Yes, the day is finally drawing closer: the day Windows XP died. October 22, 2010 will be the final and definitive day for the venerable operating system, since OEMs will no longer be able to pre-load it on netbooks after that day. I might not make myself popular around here with this, but thank god, it’s about time that pile of junk is taken behind the shed.
Just today I decided to see if there was life in the old hag yet. I installed Windows XP Professional (64bit) Service Pack 2 on my main machine, and I was baffled just by how horrible the entire experience was compared to installing and setting up Ubuntu 10.04 or Windows 7.
The installation process is remarkably archaic, and updating the operating system is an exercise in frustration. Not only does it take ages for a single update to download, you’ll also be running about 4-5 batches of updates, marked by reboots. The operating system takes ages to boot, hammers your hard drive to pulp even after the desktop has already loaded, and applications are slow to load. Responsiveness is terrible, and there’s graphical tearing all over the place while performing operations like window dragging.
I never liked Windows XP (during the XP days, I used BeOS, Mac OS X, and Linux), and I just can’t understand people still clinging to it to this very day. I have several machines on which I’ve tried both XP and 7, and in every case, Windows 7 blew XP out of the water on every level – performance, stability, responsiveness, consistency, prettiness, and so much more. Mind you, we’re talking, among other things, two Atom machines, and a 2002 Pentium 4 – hardly powerhouses.
In other words, I’m happy Microsoft finally realised it’s time to nut up and put a bullet right between the eyes of Windows XP. Puppy eyes or no, this girl has to die. Luckily, OEMs are agreeing with me, since 81% of US netbooks are already sold with Windows 7 pre-installed instead of Windows XP. Who would’ve thought OEMs could do anything good, software-wise.
There are drivers for EVERYTHING. PERIOD.
“What do you mean I can’t print to my 1970’s Xerox printer from Windows 7?”
RIP XP/2000/NT4/NT3.1
not for about half the hardware on my 2 year old laptop. vista and up only.
Yeah, it’s finally getting to the point where XP drivers are not being made for new hardware. It’s almost easier to find Linux drivers than XP drivers.
Edit: Whoops, the title should be != and not ==.
The 64-bit version of XP has nothing in common with the 32-bit version of XP beyond the name. You really can’t compare the two. One uses the Windows Server core, the other uses the Windows XP core. There’s a lot more going on in the 64-bit version than the 32-bit version.
The nice thing about XP is that it is easy to use, easy to discover how things work, and easy to configure. The Control Panel in Windows 7 looks like someone puked code onto a GUI. There’s no organisation to it, and virtually impossible to find anything without using the search feature. Configuring anything in Windows 7 takes at least 3 screens to do, and those 3 screens may be located in different places. Things just seem easy to do, as there are helpful wizards that pop up all the time … but that just masks the configuration, it doesn’t actually simplify it.
Yes, 7 looks pretty and is stable. But XP is a lot more functional and easier to manage. And I’ll take functional over pretty any day, unless the pretty makes things easier to use.
It would be great if they would take the time to organise and simplify the Control Panel so that it was easier to use than the 2000/XP Classic View. Of all the things they copy from the Mac, why couldn’t they copy System Settings???
Yes, the future of Windows is 7. But there’s no way you can categorically say that 7 is better than XP.
Edited 2010-06-11 22:30 UTC
Microsoft already tried that trick and renamed it Control Panel; years of litigation resulted. Can you imagine how it would go now with Mr Jobs trend the last few years?
Sure I can, at least in one crucial area: stability. Where as XP crashed on me at least once per day, whatever I think of 7’s UI (and I’m not very fond of it as regulars here will no doubt be aware) at least 7 doesn’t crash. Me, I’ll take stable over simple any day… guess that’s why I’m primarily a *NIX user though
. I’m glad XP is dying. I think it was a horrible continuation of the NT line from 2000 (which was really awesome for its time), and all XP did was increase the bloatware in 2000 by about a gigabyte and remove most of the stability 2000 boasted. And 2000 was actually fine for consumer use, the problem was most consumers never heard of it. I loaded up 2000 for my family when their XP machine died, and they absolutely loved how responsive it was by comparison (clean installations both times, no OEM bloatware involved).
I’m glad XP is going behind the shed. I only wish I could be the one to pull the trigger.
You’re doing something wrong there … XP doesn’t crash unless there’s a problem with the drivers/hardware.
Given enough time, every software crashes…
Given enough time, but not once a day …
One of our Unisys mainframes (the main message sending machine that routed ALL of the messages from other systems) at the airline I used to work for went for over three years without a reboot. The only reason they did one eventually was because of a critical OS update.
Not all software crashes. PC users are simply more fault tolerant than the users of other types of machines.
Random fact: the server in our office is a 12 year old P3 5-600Mhz we found in the basement. It runs Win XP, it handles routing, network printing, it hosts a small website, it runs our invoice software and is our file server. The only time we have to reboot it/turn it on is when the power fails for a few seconds (it happens once every few month in our neighborhood). Never crashed.
Windows 7 is better than XP. Categorically
Windows 7 is not always suitable as a replacement for XP though, so it still has uses. If I had to pick between XP and Windows 7 to run on a PII 600 with 512MB of memory and an old Riva 128 video card – Id pick XP in a heartbeat (or a lightweight Linux distribution). But if the machine has a 2GB or more of memory and a halfway decent video card I cannot fathom any good reason to use XP – even given your arguments. The stability, features, and performance trump the few issues I have with the UI. Ill will agree with you that the control panel UI is pretty bad though…
OH, I don’t know. I’m running it on one of my Atom machines here, 1.66 ghz and only 1 gb of memory, and 7 outperforms the xp that it came with. I’m not sure I’d run it on an old Pentium II, but the latest version of Windows I’d even consider running on such a machine is 2000. Any functionality beyond that, and I’ll pick a lightweight Linux.
I find Win7 only marginally better than XP. Whoever wrote this article obviously had no f**king clue what they were talking about. Slipstream the latest service pack into your XP installation disc, along with whatever features you want plus your cd key (using nLite), and you can install XP with a couple of key presses. (Is it even possible to slipstream service packs anymore with Vista/7?) And after you install XP, use autopatcher to install whatever updates you need, and you’re done. And it’s fast too. Win7 takes forever to install, and 10-15gb vs 1gb? Win7 isn’t THAT much more advanced than XP to account for all that extra space, so WTF did they put in there?
Then, once you start up Win7, you notice that it’s not all that different. They threw in an OSX-style glassy-ass transparent UI (probably to appeal to the iTards), which is the first thing that got turned off. The second thing to get turned off was the new task bar; I guarantee you whoever thought up that train wreck never had more than 10+ apps on his quick launch toolbar, much less 30 or 40. The third thing to get turned off was the ‘aero snap’ BS, which kept wanting to attach windows to the top/sides of the screen every time I moved it around. Then they went and renamed/moved sh*t around for no apparent reason, so now I have to relearn where everything is.
Esentially, once I had all of this useless crap turned off, I was basically back to something that looked and felt like XP. Well, the start menu is better, but that’s hardly worth the price I paid. I’m not saying there’s anything particularly wrong with it, just that it’s not a huge leap over XP.
In all the years I ran XP, I could count the number of times on one hand that it crashed, that didn’t have to do with faulty hardware. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it stands up quite well to Win7, at least for those of us who knew what we were doing. This is especially true when you consider that XP is almost 10 years old. In all this time, Win7 is the best that MS could come up with? The file manager doesn’t even support tabbed browsing, for Christ’s sake. Notepad still sucks ass. Most of the built-in apps are gone. Etc, etc.
Unfortunately, old things pass away, and we can’t stay stuck in the past forever, so we must move on…. either to a new version of Windows, or to some other OS. Either that, or just hope our hardware holds out for another 20 years.
Edited 2010-06-11 23:19 UTC
I totally agree. Especially the “file manager doesn’t even support tabbed browsing” part: I’ve written a few days ago in a comment that Microsoft should’ve done themselves a favor and bought FreeCommander, and ClipDiary. I also mentioned RocketDock but Steve J. would be pissed off.
No tabbed browsing in the explorer? That’s a joke! No clipboard history? Joke too! What are those OS vendors thinking about? There is still room for making users experience better. I hope the guys behind Haiku, AROS and likes know better than that.
How does one use tabs in a file manager?
Separate windows I can see.
Window with folder tree I can see.
But I don’t see how a bunch of tabs would be useful.
Not disparaging your comment; actually curious how this would be used.
How does one use multiple tabs in a web browser?
It is the same concept really. If you need to open up 2+ folders at once, it’s more handy to have them in a single window with tabs than separate windows. If you need to move/copy files from one folder to another, you just drag them over to a folder’s tab.
I use Directory Opus (best file manager on the planet, btw, and one of the apps that keeps me on Windows) and once I got a taste of using tabs in a file manager, I’ll never go back.
Hrm, maybe I’m used to multi-paned file managers, shortcut lists, and folder lists. I just can’t see how tabs would make things easier. Guess I’d have to try it.
It’s not the same concept at all.
Each tab in a browser is its own isolated experience. There’s no real reason you’d ever need to see two webpages at the same time. A file manager is just the opposite. Each window of your file manager is mostly useless on its own. You need a few of them on the screen together before any of them are useful for managing files. Their contents relate to eachother. I personally do not want to trade dragging and dropping files for tabs.
That’s what my feeling was as well. I just can’t picture how using tabs would make file management easier compared to multiple panes or a single pane with a folder list.
I’ll have to play around with it, though, to see for my self. Using multiple Dolphin windows in KDE4 with the window-tabs feature enabled should be a good simulation.
I believe that Dolphin has tabs, just like Konqueror does. They don’t work that well.
The split window view works much better.
A setup like Notepad++ would be nice in a filemanager … you have two panes, and you can move tabs between them.
That means you can do a split view of any two tabs, and you can keep other focal points around in the background until you need to use them as source or target directories.
It’s just like a web browser. Or the old Norton Commander (kudos to whoever invented it). I can’t attach a picture here, but FreeCommander is… free, in all respects. So you can try it, or visit the website, there are probably a few screenshots.
This program changed parts of my experience on Windows systems. It has FTP, network drives, MD5 checking/creating, shortcuts editing, secure delete, renaming of multiple files, console launching in the current folder, and a whole bunch of options and capabilities, to the point that the menus look scary.
Just like Opera on the browser side, it allows me to lock/pin a tab and sessions are preserved. I have 8 of my most frequently used folders locked.
Rich, well-thought, very professional program with a very good experience.
The best part is being able to switch folders with only one window in the taskbar. That’s what tabbed browsing (whether on a browser or explorer) is useful for (for me).
More than that, what about a system-wide spell checker? There are plenty of 3rd party apps that will account for most of what Windows lacks (including clipboard managers), but I don’t know of any app that will give me spell checking across the entire OS. I’d almost be willing to give my right nut for one though
As far as I know, the only way you can get complete system-wide spell checking is to use OS X. *nix desktops don’t have it, Windows doesn’t have it. There used to be one for win9x, Spell Pro or something it was called (I really can’t remember the exact name), but even it didn’t give spell checking everywhere though it did account for the majority of text fields. That was a good ten years ago though, and I don’t know of anything like that being developed for Windows today.
I’m pretty sure KDE has one, available to all KDE apps. Doesn’t help the non-KDE apps, but if you stick to KDE apps, then you could say your KDE system has desktop-wide spellcheck.
Not sure about GNOME, though.
KDE has it
Furthermore, it can detect the language you are using with just a few words!
If you don’t like the file manager then download a new one. They aren’t going to provide a double paned file explorer with built in ftp support for typical users.
Explorer already has FTP support. Just type ftp://user:password@host/dir in your address bar.
Yea but it is barebones and might as well not exist.
Then why the hell should ‘non typical’ users bother to upgrade? Anyway, Windows Explorer, for as bad as it sucks, actually does have ftp support.
Believe me, I have. And having used XP for about 8 years, I never had any issues related to security. For your average Joe Sixpack who will run any executable that promises them nude pics of Megan Fox, I’m sure Win7 is a huge improvement in this regard. (And maybe not even then, if they just click right past the UAC prompt.) But for your average OSNews reader? Not so much.
Edited 2010-06-12 06:26 UTC
It’s not just about click me crap, those additional protections have stopped numerous drive-by attacks.
I don’t doubt you have had no problems with security, but then operating systems aren’t designed for you. They’re designed for the average person and XP is an unneeded security risk for that demographic.
But I still think the additional security measures are worth upgrading for, especially when the upgrade is only a hundred bucks. If you keep the OS for 5 years that breaks down to 20 dollars a year for protection that has proven to be effective.
Then you must never read about computer security.
Thanks for that wall of text though.
“Win7 isn’t THAT much more advanced than XP to account for all that extra space, so WTF did they put in there? ”
AFAIR: WinSxS, which is the shared library folder. [I’m not a Win user though. so it comes from my own research and Win7 testing]
“Esentially, once I had all of this useless crap turned off, I was basically back to something that looked and felt like XP. Well, the start menu is better, but that’s hardly worth the price I paid”
I’m still amazed you oaid it. You know, there was Win7 RC for testing purposes …
But if the machine has a 2GB or more of memory and a halfway decent video card I cannot fathom any good reason to use XP
I have an Athlon 64 2Ghz, 2GB RAM and GeForce 7600GT… and guess what? XP DOES indeed run better on it than 7! You people seem to think 7 is comparable to the second coming of Jesus, but it’s not. It doesn’t provide any significant features I can’t get with XP already and it actually runs worse. Since I mostly use my PC for gaming having less resources available for the game does matter.
7 is good, I give that, but I still prefer XP over it.
I agree. 7 does not have any additional feature I want and uses double CPU, triple RAM and quadruple hard disk. lol.
If Company of Heroes doesn’t work on Wine by the time I change my laptop I’ll have rethink my gaming strategy or install 7 knowing that is a waste of energy.
If Company of Heroes doesn’t work on Wine by the time I change my laptop I’ll have rethink my gaming strategy or install 7 knowing that is a waste of energy.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=45…
Looks like a recent version of Company of Heroes does work without a hitch in any recent version of Wine. I just suggest getting a machine with nVidia card, I’ve never had issues with those whereas I always run into one or another issue with ATi ones.
Cheers
If you are a gamer then and upgrade to Windows 7 simply for DirectX 10/11. More and more games are moving over.
I have a Quad Core Intel, 2GB RAM, nVidia 9800.
I used to run WindowsXP as this machine is mainly for games (I use a mac for my day to day stuff at home).
Windows 7 offers a lot more than XP. Better file transfers and file operations as 7 makes better use of memory for caching data. I notice a big difference when copying files to my server.
Better use of the cores and video cards provides a noticeably faster machine. However also usability wise windows 7 provides a more easier and faster system to interact with, aero peek i couldn’t do without and it really makes a difference when using a computer daily both at home for games and at work for work related tasks.
I never was a fan of XP, i much preferred Windows 2000. However 7 does offer a lot and makes greater use of modern hardware.
I used to run WindowsXP as this machine is mainly for games (I use a mac for my day to day stuff at home).
Windows 7 offers a lot more than XP. Better file transfers and file operations as 7 makes better use of memory for caching data. I notice a big difference when copying files to my server.
Copying stuff to/from server isn’t related to gaming. Personally, I have not noticed any difference in network performance between XP and 7, perhaps due to still using 100mbit/s where the bottle cap is the network, not the performance of either of the computers themselves. If you notice a difference of performance in 100mbit/s network then you have had something configured really wrong or malfunctioning drivers I’d say.
Better use of the cores and video cards provides a noticeably faster machine.
My framerate in WoW dropped from 37fps to 13fps between XP and 7. “Faster” isn’t the wording I’d use. However, for multicore machines I do suspect 7 would do better than XP. 7 has a better refined scheduler.
aero peek i couldn’t do without and it really makes a difference when using a computer daily both at home for games and at work for work related tasks.
That is indeed a pretty handy ability, but that’s still not related to gaming, really. And I can’t remember the name of the application which does provide the same feature for XP, so it’s not something you need to buy 7 in order to have.
That’s strange, I don’t remember seeing any difference in WoW when I moved from XP to 7 on my dual core. Not a 70% drop, anyway.
I had problems with older games, instead.
Some errors. the p2 only ran at stock speeds at 450mhz max and was overclockable to 504mhz but after that it got very problematic due to the slot1 slot beeing very less asynchronously adapted than a socket build. But no i would neither use win7 or xp on (if there ever existed a pentium two at 600mhz) such a machine. I would run BeOS on it =D
Typo. I meant Pentium III. I still have an old Katmai system that for whatever reason runs like a clock on XP.
I suppose, this could help in configuring – create new folder on desktop and name it:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Now you have all configs in one place. I guess it is convenient.
Part till period is up to your taste. This hint works with win7 x86 only.
Hah! And then people tell me that *Linux* is full of cryptic commands… lol
xp 64 just uses a different kernel, but it doesn’t mean much though, the overall experience and feeling is still the same, and like Thom I’m happy that xp will finaly die.
Despite what people claims windows 7(and vista too) is much faster than xp, aero makes the ui snappier and not slower since it uses the gpu instead of the cpu to manage the windows(try to fastly move a window with areo turned on and off and see the difference in cpu usage, here it’s 15% vs 80%)
Nobody sane can ever say that Vista is faster than XP. Nobody can speak such a blatant lie. Otherwise, they’ve had NO encounter with Vista.
Maybe you haven’t had an encounter with Vista since SP1.
Oddly enough, Vista SP1 felt more responsive [than XP SP2]to user inputs such as opening applications and saving fileswhile the tasks were being performed (we tried this out on separate runs).Problem is that its darn hard to measure this end responsiveness without relying more on synthetic benchmarks.
My experience is the same. In fact, it appears that Vistas designers have made a conscious choice to favor smooth, consistent performance over raw speed.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/another-take-on-vista-vs-xp-benchmar…
Sorry, but the experience I have daily with the configs I’ve described in a previous comment has more value than benchmarks of file copying or zipping. Even more when the benchmarkers themselves say
And that is what’s being dealt with: the user experience, not the conscious design decisions made by people who “chose to favor smooth consistent performance over raw speed”. Even the sentence does not feel normal.
I have a more responsive XP on an 7-year old laptop than a Vista SP1 on a 2-year old laptop. It’s in the light of this that I said it’s impossible to find that Vista is faster than XP. Why would it have garnered such a bad reputation of slowness?
seriously nt_jerkface how can we take anything you write seriously when you insist on claiming that Vista is fast responsive and the best OS ever with the possible exception of Win 7.
I use Vista (with service packs) every day and I can say without doubt it is utterly vile. It is possible that it is 0.01 seconds faster opening office than XP. However, this doesn’t make up for the 40 plus seconds that it takes to wake up after you’ve made the mistake of going for a cup of coffee, or the horrendous print management, or the minute plus it takes to find anything on the network, or why it refuses to remember network login passwords, or the 10 plus seconds it takes to get a usable desktop, or why parts of the control panel take ages to wake up or the ….
Maybe next week I’ll make a log of all the ways Vista pissed me off.
I’ve never claimed any OS as the best ever so please don’t make stuff up.
I use XP, Vista and 7 all the time and I wouldn’t describe one as being far ahead of the others when it comes to speed. They are all plenty fast on new hardware. Various benchmarks around the web show this.
As for your office computer rant that really isn’t a fair way of judging an operating system. Wake times and network issues can be caused by a variety of factors. You should test clean installs on the same hardware. I’ve done it and while I found 7 to be better than Vista the difference is nowhere near what tech hipsters would claim.
In the real world the only complaint about Vista I heard was that it was hard to find things compared to XP, which was really an issue of familiarity. XP has scattered config menus around the system and they tried to clean that up a bit in Vista/7.
I’ve also never suggested upgrading to Vista or 7 from XP for speed reasons. My position is that XP should be ditched for the security additions in Vista/7.
OK
with XP I agree with you absolutely
Now
How am I to judge an OS other than my experience with it? In the real world – where I live – Vista is appalling and compared with any other OS I’ve used on our network, XP, Win 2000, Opensuse and Ubuntu much, slower and less responsive.
Please stop saying
and include my last post as a series of complaints, if you wish I will post next weeks things that seriously annoyed me about Vista and post them. Now if you say Vista is OK (which I doubt) on a quad core with 8 Gig of RAM the latest 3D card, etc, etc why do I need a serious gaming machine to run an OS?
By real world I am talking about my own experience, not forum comments from a self-selected group of anonymous people. Benchmarks show that there is no magical application accelerator missing in Vista and network issues could be caused by a dozens of issues, especially in an environment with that many systems. Windows sucks at mixed environments by design and it really has nothing to do with Vista specifically. I’ve seen weird issues with using Samba and multiple versions of Windows.
All I said was that I have read many comments about how Vista is more responsive than XP on a quad core machine.
I already linked to two ZDNet editors who bashed Vista before SP1 and now both agree that Vista is generally more responsive than XP. Perhaps hardware is the reason behind the mixed opinions.
However I have worked with Vista enough on a variety of hardware to know that it is not awful compared to XP or 7 on a mid spec machine. I doubt half the people who say “vista sucks” are even aware that 7 is really just Vista with a few improvements. The major kernel changes were between XP and Vista, not Vista and 7.
Well I think that says it all, real world means your own exclusive unbiased opinion.
Possibly – and it damn well should be – XP is old – only designed to work with single or dual processors. MS in 1998 – 1999, didn’t envisage multi-core processor designs. So Vista might be insignificantly faster at artificial benchmarks than XP an OS that was designed over 10 years ago and is only really capable of using half the processor – Well that is fantastic and the point remains why do I need such power to run the OS Adequately?
Why do you always have to find excuses for Vista – its not Vista’s fault its because of x,y, or z. The network thing is using Vista business and it performs poorly, I assume that it is legitimate to use the business edition in a network environment? I could have commented on numerous other Vista failings but every one you find an excuse for, 40 seconds plus to wake up thats not Vista’s fault, the print management thats HPs fault etc etc etc
I think you’ll find that most OS News readers are aware – and yes, although I don’t think that Windows 7 is that good, it is remarkable how MS has changed the basic OS only slightly and produced a reasonable, if not stunning OS in comparison with the horror show that is Vista.
Mojave effect, maybe
Neolander quipped…
Heh. I keep waiting for someone to come out with a KDE based distro or an updated XPDE distro named Mojave just to mess with Microsoft and to capitalize on those ads…
–bornagainpenguin
Someone already lured people into believing that a vista-themed ubuntu was windows Vista. But sadly, this person did not know about the Mojave story…
(PS : Let’s recall that Mojave is a marketting action from microsoft, and that they only kept positive reviews of the system as such. I’d love to see a mojave experiment made with various OSs by independent peoples…)
Vista has a bad reputation from being released too early. It had problems that needed to be fixed and it was also installed on a lot of machines that only had 512 mb of RAM. MS should have required 1 gig.
General responsiveness is a somewhat subjective matter and I’ve read mixed opinions when it comes to XP and Vista. XP is certainly faster than Vista on low end machines while I have read accounts of Vista being faster on quad core desktops.
As for your situation I would try turning off the animations in Vista if it seems slow. On some laptops Vista is more responsive with Aero turned off. The other thing with Vista/7 on laptops is that they should have 2 gigs of RAM, if not 3.
Seems like someone said previously that XP doesn’t use multicores. Would it be the explanation?
Turning these and Aero is the first thing I did on Vista. I’ve also stopped the indexer service.
Didn’t really mention it in the main comment, but this was more about the differences in updates, features, what’s running after a boot, etc. XP64 is just an XP GUI on top of the 2003 server, so the services running after boot are different.
XP64 is almost the same as Windows 2003 x64. I ran it for a couple of years, some software even detects XP64 as being Windows 2003 x64. That’s why SP3 for XP64 never came, because it didn’t came for Windows 2003 as well.
Further more, XP64 was never very popular. It lacked driver support and most people ignored it except people like me and others that wanted to run 64-bit, so you really can’t compare XP64 to Windows XP SP3 x86.
I like Windows 2003, I think it’s a great OS but if you’re going to compare XP with Vista/Windows 7 you might want to install the real XP next time and not Windows 2003 server with an XP GUI.
The part where you say: It’s already at the desktop and the harddrive is still busy for 5 minutes, I know that feeling. I still run XP and have that too but the same thing can happen to Windows 7. It just depends on the amount of programs you have installed and run at boot-time.
They share the same kernel but it’s an updated version of the XP kernel. It isn’t a rewrite so to say that XP 64 has nothing in common with XP 32 is not just a stretch but wrong.
Sure you can, by virtue of security.
I find I prefer the search but that may be because I know what I’m searching for. However icon view instead of category view in the Control Panel can be easier to get around from a point-and-click perspective, as can GodMode http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=windows+7+godmode
Yes, search is a nice addition, but it’s really only useful if you know what to search for.
However, the search field should not become the primary access method. The fact that it has, for a lot of people, just goes to show how poor the organisation of the Control Panel really is.
A well organised control panel would not need a search field. Having one would be a bonus.
MS devs really need to take some time and look at how KDE’s System Settings works and how MacOS X’ preferences folder thingy (what is it called?) works. And then come up with something similar.
The current path is a dead end.
Xp was awesome. IT may be getting a little long in the tooth, but you can’t judge an OS by other OSes at the time of tis retirement. You have to look at the available options at the time of its release.
It was replacing win 98/me, and it was 1000 times better. MS finally made a consumer version of NT, for that it should be lauded. Alternative simply were not viable at the time. Sure I tripple booted between win xp, RedHat 9, and Beos. But for friends and family there was no choice at the time. Linux was hit or miss hardware wise, and BeOs didn’t work with enough software for most people or come preloaded on their dell.
It deserves better than that vitrol, but yes its time to slip into the night is at hand. Fear not though, should you pass into the same irrelevance as XP is headed, I’ll not enumerate all of your flaws at your time of passing.
Win2K was vastly superior to XP, IMO.
XP was decent, but 2K is the second best windows ever (after 7)
Win2k was swiss cheese when it came to security. It was a complete disgrace that they shipped it without a firewall. Same goes for XP. Early XP and Win2k users were basically security beta testers. That isn’t debatable, you can go back and look at all the exploits those systems had. Win2k servers were a joke compared to Linux then.
It wasn’t until XP SP2 that they got serious when it comes to security.
Win 2K didn’t have any kind of anti-aliasing (not standard, not cleartype). It looks horrible on an LCD screen. That’s a pretty big shortcoming for a desktop OS.
What’s puzzling is that I didn’t know that and honestly did not spot the difference on the Win2K PC which I use at work ^^’
I can easily spot the difference when I turn the antialiasing off and then back on here, and prefer the look with slight antialiasing, but it looks like when blind-testing, it makes only little difference.
Ok, I guess I should have pre-empted this whole Win2k rebuttal in my first post. Win 2k didn’t come pre-installed on the computers at best buy. Win Me did. Win Xp did. Win 2k was for businesses where it replaced the capable win nt 4.0. XP was when they merged the business oriented NT workstation and the home oriented win 9x product lines. So Xp is great in my mind for finally achieving that. I actually paid for my parents to upgrade to Xp, as it resulted in less calls to me. And it was worth every dime.
Migration costs. Unless you want minimal functionality out of a “home” version, you’ll be paying a noticeable license fee to upgrade past winXP. Another is familiarity. While techs are generally ready to exploit and familiarize with a new desktop (and, even then it’s surprising how many are not), regular user are not general adventurous.
Win7 may be awsome sauce with chocolate sprinkles but in many cases, it will only replace winXP as fast as new machines are purchased pre-installed unless the consumer is very adventurous or the org is deep pockets.
I don’t know if it is a pile of junk, I don’t think so.
After ME it felt great!
But it is *old*, I appreciate that, and I am not in favour of us using old stuff forever, whatever it might be.
However people keep using it wherever I go, even very professional people.
First off, there was no SP3 for WinXP 64bit so the fact there were a lot of updates doesn’t surprise me.
However I install XP quite often at my job. After installing XP with SP3, then installing WMP 11, and IE8 there are about 74 updates. Then all the .Net stuff and it’s updates.
The update process hasn’t been fixed though in Vista or Win7. from my experience, if an update requires a reboot in Vista or Win7 it will actually take up more time for me to get back to the desktop than XP.
I’ve never upgraded windows an any box that I’ve ever bought or put together – ever. I buy the most appropriate version of Windows when I put the box together (generally the newest OS) and leave it at that. When I put together a new box, I put the newer version on that. But upgrade? Never have, never will. It costs money and really isn’t worth it.
At this point, I think that it makes perfect sense that new boxes have Windows 7 on them. XP is old and doesn’t belong on new boxes without a really good reason. IIRC, it doesn’t even support multiple cores on a CPU, which in this day and age is a huge loss. Newer versions of Windows have definite advantages over XP, and I see no real reason to not put Windows 7 on new boxes in most cases, so really, new machines should have Windows 7, not XP.
However, that doesn’t mean that there’s any real reason to upgrade older computers. XP may be old, but it works. This is especially true of corporate environments where stability and uniformity are huge gains. The sheer cost of upgrading a company’s worth of computers isn’t exactly pleasant either, so I find it totally understandable and reasonably that the corporate folks would continue to use XP.
I see no compelling reason to upgrade Windows on an older box, but I definitely agree that new boxes should generally have the newest version of Windows on them.
XP most certainly uses multiple cores. However, it doesn’t differentiate between separate CPUs, separate cores on a CPU, and hyperthreading “cores” on a CPU. Thus, it’s process/thread scheduling is sub-optimal (it treats them all the same). And, I believe there’s a 2 core max to XP Pro.
Agreed. XP’s time has passed. It’s just too bad that 7 isn’t a perfect upgrade for it.
Agreed. At least until security fixes are no longer developed for it.
Windows XP Home edition is limited to 2 cores, physical or logical; Windows XP Pro is limited to 8 core.
Unless that older box came with Vista perhaps?
Windows supports multiple cores per CPU, but the number is limited in both legal and technical ways.
Legal limit is the one imposed by the EULA and enforced by windows itself.
The other is the technical limit that says that Windows XP might not work as efficiently with Quad – or – more – Core CPUs. The makers might not have foreseen this pace of doubling the cores almost each year
I have to disagree with Thom here, XP has never been that horrible experience to me, to the point that dragging windows leads to lags or artifacts on the screen.
I bought two Asus EeePC 1001HA netbooks and brought them back to Africa in April. I was amazed at the speed and responsiveness of apps. Maybe because of the hardware being so recent.
I’m also using XP on a September 2003 Acer laptop, single core with an AMD Athlon 3000 (796Mhz) and 512 MB, that is constantly on for tor, BOINC, Opera Unite applications and backup. Less impressive but meets my needs when it comes to these tasks, browsing and playing (very?) old games in DosBox.
All three computers run XP SP3. Mine boots in 30 seconds on average, despite all my usual programs being installed, with some of them launched at startup. That’s 1/6th of the time Vista takes to boot on my other laptop, a 2Ghz Core2 Duo with 2MB of RAM. That’s 6 or 7 seconds more than Ubuntu 10.04 on the same old system. I’ve experienced more crashes on a few days of Ubuntu + KDE than with XP (exactly 1) in 6 weeks.
True, XP is unwieldy: I can’t use WPA on the built-in wifi a/b card unless I switch to the admin account and launch the Realtek wifi utility first. Options are buried in arcane places, etc. It has its flaws, but much less than Vista. If I want to switch from normal account to admin, I need less than 2 seconds to get the login screen on XP. I’ve never, ever, had less than 20 seconds on Vista for that same procedure.
But it’s not the turtle you are describing. And, despite using Snow Leopard and Ubuntu, I’ve never thought of the experience as that bad.
The comparison with Ubuntu is not fair if it’s 10.04. Comparing it with 7 is not either: 8 years, a debacle and probably a “prise de conscience” in between. Vista is a more suitable contender in a comparison. And in this match, the experience on XP is way better than on Vista.
I guess different people with different computing cultures get different impressions. But I disagree.
Microsoft should have killed Vista. Doesn’t even have the puppy eyes. Never reached half the market share of XP. Will Windows 7 ever reach that market share?
I forgot: the speed of apps has more to do with the apps than with the OS. Anyone with Visual Studio 2008 and OpenOffice should do a little experiment.
I might not make myself popular around here with this, but thank god, it’s about time that pile of junk is taken behind the shed.
Finally somebody says the things which should have been said four years ago. So I thank you for your courage.
Wasn’t an option four years ago, there wasn’t a new version of Windows yet… and when we got one, the pile of crap they put out was called Vista. Vista was the reason XP stuck around as long as it did, and of course Microsoft would have never killed off XP before Vista in favor of an os they didn’t create. As much as it should’ve been done years ago, they just couldn’t have done it. There was nothing to fill the void.
The problem with Vista was that it was released too early.
It was fixed by SP1 but everyone had bought into the meme that “Vista sucks” without actually looking at benchmarks. Windows 7 is mostly Vista with some additional window dressings and benchmarks show this as well. It’s mostly a PR release.
I have machines with XP, Vista and 7. People that think 7 is a massive improvement over Vista either have little experience with either or don’t spend enough time reading articles that contain objective analysis.
Hey, I can read all the objective benchmarks I like, but it didn’t make my Vista sp1 installation perform any faster. Hardware configs differ, drivers differ, there are hundreds of different variables that can affect performance. Vista was dog slow on my hardware, 7 performs very well on the same machine. Next to that, I could give a rat’s ass what the benchmarks say Vista *should have done*.
I run XP in a VM, it installed quickly with a single reboot, and even in a VM windows drag without tearing. It’s fast and responsive, and it does the job.
I only run Windows in VMs. A similar software loaded 7 is much more responsive, starts faster and in general feels better than XP in a VM on the exact same hardware. I can’t argue with that. I bet the experience would be similar on real hardware. Don’t get me wrong, I despise Windows and it took some convincing to instal it in a VM session I tell you but glad I did. No more XP VMs here. RIP.
Microsoft always had a hard time killing over previous versions of Windows. I remember when people were holding onto Windows 98 with dear life. Windows XP will die off once it stops being a good user eXPerience.
If that were true, it would’ve died off in favor of something else several years ago. XP will die off once the corporate intranet in-house apps don’t rely on it, and when users are brave enough to leave their comfort zone. It’s not so much that XP provides a good experience, it provides a familiar experience, and familiarity will win over awesomeness in the minds of many. Vista, and now 7, were a departure from the traditional Windows experience. XP, despite its eye candy and newer NT-based underpinnings, still behaved exactly like 9x as did 2000 before it.
So you are saying Windows XP doesn’t provide a good user experience to its users? They cannot run the programs they want to run? They cannot operate the hardware they want to operate? To many users, the interface being familiar and able to use the software/hardware they want to use is a good user experience. Once a user finds out that Windows XP cannot operate a new piece of software/hardware they want to use, will migrate to a new version.
Edited 2010-06-12 04:21 UTC
The experience is adequate but the security is not.
True, and that is going to take a while since for most Windows software it would still be cost effective to build for XP even it only had 10% share. The cost of maintaining backwards compatibility is very low which will ensure plenty of new software for XP users.
That’s why I was glad to see MS announce IE9 for Vista/7 only since most software companies can’t afford to ignore XP.
1/Network Center
2/Mobility Center and power settings
3/Control Panel, globally.
4/Windows Explorer
5/Distracting look with overdone effects
6/UAC
7/The boot times and update issues have been worsened.
Win7 is Vista’s successor, and Microsoft’s teams obviously has done their best to make Vista more usable on a daily basis (at the cost of even more overdone theming). But it remains Vista’s horrible UI, globally…
Edited 2010-06-12 05:18 UTC
Security features in Vista/7 like UAC, DEP, ASLR, and registry protection make life far more difficult for malware creators. There are long lists of exploits that were stopped by one or more of these technologies but had no problem attacking XP.
The situation is made worse by all the old XP machines with updates off or have an older browser installed.
The other problem with XP is that it holds back developers in areas like DirectX 10 and WPF/Aero rendering.
XP was great compared to 98 but 7 is much better. This is great news that they are phasing out XP. All you HTML5 advocates should be happy since XP users tend to stick with IE and IE9 is Vista/7 only.
This comes from the same guy that lauded Vista as the greatest thing since sliced bread..
Take Vista and Win7 with you when you do, cause we need some new lamps around here!
From the perspective of this home user, XP was (and still is) pretty good. Although it should have come bundled with a software firewall and an antivirus app from the get-go. And if Microsoft were really serious about security, they wouldn’t have disabled Windows Update for users of pirated copies.
Once you’ve gotten an OS set up the way you want it, know its ins and outs, and have been using it for years, it’s hard to leave it behind. Fortunately, XP will run just fine on my new Linux box full screen in a VM, as others have mentioned. (Anyone have any experience using VMware Converter?)
What I find ridiculous is that I work for a large state agency (that will remain nameless) that’s standardized on XP Pro, IE 6, and MS Office 2003. I guess they’ve written so many custom document creation macros for Word and so many custom web apps for IE 6 that they don’t want to fix something that they don’t think is broken. (And then there’s the budget deficit…)
Since they just moved us worker bees from Dell pizza boxes with P4s and 512MB of RAM to Dells with quad-core CPUs and 2GB of RAM, they may actually be thinking of upgrading.
Edit: Should read, “Office XP/2002” rather than “Office 2003”.
Everything has its pros and cons.
XP has served us well a lot of us for a very long time. And served us well enough since XP SP2. Stable, an enormous choice of applications and devices.
Yea, it has its shortcomings, like all software. Security could be better,
Most of its design decisions were made for hardware more than 10 years ago. A time when linux was very immature ….
So its dated. Yea, lets move on to newer things. Put XP in a museum, next to DOS 6,2, Windows 98SE and do not compare it to the latest and greatest.
This article is so biased and crappy argumented, religious of nature, a waste of my time. An article unworthy of you Thom.
I’ve been using XP Pro since 2002, before it even had a working integrated firewall. But I’ve never had any sort of security issues with it at all. As far as crash is concerned, nothing bad has caught my eyes thus far. Even when it crashed, it didn’t bring the entire OS to complete halt.
What I like from XP is its simplicity. I can quickly find options somewhere in Control Panel, unlike Vista/7. I know I’ll have to move on to a later, more up-to-date version of Windows at some point, but I don’t think Win7 will be it. Speaking of which, my next upgrade is due in 2012 so XP might be the last Windows I ever use on my desktop.
So no Thom, XP is not a pile of junk. You must be an idiot to actually have unpleasant experience with XP — and yes, I do run Win 7 on my VAIO, because Sony refused to provide XP-compatible drivers for it.
Edited 2010-06-12 11:10 UTC
you make it seem as if sony are being a bunch of scumbags for not supporting a crufty 10 year old operating system that has significant differences in driver models. I bet that your vaio didn’t even come with xp on it
XP 64bit was never good to start with, there was a big lack for drivers and the ones that existed were not that good.
XP 32bit crashing was mostly due to bad hardware and bad drivers (mostly unsigned drivers pertaining to graphics cards and less common hardware). Then there is the sh*tload of third party programs used to “optimize” Windows, certainly those can’t hurt stability.
On W7 being more stable than XP I don’t argue, it’s been 10 years after all, however you need really to look at W7 with thick glasses to say it is faster than XP, it’s just that W7 is better at hiding all the bloat and disk access. Try both in a virtual machine and then you can see which OS trashes the hard disk more.
Sure W7 is more refined but requiring an order of magnitude more of hard disk space than XP just for the install is overkill, even more when an install of any linux distro with a lot more software will use _less_ disk space than W7, who cares about the eye candy when it gets in the way of what you really want to do.
I have to agree, It’s time to put windows xp out to pasture, but I wonder just how long microsoft will keep the activation servers for XP online. I remember reading somewhere that when they got ready to take XP behind the shed they would release a patch that permanently turns off the activation feature.
I recall when 98SE was finally put out to pasture, Microsoft mailed out a CD with all of the final patches and upgrades. Maybe they’ll do something like that for XP.
I’m an XP user, and built a new XP machine as recently as January. Immediately after though I did a Windows 7 build and was quite impressed. XP is great, but if doing a new machine tomorrow it’d be with 7.
XP is a pile of junk these days compared with Win 7 and Mac OS X.
I installed it back a few months ago for my girl and the updates took so long I wanted to die.
XP.Destroy();
Edited 2010-06-12 20:17 UTC
In regard to updating an XP install, starting off with an integrated update pack makes things bearable: http://www.ryanvm.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=25
Full ack…
Man, I have to use it for development at my job at a bank and you can’t really install anything on these machines. So you pretty much have to live with “vanilla” XP, which is horrible. The taskbar I hate the most. You can’t even rearrange the windows on it. WTF??? Or no desktop search integrated. Those are serious productivity killers!
Can’t wait for 2014 when XP will have to disappear from business IT desktops as well because MS stops delivering security updates. XP isn’t even a dinosaur, it’s an amoeba 😉
I fail to see where Windows 7 is better then XP. Sure, it has improved visually a bit, so you don’t want to rip your eyeballs out anymore but hey, Windows XP was without a doubt the ugliest OS since the invention of VGA so that is hardly an accomplishment. Now it looks like a Winamp skin and for a second you might even think it is pretty, but think about what pretty should mean for an OS.
IMHO an OS should have an look that is neutral enough not to look displaced in most places. Windows 7 doesn’t look displaced on an gamers LAN party, but that about covers it. I can’t help but stare if I see it in an office, i can’t help to stare if I see it in a TV show (it is almost comical to see it in 24) I can’t help staring if I see it in an hospital.
I second every dot and comma…
Windows 7 eye candy? That’s right!
But it just happens I’m a grown up and stopped eating candy 20 years ago…
Since XP its all been gay rainbow coloured…
Give me something elegant, its 2010 already.
There is always the bold striking colors of black, white, and blue in DOS for ya!
I keep running it in Boot Camp on my Alu MacBook, because of games. Titles from some years ago run great on this machine, but they often have compatibility issues on Seven. On the other hand, newer games will choke on this machine’s GPU.
I installed Windows XP 64-bit yesterday too. Installation was easy and fast (yes, I needed to integrated some drivers before, but it was the same with vista and windows 7), 85 updates downloaded and installed in one go (one reboot). Yes, I needed one more restart because of drivers (I don’t remember if windows 7 requires that still). Windows 7 downloads drivers automatically but Windows XP recognized everything except video and printer too (still if you want the latest drivers you need to download them in both OSes). It was much more responsive than Windows 7 on that computer (via nano 1.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, radeon 4650, so it is modest but modern configuration). And I bet it will be much more stable (it is the reason why I reinstalled. Windows 7 just was quite unstable with regular blue screens and freezes. it might be drivers fault but user doesn’t care). So, it was strange to read this article… I didn’t like Windows XP too but it matured by the time. What is more, Windows XP 64-bit I liked from the start because it showed very stable and very good performance from my experience (I have a computer which works several years with it and I changed almost everything in it several times without any reinstall). Windows 7 (and especially Windows Vista) experience unfortunately wasn’t that good. Yes, windows 7 is better on fast multicore computers but it is still not very suitable for netbook, nettop style and some older computers in my opinion.
On initially reading your article, I did feel it was written with bias, and was immediately puzzled by your choice to use the problematic 64bit rather than the more common 32bit XP, to compare against W7.
I then read the comments, and see that readers before me also noticed the bias, and noted at least one flaw in your argument, was as a result in your choosing XP64bit, which had no SP3 – hence lengthy patch updates. As you write as a professional, that should not have ‘baffled’ you at all. You state speedwise, W7 blows XP away. For those on a budget owning netbooks or older desktops, I recall reading in an article last Nov/Dec, XP & 7 were close on speed for netbook users. In googling now for that comparison, can’t find it, but come across 2 admittedly ‘early’ comparisons: the notebookcheck,net of 8/7/09, legitreviews.com of 28/7/09. I see the intro to the Notebookcheck comparison of XP/Vista/7 states “Why have we used the 32bit version of XP? Windows XP 64bit is on the one hand scarcely distributed and in addition not as well-engineered as XP [SP3] 32bit” – which supports my comment above. A more timely comparison on a top-end desktop is testfreaks.com 15/9/09 which puts XP slightly faster than 7 using industry standard benchmarks. From these it would appear your assertion is wrong.
When buying a new pc, W7 yes, but your article misses the point that for probably the majority of private owners, the cost of MS forcing them to pay for replacing their OS as result of ‘killing XP’ (I assume by ending security fixes), would add an unwanted big percentage to the cost of their pc. (I think MS should issue an SP4 at end of support) I have read osnews.com for over a year, but registered just now as I felt this article lacked objectivity and balance. I try to be selective as to which tech sites to monitor and seek objectivity not bias, so hope this article is an isolated abberation.