Why do people like Windows XP so much? What went so right here?

>>105575708 (OP)
>3GB RAM max

>>105575708 (OP)
XP is a defiled and mutilated version of win2k. The residual perfection remaining from win2k is why people like XP, they really like win2k but don't realize it.

>>105575708 (OP)
>cool design
>many people grew up with it (very long lifespan added to this)
>just werked

2000 and XP were good. Fast and responsive, easy user configuration, easy to disable unnecessary services (not invasive), bitmap fonts, registry tweaks actually did what you told them to (no "you gotta buy Enterprise Edition and no its still not going to work even if you do lol").
You could not compile the kernel, because it's not Linux, but you didn't have to, because everything was changeable in the registry.
Wangblows updates werent forced, you would get a popup asking you to install (you could still configure it to auto update if you want). And the updates weren't evil, just security patches and the usual stuff.

>>105575708 (OP)
it was just a popular os that was easy to run. thats it. most people remember it fondly primarily because vista was such aids on weaker computers that they got traumatized and began idolizing xp. in my experience xp was actually pretty fucking terrible, it had the by far worst update system and the amount of viruses you could easily get on internet during that era was terrible, every installer also had those spyware bloatware apps getting installed if you dont uncheck them carefully. total xp death

windows user syndrome
they love the windows they first started with, hate the windows released directly after that, and keep going between like and hate afterwards

>>105575749
Sort of. I wouldn't call windows 2000 perfection but it was a massive improvement over 9x. The problem was it wasn't easily compatible with a bunch of software - especially games - that were really designed to run on dos. iirc I think I had issues with my graphics card too before switching to XP. XP wasn't really good until SP2, it was pretty stable then and had the benefit of being extremely undemanding compared to hardware typical of the time. Vista was a technical improvement, despite what everyone thought, but ramper up the hardware requirements massively and didn't come clean enough with the fact so it ran like shit on a lot of people's machines.

>>105575796
>by far worst update system
Wdym? Right now it is in its worst state. Unwanted updates that are literally forced down your throat. Copilot garbage pushed everywhere. XP updates were nice and not invasive.

>>105575815
nah, windows updates are literally painless now, you have zero maintenance on a default install, system storage, windows update, system restore points, microsoft store app integration, all apps and including windows itself and security/defender get updated automatically and on a stable basis once a month, its not intrusive at all because you simply click shut down and update, and the PC updates and shuts down as you go to sleep. plus you have command line interface for installing apps and updates easily now with winget. there's literally no reason to like the xp system beyond being a schizo who thinks microsoft is out to get him, in that case why are you connecting to internet at all using a windows machine

>>105575815
>forced down your throat
why is this phrase so lewd always

>>105575708 (OP)
It was less shit.

>>105575779
Only your second answer is correct. Probably one of the cringest UIs there was for Windows and widely derided. Also crashed and got the registry corrupted all the time, just not as bad as 9x

>>105575716
You can install the 64-bit version. Just don't install any third-party applications and you might get away with it.

>>105575847
is she supposed to be a magical girl or a magical janitor? what's with the wand-looking broom? or is it a broom-looking wand?

>>105575868
its a magical dildo, and she's a trans japanese girl. hope that helps

>>105575815
XP didn't update your software, drivers, or frameworks. I know contrarians will claim this a good thing, but it wasn't. The only way to keep on top of often write important updates was to check the relevant company's website every so often and download any executables needing installed.

>>105575878
how the FUCK is that a dildo nigga, is her vagina built like pic related?

>>105575839
>windows updates are literally painless now,
They are NOT painless. You cannot disable the update service no matter what. Even if you delete the service, the service registry key, all executables associated with Windows Update, and all scheduled tasks related to it, Update Orchestrator, WaasMedicSvc, set all group policies to disabled, yep, you guessed it, it'll be back in a couple days.
If you "shut down and update", it doesn't even do what it says. Wangblows now has "fast boot", so it reboots to skip that fast boot, install updates, and then "shuts down", still wasting time rebooting. It'd make sense if it temporarily disabled fast boot, installed updates and shut down, but no, it has to do this gymnastics.

>there's literally no reason to like the xp system beyond being a schizo who thinks microsoft is out to get him, in that case why are you connecting to internet at all using a windows machine
I'm not. Sure feels good to post this from Arch Linux. I had fucking enough of Wangblows 11.

>>105575812
> Vista was a technical improvement
Vista was an unmitigated disaster. They completely destroyed the graphics stack. Removing all hardware acceleration from the GUI all so that they could make windows transparent. Even the fastest hardware in existence will still run worse with Vista that it would with 2k/xp. Also, besides the graphics stack, they also mangled the sound stack, putting an end to hardware acceleration in sound cards to. And they doubled down on winsxs, putting all system files into that. Winsxs was an all around terrible idea. It was bad in XP, and it was hellish in Vista.

>>105575894
Oh no, I had to check NVidia website like once in 5 years when game install popped up window about some requirement, totally worth losing control and having telemetry shoved up your ass so you'd be spared these couple minutes of annoyance. Truly terrible.

>>105575868
>magical janitor
this

>>105575708 (OP)
xp was bloated 2k
m$ has added nothing of value since 2k sans required basic hardware support

>>105575708 (OP)
Because they have no taste.

>>105575901
nigga you just might be retarded if you cant control a os like w11 thats built so a child could use it. enjoy linux i guess, i doubt you are considering how rent free windows is in your head and you cant stop talking and crying about it despite supposedly moving on. im happy with my comfy w11 machine

>>105576127
the art style reminds me of steins gate

>>105575800
I started with Windows 3.1 and thought it was hot garbage

>>105575708 (OP)
>lightwieght
>runs fast
>no ui bloat
>can be navigated comfortably with just a keyboard if necessary
>no ads
>no spyware
>native DOS application support

>>105575894
Updates are aids, they change and break shit unnecessarily. I prefer it only updating the OS itself and keeping the frameworks limited to service packs.n40vw

>>105575708 (OP)
I hated it, immediately went back to 2000 mode and turned off the green and blue bar

>>105575708 (OP)
Pic related.
Windows 9x let every piece of hardware do basically whatever the fuck it wanted to. This meant that when something went wrong, the entire system went down.
Plugged in an USB mouse the wrong way? BSOD. Printed at just the wrong moment so the print queue overflowed? BSOD. An application tried to access hardware accelerated sound when something else was already doing the same? BSOD.
But with the Windows NT kernel you could now have applications crash by themself instead of taking down the entire system, not only saving valuable time and potential file corruption but also making it more clear than before what the fuck went wrong.
It wasn't perfect as XP still BSOD'd a lot but it was a hell of a lot better than 9x could ever be, and MS kept reducing the amount of potential BSODs with later versions of Windows by moving as many things as possible toward userland.

>>105575795
windows back then was still evil as shit, but otherwise you are right. xp still looks like puke though

>>105576456
obsessed with jewish cock award

>>105576456
You can just change the theme, anon. XP actually had decent theming options unlike anything aero onwards.

>>105575708 (OP)
look at it, it's iconic

>>105575708 (OP)
it was widely ridiculed at first
they called it a childs toy
the "Fisher Price" interface
it did not have basic firewall
if you plugged it into your modem you got instapwned
microsoft later fixed this in service pack 1 or something
as for the interface. there were a lot of themes for it.
true hackermans did not use vanilla Windows XP

>>105576592
everyone ran zone alarm back then or the popular free alternative i think tinywall or some shit

it was really good, like driving a mustang
fast, responsive, like a well sharpen tool
zero bloat
no need to restar after installing software, plug and play, so on

it was better than 7, but 7 was 64bit and was almost as good, so it eventually overtook, it was a big technological step, not just memes

>>105576274
>w11 thats built so a child could use it
Windows 11 fights back when I try to do anything on it.

>rent free windows is in your head and you cant stop talking and crying about it despite supposedly moving on
It is not only Windows I have a problem with, but general enshittification. GTK3 and up have no arrow buttons on the scrollbar. I got them back by editing some gtk.css and userChrome.css files but it doesn't work everywhere. Also, fonts aren't bitmap and I only managed to get bitmap fonts to work in Mousepad and GNOME Terminal so far. Non-bitmap fonts still cause me headache and nausea even though I have been looking at them for 10 years now. Bitmap fonts on the other hand are crisp and clear.

>>105575911
>Removing all hardware acceleration from the GUI all so that they could make windows transparent.
yep. you’re fucking retarded.
The shell/desktop manager was always CPU powered until Windows Vista, where they moved it to the GPU via dwm.exe
delete your post and never return.

I remember people hating xp until sp2, sp1 at the very least
>waaaaa I can't run my dos crap
>waaa it's slow on my crapbox
>waaaaaa it's eating up all my 128mb of ram
sounds so familiar

>>105575708 (OP)
it didn't do anything you haven't asked it to do

- drivers?
just open device manager, look at the warnings and check what it is then look for the driver
or just batch install all the drivers that came with your computer and peripherals
- why it's good to install drivers yourself?
no way of windows installing bad version of a driver or rogue-updating a driver to a faulty one like they did several times in windows 10 and 11
- add a printer?
just go to printers, add and go through a wizard
- network shares?
just open explorer, add network share, wizard
- why it's bad to join domain and share documents by default?
because it's retarded to share resources and announce yourself on a network by default
- settings file extensions associations actually worked in xp
in 10/11 there are like 3 ways or more to set up a file extensions associations and it still doesn't work, especially a browser
- search actually worked
even fucking windows 7 search was hot garbage in comparison
- start menu was simple and had everything you need and was configurable
fucked up in windows 8
bloated and broken beyond help in windows 11
- no ribbon in file explorer
Ribbon is garbage interface and wastes space. I don't believe anyone ever needed to use a ribbon. Everyone just right clicks a file and does something on it or uses a shortcut. People don't left click something and look for an icon in a ribbon. It's retarded.
- control panel made sense
fucked up in windows 10?
- ui made sense
ui was still made based with CUA and HIG in mind, were coherent, consistent, straightforward and accessible
- it looked nice
at least it wasn't straight up ugly like windows 10 and up (flatshit)
- themes existed and worked if you weren't satisfied with what was there
fucked up in windows 10

>>105576683
>Windows 11 fights back when I try to do anything on it
Nonsense unsourced bullshit with no examples provided.

>>105576683
then we just have different use cases, w11 doesnt really mess around with my workflow, i get a stable environment to use apps i want to use and freedom to customize it with 3rd party applications how i want, but i dont feel put in a position where i'm forced to make changes to have a working environment. it could be that i'm just used to the way windows works so I sort of subconsciously accept some bugs or issues and treat them as unimportant or part of normal patterns in my brain, but when I tried using linux it felt for me that I was constantly fighting my OS, and that when I tried to do something every single time I'd have to ask myself, wait, does linux allow this software or hardware to work properly, and that shit is unacceptable, I don't want to think about my OS, it serves me, not the other way around. I understand that's due to microsoft's monopoly on desktop for so long before macOS and chromeOS, but I'm not about to sacrifice my sanity and free time to fight a corporation for activism.

>>105576444
Win9x had issues, but your assertions are unsound.

> Windows 9x let every piece of hardware do basically whatever the fuck it wanted to
This statement is gibberish. Firstly hardware does not typically do things by itself, and if the hardware does to things on its own, the operating system can't stop that. Presumably you mean drivers, well drivers can do what ever they want on NT too. Kernel mode software has complete authority over the system.

> But with the Windows NT kernel you could now have applications crash by themself instead of taking down the entire system
Applications can crash on Win9x without taking out the entire system. Its not quite as robust as NT, but its very possible for crashes to happen safely.

>>105576725
I already provided an example: Disable Windows Update. Literally impossible to do.

>>105576274
> w11 thats built so a retard could use it.
what is good about that? you lower the bar so much it becomes a joke, you have to give up a lot for this to happen

>>105576728
Linux allows me to do what I want. If something breaks, it is always my own fault. On Windows, something can break and it's not my fault, but the fault of the fact that it's impossible to change some settings, or they reset back to default when there's an update or just randomly.

>>105576712
GDI was hardware accelerated in windows xp

>>105576756
i dont give anything up, you are projecting your issues onto me and thinking they are universal. it's an objective statement that for an average user windows does not restrict them at all compared to android/ios/chromeos/macos, yet it's very simple to easy and the default for desktops that everyone is accustomed to. You can't say the same about linux, since linux as an OS doesn't exist, you could say Fedora or Arch or Debian or Ubuntu is good for this or that yet they all have huge flaws for an average user, and not even an average users but most niches too. Linux has use cases for older machines, for handhelds and very specific limited user access/control environments, and it's obviously useful for web servers and such. It's just that no traditional distro is a pleasant enough experience because of many bad decisions over the years, fracturing of foss, and mostly just no corporate support. Nobody cares about non-paying customers that want everything free. Linux literally doesn't have respect of NVIDIA to give them proper drivers and performance, and NVIDIA is 98% of GPU market share on desktop.

>>105576763
>GDI was hardware accelerated in windows xp
most computers of that time didn't have GPUs, so what are you talking about?

>>105576760
yeah, haven't experienced that myself. will change my mind on windows if that ever happens. most of the time for me it's smooth flowing, or if there is an issue like the recommended section in start menu there's always a quick regedit fix for it.

>>105576745
>In Windows XP, GDI (Graphics Device Interface) supported hardware acceleration for certain operations. This meant that some 2D drawing tasks could be offloaded to the graphics card, leading to smoother and faster rendering. However, it's important to note that GDI's hardware acceleration was not as comprehensive or efficient as Direct2D, which is used in newer Windows versions and takes full advantage of GPU capabilities
GDI was never fully hardware accelerated until Windows 7 and a WDDM 1.1 compatible driver.

again, don’t come back.

>>105576801
meant for: >>105576763

>>105576793
Regedit fixes would be nice if they worked. They used to, in the XP times. Now, you make a tweak in the registry, and said tweak will stop working after a few updates (Microsoft just randomly and silently decided to deprecate the parameter) OR it gets fucking reset to default. Windows actually deletes some values from the registry periodically. It should NEVER do that, even if that parameter does nothing. It is MY business to operate MY settings on MY computer, not Microsoft's.

>>105576782
you didn't give up anything because you never had it

you like an os for retards, with everything being "hidden under the hood", like a woman driver who can't even add water to her radiator in an emergency
that's all you,
you like it, because you are that woman, i'm not

i like a proper machine in which i am in control, that doesn't have retarded adds, cutie buttons, everything hidden, bloated, slow, spying on you and suggesting you what to do next

it's unacceptable

>>105576745
Lol I remember you, i recognize that typing style
you’re that Windows 11 Home faggot that BOUGHT WINDOWS KEEEEEEEK
exactly the same as I told you at the time: Group Policy on a non-retarded version of Windows

KEK

>>105576822
That has literally never happened to me, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft would be in hot water by EU if they ever attempted anything as goofy as that. Sometimes I think that maybe EU builds of windows and US builds of windows are completely different, because I have never had a single group policy or regedit entry unapply itself after updates. The only case where that could happen is if the entire thing that regedit entry was affecting is stripped on a new version update of windows, obviously. But there are some regedit and gpedit changes I make like for example disabling windows error report service since I don't use troubleshooting or want to report crashes, and I disable diagnostic data since I don't care to give basic diagnostic data to ms, and removing the new quite frankly embarassingly slow "Edit with ClipChamp", "Edit with Notepad", "Edit with Paint" entries in right click context menu or Home section in Settings and File Explorer that's kinda useless, and they have never returned from 21H2 in 2021 to now 24H2 in 2025.

>>105576833
KDE literally added a update which sent a notifaction to everyone that they should send donations to KDE team. Please man stop lying. I don't know why you linux people are like this sometimes? Why do you lie? Why not try to be objective and accept that linux has faults? Do you not get tired of trying to spin it up as some perfect OS? You can't convince me you unironically have less trouble daily driving linux than windows, it's just impossible unless your entire workflow is running firefox, vlc, libreoffice and coding.

>>105576258
Why yes I was a chad that went right from 98 to 7. How could you tell I skipped all the trash?

>>105575708 (OP)
nothing really. it's just nostalgia

>>105576844
One of NoDriveAutoRun or NoDriveTypeAutoRun, forgot which, will get deleted from registry after a while. There are entries in both HKCU and HKLM, and I think the HKLM one gets deleted. Not because an update removes the setting, but literally periodically. Try it.
Also, the HKCU version of NoDriveTypeAutoRun gets reset to default once in a while (not as often as the removal of the HKLM entry though).

The reason I set NoDriveTypeAutoRun to 0xFF and NoDriveAutoRun to 0x3FFFFFF is so that, for example, a USB drive will not run its autorun.inf when plugged in, which is an obvious security problem. It probably doesn't do that by default anymore, but I intend to disable all autorun.inf functionality, not just that of USB drives.

Whether these settings are relevant any more DOES NOT explain how they get reset to default or wiped from the registry.

>>105576929
Hmm, I followed the privacyguides guide to set auto-play off, and I haven't had any issues with it disabling. Now I did have an issue that was something similar to what you say with the whole Windows Backup thing (which is inactive if you don't have a ms acc, and I thankfully didn't), but if you disable the windows backup options one by one in settings, then afterwards go into gpedit and do the same, once you reboot it shows at least in settings gui as all enabled again, but if you disable it again there it's disabled everywhere for good. I can't tell if that's malice or incompetence from MS desu because sometimes some of the shit they code is terrible, but I'm used to jank on android and oneUI too

>>105576854
i never mentioned linux, i was only talking about windows xp
linux was never as optimized as windows, for x86 machines,
the software was also better for windows

but since windows 7 it got really enshittified and it's broken, so is the software
this is why many people are dumping this crap, but somehow people like you can't accept it

even your argument: it's so easy a child could use it
wtf? then ride a tricycle instead of a car

>>105576801
Windows 7 only accelerates BitBlt for GDI.

XP also accelerates text rendering, and lines and filled shapes. All the basic things that are used for rendering the UI. I am literally looking at the win2k3 source code right now, the included graphics drivers for various gpus have hardware accelerated drawing functions. Also, having programmed on NT5 for years, I can tell you categorically that GDI was hardware accelerated. The performance of the gdi on 2k/xp is incredibly high.

>>105576973
my experience with windows xp was terrible, not sure how much of that was due to me being like 12yo, but it was the worst os I ever used. I also really feel like you live in a echochamber and a small bubble, nobody is really leaving windows enmasse. There's a niche of people that prefer alternatives, be it just using smartphones and tablets, or using macos, chromeos, or linux, but windows has remained the dominant desktop os. I agree with you about enshittification, windows out of box for people who are aware of how good things can be is fucking cancer, I refuse to ever make a microsoft account or use any of ms cloud/web related services like bing search or edge or onedrive etc. I just genuinely feel like the base underneath all that slop is still really fucking good. It's compatible with any software or hardware I want to use even if it's decades old, it has a lot of freedom (at least relative to proprietary operating systems) and there's a lot of documentation and guides for fixing most annoyances online. It's not a matter of windows being easier, and me picking the easy way out, it's just linux not working at all. I can't use it if it doesn't support my hardware and software needs. I cannot get better, just like I cannot vooooote harder. Linux is simply limited in support for stuff I need to do.

>>105576989
then how exactly was GDI in XP hardware accelerated? In a normal PC, no GPU
there is no hardware to use to accelerate anything

you can't use a VGA card for any computing

>>105577005
well, if you have to use it, use it, but why you have to say it's the best thing ever, it's not
the fucked it up, windows used to be good, they suck, that's the whole point

me, on the other hand, i can't get over the fact of how bad it is, so i don't use it

>>105577061
if you didn't have hardware to accelerate it, it wasn't hardware accelerated obviously. how tf is this a question? gpus weren't exactly uncommon in 2004

>>105577081
Didn't really ever say that it's the best thing lol. I see the flaws with windows, it's just for my use case it's better than any alternative. I'm personally sort of a macOS hater and general Apple hater because I think it's overpriced bullshit for hipsters and I'd always take anything Microsoft over them. But I think in many cases Linux is great, in particular with the way it handles drivers it does support, and the way everything is updated, or some ideas for atomic distros that could make linux desktop much more secure than windows and easily managed IF it becomes popular enough to be supported by corporations software and hardware. But as of right now I think windows is simply better than linux for me, it's not some sort of dismissal and calling linux shit, it's just weighing the pros and cons as of now and not of some future reality.

>>105577092
GPUs were used for gaming only at that time, there was no CUDA even
you couldn't use the GPU for anything other than rendering polygons

my point was that XP worked nicely and smoothly using CPU only, because it was well optimized

>>105576854
>Why not try to be objective and accept that linux has faults?
linux's faults include:
>reliance on guhnoo
>the absolute travesty that is the devtree
kde has nothing to do with linux. it's a collection of x11/wayland software. linux is a kernel.
your choice to use the unequivocably dogshit collection of software pushed by redhat + microsoft is your own problem when there are entire libraries of complaints about this shit.

but you think you're smarter than everyone else. you know better. so you ignore all of that and charge blindly off of a cliff into a septic pit and then start crying about it. maybe look where you're walking you fucking dumbass.

>>105577181
idk, you are a lost cause my man. cool it with the ego and get a job

>>105577061
You are thinking of gpus in the modern sense, that being general purpose computing devices. Old graphics cards had basic fixed function 2d acceleration abilities such as drawing lines and filled shapes, or pixel plotting. For example, a primitive drawing function that greatly accelerates text rendering is a pixel plotting function that accepts 1 bit per pixel image data and draws it with a specified foreground and background color at some x/y coordinate. It can also draw text with a transparent background.

>>105577132
>there was no CUDA even
completely irrelevant
>you couldn't use the GPU for anything other than rendering polygons
how do you think text rendering works anon
>my point was that XP worked nicely and smoothly using CPU only
xp was a buggy piece of shit until sp2 and it was completely unusable on anything older than a pentium 3 with minimum 512mb.

>>105577190
keep bathing in septic pits out of hubris. it's only fitting you should smell as foul as your attitude is

>>105577274
it is very relevant that there was no CUDA, why?

it's obvious
because nobody other than a gamer would buy a computer with a GPU

>>105577274
>xp was a buggy piece of shit until sp2 and it was completely unusable on anything older than a pentium 3 with minimum 512mb.
holy nostalgia
I just remember an exploit that would cause the display driver to crash
<img src=someimage.jpg width=9999999 height=9999999>
That's it, it really that simple, it would cause BSoD and reboot. Those times were glorious

>>105576258
>>105576872
This was pretty much me
I've only ever known 2000/XP from school and other people's houses.

Even when I was given an XP capable machine, I still ended up installing 98 because 128mb of RAM was brutal

>>105577309
and most people had games on their computer. most people also had gpus. this wasn't the voodoo era, you're like 5 years too late for that. microsoft was pushing direct3d and hardware acceleration hard with windows xp. opengl 2.0 had just released. we already had programmable pipelines being rolled out ffs. graphics acceleration at this point had already been generalized and was being taken advantage of through generic apis. in the mid 90s, only a handful of games were supported by graphics drivers. in the early 2000s, rendering apis had become standardized and wrapped at a system-level and were used automatically through the win32 apis.

most home computers had gpus, not just because most households had at least 1 person who played games, but because most computers were being built with gpus at this point and they had become generally useful.

cuda is irrelevant because it is. i don't know why you're attached to this singular api, but it's making me think you might have no idea what you're talking about. you just recognize it from ai buzzword hype or whatever. yes anon, it's completely irrelevant. drawing things to the screen does not require you pull shit out of the gpu. i don't know why this is such a hard concept for you to wrap your head around, but gpus are infinitely better at working with 2d quads than cpus too, whether simply filled or texture mapped. this magic limitation in your head is from a different era entirely.

>>105577132
XP rendered directly into the gpu front buffer. pci/pcie is as slow as treacle for read modify write operations. Any GPU that was even remotely decent made sure to implement sufficient 2d operations to avoid read modify write ops otherwise the performance would have been horrifically bad.

>>105577274
>xp was a buggy piece of shit until sp2 and it was completely unusable on anything older than a pentium 3 with minimum 512mb.
worked on my machine you zoomer faggot

>>105575708 (OP)
For me, it's the lack of CPU resources used on transparency, background services, and telemetry.
What I REALLY liked about it was that they didn't have apps opening up programs. Why even bother with apps if they're just gonna open up programs?

>>105575708 (OP)
It looks good and werks good, which you NEVER see nowadays.

>>105575779
Many people called it the Fischer Price UI, but at least you could download and use custom themes for it that completely changed how it looked.

>>105578630
It really didn't work that good. I have several CD keys of games almost entirely memorized from reinstalling everything after having to reinstall XP so many times.

Will Windows 11 ever have a chance to be redeemed?

>>105575708 (OP)
>Simple to use
>Ran nicely on decent enough hardware for the time
>Didn't lock shit arbitrarily behind security theater
>Didn't shove ads in my fucking face
I could go on

>>105575716
Programs were designed to use less RAM because of that limit. Now programmers are lazy because "just buy 128GB of RAM bruh"

>>105575899
Everything is a dildo if you're brave enough.

>>105575708 (OP)
baby duck millenials

7 and 10 were better

pure nostalgia. xp had rollercoaster tycoon, msn messenger, age of empires, nero cd burner, etc.

its like a millenial wet dream.

>>105575708 (OP)
No other Windows came out for 5 years, the only reason.

Even then, there were stupid shits that refused to install service packs.

>>105575716
>3GB RAM max
And?
There's literally no reason a computer should need more
A couple of web browser tabs shouldn't use over 1GB of RAM

>>105575708 (OP)
colorful vibrant playful rounded edges. also Tahoma is a god tier font. felt fast, very few crashes. could revert to looking like old windows if u wanted. everything worked well, looked good, and was familiar.

>>105575800
>they love the windows they first started with
I started with Win 3.1 and think Win XP and 2k Pro were peak.

>>105578682
that looks really dope

>>105575859
ur probably right anon, i was under 10 the last time i used windows xp

>>105575708 (OP)
Peak comfyness, "My Computer" was "This Computer", and everything wasn't flat grey soulless corpopunk shit.
It ran on like 150mb ram and literally has 99% of the real features win11 has today lel

>>105580906
*meant "This computer" was "my computer" i have a retardation

>>105575933
>totally worth losing control and having telemetry shoved up your ass
Precisely zero people here made this argument other than the voices in your head.
>>105576430
>I know contrarians will claim this a good thing

>>105575708 (OP)
No one liked it. It was called the Fisher Price UI. Only normies kept the default theme. But the NT kernel was a stability inprovement over Win98 kernel.

I actually liked the default theme
The colors everywhere felt nice to look at

Objective truths

>the more colorful shapely UI was a pleasant improvement over the old grey Windows UI
>it still kept things simple otherwise
>performant, functional, as others mention it had 99% of what we have today so this was the version of Windows that created Windows as we know it ever since

XP and Win10 UIs have been my favorites

>>105582395
The default theme was kinda dogshit, the gray Windows 2000 theme is better

>>105575708 (OP)
felt like the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNXzMBA9VU4

>>105575865
the 64-bit version was just a rebadged windows 2003 server without the compatibility of xp

>>105575894
/thread
and finding drivers and software was a complete fucking nightmare. If the mfg pulled the downloads for whatever reason, good luck. your only option is trusting some randy on a forum. Internet archive wasn't viable for that yet.

so much shit used to be trashed back then because drivers were no longer available.

>>105584803
I remember running Windows XP in a vm when I was younger and this music blew my mind. How could Microsoft had made anything so cool? Why did my first computer have to be Windows 8 and not that?

>>105575708 (OP)
do they?
i held out on win xp bc win 98SE was much MUCH lighter

>>105584998
(cont.)
now that i think of it, this might be the origin of the "babyduck syndrome"
this was the first time when windows had two oses in service with pretty much equivalent functionality, but one that was way heavier

at that time i ripped mp3s heavily
and the difference was enormous
were not talking about percentiles here
were talking about x2 delta in difference bw win 98se and win xp (up to sp 1 i think. the service packs fixed alot of the slowness)

win2000 / NT but with RAW FUCKING PERFORMANCE CRANKED IN VIA A 64 BIT VERSION THAT EVENTUALLY LAUNCHED*

*drivers not supplied

>>105575708 (OP)
When it first came out, it wasn't all that impressive on contemporary hardware, it was RAM hungry and had a lot of overhead over Windows 98. It was also buggy.
But by SP 2's release, they had fixed most of the issues and computer hardware had become so powerful and RAM so cheap that it ran pretty well on any system.
Then, Vista came out and gave little reason to "upgrade" from XP. The most noticeable aspects of Vista was its shitty performance, RAM hungryness, booting up taking at least twice as long, UAC prompts every 5 seconds and buggy drivers crashing the system.

So people grew to love XP, which ran just fine even on shitty hardware of the time. And even If you bought a computer that came with Vista, it would run better if you "downgraded" it to XP. SAD!

>>105575708 (OP)

>>105575708 (OP)
It didn't spy on you constantly. That is all. That's all it takes. Just write an OS that runs the programs and does nothing else.

>>105586088
you mean like add another layer of spying to the botnet so nothing interferes with it

>>105578682
uxthemepatcher took a (relatively) long time to come out and normies never used it. If you didn't like FisherPrice UI you changed the theme to Classic 9x or went with Luna Silver

>>105586088
>doesn't spy on you
look up nsakey

>>105588033
False.
You used a windowsblinds equivalent theme to turn your computer into le ebin 1337 desktop. Which is the same thing we were also doing on Windows 2000.

>>105588885
based stardock enjoyer