[HN Gopher] The History of Windows XP
___________________________________________________________________
The History of Windows XP
Author : achairapart
Score : 143 points
Date : 2025-08-10 10:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 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.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| 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.
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| sgarland wrote:
| 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.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| 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.
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AshleyGrant wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| All I had to do was try them both back-to-back on the same
| hardware.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| o11c wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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...
| basch wrote:
| 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
| mikestorrent wrote:
| 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.
| lproven wrote:
| Are you sure?
|
| https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/e282ac57-e280-93c3-af26-4
| 4...
| mark_undoio wrote:
| Encarta 95 had it - I remember thinking how cool it was
| that it looked like Win 95.
| Lammy wrote:
| Office 95 & 97 do this too on NT 3.51, kinda; just their
| inner MDI document title bars:
| http://toastytech.com/guis/miscnt351office97.png
| steve1977 wrote:
| Microsoft Money also already had the flat look that became
| more popular later.
| basch wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| > 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
| basch wrote:
| https://ibb.co/Q7PHPNhj
|
| https://i.ibb.co/Y4cdckJT/bliss25.webp
|
| https://archive.org/download/bliss-600dpi/bliss-600dpi.png
| Kwpolska wrote:
| "Version 2002" also appears in the System Properties window.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| 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.
| stetrain wrote:
| 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.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| 7 was basically a Vista service pack but after the hardware
| vendors had time to cure some cerebral rectitis and give
| proper hardware.
| anonymars wrote:
| 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
| kasabali wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume
| shadow copy.
| anonymars wrote:
| 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
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| anonymars wrote:
| You've never wished you (or some process) hadn't just
| overwritten a file?
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| anonymars wrote:
| 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
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lproven wrote:
| 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.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| > 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.
| anonymars wrote:
| 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
| lproven wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| jodleif wrote:
| I actually liked windows 7 quite a bit
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| 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.
| ayaros wrote:
| 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.
| sunaookami wrote:
| You might like
| https://logonoff.co/projects/windowsxptour/mmTour/index.html
| ayaros wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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-...
| ayaros wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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)
| ayaros wrote:
| This is heresy against the Windows XP Tour. Were you not made
| aware that Windows XP lets you unlock the world of digital
| media?
| avgDev wrote:
| 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.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| spankibalt wrote:
| _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.
| krige wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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"...
| herbst wrote:
| 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.
| linguae wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You could simply set Windows XP to use the classic theme as
| well.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| cyrialize wrote:
| 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.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > 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.
| ianhawes wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It had an exceptional lifespan and basically represented the
| height of dominance for Microsoft.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| 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.
| sprybear wrote:
| 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.
| kreig wrote:
| FCKGW-RHQQ2...
| donjapan22 wrote:
| 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!
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