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Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP
david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."
how people are willing to put up with all the bugs that Windows has, and all the restrictions it is now tacking on.
MS will require all PC software & games be XP compatible whether the consumers want it or not, and people will just obey.
Whatever happened to consumers dictating how the market changes?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Windows 98 fixed problems with Win95, and was the last version to support DOS. Seeing as I built a massive DOS library in C/C++, I'm ticked I can't keep coding in my DOS mode. If I switch to coding under WINXP, will they obfuscate that too, so my code library will be lost again. I'm just at a loss because I have problems running DOS emulators too.
God spoke to me.
First, remember that the "markedly better" comment references what HOME users were using before, Windows ME. For businesses, XP isn't much better (or is much worse).
But let's look at what OS X has done in the past 5 years (I only converted early last year). OS X has hardware accelerated it's GUI. It has gained Spotlight and Exposé, probably the two best inventions in improving computer use in the last 5 years. It has had little touches like spring-loaded folders. It manages to get basic window use right.
The fact that Apple did the first 3 things (OpenGL GUI, Spotlight, Expose) which MS sat around (really: spent all their time on patches) is just sad. MS has improved things (the wireless handling was abysmal compared to today's XP), but not others. I took a job last month that has me using a Windows box for the first time in a year and the result of having to use it for long periods is jarring.
Let's ignore the lack of Spotlight (which I love). Let's focus on something simple. Something that was in Windows 95. Something that was in Windows 3.1. Something that was there before that (don't know which version exactly, probably 1.0). Let's talk about the Z-ordering of windows.
At least once a day I seem to run into this. Let us consider 3 windows among about 10. We'll use FireFox, Outlook, and Calculator. Let's say those windows are all maximized (as are all others) except for Calculator. Calculator has been buried to the very bottom of the windows (or near). Firefox is on top, with Outlook below. Now click on the taskbar button for Calculator. What happens?
What SHOULD happen is you see Firefox with Calculator on top. That is what happens most of the time. But some times, for some random reason I can't find, doing this will bring Outlook to the front window behind Calculator, so you see those two on your desktop (Calculator on top). You can often repeat this 3 or 4 times before Windows "gets it" and things are put correct. By this I mean you can switch back to Firefox (which works), then click for Calculator and have it happen again.
I have NO IDEA how this happens or why, but how hard is it to keep a Z ranking of the windows I have?
I won't even touch on how hard it is to manage 10 windows with your only tools being the taskbar and Alt-Tab. Exposé is so intuitive and simple. From the screenshots I've seen (I haven't looked hard) Vista only seems to have a graphical version of the current Alt-Tab.
There are no spring-loaded folders (terribly handy for moving stuff around).
Windows DOES have a Cut command in Explorer, something that still boggles my mind about the Mac (how can Finder not have a Cut?)
Windows hasn't really improved at all (other than in security) since 1999 (when Windows 2k was released). Look at the changes OS X has made from 10.0 to 10.4. I'm not even including the cool stuff that's coming in Tiger. OS X even gets faster.
I'm glad to be off Windows for my personal use. And since my job is all Java and HTML, I'm going to ask for a Mac when my current Dell is no longer powerful enough. I think Exposé alone will vastly improve my productivity.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The other feature Redmond needs to work on: "not listening to a single damn thing Adobe Reader says".
Nothing like strolling into the office in the morning and finding your computer still at the shutdown screen... and what is it holding it open, pray tell? Not the IDE. Not the source control client. Not the database browser. Nope. Adobe Reader is sitting there smugly asking "are you sure you want me to shut down?" holding up the whole system from logging off. FFS, it's VIEWING TEXT - it can shutdown when I damn well ask it to.
Having used FreeBSD, Linux, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 2K3 Standard, my opinion is this:
FreeBSD for servers, Windows XP Pro for the desktop.
It works very well for me - in fact, well enough that I'm considering trying out Vista when they release that. Part of the reason it works so well for me, is that instead of being locked in to IE, OE, and Office, I have opted instead to use Firefox, Thunderbird+Lightning, OpenOffice, and other OSS tools (like Eclipse). Theoretically, I could swap out Windows XP Pro and barely even notice the difference.
Why don't I? Because I don't feel like it just yet. It's comfortable.
I expect the majority of the replies to this will be along the lines of "zomg wind0ze sux, linux is teh pwn", which seems to be rather offtopic, considering the article is about windows, but so it goes.
This article, though, while balanced, seems to be pushing a bit towards tcpa at the end, which is a bit frightening. I don't believe any OS manufacturer should have the right to dictate the software that is written for the OS, or how much power it can have. The point of an OS is to act as an interface between other programs and the hardware, not to act as a babysitter for users who don't know what they are running. Essentially, an OS should be clean, simple, and secure; all this excess garbage thrown in really seems to be distracting developers from this point. Everything else, like visuals, media players, web browsers, what-have-you, can be added later on and doesn't need to be nor should it be part of the operating system. The fact that the author seems to be suggesting that system admins should not have absolute power over what happens on the machine seems rediculous.
Yeah - until you try to install something like Adobe Premiere Pro on Win2K - no go - AVID NLE apps are the same way - the only one that seems to play nice with Win2K is SONY Vegas - but then you can't acquire HD content from the latest HD prosumer camcorders. I use my computer day in and out creating multimedia content, WINXP has given me the perfect platform to do that - and now I run x64 XP pro - and with 4GB of RAM - all of it being seen, my apps run much better. If there was a serious NLE app for Linux, I would dump Windows in a heartbeat.
Why can't someone develop a commercially available NLE that kicks A$$ on Linux - screw the OSS stuff - gimme a stable and viable NLE alternative and I would happily pay for it. If FCP can be ported to Intel MAC, surely someone can port their NLE App to Linux - they would have the total market - port it to run on Ubuntu and all would be right in this world as far as I'm concerned.
Slashdot posted to a story the other day that has a lot to do with MS woes. That was the story about MS not forcing their own employees to run as non-admins.
The home version actually seems to do this a little better then the Professional edition. My parents and my siblings login to their computer with their own accounts and all as non-admins. Of course they don't lock down admin, so they all install all kinds of stuff.
Vista seems to go a long way in stopping unwanted stuff from installing, but with such a mainstream system does is it really going to help? If a user has to switch to admin to install that screensaver that also is spyware does that really help? Does Ms have to be held accountable for Spyware that is purposely installed on a machine. If it comes in through IE 6...sure it is MSs fault.
Linux installers are applauded by most, but I wonder what will happen to them in the mainstream. Commercial software will probably still install with stand-alone installers if Linux where to take off. Linux ( and others ) has standards that adhered to via open source packages, but would another company really put up with it. So a user in Linux goes to run an executable off a web page...they get an error from it saying please be in root mode. If they login as root would Linux do anything to stop them from overwriting system config files? Would we blame the problem on Linux or the author?
The author seems to be misplacing the blame. MS has to be the app cops? I guess in this day and age yes...5 years ago...not so much.
In the long run I think all OS's need to force application to install in virtual file systems. When I go to install a major app I wish that it would just copy a big file and "mount" it to the machine. You wouldn't even need to be in root to do it if done via an API call. The app would be registered with the OS and given a small amount of hardrive space to write it's config files to that only it would have access to. When it goes to save data files for the user the OS would ask the user if it was alright for it to. We can run entire OSs in a VMWare like system, why not applications themselves.
Of course lots of apps, especially in OS use pipes and heavily rely on other systems and libraries. Back in the day when sharing a DLL was needed to save HD space it was a good idea...is it now. Should we require all the apps to include their libraries? This would make code injects a lot harder as well....sorry botters.
The fundamental idea of an App installing needs to be re-engineered. Some OSs do a better job then others, but they all fundamentally invovled the installer coping files around, which will always lead to the types of problems we are seeing.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's found that drivers can crash Linux perfectly well, too.
I've been playing around since the good ol' days of DOS and mashing F8 to play with drivers... But XP is by far the best operating system I've used. I've installed Kubuntu and Ubuntu, but Linux is incredibly annoying, and far to fiddly. I've never actually had a problem with Windows itself, only dodgy hardware. TBQH Linux isn't worth the trouble when XP works, and works well.
I'd agree with this in the sense that bad drivers OR bad hardware are the primary source for the BSOD. I remember when I would suffer a BSOD fairly predictably in Battlefield 2, and also sometimes at a certain point during a reinstall of XP. Turns out my video card was dying (a suspicion proved when it eventually exploded); a new card was obtained and the BSODs simply disappeared.
I tried running things like Doom 3/Quake 4 in Linux with the same card before it exploded, and instead of a BSOD which Linux prides itself on not having... the games simply froze up requiring a hard reset. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be better than a BSOD, but at least a BSOD provides some information (even if it's often unintelligible).
They did. It's called WoW (Windows on Windows). That's how NT runs old Win16 apps.
Note, however, that there is much old software Windows NT will *never* support, because of the way it expects to access the hardware and OS internals.
I also think it's worth mentioning that they would never do this with Linux; if they did (and I'm not saying they will) they would use one of the BSDs.
Neither Linux, nor any of the BSDs, would provide any technological advantage. At best, they'd be a step sideways. That's the single biggest reason Microsoft would never use them as a base.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I have had huge success with Windows XP Pro in installation, management, troubleshooting, and day-to-day operation. If you have installed Windows XP regularly enough to really understand its quirks, shortcomings, and nuances, the reality is that you can have a viable, stable system up and running in literally minutes. Create an unattended install disk, and on a newer PC, you can be online and productive in a very short time.
It's so easy to disparage Windows XP and Microsoft, but compared to its predecessors, Windows XP Pro really has matured into a decent product. The other night, I helped troubleshoot one of my wife's work computers running Windows 98, and I was frustrated by the lack or "mispalcement" of utilities, settings, and system tools that are always and predictably available in Windows XP Pro.
This is certainly not to say that it is without faults, security and vulnerability being the biggest issue. Microsoft should forget about the whiz-bang Vista approach, and re-write Windows XP Pro from the ground up. THAT would sell.
My only real complaint with Microsoft and Windows XP Pro is that they have never provided cost-effective licensing for home users to legally maintain multiple computers. WIndows XP Pro is really the way to go, but at its original $300+ price, it was far out of the reach of most home users. I bit the bullet and purchased multiple copies, but if Microsoft had provided a more cost-friendly option, I would have promoted it and recommended it much much more.
It was basically a derivative of VMS 5 called MICA; for a while, NT and MICA were patch-compatible; Microsoft hired many of the key Digital people (there was even a lawsuit about this) & still couldn't make it anywhere near as tough or secure as VMS routinely was.
So... even with such a blatant head-start, Microsoft couldn't make it anything but rattley.
No change there in decades.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I believe it's actually a design decision on the part of Apple. The traditional way to move or copy files on a Mac has always been to use the mouse to drag them. This isn't hard at all when you have a decent sized screen and you can simply stagger the source and destination windows then drag from one to the other.
It is interesting though because dragging files is really something someone needs to be shown. My experience has been that people don't just pick it up without at least some minor prompting. Once you show someone on a Mac they seem to understand it quickly. However, I've had a hell of a time showing how to do it on Windows PCs. It just seems that people can't get their mind out of the one maximized window mindset and it's rather hard to drag from one maximized thing to another. Of course, you can drag through the task bar but that's another learned behavior, one that doesn't make that much sense compared with a normal drag.
This, I think, is one of the major shortcomings of Windows. Microsoft has basically crippled the UI to the point where it's nearly impossible to run more than a few apps with more than a few windows open. Unfortunately, it seems that Vista doesn't really fix this shortcoming. They have a cool looking alt-tab replacement but it's just that, cool looking.
It would be very hard for Microsoft to move to the Mac model here. Part of the Mac model is that the menubar switches with the app you're using and that all the toolbars and pallets disappear when the app is not active and switch when you switch which document you're working on within an app. Contrast this with the Microsoft style of putting giant sidebars on all four sides of the document area within the window. It makes the windows too big to be sized anything other than maximized on many screens.
Of course, some people have a preference for the Windows way. They say it "looks cleaner" because they only see what they're working on. Maybe some people really get distracted by having portions of other windows behind their active one still visible. Funny enough, that aspect of OS X never bothered me. I found it relatively easy to get used to the idea that windows generally exist on the screen and don't try to own the entire screen. To me it seems similar to the way one stack of paper sometimes obscures another on my real desk. I never stack everything neatly in piles and grid them out like tiles. I've got one pile of papers that's half covering another so I can see at least part of what's under it to know it's there. This way I can put a lot more crap on my desk and still know where it is. Now I know I'm not the only person whose desk looks this way
Still, can I really blame Microsoft for these things though? Not really. They made these decisions years ago trying to get people to move from DOS to Windows and then later from Windows to newer versions of Windows. The latest trend I'm seeing is for some people to get dual monitors on Windows. This way they can have two apps maximized, one maximized on each screen. I ran dual monitors on OS X for a while but lack of real maximization (and no desire to have it either) means you wind up with a good sized worksurface with a huge line in the middle of it. I've since decided that Apple is defiitely on the right track with the bigger displays. Particularly if you have the 23" you can begin to see how it completely changes how you want to interact with the computer. You're not going to maximize things; even at the smaller 20" size a window would be ridiculously big. What I find myself doing is just staggering more and more windows all over the place. It looks just as messy as my real desk. This, I think, is exactly the point. Apple has taken the desktop metaphor one step further with these huge displays.
And what has Microsoft offered us? More of the same. Compu
TabletPCs may be a good solution for a right-handed person, but they're slow and cumbersome for a left-handed person.
That's where reading reviews come in, some are better than others. Though to be honest, even the best of them acording to reviews I've read by left handed people, still need improvement. Though "slow and cumbersome" aren't an issue with the better ones. Let's face it, windowsXP UI was designed for a right handed world, so it won't ever be perfect for left handed people.
The few times I tried a tablet, I would mess up any handwriting recognition with the digital version of ink smudge.
As I said in my original post, handwriting recognition is not what the tabletpc is about. The value of tabletPC is working with documents stored in your own handwriting, not real time recognition of your handwriting. Just put that out of your mind. The conversion tool is best used at a later date, when using portions of your notes for preparing emails, documents that need sharing, printing, etc... At that time, it is trivial to use it in conjunction with a spell checker and a keyboard to correct the notes to prep them for sharing. It is a lot faster than retyping handwritten notes anyway.
At this point in my life, I can actually type faster that I can write.
Yeah, but can you walk into someone's office, stand at the door, and quickly type in what they're telling you on your laptop? You may not need that in your job function, but I need that in mine. Or I should say, it adds to my professional appearance and has upped my ability to stay on top of information given me in relatively casual ways, which is very common in my job, and as such, has enhanced my job performance.
Here's an honest question: Ignoring the cost, just what is it that you think is so much better about Windows 2000 compared to XP?
Product activation. If I tried to sell you my car, but insisted on keeping the starter-kill remote, you'd tell me to go jump in the lake. For some reason, people don't subject Microsoft to the same scrutiny.
Product activation is bad enough at the application level, where individual programs have to phone home to receive permission to run. It should be absolutely unacceptable at the OS level... which is why it really, really sucks that everybody accepted it.
As far as I can tell, people who still use 2000 by choice are either ignorant or just dumb.
Yeah, OK, that must be it.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Same here.
I think a lot of it has to do with what kind of computer you have. From what I can gather, Microsoft made a lot of improvement when it comes to high end machines, but clearly doesn't expect low end machines to handle it, so I don't think they bothered.
A lot of the little irritations I had with Windows XP disappeared. Small things like "My Computer" hanging for a little bit when waiting on a CD/DVD ROM drive, seem to have been addressed. It opens for me instantly without any of the previous delays. That seems to be the biggest improvement, for me -- a lot of the "little delays" that XP exhibited are gone. I think that perhaps a lot of the slowness that people see comes from people who have video cards that work decently for the most part, but can't handle Vista's Aero with the kind of speed they would like.
All of this is just observation, nothing concrete or benchmarked. When I get up in the morning and log into my workstation, Vista is actually pleasantly minimalist to look at, whereas XP (which I use in Classic Mode), seems harsh. Is any of this a good reason for someone to pay another 200 bucks and upgrade? Probably not. But work pays for my copy, so I'll be more than happy to use it.
>> From what I can gather, Microsoft made a lot of improvement when it comes to high end machines, but clearly doesn't expect low end machines to handle it,
Heres my machine specs:
intel dual core 6800 extreme
two western digital 150GB raptors in raid 0
a factory-overclocked nvidia 6800 ultra (256mb video ram)
1Gb fast system ram
I guess my machine must be classed as a low-end machine then, because vista was noticeably (too much) slower than XP. The GUI has so many fades etc, it feels like walking through mud when you do anything. After a very short while all the graphical crap and bloatware going on is just annoying and distracting.
It seems funny that I can run a graphically intense game like Halflife 2 with all the graphical features on max and still get an excellent framerate, but Vista just crawls, relatively.
Furthermore vista's gui is way less productive. The GUI designers seem to have designed and prioritised the whole gui from about 20 use-cases written by business secretaries with no technical skills that IM or buy on-line media all day.
If you don't fit their mold the gui just plain gets in the way. Furthermore you can't do a damn thing any more without it asking you if you're really sure all the friggin time. Its all VERY annoying. Enough that Vista is really a functional downgrade from Linux or even XP (don't even get me started about all the DRM), so I won't be installing it again anytime soon.
I tend to reinstall my OS every 6-9 months. Swapping hardware, testing drivers, the occasional software that just won't uninstall all adds up and makes all versions of windows glitchy and crufty. The Solution? Reinstall the OS.
I refuse to pick up the phone and explain to MS why I should be allowed to reinstall XP. 2k no suck problems.
My reason for sticking with 2K until I am forced to move? General F'ing Principal.
Place a curse on Microsoft.
Windows PCs. It just seems that people can't get their mind out of the one maximized window mindset
Bingo. One thing that I've always wondered about. Why is this unique to the windos world? Every Mac and Unix user I know has their windows scattered around the screen in whatever way makes sense to them, while windos users work with maximized windows all the time. What's a windowing system for if you don't use it? And why is it that only windos people work this way?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
(shrug) Kudos, I guess. Everyone has different experiences; I suspect these are influenced heavily by the socio-economic and age sector where you work and of the people you interact with.
The only retail boxes I've personally ever seen of Windows that didn't say "95" on them, were WinXP Pro boxes, seemingly used mostly as an upsell at big-box stores, for the salespeople to push to people who were buying systems that only came with Home on them.
I'm not making a moral judgment one way or the other, it's just that in my personal experience, I'd say that the overwhelming number of Windows systems are ones that were pre-installed. After that, I'd say that a majority of the remaining installs are pirate copies, or are at least installed from pirated media.
The situation might be different among older people, but in the college and post-college crowd, finding a pirated Windows ISO is about as challenging as finding change for a $20, and carries about as much social stigma. Add to this the fact that most computer don't come with real OS install CDs, and some don't come with CDs at all, and you have a huge demand. People's computers get messed up, they want to do a reformat-and-reinstall...what are you going to do when you don't have the CDs anymore? You find somebody who does have them. (I question whether this is actually all that illegal; if it's the same version of the OS and the computer had a license to use it already...you're just using alternate media to re-install it. At any rate, I digress, because most people don't give a damn.)
Now, this is only my experience, YMMV and all that; it's quite consistent with other people that I've talked to in other areas, however. Perhaps when you get into age groups where there's less social interaction or it's less socially acceptable to walk around and ask your neighbors if they can burn you a copy of Office XP, the situation is different.
You can call me a Ballmer/MS shill (I've been called a lot of things, but that is definitely a new one), but I'm just giving the truth as I've seen it. If Windows isn't the most-often pirated piece of software in the world, it must be in the top 5;* or it's prevented from being there only because it's so widely pre-installed. On a personal standpoint, I would love to see Microsoft implement all sorts of draconian anti-piracy measures. All those pirated installs that I mentioned are all MS marketshare, and more importantly mindshare, at the end of the day. They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by making it harder to do. But by all means, Mr. Ballmer: turn them all off, if you possibly can and dare to.
I think the computer ecosystem would be healthier in general if pirated copies of Windows weren't so widely available; it does nothing but artificially deflate the price of Windows and make it harder for legitimate alternatives to exist.
* An interesting side-note: taking the top 1 and 2 place on the Pirate Bay's list of top torrents in the Windows category are Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows XP SP3, respectively. http://thepiratebay.org/top/301
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A lot of the stuff that's wrong with Windows XP was already known to be wrong as early as 1997, back when Windows XP's precursor was Windows NT 3.51 and the integration of Windows 95's shell was the big obvious change in Windows NT 4.0.
...
As a result, something that should have been fixed in Win 95 -- the way Windows slowly chokes on the leftovers of old programs -- remains a problem.
Something that should have been fixed in Windows 3.1, you mean. By 1997 this was a huge and obvious problem in Windows, and one that we'd already been fighting for five years.
Microsoft also did nothing to make the system registry -- the collection of settings that constitutes a single, system-wide point of failure -- less of a nightmare.
Relacing INI files with a binary encoded version of the same INI files (look at a registry dump some time) was obviously a huge step backwards... in 1994 or so.
Note, also, what Microsoft never thought to include in XP: anti-virus software
Anti-virus software isn't necessary in a competantly written system. The OS and applications should be held responsible for keeping viruses out in the first place, rather than trying to catch them after the fact. In 1997 Microsoft completely blew it, introduced the greatest virus distribution system the world has ever known in the criminally incompetant "Active Desktop" and everything that it's spawned. The only "antivirus" I use now, and from 1997 to 2002 the most important standard "antivirus" for the systems I supported, was "no Internet Explorer or Outlook", and then later (as they started using the HTML control) "no Windows Media Player or Realplayer".
This stuff was obvious years before XP came out. A headline like "If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP" only means "it's not just the political reporters who can't remember what happened a few years ago".