Posted November 10, 2021
Jon_Irenicus_PL: As we were nearing the turn of the century, Microsoft wanted to introduce a new operating system....But they went too far. Much too far. Through their carelessness, they created something so perfect one could not imagine it was created by humans...An operating system so perfect, so pristine, so flawless, that it blew the competition. predecessors AND successors out of the water...
If you had said "Windows 2000" then you would have had a solid point - this was a turning point providing rock-solid stability (compared to the Win9x/ME series) along with major functionality such as plug-and-play, power-saving, hibernation support, USB support, side-by-side versioning (ending "DLL Hell") and, for business users: Active Directory, Hierarchical Storage Management, software RAID, Encrypted File System. In contrast, much of what XP added was either trivial or annoying, including:
* Windows Product Activation;
* that stupid search mutt;
* overly-complex Start Menu;
* half-baked implementation of Windows Themes;
More useful additions XP provided were:
* faster startup;
* Shadow Copy Service;
* improved compatibility with older applications;
* FAT32 filesystem support (and exFAT with KB955704);
Fortunately, most of the irritating changes in XP can be reverted (mostly via Registry changes) with Product Activation having numerous bypass options. Vista/7 however made many of those changes compulsory.
pazZzurro: Mainly because Windows systems since the good old days always had issues and sooner or later had to be reinstalled, making a clean sweep of you C: disc. Like clockwork - XP had at most 2 years, after that the whole system would collapse on itself...
YMMV - the system this post was typed on has been running the same install of XP since 2007. As long as you maintain it properly (and in fairness, that applies to any OS) you shouldn't ever need to re-install. dtgreene: (Also, Windows XP still doesn't do proper disk caching, so, for example, starting the same game multiple times is slow...
The disc cache on XP works fine in my experience (in fact, my problem is that I want to be able to disable it to use third party alternatives) but it will (and should) give up memory to applications. So if you are frequently running applications with high memory usage, that will negate the benefits of Windows file caching. However you can get an alternative that uses PAE (Physical Address Extension) to access memory above the 4GB limit (up to 64GB) for caching - Primo Cache refers to this feature as "invisible memory" and it can also record cached folders and reload them on the next system reboot (pre-fetch). It can further use NVMe/SSD volumes to cache HDDs (L2 caching). It's one big downside is that it requires online activation.
rtcvb32: Requiring heavily on the NT kernel, a kernel that originally came from Sun Micro-systems with heavy changes in source code...
Sun had absolutely nothing to do with NT - their OS was a commercial Unix, SunOS/Solaris. Microsoft did initially collaborate with IBM in producing OS/2 - when they parted ways IBM developed their portion into OS/2 2.0 while MS produced NT 3.0. NT's TCP/IP stack was originally taken from BSD Unix but later replaced with MS's own code.
XP's core file system is NTFS which has a file size limit of 256 TB (it'll be a few years yet before disks get that large). FAT32 was a Win9x/ME file system, which XP supported to make migration from those OSes easier.
rtcvb32: But Win7 is where i think is the best balance of new/old and stability as well as support for hardware and software....
Win7 requires twice the memory to do the same job as XP, has slower performance for a number of reasons (graphics driver moved from Ring 0 to Ring 1, UAC file/folder/registry redirection, Windows Registry no longer a memory-mapped file, system utilities like Event Viewer re-written using .NET Framework), tightening up on online activation (last time I checked, you had to do a BIOS flash to fake being a top-tier OEM system) and requiring third party software like Classic Shell to get the traditional UI back. What - removal of support for modems slower than 28.8K? Dropping support for the 486 processor? Hardly a big deal and most of the other examples there can either be reinstated (desktop themes, missing screensavers) or were replaced with (arguably better) options ("minimise to desktop", "align to grid").
Nice try, but the first version of Windows was released in 1985. Or maybe you were confusing it with Unix's genesis in 1969?
Mortius1: I know of a group of people that would agree with the original poster...They are called malware writers. The incredible library of applications consisted of viruses, worms and Trojans...Microsoft didn't even start to care about security until Service Pack 2 - the third iteration of their "flawless OS".
Agreed - MS was unforgivably lax on malware until SP2. But this did result in a thriving community of third-party security software, including application-level firewalls, process-control software and a host of anti-keylogger, anti-spyware and anti-trojan utilities that any knowledgable user can rely on to lock down their system (if anything, the danger now is in going over-the-top and running into conflicts between different security approaches). Plus most of the worst security breaches were in Microsoft applications (Internet Explorer, Outlook, MSN Messenger) so using customisation software like nLite (free) or XPLite (commercial) to remove them and replace them with third-party alternatives is a valuable (and in my view, necessary) security enhancement.
Drivers did, and still do, run at kernel level and a poorly-written one can crash either a Windows or Unix/Linux system. The key thing is keeping tight control of what software can load drivers and Windows XP scores better, courtesy of third party software like Process Guard, AppDefend, System Safety Monitor, EQSecure and many others. Such software has to hook into Windows' SSDT (System Service Delivery Table) to function effectively however and Microsoft have made this much harder with Kernel Patch Protection - so while later versions of Windows can be said to be more secure "out of the box" there's less opportunity for security conscious users to lock them down further.