[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Let us pause to remember the birthday of a perfectly fine operating system, one that Microsoft and the Generation Xbox cult has chosen not just to ignore, but also to badmouth and criticize mercilessly ...



My personal experience was managing roll-outs of new PC's and upgrades of some older ones beginning in November of that year. These were not fun times for the faint of heart because there were many issues going on simultaneously. All the computers were still plain 100 MHz SDRAM which was bad enough because 1 GB was not even an option. It was more like 2 or 3 slots of 128 MB or 256 MB DIMMs for a total of 384 or 512 or 768 total! Windows XP really needed at least 512 MB to run smoothly.

We also had the rather serious problem of using a non 48-bit LBA Windows XP ( sometimes on older machines with a non 48-bit LBA BIOS ) just as harddrives were crossing the various size boundaries. It wasn't until SP1 that things became safe with respect to data storage, so large drives crossing the 128+ GB barrier without risk was solved. Updated BIOS's eliminated the need to fiddle with CHS since Auto-Detect finally worked correctly. This whole thing was a bad memory thankfully left in the rear-view mirror of history.

Probably the worst thing of all was the fact that as usual, Microsoft was releasing an Operating System built and tested on expensive cutting edge hardware that wasn't yet present in the average workplace. Intel had just switched over to Pentium 4, and that very first Willamette generation sucked bad. Not to mention the fact that frequencies were just barely into the 1.3 GHz range on single-core CPUs. The bulk of that limited power was used up managing the screen elements ( themes and effects ) and also on the huge list of services compared to previous releases that we now had to deal with. Most damaging was disk indexing and which soon became the first thing to disable on a system. System Restore didn't help much but was often required in the work environment. The consequences of an under-powered computer using Windows XP could be seen in the lags from pressing the Start Button and waiting for menus to finally popup



In my opinion, things were not at all smooth until late-2004, after SP2 and after Intel had most of their processors well over 2 GHz and some over 3 GHz with their Northwoods and Prescotts. Let's not forget to mention AMD's Athlon XP which in itself was an extraordinary CPU that fit perfectly underneath this operating system. By this time we were well into the DDR era and DDR-2 was becoming available and running with 1 or even 2 GB of DDR RAM was simple and effective. This is really when computers running Windows XP began to shine. And shine they did from this point forward. As the dual-core and quad-core era approached Windows XP got a second and third wind, becoming as fast on that hardware as Win98se is on the earlier generation.

Of course Microsoft was already plotting to destroy this satisfying era and were already in the process of continuing their tradition of building an OS designed for hardware for ~3 years into the future with Longhorn/Vista set for release "at any moment" but actually two more years away. But that's off-topic for this day. Happy Birthday!

At least one reputable site remembered ...

Windows XP turns 11, still not dead yet ( PC World 2012-10-25 )




EDIT: typo, clarity, updated image URLs, and again

This post has been edited by CharlotteTheHarlot: 06 May 2013 - 08:06 AM

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Almost forgot, from that posted link at PC WORLD ...

Quote

As far back as June 2011, a Microsoft manager claimed it was “time to move on” from XP, while even earlier that year an executive on the Internet Explorer team belittled XP as the “lowest common denominator” when he explained why the OS wouldn’t run the then-new IE9.

Imagine the gall of someone connected with MSIE saying Windows XP is "lowest common denominator". That really takes the cake. MSIE has been the world's leading malware facilitator

.

[tomasz86]

CharlotteTheHarlot, on 27 October 2012 - 04:49 AM, said:

At least one reputable site remembered ...

Windows XP turns 11, still not dead yet ( PC World 2012-10-25 )

A good article but there's a mistake:

Quote

Also off the support list when XP retires: 2001’s IE6 and 2006’s IE7.

IE7 is going to be supported until 2017 (together with Vista), and IE6 up to 2015 (together with Windows 2003 Server).

This post has been edited by tomasz86: 27 October 2012 - 05:29 AM

[xpclient]

Welcome to Windows XP from Microsoft, the new version of Windows that brings your PC to life. Experience the best, experience Windows XP.

[Sp0iLedBrAt]

Quote

leading malware facilitator

You, Sir, have a way with words!

Using XP since 2003.

[HarryTri]

Well, I fell in love with Windows XP (I was on Windows 98 SE untill then - very good OS also) as soon as I saw its desktop for the first time! (The default one presented in the first post here - I think this is really the spirit of Windows XP: happy PC users).
When I saw the Start Menu the effect was doubled, and the things were to become more and more happier.

This post has been edited by HarryTri: 27 October 2012 - 02:28 PM

[duffy98]

Well, I arrived late to the XP Party ... having just made the change to Windows XP from Windows 98SE earlier this year. I am very satisfied (98%) with my move to XP ... still have a few things to figure out but my Thinkpads are running super great with XP installed. Only wish I had made the move a few years earlier ... I had a lot of fun working with Windows 98SE through the years but it was finally time for me to move on.
...

[vinifera]

I switched from 2000 to XP SP1
it was smooth enough for me then (1.3 ghz, 384 mb ram)

loved the os and been using it for 5 years
with SP3 it was even better

would've stayed on it if my hardware didn't require win "7"

[nitroshift]

11 years later, XP is still doing its job in my company (98% of the entire's company PC's are XP). Getting programmers to rewrite some legacy dll's used in our software trunk is like praying to a monkey...



nitroshift



PS. I'm happily running Windows 7 on my work laptop with "XP mode" installed.

[dencorso]

nitroshift, on 30 October 2012 - 10:54 PM, said:

PS. I'm happily running Windows 7 on my work laptop with "XP mode" installed.

Well... XP Mode is real XP in a VM... so that's the best of two worlds, in a way, isn't it?

[Thunderbolt 2864]

Yes Windows XP is truly one of the best OS's out there, so many organisations use it even today, my university still uses Windows XP on every single computer. Though I stopped using Windows XP since Windows 7 came out.

[Dogway]

Happy birthday XP, using it up to this day and many more to come. it just WORKS! it's a charm to work with, no whistles, no odds, no aero, just the OS and you, I love it.

These past days I was having a look at 7 FIle Explorer to see if I could remotely adapt to it in a remote future, and found out that it's crap sticked to its core, no customizability possible (without installing 3rd tools), no way I'm gonna change.

[MaximRecoil]

I got my first PC in July of 2001, when new PCs were still coming with Windows Me. I didn't know the first thing about PCs at the time. I had been using the internet at the local library to play chess online, and I wanted to be able to do that at home. So I went to Best Buy and bought the cheapest thing I could find, which was an eMachines with a 733 MHz Celeron, 64 MB of PC100 RAM, and a 20 GB, 5400 RPM, Seagate HDD.

It worked for the most part. I assumed that having to reboot a couple of times per hour because of freezes and other malfunctions was just the way things were in the Windows world, and I was just happy to be online in my own living room.

A friend (Sam) that I went to school with (who was always "into" computers, to the point of spending $800 for 8 MB of RAM in the early '90s), was working in the IT department at the place I was working at the time, so I headed over to his house to see what I could learn. He was running Windows 2000, had 512 MB of RAM, and had a 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbird. He didn't have any stability problems. He was a self-confessed "Microsoft fanboy", so he wouldn't say anything bad about Windows Me, but he also made it clear that it was no accident that he was running Windows 2K.

A couple of months later I discovered MAME (which was awesome, because I loved playing arcade games when I was a kid). Some of the newer games like Mortal Kombat II would work, but they were slow/choppy. I'd heard a lot about RAM, and figured that maybe I needed more of that stuff (in reality, the slow CPU was to blame, not the low amount of RAM). I asked Sam if he would help me get more RAM. So he came over and determined what type of RAM I needed, and how much of it was supported (it turned out that my cheap PC maxed out at 256 MB [128 x 2]), but that was still 4 times what I had.

So we went to Best Buy and picked up two 128 MB sticks of RAM (about $20 each if I remember right), and Sam installed them in my machine (I noticed how easy it was when I watched him do it). This improved things a bit, but had no effect on MAME.

In the winter of 2002 I decided to try XP. By that time I'd learned quite a bit about computers, and felt comfortable installing it myself, but I had Sam on the phone while doing it just to make sure. After getting it installed, I was skeptical of the Yoshi's Island-looking GUI, but I gave it a chance. After using it all day and not having to reboot even once, nor having any other issues whatsoever, I was sold.

After disabling the themes service (along with some other services I didn't need), and turning off most of the "Visual Effects" under "Performance Options", XP actually ran fine on that weak hardware; I had no complaints at all.

In the summer of 2002 I was taking an A+ and MCSE course, and I decided to build a PC. I went to Best Buy and bought a large Antec SX830 case, and then I ordered the guts online (Athlon XP 1800+, 512 MB PC2100 DDR, ATI AIW 7500 video card, 80 GB Maxor 7200 RPM HDD [which I still have in use by the way, along with a 120 GB Maxtor that I bought a couple of months later; over 10 years of near constant use and they are both still going strong]. XP ran beautifully on that system, and I used it until I built a new system in the spring of 2006 (Athlon 64 3700+ single core). I'm still using that system today and it is still running XP.

I've used Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, and I don't like them at all (though I like 7 much better than Vista, and Windows 8 is a complete joke). As far as I'm concerned, XP was the peak for Windows, and it has been all downhill from there (and I doubt there will ever be another version of Windows that I like in the future).