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."

Comments

W2K FTW

[DrunkenTerror]

n/t

Windows = the problem

[MaliciousSmurf]

Gates could save a lot of hassle by scraping his Windows model and rebuilding from the ground up, in my opinion, because XP/Vista are so riddle with problems that anything based on them will be typically buggy.

Re:Windows = the problem

[bogaboga]

...why not just move straight to Linux and save the complete redesign and recoding?

Here's why:

No one is interested in spending hours making the Linux desktop useable from default settings. Even now, one cannot click on a multimedia link and expect to listen or watch the content by default!

The [Linux] desktops are simply ugly, slow and not user friendly! I wonder why I cnnot rename a file in GNOME's file selector. I cannot paste a URL in its file selector and expect GNOME to call the appropriate program to handle the content either. I must say KDE does this by default. Kudos to them.

This is the most important: Application portability between distros.

Confusion reigns on this one....An application gets advertised as Linux ready...an ambitious slashdotter downloads it and tries to install it. But first, this poor man must know in which format its packaged (tar, deb, rpm etc). Then he must know whether it's for his particular distro. Even when it is, on trying to get it installed, he's warned that there are dependencies to be met, and as such, some files must be downloaded from the internet. The poor guy hooks up on the internet, downloads the necessary files but while in the process of installing, he's informed that there are conflicts...Guys, this madness must stop if Linux is to get anywhere.

There are solutions to all this but how many folks can stomach this confusion? I was faced with a similar problem while trying to get the latest version of VLC installed. I satisfied all dependencies and was installing from source. The whole process failed at the `make' command, and being no programmer, I could not figure out what `error 2' meant!

To make matters worse, the older version of VLC is very unstable now. Re-installation does not make a difference.

But it was advertised as Linux ready...including being ready and downloadable for my distro (Ubuntu Dapper).

Food for thought guys.

Re:WinXP vs Win2K

[SmurfButcher Bob]

>> IMHO the best "improvements" that XP has over 2K was...

That was the most polite way of saying the best "improvements" to the "operating system"... were all irrelevent userland apps that had nothing to do with the acutal OS... that I've seen in a long time. :)

But, it's Microsoft; perhaps these userland apps ARE part of the OS. Notepad.exe... kernel32.exe... same things, each one can get an arbitrary user's context into Ring0. :)

I work for Microsoft...

[Digital Vomit]

I work for Microsoft; So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.

Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.

But trust me.... You don't.

I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about.

This is how bad info gets passed around.

If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.

Cos some Slashdotters believe anything they hear.