Whimsy

I must nitpick on this one. Did you ever realize that you make unfair comparison: 2K run on P4 XP run on P4 yet you said it was like : Halo run on XBOX Halo4 run on XBOX-360 The point still stands: the hardware was a natural evolution of the platform, same as the kernel was a natural evolution of the platform. The kernel team doesn't stop building new functionality because another team is adding functions, nor should other teams preclude newer technologies introduced with that kernel in the name of backporting features. The hardware equivalent would be to nix MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, 3DNow and other support because 486's are also 32-bit processors. We've already talked about doubling minimum requirements, but often times the OS itself is the requirement because of the changes it introduced. Sure, people have projects that do enable some of these newer features on older systems, but getting Firefox 8 to run on Windows 98 is probably a support situation that's specific to the people who have done it. If you need Windows 98 support, there's always Virtual PC/Hyper-V, VirtualBox or VMWare Software projects typically have feature goals set for its release before any significant code is written, and then the software gets written to that spec. This prevents backporting of most features, but it ensures stability in professional environments. Bugs tend to slip in with new code and features. There's also the headache of writing to the older version's capabilities. Sure, you could re-implement everything every time, but it's expensive, and then you need to make sure that everyone running OS version 3 is using the correct version of OS version 3 (probably because you had to change a core feature that broke another core feature). The alternative - supporting DOS, Win16, and newer 32-bit software on a newer file system - did exist, by the way. Unfortunately OS/2 never took off (I still have my Warp 3 Connect CD!) ...Good ol' Comic Sans I see no points of contention , actually you seem to say (just like I do) that Windows 2000 was an excellent Operating System, the "rightful" evolution of NT 4.00. I see 2000 as a technical, or if you prefer "natural, logical" evolution of NT and XP as a (mostly) commercial evolution of 2K., in the sense that a large part (but of course not all) the "added" features of XP are "eye candy" or "bells and whistles". Personally I rate *any* NT based system far more "stable" than any comparable DOS based one, but the argument that most people raise when this kind of discussion starts is "but NT has the far better NTFS filesystem that you cannot have in 9x/Me and thus you are limited to files 4 Gb in size" (no I don't want to start the usual flamewar about FAT32 vs. NTFS), with the not-so-hidden understatement that a Dos based OS cannot have NTFS because of technical reasons (while it has been a simple, plain, commercial one). The great idea was evidently something like let's consolidate our two largely different Operating System branches, one dedicated to the "Professional" use and one to "Home" and let's make a one-size-fits-all OS. It is rather obvious how in order to do that you need to impose on "home" customers that have not any need for them a number of "features" only useful in a "professional" environment, on the other hand, in order to let the "home" users be actually able to run, install, and "like" it etc. you need to add some "bells and whistles" that the "profesionals" have no or very little use for. If you think about it, the following iteration of the "higher level" Server edition offers - strangely enough - a "Core" edition, from the mouth of the wolf: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd184075.aspx I will however re-state how pre-made machines (OEM) on sale during the very first period of XP, and expecially laptop/notebooks were largely underpowered, as well as later this happened AGAIN when Vista was launched. My personal rule of thumb has alway been that of taking the MS minimal requirements and at very least double them, whenever possible use a factor of 4x, example, XP minimal requirements: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865/en-us Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended) <- please read this as 1 Ghz processor At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended) <- please read this as "512 Mbytes" if you want to actually run software on this OS jaclaz I think a large part of the challenge when creating a core OS was a lack of command line tools to effectively administrate the system. CMD.EXE is great, but not everything exists as a tool. PowerShell fixed that up while adding a little more flexibility to the system, but it took resources to build. Server Core drops desktop support too, by the way - hardly a good experience for the front-line worker who needs to run Office. XP ran pretty nicely on early machines with earlier software on 256MB RAM, and I also recall projects to coax it into running on 32MB. OEMS have had a long tradition of trying to sell out older hardware, and with Vista I think it's fair to say it blew up in everyone's face. Vista itself was fine, but immature driver support and the assumption that Program Files was fair game for data files harmed it. By Windows 7 everyone had their work in order and Windows 8 is designed to have the same system requirements as 7. Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft Employee.

No. XP is a good OS, not as good as 2K for several aspects and far less suitable to "simple" home users EXACTLY because of the features that only professionals (and only in some given "corporate" environments) actually needed. This is probably the biggest point of contention I've got with your posts. First, the differences in experiences between NT and 2000 alone were *massive*. Basic things, like USB support and graphical differences, to Active Directory's reliance on Primary and Backup Domain Controllers, to File System and overall performance upgrades. Suggesting that MS would have been better to backport these features into NT4 would be like suggesting that Halo 4 should have been back ported to the original XBOX. It could be done, but not without some compromises, a lot of resources, and with the devotion of a team to make it all fit. Even for third parties, some things were simplified: one driver instead of two (or three), one target OS, one established platform for everybody. 9x and NT both run Win32, but by the time 2K was released Win32 had been extended, and I'd hazard a guess that they weren't going to run two teams to reinvent the wheel while leaving customers with an OS that's fundamentally flawed from a security perspective. The "commercial" decisions you're referring to are typically licensing conditions. Yes, NT is NT, and with a few registry hacks it may be possible to re-create the functionality of other "editions", but business environments usually want to stay in compliance. If they're not content with those options, they could look into other platforms of course! I plead ignorance - I didn't know people were running 9X with that kind of memory. I did know about the back-porting projects, but not that people had been tinkering with hacks. I'd need to know more about what MaxPhysPage does. Not that I don't doubt it's efficacy, but there were certainly ways to work around the 4GB limit in 32-bit OS, but they also introduced problems and few people are pining for the 32-bit Windows days. I also noticed that some of these configurations require certain conditions and configurations. Sure, you could program a few hacks and set a few system specific settings which setting up a team to backport functionality. Or you could just reuse that tested kernel that's in its third iteration and which has a host of other new functionality to boot. NTFSDos provided NTFS support for, well, DOS; I thought you were referring to streaming, hardlinks and other NTFS improvements, which are a file system feature and not necessarily a feature of the OS. There are installable file system drivers for MacOS and Linux file systems available for Windows. There was also a service pack for NT4 that gave it compatibility with NTFS3 (yep, you could even argue that at one point NT didn't support a version NTFS!) It was the dawn of the Pentium 4, and XP ran really well on P2's, P3's and the 1GHz Athlon's of that era (I'll leave out comments about first generation P4's...). The requirements were pretty similar to Windows 2000. If anyone put it on underpowered hardware, it was probably people who wanted to latest and greatest on their Pentium MMX's and K6's. That aside, many companies were putting out software that supported both platforms. Internet Explorer 6 and Office XP in particular both worked in Windows 98 and up. Nobody was forced, but people wanted on board because they thought it was pretty cool. My uncle wanted it on his Celeron 300a (I was smarter than to do it, but it would have "worked") Well, this doesn't necessarily mean that you are as blinfdfolded as your leaders . jaclaz I have to put that into my posts. It's a transparency thing, but I speak for myself. I was around during the 9x/ME transition and used Windows 2000/XP for years. I also did a lot of support during the Vista launch, though not under the MS banner, but which was still pretty fun and educational.

Windows XP, in all its forms, was a great OS. Home Edition and Professional Edition had overlapping featuresets limited by license levels because they had to support the same technologies. NTFS permissions and built-in accounts are supported in Home, even if the user is never directly exposed to them, and by default Home doesn't let a typical user create accounts with Backup Operators; Only standard users and local administrators. But it can also be upgraded to professional. Professional Edition was marketed to users who needed certain feature sets, including remote desktop and, yes, domain join features. It was heavily based on Windows 2000, which included plug-and-play, USB support, and far better support of Direct X. It was leaps and bounds beyond NT4. Incidentally, hard-links and junctions existed in Windows 2000 (strictly speaking, NTFS 3.0), but you needed the resource kit to use them. NTFS has a lot of features that get underutilized. XP wasn't merely a crappy attempt to unify OS's; it brought NT to the masses, and it made it cheap. NT brought stability and security. DOS-based systems, including Windows 9x/ME had severe limitations to how it could use memory, so the choices were to re-engineer a broken system (potentially at the cost of compatibility; I read recently that having classes.dat divide the registry up was a kludge!) while prolonging the life of DOS, or switch people to a system that already worked and which supported a host of other superior technologies - things like NTFS, better multitasking, and which already had some developer support (including Windows 2000 driver support. As for RT creating compatibility issues - it's true that it's a different platform. In the earlier days of modern smartphones, I seem to recall people talking about how at least one of them could run Photoshop ("it heard that it runs a modified version of MacOS!" was the word of the day) until they were educated about its features and, in some cases, disappointed. What RT offers developers is a unified platform for creating apps on a tablet and desktop OS at the same time. TL;DR: RT is a tablet OS that happens to resemble Windows in a lot of ways, but it's still a distinct OS separate from desktop/"Intel" Windows. Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft Employee.