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10 Years of Windows XP
Julie188 writes "Windows XP – the XP stood for 'Experience' — was released October 25, 2001. With Windows XP, Microsoft hoped to have one codebase that would span everything from consumers to corporate desktops. Microsoft was fairly ambitious with XP. There was an embedded version that went everywhere, from phones to information kiosks. Banks in particular embraced it as a way to migrate off IBM's dead-end-but-once-great OS/2. Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 while businesses hem and haw and slowly test a decade's-worth of custom apps on Windows 7. Some estimates show that XP still has a hold on 48% of the Windows market."
XP was for eXperimental Prototype as in test aircraft. The kind that crashed a lot.
No, I'm pretty certain that they only crashed once...
(I am a Linux user... I do not share your pain)
My blog
I thought XP stood for Chi Rho (the greek letters it looks like), a pun on the project name "Cairo".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Or much of anything?
Compared to previous versions of Windows (especially those that ran on 9x codebase), XP was much better. Compared to Windows 2000, it ran games better.
Vista compared to XP is worse, or at least it was worse just after the release. Windows 7 is about the same as XP, just a new UI, but it is not that much better for people to buy it (and probably upgrade their PCs), because XP is stable and does everything they want. The computer is fast enough for hat they use it for, so no need for an upgrade until it breaks down.
...it's just about ready for release now.
I wouldn't say consumers were quicker to ditch XP because they wanted to ditch it. Typically consumers get new versions of Windows when they get new computers. Businesses on the other hand have to evaluate whether it is in their best interest and most decided Vista wasn't good enough to ditch XP. Some of them were probably a little miffed about the SA deals. Windows 7 is actual usable and stable compared to Vista.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I thought it was a pun on Cairo, the vaporware, or head-fake, or whatever it was that Microsoft claimed would be so great but never released... and that the claim that it was a reference to user "x-perience" was a later concoction.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
XP itself never crashed(BSOD'd) unless you had serious hardware (or later, malware when it became sufficiently virulent) problems. It also otherwise Just Worked(TM).
Compare that to the stinking unworkable piles of shit that were the average Linux distros at the time, hell, I remember Gnome back when XP was released and it looked like some horrible blocky IRIX knockoff. That was back when ISP's gave you shell accounts and the only sane uses of Linux were running servers and taking IRC channels. As far as the speed, stability, and usability of Linux distros go; they are still playing catch-up to Windows XP, especially with respect to the dominant third-party applications.
And I'm a hardcore Linux/UNIX fan.
I have two laptops and three desktops in my household that are probably going to be running XP for at least another year. I don't want to upgrade one of them to window 7 until I'm ready to upgrade most/all of them to 7.
Kind of the same reason I still use DVDs instead of Blurays, I guess.
Windows 2000 was XP minus the play school look and feel (more or less like the classic look and feel on XP) and I think it was the last pure Windows OS that I liked without substantial customization.
Bye!
Yep, saves $$$$$ on licensing too, the machine license is included with the machine so on like a 5 year cycle, everybody would run windows 7 in 5 years, but we've had to make exceptions to that and use open license to upgrade some. Expensive, but compared to the bs that was going on back in the day, this is just fine.
I remember when XP came out everyone was complaining about its online activation requirement. They said they would stay with Windows 2000, which didn't have that requirement. Nowadays, barring Windows 7, it's everyone's favorite OS. Funny how things change.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Win7 is worlds better for everything except the file manager - somehow that has gotten worse in every release since 3.1.
Perhaps my single largest annoyance with Windows 7 -- and there are few, honestly -- is the file manager's sorting "memory".
Let's say that:
In Windows XP, if I set folder #1 to be sorted by the "date modified" field, it remembered it for that folder. If I left alphabetical sorting for every other folder, it remembered that too.
In Windows 7, if I set folder #1 to be sorted by the "date modified" field, it applies that setting to any folder I should happen to look at.
Annoying.
I don't miss 3.11
I don't miss watching Winsock eat itself in the debug window while connected to the internet.
I don't miss the dumb Program Manager.
I don't miss one crashed program taking down the entire "OS".
You forget how clunky it is. Go install it in a VM.
I also installed NT4 inside a virtual machine recently, out of misplaced nostalgia.
Without stealing DLLs from Windows 2000 and XP, good luck getting any software from the last 10 years to install. It was like pulling teeth just to get Opera installed, and even then, it still complained.
WordPerfect won't even install on 2000. No way, no how.
I used to be a big OS/2 fan. I have Ecomstation in a VM. Yeah, I'm sticking with Linux and not going back to OS/2.
--
BMO
This time frame also coincided with a big increase in the proportion of web apps businesses deployed for internal use. It's a lot less important to keep your machines up to date if you're basically using them as browser-terminals.
Well at any rate, it stood for a much better pair than Windows ME. (Might Explode)
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
What happened to the bill gates borg icon?
It was assimilated.
IE 9 fixes that. Leaving XP behind is a necessity as business users will never leave IE ever. But I doubt that would help.
My fear is that your grandchildren who want to get to do I.T. 50 years from now will need to learn IE 6 racing conditions, minimal CSS 1.0 support, and many bugs for intranet apps still being developed in 2061 will still require IE 6 in run in 2 emulators ala COBOL is today. Major banks run 40 year old software with IBM 360 emulators still.
I want to laugh but it is not fair to the poor sap in the future who you know will do this. ... and yes IBM 380 apps in COBOL will still be running in emulators too as well as SCO. Cost accountants just wont let anyone upgrade.
So your rant on SNI support wont matter as the big corps plan to run IE 6 for the next 30 to 50 years so they can save on upgrade costs and commercial portals and sites will still need to support XP and IE 6 then.
http://saveie6.com/
Software development used to be easier when I started this life...
I don't know when you started yours, but I got going in the 80s 8-bit home computer era. Everything of consequence was assembly language, and every platform was completely incompatible. Even on the mainframes, you still had a variety of HLLs and completely different OSes & architectures.
Everything nowadays is x86/x64, everything runs C++ and hence most interpreted languages, and most everything runs Java. Graphics are fast, storage is gigantic, libraries are mature, and connectivity is pretty much a given. Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Even prior to SP1, XP never threw a BSOD (and rebooted) unless it was something hardware or device driver related. Even Anti-Virus programs which needed to install a driver could trip a BSOD. Which was hardly surprising because it's based off the NT lineage and not MSDOS. In fact, it's quite miracle that random bits of hardware and peripherals could be slapped together with near infinite permutations and still had XP provide all the extended functionality for that specific device with as little problems as it has. Microsoft shouldn't have caught hell for this, but rather praised.
Life is not for the lazy.
If you're a heavy Adobe user, you don't need anyone else's pain. You have plenty of your own.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Repeat after me: "It's just an OS. The purpose of an OS is to load programs and manage resources. The OS is not the application."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
of about 15-20 Euro for an XP Professional license, its an excellent price/performane ration when it comes to selecting something for your VM to browse occasionally under IE. Most Software still supperts XP and the Hardware requirements are modest, so that its not a pain in the ass to run it just for printing, scanning, browsing incompatible websites, updating my phone, programming FPGAs or microcontrollers where the SW primarily supports windows.
Wow, remember when, if you were a Photoshop user, you were automatically a Mac user? I'm trying to remember what the killer app is for Macintosh now. (Hint: It's not "lion".)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The Chi Rho was the symbol that Constantine the Great had painted on the shields of his legions before the battle of Milvian Bridge; this act signalled his and the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity. Who knew thaty 1600 years later it would hail the dominance of the most mediocre operating system the world has ever seen as well.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
What do you mean might explode? :P
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
paging dan brown, paging dan brown
there's a bad book plot here somewhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Sure, but the problems were so much easier back then.
TCAP-Abort
Very true. Linux is much better now than just a few years ago but Windows 7 is probably the best OS ever made. I'm thoroughly enjoying dual-booting both (Xubuntu 11.10 - I can't stand Unity).
And speaking of Unity... it appears Canonical and Microsoft BOTH are about to shoot themselves in the foot with UIs that most make most people cringe (Unity and the proposed Metro in Windows 8). Thank God that with Ubuntu, we can still choose xfce or KDE. With Windows, you're stuck with whatever MS gives you.
It meant that in some cases, it didn't. I ran ME for about 3 years on a home PC, and it was actually far more stable then 98SE I switched from.
I have no idea why to this very day, I've had huge amount of problems getting rid of ME "exploding" on family/friends' computers I was maintaining. But my home PC with ME was rock stable (at least by standards of that age).
I dunno; I like KDE over w7... These days, I can't live without 3-6 bash tabs open in addition to my 40 FF tabs.
I actually like XP x64 over 7, mainly due to W7's "audiodg.exe" problem. Oh, and still having to reinstall drivers to fix issues - I never realized how little I miss that little thing until I have to use windows and run into it. /no/ issues with audio. Linux has minor ones, and wU has glitches where audiodg.exe can suck up the entire CPU for 30s for no reason. Horrible when trying to game.
XP X64, for me, was quite stable, worked excellently, and had
Microsoft had a nice coffin and a burial site carefully planned for XP. When sub 100$ notebooks with Linux appeared in the market and it was clear the designated successor Vista would not run on such puny machine, they hastily cut the noose and brought it down from the gallows and gave it another lease on life. Wonder what would have happened if that 100$ notebook had come after XP death process had moved too far to be rescued.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I've never used WinME, actually, but from what I heard, the true problem was the device drivers: it could use the old "VxD" drivers, as well as the newer "WDM" drivers. Stick to WDM and you have a very stable system, but throw a bunch of VxD in the mix and the whole thing goes to hell.
Circumcision is child abuse.
One reason why XP is still so prevalent in businesses is that stack of custom apps. With everything going to webapps and the cloud now, here's hoping that this will be the last time we have to worry about app compatibility. Hopefully some of these big companies have taken the hint and realized that if they have to sink all this effort into testing app compatibility, why not just take it a step further and put the app stack in the cloud and never have to worry about it again.
Bingo! If you had WDM ONLY all was gravy. if you had a mix of VxD and WDM (which is what the majority of OEM WinME installs were) then BAM! hell with my late sis' ME you could set your watch by it, exactly 23 minutes after startup it would crash even if you didn't do a thing to it and just left it on the desktop. IIRC there was also a timer bug that would cause WinME to crash hard if left on for a week as the clock timer would slowly but surely eat all available memory.
As for TFA while XP was and still is a great OS after SP2, and the X64 version frankly was kick ass, I'm glad I've finally got the last of my customers and family over to Windows 7. Its more stable, has a much nicer GUI thanks to breadcrumbs and jumplists along with integrated search, better drivers, all in all its just a better OS. XP was good but frankly PCs have come a hell of a long way since XP was released and the old gal just wasn't as good at managing the large resources we have now. When XP came out sub 1Ghz single cores with 256Mb of RAM or less was the order of the day and at its peak the amount of machines I saw with what I called the "standard XP setup' of 2.0-3.0Ghz P4 with 512Mb and 40Gb HDD was just nuts. But now we are dealing with as many as 8 cores on the desktop, 2Gb seems to be the minimum on RAM with 4-8gb becoming more common every day, the old gal just wasn't built for that.
Time to say thanks for the memories and then put XP out to pasture. I think we'll all agree X64 is the way to go, not only for the extra RAM but for the extra registers. XP was great for its time, and I still have an old socket 754 XP machine I use as a download box and nettop but when even my netbook comes with win 7 X64 its time to face the fact that the days of XP are coming to an end. XP X64 still makes a great file server and nettop though, its a damned shame they didn't push that OS when it first came out, it was and is pretty nice.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You know, I've been totally against not "owning" software most of my life, but I now think the business model for MS is wrong. They should have two versions of Windows, the normal line of Windows they have always had, and a Windows Business edition that basically gets support, security updates, and the occasional service pack, but otherwise stays the same *forever*. For the Business edition, you have to subscribe (pay) to get updates, security, new drivers, etc.
MS makes it's money from the next big version and upgrades. Imagine not having to have a new version rammed down your throat when what you had already did everything you needed it to do. It would be easier on developers (at least those targeting businesses), too.
As long as MS didn't get crazy with the fees, I think it would be a happy compromise from the forced upgrade path.
In fact, I think this would be a good business model for Mozilla as well. I would pay money just to get a stable version that works...and just *stays* the freaking same.
It's not that I hate change. It's that I think they are forcing new features that don't need to be there just to stoke their egos. Businesses don't need that. They just need something that works and stays the same.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
And yet, those recycling kiosks at the grocery store are still running Windows 98.
Thats not the scary part.
Most POS terminals are XP based. A lot of them un patched with IE6 accessible by simply closing down or alt tabbing out of Pronto (or similar POS software). One of the saddest things I have ever seen is a POS terminal with the Ask toolbar installed.
This is why I refuse to run my card in 99% of stores.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Actually you are partially incorrect. while its true that Metro is a serious clusterfuck of a UI (I've shown the screencaps to over 120 customers so far and NOT A SINGLE ONE liked the look or thought they would want to try it. The closest I got to an endorsement was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen, what kind of cell phone is it? Is it Android? i've heard those are quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? why that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone for my desktop?") there is also a "classic mode" which you can see in some of the developer's presentation which is just the Windows 7 GUI with a square start button instead of round and from what I've heard a simple registry change makes it default.
So actually in this case with BOTH Windows and ubuntu you don't have to take the clusterfuck UI, although I hear its more of a PITA to strip out unity and get something decent running than it is to just run Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the first place. Personally if it were me I'd be looking at Vector Linux which not only has 6 versions tailored for what kind of machine you want to run it on, from ultra light live to workstation, but they also have a "KDE Classic' version that has a fully updated KDE 3 as the default DE. I've been playing with it and its pretty nice, especially the light live for older laptops.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 while businesses hem and haw and slowly test a decade's-worth of custom apps on Windows 7.
Consumer's haven't been given a choice..Businesses do have a choice.
Just because 90% of laptops are grey doesn't mean that 90% of people would buy a grey laptop if they had a choice.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Also minus the firewall, the fast user switching, the WiFi auto-config, the collapsable system tray, the System Restore feature, and a variety of other useful and user-visible features. I used Win2000 from 2000 to (late) 2003 as my primary OS, and I still have my laptop from back then (and it still has its 2000 install, though it gets little use now). It was a good OS for its day, no doubt about it, and XP wasn't that tremendous of step forward (although for some people, the theme-ability was a big deal). Calling it *better* than XP is just flat-out wrong, though. You may be able to concoct a specific set of needs for which it's superior, but in the general sense it's a ludicous statement.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
paging dan brown, paging dan brown
there's a bad book plot here somewhere
Sounds like a best seller to me.
You're _both_ right!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"If you use Windows for financial stuff you will get screwed eventually."
You are clearly not familiar with true computer security. I have used windows for more than a decade (one of many OS's I work with) and have done "financial stuff" on them. A Windows system can be just as hardened as any other. I do everything from person banking to stock trading. I have never had any problems because I have never had a virus or spyware running on any system I have ever used. I know how operating systems work and I make sure I know what every service, application, or driver is doing on my system. This is what being secure really is. Every OS is vulnerable including Linux and OS X, it's just that Windows gets more of the press and targeting by hackers. If you blindly trust the makers of your OS to provide security your going to get screwed.
What's your point..
Our "point" is that this knee-jerk Microsoft / XP bashing is tired. XP is, by and large, a stable, reliable workhorse.
Exactly. And when you say "There are really simple things you can do. Here's two: (1), put canvas covers over the recycling trucks like is currently required for trucks carrying gravel, so they don't lose their load at highway speeds. It's a known technology. There's no excuse for recycling trucks to litter. (2), adopt the practice already used in other states of reclaiming pop cans by the pound, instead of those damfool machines that have to read the bar code on each can. (Sometimes twice or three or four times if the barcode is marred in any way.) Then I can crush the cans and take them in when the bag gets heavy, like in a civilized state. " ...they look at you like you just proposed that they stick the cans up their arse. Well, that's going to be the next suggestion. And I'm willing to help.
And so, I exercise my right to protest by throwing the damned things away. To. Hell. With. Them.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.