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 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.
EvanAnderson 4 hours ago [-]
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.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
> 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)
Lammy 12 hours ago [-]
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
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.
Microsoft Money also already had the flat look that became more popular later.
vjvjvjvjghv 11 hours ago [-]
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.
anonymars 8 hours ago [-]
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
lproven 2 hours ago [-]
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
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.
kasabali 7 hours ago [-]
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.
justin66 6 hours ago [-]
All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume shadow copy.
anonymars 8 minutes ago [-]
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
FirmwareBurner 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
EvanAnderson 4 hours ago [-]
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.)
bee_rider 3 hours ago [-]
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.
anonymars 25 minutes ago [-]
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
finaard 4 hours ago [-]
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.
stetrain 10 hours ago [-]
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.
BirAdam 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
steve1977 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu.
lproven 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jodleif 2 hours ago [-]
I actually liked windows 7 quite a bit
EvanAnderson 4 hours ago [-]
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.
djxfade 3 hours ago [-]
You could simply set Windows XP to use the classic theme as well.
krige 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dijit 7 hours ago [-]
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.
stephen_g 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jim180 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jeroenhd 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
lproven 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bitwize 5 hours ago [-]
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"...
linguae 4 hours ago [-]
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.
lproven 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jeroenhd 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
herbst 5 hours ago [-]
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.
spankibalt 9 hours ago [-]
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.
iJohnDoe 10 hours ago [-]
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.
bux93 2 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
fuzzfactor 2 days ago [-]
>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.
userbinator 13 hours ago [-]
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.
lproven 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
zamadatix 12 hours ago [-]
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".
fuzzfactor 11 hours ago [-]
All I had to do was try them both back-to-back on the same hardware.
zamadatix 11 hours ago [-]
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.
fuzzfactor 10 hours ago [-]
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 ;)
zamadatix 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cheschire 12 hours ago [-]
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.
_carbyau_ 10 hours ago [-]
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.
sgarland 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Sophistifunk 9 hours ago [-]
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.
redwall_hp 8 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was Windows 2000. Everything else was just downhill from there :) (well, Windows XP SP 2 deserves a special mention)
> 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...
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
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/e282ac57-e280-93c3-af26-44...
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
- 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
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 remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
Exactly! Well said.
It was shockingly better than Win98/ME but not if you were already running NT. Then, it was a step backwards.
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.
I haven't looked back switching to Linux back then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
But boy are they sure fast.
But I wouldn’t daily drive one.
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.