Exactly ten years ago, on April 8, 2014, Microsoft released the final security patch for Windows XP. The day marked the end of the road for one of the most iconic Windows versions ever released.
↫ Taras Buria at Neowin
I never liked Windows XP. Compared to the operating systems I was using at the time – BeOS, Mandrake Linux 8.x – Windows XP felt kind of like a bad joke I wasn’t in on. It looked ridiculous, didn’t seem to offer anything substantial, and it didn’t take long for major security incidents related to Windows XP to start dominating the news. It wasn’t until several service packs had been released that Windows XP came into its own, but by that point, I had already found a much better alternative for my Windows needs at the time. I’m of course talking about Windows Server 2003, the better Windows than Windows XP.
Today though, I do have an odd fondness for Windows XP, as I grow older and XP has become something from my teenage years. The look and feel of Windows XP – the classic theme, not that horrendous Fisher Price nonsense – the sound set, the wallpaper of course – has become iconic, warts and all, and whole generations of people will feel instant feelings as soon as they see Bliss or hear that iconic startup sound.
Windows XP with a few service packs now belongs to the small group of Windows releases that I would call the peak of the platform, together with Windows 95 and Windows 7 (and perhaps Server 2003, but that’s more of a personal thing and not a consumer operating system). Everything else has not exactly been great or even aged well, and I doubt Windows 10 and 11 will suddenly get good, either.
Most of my usage of XP was with “XP 64bit Edition” which is actually Server 2003 x64 with the Fisher Price theme and joystick support.
I’m currently working on making a XP 64bit retro-pc out of the fastest supported hardware I have laying around:
AMD FX-8350
16GB DDR3
dual GTS 450 in SLI
250GB SATA SSD and 2TB SATA HDD (Yes, I know XP doesn’t natively support SATA, I have F6 drivers and a USB floppy)
the 980Ti is the fastest graphics chip for gaming i have seen for the XP x64 machines. And SATA and AHCI is natively supported in XP x64 from the first release. You might still need drivers for your particular chipset though. And if you do not want to go the Xeon route you could get a Haswell 4790k instead, which would be faster paired with 32gb ram and a Asus z97-a which has all drivers available for full support of every single device on the board.
The chosen parts are selected from my junk bin and e-waste I have on hand, not buying anything for this. I might bump the RAM to 32GB or swap the CPU to a Phenom II 1090T if XP doesn’t like the FX-8350. Using the GTS 450s just because I have 2 identical ones.
Mostly interested in using it for games from the pre-Vista era (’96 to 2006 specifically).
Same, switched my home PC to XP x64 as soon as I got a 64-bit CPU (Phenom II).
And I did the same at work when Intel also switched to AMD64.
Sadly, the XP default theme and overall GUI really felt like it was “Windows for kids”, and I spent hours trying to make it look less silly/ugly.
Finally moved on to Windows 7 when the memory management problems in XP64/WS2003 became too hard to deal with.
With a SSD, be careful about partition misalignment problems, your best option is probably to partition your disk with a more modern OS, then only install XP x64.
Windows peaked with Win2k. Everything was consistent in Control Panel. Then XP came and started hiding Control Panel items and it’s just been a mess of multiple places and user interfaces to find standard system settings ever since then.
I was happy with the preview Whistler themes, but then the atrocity that is the luna theme made the final cut instead. The only real theme from that style that I liked was the Royale/Media Center edition.
Whistler aged pretty well and would make a good interface even today.
Windows 2000 was peak Windows for me too – it just felt very solid for the time, unlike the versions I’d used previously (3.11, 95 and 98).
Same. Just rock solid. I used it on my Vaio T1XP in pref to XP. I had it for *years* on my Athlon 500 and did a lot of pro-audio type stuff and a ton of coding including WAMP stack, C, C++ and even Silverlight (yeah, you had to hack it in there but it worked). Bomb proof and very easy to use.
I have a windows XP x64 machine with 24 cores/48 threads 64gb ram and a geforce 980ti in my rack. But i dual boot it with Haiku, so the XP side gets a lot less run-time as i have other machines that is much more powerful for my other tasks.
Thom,
Everything you are describing about nostalgia for Windows XP is what I feel for Windows 95, which makes sense given I was 18 years old when 95 was released. I always hated XP, I stuck with Windows 2000 for as long as I could (when I wasn’t running BeOS) and then, like you, switched to Server 2003 tweaked for desktop use.
Windows 7 was the game changer, it made Windows a pleasure to use again instead of a major headache. It wasn’t perfect, but there’s a reason it held on for as long as it did. Windows 10 (via LTSC) has just now, at the end of its retail life, reached a point where it’s almost as good as 7 was. Windows 11 is still dogshit compared to any previous version except ME.
I stuck with 2K until all the dev tools broke then jumped ship to Mac/OSX Lion. The first rule of WinME is… never mention WinME.
Can you clarify which dev tools broke? Obviously 2000 didn’t support newer tools, but I don’t remember any regressing later.
The main reason I don’t use 2000 more today is Git for Windows doesn’t appear to have ever supported it. XP can run up to 2.10, which is perfectly useful and capable.
Not really as it was a long time back! I do remember hacking Silverlight to run then .NET releases started to dry up. I gave up and went *NIX.
Windows 2000 was amazing.
I, for one, Loved windows XP. yes I had BeOs, various Linuxes, maybe QNX as well. It wasn’t my preferred choice of operating system by any means. But at work we were required to use Windows. Moving from windows 98 to it, was an amazing productivity boost due to it not crashing every other hour. My parents, siblings and family members stopped bugging me to fix their janked up win 9x boxes every other week. Eventually the security issues would rear their ugly head and I’d be back supporting all of them. But it was still much less frequent than the crashing of 9x. In college I helped various friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, fix their horribly broken windows installs as they cried in stress as their Mid term paper and their grade hung in the balance. I have a lot of scars with win 9x, that simply started to vanish by getting people to win xp.
Windows 2000 for me, please.
Drunkula,
I notice that there are many of us who liked win2k. Microsoft’s designers were still putting a lot of work into promoting UI best practices and frankly they were leading by example here. Controls were standardized, easy to use & see, window borders were much clearer. Over subsequent windows operating systems microsoft started promoting GUI differentiation. But there was always “classic mode” to bring back the win2k theme, so I was never that bothered with the new GUIs. That is until they butchered absolutely everything with windows 8/metro. That was such a usability dumpster fire, not only was it jarring, but they threw away nearly all context clues and you couldn’t even tell what was supposed to be a button. I’m sure there were employees who cared about usability, clarity, visual standards and best practices, but obviously their roles got demoted at microsoft in favor of artistic designers with no functional UI experience.
It is funny. I never liked Windows XP when it was around. Like many here, I loved Windows 2000 and used it until Firefox stopped supporting it ( in 2012 or so ). I moved straight to Windows 7 and stayed there until 10.
In particular, I disliked the look. And yet, the Linux machine that I am typing on now has been crafted to look practically pixel for pixel like Windows XP using an XFCE mod called WinXP-tc.
https://github.com/rozniak/xfce-winxp-tc
Better title: Ten years ago, Windows XP received Microsoft’s final update
https://msfn.org/board/topic/184774-my-windows-xp-os-addons-and-update-pack-2023/
EDIT: forgot the XP section…
https://msfn.org/board/forum/34-windows-xp/
Windows XP is the *true* granddaddy of modern Windows. You need to know from which users were switching to XP: from Windows 9x & Me. XP was the first consumer version of NT, which gave incredible bump in terms of system stability & robustness, especially in the early Web era. Cost for that were higher system requirements (XP truly required >=128 MB of RAM back when 64MB was hi-end barely 2 years prior) and slightly lower compatibility (which were great anyway, mainly because MS planned for this 9x -> NT transition for almost a decade). It was considered quite a big cons in the early XP era, but were quickly forgotten when computers became way faster and old DOS stuff irrelevant.
I sticked to Windows 98 waay too long, even when having hardware that would run XP rather well. I knew the opinion about it of being slower & incompatible. But after I first went online at my home (~2003) – it quickly became obvious that Windows 9x was completely unfit for that: all that stuff that I wanted to install, caused system to be quickly unstable & internally inconsistent which then required reinstalling the system and so on. XP was actual blessing & new era for Windows users. After that I reinstalled OS only if I had to, with many years on the same XP installation.
QEMU virtio Windows XP virtual machines are really fast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avo2YtcJjlY