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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 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.
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.
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!
Only reason I went to windows 7 was because Xp won't recognize more than 4Gb or memory.
XP comes in a 64 bit flavor as well, although it never was supported very well by other vendors, which should have supported more RAM, assuming the mother board did (another problem altogether).
The real issue with XP vs 7 isn't 4+ GB of RAM so much as having better support for multiple processors. XP wasn't written for 6 or more CPUs/cores, and while it will run, it was never optimized for it. Originally, vanilla 2K only was "licensed" for two CPUs, not sure about XP before SP1.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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
Incorrect. Windows Server 2003 32-bit goes up to 64 GB. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx
The reason XP/Vista/7 32-bit is limited to 4GB is because there are so many badly-written drivers that assume they will be in a physical 4GB address space, that there was no way for Windows to change it without massive bluescreens from old drivers.
To use up to 64 GB, apps and drivers have to be written to access all memory through a 2GB sliding Physical Address Extension window.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
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.
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
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.
The thing with windows XP professional x64 edition* is that it has a VERY small installed base and so many software and perhipheral vendors don't care about it. Most often the stuff works anyway with drivers intended for 64-bit vista/win7 but sometimes it doesn't (for example the NI mydaq doesn't work) and sometimes it sorta works (for example the DT9816 will work with the low level API but not with the high level API).
It was not until vista that MS really started trying to pressure vendors to support x64 (though their "designed for" logo program).
*BTW "XP 64-bit edition" was the version for the Itanium. and "XP professional x64 edition" is really 2K3 (NT 5.2) under the hood.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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
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
Well, things changed for two reasons:
1) the ones that used to complain are now tired of doing so, and
2) the youngsters now don't know any better.
Also, when XP first came out most of the people were still stuck with a dial-up connection. In addition, most were used to remedy their PC problems by re-installing the operating system. So when MS demanded that you should activate your software online and restricted the amount of activations, everybody frowned.
Regardless of the above, switch back to the old model and everyone will still thank you.