test instead of the wheel size. Especially when you're not the only one to have driven cars with different wheel sizes but you are the only one reporting it's the wheel size, specifically, that made the trip significantly longer to take and give the trip as your sole evidence for the claim you know why it was slower.
From my enterprise image/push creation days one example of something I did find different between x64 and x32 was the specific driver bugs/performance. The thing is it went/goes both ways on that, sometimes it's the 32 bit driver that's bugged, sometimes it's the 64 bit driver, sometimes there was a special patch version of the driver but the vendor didn't post both builds. You get the idea. In this case it wouldn't make sense to blame the <x> bit OS variant as inherently being massively slower, but it sure might seem like that with an n=1 test.
I've been doing it since W10 was released, and continue to this day.
The consistency is quite good.
It's actually such a simple comparison anybody can try it and see for themself.
Now that you mention it I actually did drive (rental) cars back & forth between airports when I was a student. We went south packed into one car, then came back from the resort areas in a half-dozen or more cars so they could replenish the ones needed in the rental lots hours to the north.
We really would all reach the destination at the same time, traveling at virtually the same speed, but you could easily tell the difference when you had a V8 under the hood compared to a 6-cylinder.
Neither one was a show-stopper and plenty of people wouldn't know the difference anyway.
It's not like some had air conditioning and some didn't, that was by far the most important feature, not performance ;)
It is definitely a simple comparison, which is why I asked how you explain others, such as myself, reaching different results with the same test if it's supposed to be inherent to the bitness itself? I can reproduce a couple percentage points difference (in either direction, depending on the measure), but nothing more. If it was inherently related to the bitness itself then that should not be possible.
Similarly, for the rental cars, if one you drove was really "lightening fast" compared to another rather than something you noticed while microbenching it up the on-ramp or similar then you probably deserve jail time for the speeding ticket. That or a Model T was a rental option :D. But again, the point was 2 cars of the same model with a different trim, not 2 completely different cars.
Nitpick I know but race cars in well run series actually have quite good safety - just not in the same way because the environment and expectations are different. You don't need/want a reversing camera or parking beeps and boops...
I think part of MS issue is that they keep bundling and pushing "crap useful to some minority" (as well as unwanted ads and features too) by default into ostensibly "your" system and making it hard to focus on what you want it for.
If you want it to focus on gaming performance... well it's more about arcane tweaks rather than having a turn off the shit button.
Maybe the coming Win10 EoL will see a few % points jump to Bazzite or some other linux gaming-focussed distro.
Considering a common use for Windows these days is Steam Launcher, performance is kind of a big deal, actually. Literally the only thing I use my desktop for is to play games, so yes, performance is pretty much the only thing I care about with it.
Race cars have heaps of safety systems not present in road cars. They don't have ABS and traction control because they don't actually increase safety on track with a professional driver. SRS airbags also offer no additional safety when in a 6 point harness and wearing a helmet and neck brace.
Race cars have drastically more safety features than road cars. Your road car doesn't tether your helmet to your headrest to protect your neck and doesn't have a roll cage, for starters.
Road cars also don't have built-in fire extinguishers, tethers to keep wheels attached to the car in the event of a catastrophic failure of the suspension, five point harnesses for the drivers, escape hatches in the roof or no roof at all but a halo and bar in front of the driver to protect them in the event the car hits something that could decapitate the driver, break away body panels and impact absorbent foam that dissipates energy in 200+ MPH crashes generally allowing drivers to walk away from impacts that would kill occupants of road-going vehicles...
I could go on, but yeah, not sure how OP thinks that race cars aren't as safe as road cars.
What a cool article to have at the 30th anniversary of Windows 95's release (24th of Windows XP's).
Windows XP was about the time I started moving away from Windows more definitively, even as a secondary OS. It was the product activation crap. My OS on my computer should serve ME, not be beholden to the vendor after I put it on. Of course, we didn't realize back then how bad things could/would get...
So for that reason, I'm not really nostalgic about Windows XP, or subsequent versions, the way some people are.
Although it is interesting to see what many now consider to be the bad ideas of Windows 8, get their start in "Neptune"...
I feel the same way about Windows XP. Windows XP may have brought NT-based Windows to regular consumers, which is partly why there's nostalgia for XP, but for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time, Windows XP wasn't that much better than its predecessor, Windows 2000.
To me, Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Windows XP introduced activation, which I find an annoying hindrance, and weird UI decisions in the form of the Fisher-Price Luna interface and the search dog. It was all downhill from there, though Windows 7 was solid and I greatly appreciate the introduction of WSL in Windows 10.
The advantage XP had targeting consumers was that gaming peripheral makers were more interested in developing drivers for XP. Win2k itself was pretty stable but its hardware support was suboptimal and its DOS emulation needed some work.
Win2k was excellent if it did everything you needed from it, though. XP had some advantages (like better search capabilities) but most of them came later in the form of service packs.
The only XP had over 2000 IMO was 64-bit support. Which isn't even part of the XP most people are talking about since it was an uncommonly used variant based on server 2003.
Same here. XP was an absolute security nightmare and the internet felt like the most dangerous place ever. Everybody and my mom were constantly passing viruses around.
I haven't looked back switching to Linux back then.
> For 64bit versions, both AMD64 and Itanium, support ended on the 30th of June in 2005.
Even Apple would not deprecate an OS two months after its release. The AMD64 version was supported until 2014, the same as the x86 version. Itanium was a dumpster fire, and anyone who had any Itanium hardware would probably want Server 2003 anyway.
Microsoft also created a Zune theme which makes the start button orange and the taskbar and many other things black. It’s the only theme I use on my XP installs!
Windows XP was pretty amazing. I remember installing it on my work PC and it found all the printers on the network and automatically installed them.
Windows XP also had perfect timing for the beginning era of broadband and a generation spending hours on their computers.
You only need to look at the leadership at Microsoft who were in charge of Vista and Windows 8. They were “suits” who didn’t understand “mobile”, which was arguably confusing at the time. I vividly remember watching the release videos of Windows 8 and the interviews of the leadership clearly showed they had no concept of what they were doing.
An OS should be extremely boring. It’s an app launcher and file organizer. An OS shouldn’t be flashy. That’s why people have fond memories of Windows 2000 and XP.
Windows 10 can also be extremely boring if Open Shell is installed and some other tweaks. Same thing with Windows 11.
Without open shell, you can fairly easily ignore the start menu by just starting to type after you press the win-button; it sanely defaults to search. Then you just set the main taskbar to align to the left and remove the search bar and whatever stuff they shove in there from it.
Windows 2000 was the GOAT, it looked perfectly OK, had NT underpinnings, was stable and had pretty good hardware support. You could probably run it today if you don't play games or have a non-postscript/HPL printer.
Absolutely nothing Windows XP is "peak Microsoft", least of all the Neptune UI, which foreshadowed the terminally ugly Apple and Android UIs of today at least in color composition (Clickibunti as we say in German). Immediately switched to a modified Classic Theme.
The Windows XP tour was peak Luna and peak Microsoft and represents the high point of all human technology.
It should have been represented in this article and it wasn't. Truly that's a crime against those who have not had the opportunity to experience it.
I have the Windows XP tour music. I keep it in my library and listen to it. You can find WAV files if you know where to look. I keep the OOBE music in the same album (both the original and remastered versions).
Through this incredible multimedia presentation I had the opportunity to learn about wizards and how Windows XP is best for business. I think there was also something in there about how to open a window. Also, it had that beautiful compass icon and those unmarked Luna-style colored buttons that were used to select each section of the tour. They were my favorite part.
I miss those days.
You triggered a memory.
I modified the WMA file that played during the XP OOBE on an image that was rolling out to one of my Customers. I knew who would be deploying most of the PCs. At a point about halfway thru the piece, when it gets kind of quiet and the melodic instruments fall away (right before the chanting bit, if I remember correctly) I mixed my voice quietly whispering the deployment person's name a couple of times. Sadly, I never heard of they noticed their name in the music or not. People moved on and I never got a chance to ask before they left.
For anybody who, like me, suddenly wants to hear the music from the XP OOBE (and with some fun background about the piece): https://archive.org/details/stan-lepard-velkommen-song-pack-...
https://archive.org/details/02-windows-xp-tour-1/01+Windows+...
What makes it so surreal is the intro starts out almost as an extension of the intimately familiar Windows XP startup sound (of course, the same person, Bill Brown, composed The Tour music). If you've never heard it before, or are only just young enough to be familiar with the startup sound, it might seem like some lost never-was artifact, an extension of the Windows XP branding you never knew about.
However that would also make you an ignorant fool for failing to be alive or aware of the majesty of The Tour at the time it was released. Thankfully I was blessed by god and his son, William Gates III, with the privilege of being an XP user shortly after it was released. To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand The Windows XP Tour.
You might like https://logonoff.co/projects/windowsxptour/mmTour/index.html
I think I may have seen this site before; I know I've seen The Tour online before.
In any case as you can see, experiencing this is like seeing the image of God on earth, like stepping into the holy of holies, the innermost part of the temple where God's presence on Earth is present. The Windows XP Tour was handed down by God to Moses and kept in a great ark, and it was lost when the second temple was ransacked. Then in the year 1999, Microsoft employees found it while on holiday and brought it back to the states. The rest is history.
I keep an XP VM in case I need to commune with The Tour.
Windows XP pro splash screen makes me feel fuzzy and warm. For me that time was peak for gaming, peak for internet communities and peak for nerds coming together online.
I hope commercializing reddit, fb, twitter and internet as whole will push people to join smaller forums again.
> represents the high point of all human technology.
That was Windows 2000. Everything else was just downhill from there :) (well, Windows XP SP 2 deserves a special mention)
This is heresy against the Windows XP Tour. Were you not made aware that Windows XP lets you unlock the world of digital media?
The design language of the Neptune UI and the “Watercolor” UXTheme are like Peak Microsoft. Amazingly good looking to this day.
> Windows Whistler/2002/XP logo design concepts by Frog Design
I like how there's a vestige of “Windows 2002” in the little “Version 2002” on the bottom right of all the XP RTM packaging, which disappeared from the later SP2-integrated boxes: https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/-mm-/0e422e4a7e951800d133d6d73...
It's interesting this article makes no mention of Encarta. Encarta 98, 98, 2000 were the precursors to both Watercolor and Metro.
Encarta quite honestly had a beautiful typography heavy, high contrast interface, one that still shapes my design/ui preferences to this day.
If anyone needs a new wallpaper for the week.. https://archive.org/details/bliss-600dpi png and https://archive.org/details/bliss-600dpi_202006 tiff
> If anyone needs a new wallpaper for the week.
Neat. That spot on Route 12/121† is one of my favorite places to take people when they visit the Bay Area. My pic from a few months ago: https://i.imgur.com/e2jbdkx.jpeg
One thing that puzzles me though is how the story is always told that Charles O'Rear was on his way from Napa to San Francisco, i.e. westbound on the highway, but having been there it feels like it could only have been the other way around due to the angle of the POV compared to the road and the fact that when you're eastbound there's a big left-hand curve which commands your sightline to the left so it's easy to keep looking past the road and straight into Bliss: https://www.vintag.es/2022/08/bliss.html
†That particular stretch of road is both: https://cahighways.org/ROUTE012.html https://cahighways.org/ROUTE121.html
https://ibb.co/Q7PHPNhj
https://i.ibb.co/Y4cdckJT/bliss25.webp
https://archive.org/download/bliss-600dpi/bliss-600dpi.png
Encarta even led the charge on Windows 3.1, where Encarta 94 had the now-classic _ [] X buttons at the top, with custom titlebars, instead of the ^ v classic Windows 3.1 pair.
Are you sure?
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/e282ac57-e280-93c3-af26-44...
Encarta 95 had it - I remember thinking how cool it was that it looked like Win 95.
Office 95 & 97 do this too on NT 3.51, kinda; just their inner MDI document title bars: http://toastytech.com/guis/miscnt351office97.png
Must've been newer - but definitely on 3.1
Microsoft Money also already had the flat look that became more popular later.
I think it actually started for Encarta in 95, but that was ironically for Mac. It wasn’t quite as polished and consistent. I don’t remember having Encarta 96, but it appears to have had it too.
Windows XP version 2003 is a thing, for Itanium (which got version 2002 but was short-lived) and AMD64
"Version 2002" also appears in the System Properties window.
MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows has never recovered from there.
Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs.
Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.
Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.
I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network.
> Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.
I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.
Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu.
I decided the same, but for myself.
I liked Windows 2000.
XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X.
10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.
Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed.
From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.
7 was basically a Vista service pack but after the hardware vendors had time to cure some cerebral rectitis and give proper hardware.
Vista was an enhancement of XP. We got search in the start menu and made it a first class part of the OS with the indexer
WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing
Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)
No more running with full admin privileges all the time. Bitlocker was introduced
Yes, compatibility issues affected people to various degrees, and yes it required good hardware to run well. Intel's onboard graphics / 5400 rpm drives we're not kind to it. And there were too many editions
With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
XP has had shadow copies. File history tab in explorer was first available in Server 2003, but AFAIK there was a hack to enable it in XP, too.
All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume shadow copy.
Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going
Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup
It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI
I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
I always turned it off. I've literally never experienced a moment of "wow, I wish I had a shadow copy in place so I could help solve this problem."
Conversely, there were plenty of times when volume shadow copy running was the problem.
Talking about my use of home PCs, of course.
You've never wished you (or some process) hadn't just overwritten a file?
That's not what I wrote. What I wrote:
I've literally never experienced a moment of "wow, I wish I had a shadow copy in place so I could help solve this problem."
I guess my backup solutions are more primitive, but certainly more predictable in terms of their effect on the system. I didn't turn off volume shadow copy for my own amusement, I turned it off because it was freezing some devices' availability for I/O while it did its work.
My context was that, independent of any actual backup solution, in Vista and 7 shadow copy gave you file history across pretty much the whole drive (this was separate from "System Restore"). This made it trivial to deal with restoring some previous version of a file or folder even days later. If you ever had that problem, shadow copy would have solved it*
* I think it was not in Home Edition, so yes, thumbs down on that
>Vista was an enhancement of XP.
It really wasn't. You can say XP was an enhancement of 2000, but Vista was it's own thing, they reworked a lot of the NT Kernel and moved stuff like audio and video drivers from kernel space to user space, which brough increased security and stability, but broke compatibility on hardware that didn't bring updated drivers which pissed off a lot of early adopters of vista.
Funny thing is that NT originally had video drivers in user space exactly for security/stability reasons, but moved it into kernel space with NT4 for performance reasons.
Vista was, arguably, the unofficial beta for Windows 7. Just about everything they tried and failed to execute properly in Vista worked well in 7. (Similar story for 8 vs 8.1-- or more appropriately Server 2012 vs. 2012 R2.)
I’d already switched away, but 7 seemed like the peak in an absolute sense. XP might have been the biggest relative improvement or the best normalized to the competition, but Windows 7 was the last version before development started going backwards.
I actually preferred Vista - there were a bunch of things I thought 7 made worse:
- in explorer, Vista could show column headers in all views (not just details) making it easy to sort/group
- you could use the headers to set grouping
- grouping still showed all the files
- the left tree became buggy in Windows 7, it doesn't always scroll to the current folder (I think it's broken to this day)
- the "quick access" shortcuts in explorer (the top list) was its own section (so you could always click it) -- in 7 and later it is part of the tree so you have to scroll back up to use it
- dragging files into a folder in 7+ instantly sorts them in the view, rather than keeping them together until hitting F5
- windows media player got rid of "find in library", "recently added" playlist, "play all", the taskbar miniplayer
- Vista had peak taskbar tray. instead of the current all-or-nothing overflow thing, overflow icons would automatically show themselves and then hide again
- can't run Explorer as administrator anymore to temporarily access protected files
- movie maker gone, dvd maker gone, sidebar gone
This is all true, but the price was too high for me.
> WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing
It made it more stable, I don't care about tearing and stuff, but it robbed me of full-screen DOS windows and the ability to toggle a window to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. I used that a lot.
> Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)
But it's no use if the OS isn't stable enough to trust. So I kept my important stuff on servers, so lost this.
The same applies to openSUSE today.
> No more running with full admin privileges all the time.
A small win, for standalone machines.
> Bitlocker was introduced
https://xkcd.com/538/
Life is too short.
> yes it required good hardware to run well.
Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB.
> With good hardware Vista was peak Windows.
Nah. Not as bad as generally held, but not great.
> I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
I did:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...
It was glorious.
> Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB.
That's an exaggeration. I didn't have the highest-end premium kit. I had good hardware (I was a gamer after all), but I doubt very much if I had more than 2 GB memory and I ran Vista with zero performance issues whatsoever.
I want to point out about Bitlocker, it makes it easier to get rid of old drives safely and less problematic to lose a laptop. $5 wrench doesn't apply
So does ABAN and it's a lot quicker and easier and has zero effect on performance.
https://aban.derobert.net/
ABAN is the modern free replacement for DBAN once that went payware.
> https://xkcd.com/538/
I’m a big fan of XKCD but, in reality, what most people (and employers) worry about is unauthorised third-party access to private data in the event a laptop is lost or stolen (most often by opportunist theft). Bitlocker — and other Full Disk Encryption technology — provide an effective mitigation for this situation.
Well, yes, we know that. I mean, that is the reason for doing it.
But what is much more rarely discussed are the costs. There are multiple penalties.
It hurts performance.
It impedes dual-boot.
It impedes setup in general; you lose most of the nice friendly GUI tools, replaced by clunky harder CLI tools.
It makes data recovery vastly harder, which is one of those things people discount until they need it and then realise how critical it is.
It makes troubleshooting OS problems vastly harder. Many it simply prevents: the answer becomes, reinstall your OS and restore from backup. If you have no backups, tough.
It's inconvenient, unless you use modern TPM-backed systems, in which case it dramatically reduces the security benefits, while also severely reducing OS compatibility.
It adds a new vital credential people don't know they have and don't know they need to keep secure backups of.
It generally makes everything worse, to fix a threat that most people simply do not have.
The 2 employers I personally had who insisted on it published all the company info on my machines to Github anyway, making it not even security theatre. More like security pantomime: an act of pretending to pretend to do something.
The answer to all this is, in my experience as tech support type: don't do it. Conduct a proper analysis of who has what secrets and what they need to keep, and use other better-targeted tools just for them.
Because without that, it causes problems for no good reason. It's treated as a panacea but it isn't -- it fixes nothing for 99% of users -- and the very real problems and issues it causes are ignored.
This _may_ be worth it for some companies and organisations but it's not for anyone else. I can see its worth for governments and military forces but few others.
Fair points. Thankfully, I haven't had any of those issues.
I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN.
Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often.
For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need.
I actually liked windows 7 quite a bit
Certainly better than where we are now but I never really loved it. It was to heavy for me, the search doesn't find files that are there reliably and the update system system sucked. Windows 7 always developed disk sucking WinSxS folder cancer, a particularly fatal disease during the early SSD era where space became a premium again.
It did have faster file copying though. I'd say it had 64-bit for more memory addressing but that was actually available with XP as well.
I have an unopened copy of Windows XP sitting in my home office.
My old coworker at my first company gave it to me, I worked in an old mill building that had a random room for IT storage.
I also got a very old FreeBSD mouse pad from there too! I'm not sure if I still have it around.
Peak Windows XP was Server 2003. I ran it as a daily driver on a ThinkPad. It could do pretty much everything XP could but had a closer UI to Windows 2000.
You could simply set Windows XP to use the classic theme as well.
Server 2003 had the NT 5.2 kernel. There were some minor improvements and it felt more stable to me than XP. The x64 version of Windows XP was based on the Server 2003 x64 build.
Hot take but XP is only remembered fondly in this community because it was the dominant operating system from 2001 through 2011 on consumer devices that were likely purchased as first or second generation home computers for millenials that are approaching their first 25 year retrospective.
It had an exceptional lifespan and basically represented the height of dominance for Microsoft.
I mean, among "younger" American HNers (those who went to middle or HS in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s), MacOS X Leopard or Windows 7 was probably a much more foundational desktop OS - most of our school computer labs used one or the other, as did our families.
I could make a similar argument for Win7 and the indie gaming scene.
Nah, Windows 7 RTM was ~a month before most school years started back up in 2009 so relatively few schools even considered starting to roll it out until at least 2010 (usually upgrades are done by then, not just beginning). E.g. I was class of 2012 and it wasn't until my senior year the rollout started (it was about less than half complete that year). Meanwhile they had us doing Microsoft Office classes twice a week on XP since 2003.
Can't say for Macs, the district hadn't used those since the iMac G3. After I graduated it was only a couple of years (maybe 2015?) before they rolled out Chromebooks, so 7 didn't even have much staying power.
Shoutout to kipix studio deluxe.
No way. I'm in that group, and not only did every school computer lab I encountered run Windows, everyone I knew had Windows at home. Macs simply are not as common as you're thinking.
I grew up in the Bay Area so Apple donated a ton of their computers to all the schools in the area.
That said, the Windows computers I remember were Vista or Windows 7.
If you'd been using Windows 9x you'd appreciate XP just because the install didn't rot itself to pieces every 6 months from DLL hell. But the rise of internet downloaded crapware and malware managed to keep your reinstall skills sharp during that era for another reason.
Pretty much. But that's almost all of HN tbh.
A lot of references, topics, and language patterns on here really highlight the fact that the userbase is somewhere between 35-45.
Still love Windows XP though.
Absolutely loathed moving from 98 to XP. The stability wasn't much better, the resources were hogged more, and the default toys-r-us theme was an incredible eyesore (thank god for UX hacks). It was overall so much pain but Vista was even worse in many respects so I kinda weathered it until 7 came along, and that one was insanely good.
Windows 98 (from my memory) was not very stable and horribly insecure.
I recall a handful of tools that anyone could use (I was 10-11 and could figure it out) to break and bluescreen Win 98 computers remotely.
10-11 year old me liked the XP theme, the icons were so “fresh”, nearly everything that came before was grey and boring (and the beige boxes didn’t make that better) so it was a welcome change to me at the time.
Now I’m old, I see the joy of grey high contrast consistent UI: what I am doing is more important than the shell around what I am doing.
I remember our Windows 98 SE machine crashing two or three times a day just in normal use (and this was mostly light use by us kids, we were primary students at the time - I imagine it was worse if you were using it in an office eight hours a day). Moving to XP was a big stability improvement as far as I can remember.
it always depended on the hardware (being stable, security is another matter).
I've got friends who ran Windows ME and it was rock solid. My experience was very very different, same with Windows 98 SE.
With that being said my PC with Win95 OSR2 was super stable.
From what I can tell, Windows Me was the most stable version of 9x for computers that were made with Windows Me in mind while older hardware with old drivers upgrading from 9x to Me was a minefield.
Windows XP forced driver development to a more modern standard that made things more stable. Still not stable enough (Windows Vista and up enforced that more and more in their APIs) but with XP the days of drivers assuming they could take complete control of the CPU and various buses were over.
Of course the companies that made shitty drivers for 9x also made shitty drivers for XP, so old hardware and hardware with shitty drivers was still less stable than other new hardware available, but things were moving forward.
These days, it's rare to see a full BSOD in Windows on any hardware but the very shittiest, especially with Windows 11 thanks to its artificial hardware support cutoff.
> Absolutely loathed moving from 98 to XP.
Good gods no. But then in the business in the UK late-1990s, Wikn98 was known as "GameOS".
I ran NT 4 at home until W2K came out.
One correction that I can't leave on the actual article (subscriber only!) is that I'm certain multi-screen support worked on Windows 98. Excellent article as usual though!
>up to a year after release, many gamers still recommended Windows 98. Why? Mostly due to compatibility where things a Voodoo card and a Soundblaster running in MS-DOS were preferable for many titles, and this is something that simply wasn’t on offer with XP.
Actually, mostly since Wxp was slow as a dog compared to W98, because W9x still had direct control of the hardware rather than the sluggishness-inducing Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that NT has always had inserted between the OS and the devices.
W95 was noticeably faster than W98 was too, and both of course move like lightning-speed compared to W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit, and W11 is more embarrassing as it continues to further slow with each update (almost every month now rather than only once per year), which makes W10 seem like it was a quite a bit less encumbered than W11.
95 and 98 were roughly the same speed; any differences would likely be due to drivers. The main difference between the 9x and NT lineage is the former is actually a hypervisor for DOS VMs (and the GUI itself can be considered a DPMI application, running in its own VM) while the latter is a "full" OS with a very limited DOS emulator.
Not on low-end kit.
I cut down Win95 to run from a 16MB SSD in 1996, paid for by PC Pro magazine. I knew that OS inside out.
Around the turn of the century my travel laptop was an IBM Thinkpad 701C, the famous "Butterfly". 40MB RAM and a 75MHz 486DX4.
Win95 was great on it, better than OS/2, but the thing is Win95 had a max of 4 IP addresses. In total.
I had a dialup modem (1), an Ethernet card (2), AOL for toll-free dialup (different stack, so 3) and Direct Cable Connection (4).
Add a different modem or Ethernet card and it couldn't bind TCP/IP to it. No more addresses.
I tried NT 4 but it had no power management, no PnP, no FAT32.
I tried Win2K. Not fun in 40MB of nonstandard (and so vastly expensive to upgrade) RAM.
I tried 98SE. Too big, too slow.
So I cut it down as hard as possible with 98Lite.
(Still around, remarkably: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html )
No IE, no themes, no built in media stuff, no Active Desktop, and it ran reasonably on a 486 in 40MB of RAM.
And it supported more IP addresses!
But it was hard work to get it working, and it was never entirely stable.
No. I reject your statement based on considerable personal experience and benchmark testing.
98 was considerably heavier than 95.
Just look at the ISO files!
95 OSR 2.1 with USB support:
https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/osr-21
385MB.
98SE:
https://archive.org/download/windows-98-se-retail
622MB.
98 is a significantly bigger and more complex OS.
Same design, but a lot more stuff piled on top.
I remember that myself.
When people bought a new W98 PC, which was often the first computer for so many consumers, it really did perform quite similarly to earlier-adopters' W95 PC's that were already in action.
The specs on the newer hardware were so much better which made up for it, and progressive sluggishness of Windows was swept under the rug for mainstream consumers, continuing to an extent today. You know, like a snail without a shell ;)
This is why in the '90's when Grove was running Intel and Gates was running Microsoft, professional geeks coined the phrase: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." They didn't wait until WindowsME to say this.
It wasn't really worth it for mainstream apps, but if you had a challenging Office 97 workload, with or without VBA, something like live "real-time" data acquisition, or god forbid any type of ML or simulation, the best improvement you could get was to wipe W98 off the HDD and start fresh with W95. It always has seemed like there was some uncalled-for obstacle to prevent easily installing a previous version of Windows on a new PC though.
Even now this still works to an extent, buy a new mainstream W11 consumer PC, install W10 in a regular ordinary Microsoft dual-boot configuration and see for yourself.
Most people would have so much SSD space left over they could even try a triple boot, how about that W10 ISO from 2015 if you really want to emphasize the difference in how much less sluggish things could have been now. Woo hoo. Plan to stay off the internet when booted to this one, in Device Manager you could even pre-emptively disable the ethernet & wifi.
Of course try it on a HDD if you haven't done that in a while, to see how that feels compared to earlier Windows when you were using nothing but HDDs.
Windows 8.0 is also still fairly installable in new PC's if you want to see what it was like when they had one of their many brilliant engineers taking focused responsibility to achieve faster boot times in particular.
IIRC the largest speed difference was caused by Active Desktop. Windows 98 burned a "lot" of memory and clock cycles in order to view dynamic content inside Explorer.
Back in the day there used to be custom builds of Windows 98 that had Internet Explorer completely stripped out. Those were much closer to Win95's performance.
Also the fact that pre-SP2, Windows XP actually crashed (and permanently broke in "interesting" ways) more than Windows 98 in practice, theory be damned. I became so familiar with how to install Windows during this time ...
Yes, SP1 wasn't horrible if you could get it (but who can download something that big on dial-up?), but it still was not great.
I know you can run microbenchmarks to show the increased pointer size of 64 bit Windows can cause a few percentage points of performance difference in certain scenarios but that doesn't jive with the statement "W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit".
All I had to do was try them both back-to-back on the same hardware.
If one advertises they drove 2 trims of the same car model to the airport back to back and found cars with 2" smaller wheels are lightning fast because it took 30 minutes longer in the other car then people are, rightfully, going to doubt the test instead of the wheel size. Especially when you're not the only one to have driven cars with different wheel sizes but you are the only one reporting it's the wheel size, specifically, that made the trip significantly longer to take and give the trip as your sole evidence for the claim you know why it was slower.
From my enterprise image/push creation days one example of something I did find different between x64 and x32 was the specific driver bugs/performance. The thing is it went/goes both ways on that, sometimes it's the 32 bit driver that's bugged, sometimes it's the 64 bit driver, sometimes there was a special patch version of the driver but the vendor didn't post both builds. You get the idea. In this case it wouldn't make sense to blame the <x> bit OS variant as inherently being massively slower, but it sure might seem like that with an n=1 test.
I've been doing it since W10 was released, and continue to this day.
The consistency is quite good.
It's actually such a simple comparison anybody can try it and see for themself.
Now that you mention it I actually did drive (rental) cars back & forth between airports when I was a student. We went south packed into one car, then came back from the resort areas in a half-dozen or more cars so they could replenish the ones needed in the rental lots hours to the north.
We really would all reach the destination at the same time, traveling at virtually the same speed, but you could easily tell the difference when you had a V8 under the hood compared to a 6-cylinder.
Neither one was a show-stopper and plenty of people wouldn't know the difference anyway.
It's not like some had air conditioning and some didn't, that was by far the most important feature, not performance ;)
It is definitely a simple comparison, which is why I asked how you explain others, such as myself, reaching different results with the same test if it's supposed to be inherent to the bitness itself? I can reproduce a couple percentage points difference (in either direction, depending on the measure), but nothing more. If it was inherently related to the bitness itself then that should not be possible.
Similarly, for the rental cars, if one you drove was really "lightening fast" compared to another rather than something you noticed while microbenching it up the on-ramp or similar then you probably deserve jail time for the speeding ticket. That or a Model T was a rental option :D. But again, the point was 2 cars of the same model with a different trim, not 2 completely different cars.
Race cars are barren of safety and security features, creature comforts, and even frequently missing windows.
But boy are they sure fast.
But I wouldn’t daily drive one.
Nitpick I know but race cars in well run series actually have quite good safety - just not in the same way because the environment and expectations are different. You don't need/want a reversing camera or parking beeps and boops...
I think part of MS issue is that they keep bundling and pushing "crap useful to some minority" (as well as unwanted ads and features too) by default into ostensibly "your" system and making it hard to focus on what you want it for.
If you want it to focus on gaming performance... well it's more about arcane tweaks rather than having a turn off the shit button.
Maybe the coming Win10 EoL will see a few % points jump to Bazzite or some other linux gaming-focussed distro.
Considering a common use for Windows these days is Steam Launcher, performance is kind of a big deal, actually. Literally the only thing I use my desktop for is to play games, so yes, performance is pretty much the only thing I care about with it.
Race cars have heaps of safety systems not present in road cars. They don't have ABS and traction control because they don't actually increase safety on track with a professional driver. SRS airbags also offer no additional safety when in a 6 point harness and wearing a helmet and neck brace.
Race cars have drastically more safety features than road cars. Your road car doesn't tether your helmet to your headrest to protect your neck and doesn't have a roll cage, for starters.
Road cars also don't have built-in fire extinguishers, tethers to keep wheels attached to the car in the event of a catastrophic failure of the suspension, five point harnesses for the drivers, escape hatches in the roof or no roof at all but a halo and bar in front of the driver to protect them in the event the car hits something that could decapitate the driver, break away body panels and impact absorbent foam that dissipates energy in 200+ MPH crashes generally allowing drivers to walk away from impacts that would kill occupants of road-going vehicles...
I could go on, but yeah, not sure how OP thinks that race cars aren't as safe as road cars.
What a cool article to have at the 30th anniversary of Windows 95's release (24th of Windows XP's).
Windows XP was about the time I started moving away from Windows more definitively, even as a secondary OS. It was the product activation crap. My OS on my computer should serve ME, not be beholden to the vendor after I put it on. Of course, we didn't realize back then how bad things could/would get...
So for that reason, I'm not really nostalgic about Windows XP, or subsequent versions, the way some people are.
Although it is interesting to see what many now consider to be the bad ideas of Windows 8, get their start in "Neptune"...
I feel the same way about Windows XP. Windows XP may have brought NT-based Windows to regular consumers, which is partly why there's nostalgia for XP, but for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time, Windows XP wasn't that much better than its predecessor, Windows 2000.
To me, Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Windows XP introduced activation, which I find an annoying hindrance, and weird UI decisions in the form of the Fisher-Price Luna interface and the search dog. It was all downhill from there, though Windows 7 was solid and I greatly appreciate the introduction of WSL in Windows 10.
> for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time,
Exactly! Well said.
It was shockingly better than Win98/ME but not if you were already running NT. Then, it was a step backwards.
The advantage XP had targeting consumers was that gaming peripheral makers were more interested in developing drivers for XP. Win2k itself was pretty stable but its hardware support was suboptimal and its DOS emulation needed some work.
Win2k was excellent if it did everything you needed from it, though. XP had some advantages (like better search capabilities) but most of them came later in the form of service packs.
The only XP had over 2000 IMO was 64-bit support. Which isn't even part of the XP most people are talking about since it was an uncommonly used variant based on server 2003.
Same here. XP was an absolute security nightmare and the internet felt like the most dangerous place ever. Everybody and my mom were constantly passing viruses around.
I haven't looked back switching to Linux back then.
They should've keep the Watercolor style. It's more beautiful than Luna style IMHO.
XP... it really whips the llama's ass.
A true Microsoft masterpiece, back when they still remembered how to build something that didn’t need 17 updates before lunch.
> For 64bit versions, both AMD64 and Itanium, support ended on the 30th of June in 2005.
Even Apple would not deprecate an OS two months after its release. The AMD64 version was supported until 2014, the same as the x86 version. Itanium was a dumpster fire, and anyone who had any Itanium hardware would probably want Server 2003 anyway.
Microsoft also created a Zune theme which makes the start button orange and the taskbar and many other things black. It’s the only theme I use on my XP installs!
Windows XP was pretty amazing. I remember installing it on my work PC and it found all the printers on the network and automatically installed them.
Windows XP also had perfect timing for the beginning era of broadband and a generation spending hours on their computers.
You only need to look at the leadership at Microsoft who were in charge of Vista and Windows 8. They were “suits” who didn’t understand “mobile”, which was arguably confusing at the time. I vividly remember watching the release videos of Windows 8 and the interviews of the leadership clearly showed they had no concept of what they were doing.
An OS should be extremely boring. It’s an app launcher and file organizer. An OS shouldn’t be flashy. That’s why people have fond memories of Windows 2000 and XP.
Windows 10 can also be extremely boring if Open Shell is installed and some other tweaks. Same thing with Windows 11.
Without open shell, you can fairly easily ignore the start menu by just starting to type after you press the win-button; it sanely defaults to search. Then you just set the main taskbar to align to the left and remove the search bar and whatever stuff they shove in there from it.
Windows 2000 was the GOAT, it looked perfectly OK, had NT underpinnings, was stable and had pretty good hardware support. You could probably run it today if you don't play games or have a non-postscript/HPL printer.
FCKGW-RHQQ2...
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Absolutely nothing Windows XP is "peak Microsoft", least of all the Neptune UI, which foreshadowed the terminally ugly Apple and Android UIs of today at least in color composition (Clickibunti as we say in German). Immediately switched to a modified Classic Theme.