Windows XP nostalgia

By sinetheo
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Grand Master

firey

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  On 29/03/2015 at 01:56, Zagadka said:

It was very nice of MS to let a 3 year old with crayons design the interface, though.

Yep, this time they gave them a track pad and MSPaint for windows 10's UI.

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Experienced

WinMacLin Guy

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I remember installing Windows XP on my old Pentium 2 PC dual booting Windows 2000 and Windows ME (one of my least favorite versions of Windows ever). I mostly used Windows 2000 because it was more stable, had proper multiuser system (this was a family computer), etc; but I would switch to ME when I needed to run certain older games or software (most old software was compatible with Windows 2000, but the one's relying on DOS ran faster in Windows ME). XP looked nicer, but on the now archaic build I had it also ran slower; looks and slight speed decrease aside though, it was no more or less stable than 2000 (at least in my experience; but it would make sense since the core did not receive a major upgrade from 2000). However, it was miles more stable than Windows 95/98/98SE/ME and that was what a lot of home users were upgrading from, so it was overall a very good mainstream OS release.

Grand Master

+InsaneNutter MVC

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  On 30/03/2015 at 05:23, earthworm jimmy said:

Windows Me was a joke, it was so crash prone that I (and most people i knew) could not last a week with it.

 

Unbelievable, that it was released in the state it was.   No machine was immune to crashing.

 

I think Windows crashing was just normal back then, if you got a couple of hours uptime from Windows 98 / Me you were doing well. I seem to remember i'd leave stuff downloading over night with Geright set to re-dial when disconnected from the internet every 2 hours, disable any screen savers and hope Windows didn't crash so the download would finish.

 

Then Windows XP comes along and usually never crashes unless you have a bad driver for something. I remember that and the nice desktop themes been the main reason the 13 year old me wanted XP over Windows Me.

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Grand Master

binaryzero

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MS chat on Windows 3.11 was fun, you could see in real time what the other person was typing. 

 

Edit: Might be wrong on the name.... It was a long time ago lol.

 

I still use net send every now and then if I need to broadcast a simple message to say some users connected to a particular RDS server. Think Citrix uses that command to send messages through it's application. 

 

What's the general age of people in this thread? Seems like XP was the first OS for a lot of you. No offence, would just seem interesting since the word nostalgia was used in the topic.

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Darrian

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XP was fantastic. I started using it when it was Whistler (and lamented the loss of the Watercolor VS). It was also my first 64-bit OS later, while I awaited Vista beta builds.  I have never been one to cling to the past, and I am always using a beta version of the next Windows when I can get my hands on it. I'm running Windows 10 now. So yeah, I wouldn't go back to XP, nor would I recommend anybody go back to it or stay on it, but back in the day it was incredible and very stable relative to what had come before.

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Darrian

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  On 30/03/2015 at 05:23, earthworm jimmy said:

Windows Me was a joke, it was so crash prone that I (and most people i knew) could not last a week with it.

 

Unbelievable, that it was released in the state it was.   No machine was immune to crashing.

Actually Me was pretty good once you disabled System Restore. As good as 98, anyway. I preferred to use Windows 2000, though.

Experienced

tompkin

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Just a couple of funny things I remember...When Windows 95 came out I had one machine for Windows 95 and another for Windows NT 3.51(I think). I used NT because it was considered the "premiere" os between them. The thing that ticked a lot of the NT users off (the few, the proud) was that even though NT was the "premier", Windows 95 got all the glitzy user interface things first! (The flying folders, etc.) NT was still using the old Win 3.11 interface. 

 

The other unrelated thing I recall was helping a user with XP for the first time. She had probably been using Win 98. The first thing she said when looked at XP was, "But it isn't professional looking!"  :laugh:

Grand Master

+Zagadka Subscriber²

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You have to remember that a lot of software in general was much more likely to crash in those days. Web browsers, for instance, were notoriously able to take out the system. Now, those errors get caught and handled or contained.

Grand Master

binaryzero

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  On 30/03/2015 at 07:24, tompkin said:

Just a couple of funny things I remember...When Windows 95 came out I had one machine for Windows 95 and another for Windows NT 3.51(I think). I used NT because it was considered the "premiere" os between them. The thing that ticked a lot of the NT users off (the few, the proud) was that even though NT was the "premier", Windows 95 got all the glitzy user interface things first! (The flying folders, etc.) NT was still using the old Win 3.11 interface. 

 

The other unrelated thing I recall was helping a user with XP for the first time. She had probably been using Win 98. The first thing she said when looked at XP was, "But it isn't professional looking!"  :laugh:

 

I was dual booting OS/2 and NT3.51\4 for those reasons - they were cream of the crop in that era. It was my father's PC which ran Windows 9x.

Grand Master

x-scratch

Posted
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  On 30/03/2015 at 05:23, earthworm jimmy said:

Windows Me was a joke, it was so crash prone that I (and most people i knew) could not last a week with it.

 

Unbelievable, that it was released in the state it was.   No machine was immune to crashing.

 

never had any problems with windows me & no it was not a joke

Grand Master

binaryzero

Posted
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ME did introduce a lot of technologies that are still present today.

 

- UPnP

- First consumer OS to split away from real time DOS. This is probably main reason people struggled.

- System restore (lol remember date bug)

- Generic drivers for USB storage and I THINK printers.

- Pretty sure dial up networking was reworked. Supported profiles

 

I could never get it running on the box I had for tinkering around.

Experienced

tompkin

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One thing I ran across that was kind of interesting. On Windows Vista I noticed that after I had been playing Texas Holdem' for awhile, Texas Holdem would crash. I would restart, play for awhile and then another crash. It occurred to me that it was acting like a memory leak. I started Perfomance Monitor and sure enough it was using more and more memory in a linear fashion. It would continue to increase until at some point Texas Holdem' would crash.

 

I looked on the MS Community Answers board but no similar problems had been reported. I then Googled around and discovered that at least one other person had found the answer. There was an option in the Sound Blaster software (a check box) that when checked would cause a memory leak in Texas Holdem'. Curiously, I only ever experienced it when playing that game. Bugs can be subtle.  :/

Grand Master

+FloatingFatMan Subscriber¹

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  On 29/03/2015 at 01:20, sinetheo said:

It was impossible to crash unless something ran as a device driver or ran as administrator and tampered with another memory stack somewhere.

 

 

Impossible to crash!?!? Dude, can i get some of what you've been smoking please? That's some serious sh**...

Grand Master

Arachno 1D

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By its third major patch SP3 it was quite a well loved little operating system but as with the inevitability of any patched system some minor quirks.Its a pity an official SP4 patch never evolved like it did for NT but thats the way of commerce I guess MS wanted more income and to change the way the operating system addressed hardware though the resultant landfill of unusable hardware for the newer OS was not what I might call  these days very green.

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Dot Matrix

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  On 06/04/2015 at 12:37, arachnoid said:

By its third major patch SP3 it was quite a well loved little operating system but as with the inevitability of any patched system some minor quirks.Its a pity an official SP4 patch never evolved like it did for NT but thats the way of commerce I guess MS wanted more income and to change the way the operating system addressed hardware though the resultant landfill of unusable hardware for the newer OS was not what I might call these days very green.

A SP4 would have invoked even *more* support. 10 years is enough. Time to move on.

Grand Master

x-scratch

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  On 06/04/2015 at 14:47, Dot Matrix said:

A SP4 would have invoked even *more* support. 10 years is enough. Time to move on.

 

 

you are telling people to move on. you should take the same advice. unicorns have been played out since the early 80s

Grand Master

Arachno 1D

Posted
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  On 06/04/2015 at 14:47, Dot Matrix said:

A SP4 would have invoked even *more* support. 10 years is enough. Time to move on.

I believe I already covered why it was not done and age is not an issue with effectiveness or efficiency or trust its a lack of support that causes issues

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Snoopy2005uk

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I'm sat here eating my lunch at work viewing Neowin using an old XP machine. Speccy tells me windows was last installed on 13th November 2003 and has been running for for just over a year without a restart, never seems to break :(

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