In retrospect was Windows XP really that great or was it overrated?

it was overrated, definitely. the theme is ugly and the lack of UAC makes it hell for normalfags who download random software from the internet.
It's a lot closer to modern windows than 98 though, so i guess in that was it was a fairly big leap forward, that and the kernel change.

>>105621196 (OP)
overrated, we already had windows 2000 which was solid

It was a fun time to be on the internet. That's where all the nostalgia comes from. The operating system itself was shit. IE was shit. ActiveX got you raped with exploits. After the service packs and windows update it improved somewhat. A precursor to future better versions of Windows. The biggest upside of XP though was it's tolerance for running on shit hardware with low amounts of ram. They sure did fuck that up with Vista didn't they?

>>105621196 (OP)
It was Microsoft finally admitting that their home versions were broken beyond repair and moving on to the NT Colonel, which was always better. Basically win2k with a fisher price theme.

>>105621291
yeah service pack 2 is when a lot of shit got fixed and it became solid

>>105621196 (OP)
XP was the start of the decline. Windows 2000 was peak. The greatness that people attributed to XP was really just residual greatness left over from win2k. But with Vista, windows started its plunge into hell. So compared to what came after, XP was absolutely not overrated.

>>105621271
Was Windows 2000 a different kernel from Windows 98?

>>105621196 (OP)
Windows 98 was peak,but windows 3.11 was fun.

>>105621380
yeah it used the NT kernel which was solid and used as a basis for XP and later versions

>>105621381
98 was garbage, 95 with dumb web shit integrated into the file manager

>>105621196 (OP)
XP/2000 was good only because it didnt crash every 24 hours like 95/98/ME did.

>>105621328
>serial
Pirating XP was a nightmare. From time to time, I had to dig an obscure blog and test a serial-key list one by one to activate it.

>>105621327
>the NT Colonel
Thank you for your service.

I didn't have USB support on my computer for years because the drivers got disabled somehow or were never enabled. Only when I was old enough and had enough knowledge to know about that kind of shit did I find out.
I actually hauled it to some computer repair guy once and he was like "yeah the USB port power is dead you're gonna have to replace it"

>>105621196 (OP)
Yes but I like its install music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNXzMBA9VU4

>>105621425
It was easy if you got one of the ETH0 releases. I ran good old devils own in the old days but later migrated to these.

>>105621196 (OP)
it was, in most ways, a great improvement over windows 9x/me family

>>105621196 (OP)
Full Moon over Red Dunes > Bliss

>>105621475
>add a song to the installation process
>install the sound driver AFTER the installation process
The song that I never heard.

>>105621196 (OP)
overrated
missing a lot of quality of life shit
internally it's a horribly coupled tower of babel that can't run a headless server without printing support being in there somewhere
longhorn was a necessity

>>105621196 (OP)
7 was better

>>105621578
>missing a lot of quality of life shit
That's in hindsight, I don't know why you even bother posting at all.

>>105621291
>tolerance for running on shit hardware with low amounts of ram
I am going to post this every day until you like it.
yes, you could boot XP with 64 megs but realistically you weren't getting anything done with it

>>105621380
Windows 98 and NT were completely unrelated operating systems. Microsoft were actually maintaining 3 operating systems at one point. NT, Win9x, and CE.

>>105621624
The userland and API was the same, and they had binary compatibility. The same exes can run on both.
picrel was just drawn with the win98 build of paint running on nt6

2000 > XP
98 SE > ME

>>105621609
I ran it on 128mb of ram for many years. That's what the Dell my family got in 2001 had. I installed a DVD burner and another hard drive but never upgraded the ram. During my early years as a /b/tard newfag starting in 2006 that's what I had to work with.

>>105621971
128 was still painful, i'm convinced XP had worse memory management than 7
also dang you had it even worse than me, i had 380 megs and i still had to learn service debloating to make it remotely usable
playing ragnarok online and scraping boorus that nobody remembers now, playing retard CTF q3 servers, attempting to run emulators on a low mhz katmai
i am homesick for a world that no longer exists

>>105622037
Well in hindsight it was kind of a retarded move not buying more ram. I could have asked for it for my birthday like I did the other PC upgrades. But I had a very specific mindset. I had a hacked xbox and I was into pirating console games. I was hanging out on IRC and was a part of piracy groups. So I had the original 20gb drive the computer came with then added an 80gb one. I was constantly burning things to discs because those drives were filling up. I spent so much time in mIRC and FlashFXP that I barely even thought about how bad the performance would get when I opened browser windows until years later.

The way you could catch a virus even without an internet connection through autorun.inf was something else.

>>105622100
Holding shift to stick a pendrive was mandatory.

>>105621196 (OP)
windows was always bad

>>105622080
>buying
i dumpster dived like 70% of that pc, there was a computer shop on my block and they threw out all their Slot1 gen merch one day, bunch of P2 and P3 cpus, socket 370 adapters, ps/2 ball mice, a whole crate of it all
i did not have internet at first, we pirated things by going to each other's houses with ATA drives in tow
even after getting internet it was faster to ask someone for their burned anime CDs, and before that we did VHS
my userland and habits have not changed since, i still use irfanview, foobar, same pirate photoshop i had back then, still using palemoon, still have the same filesystem i started on a usb stick in 2007
one of the program folders still has a Thumbs.db in it
80 gigs is a lot, we had like 12, a 2GB stick was my kingdom while the pc was still shared
i actually scrounged up another pc from the parts during that time and installed linux on it, some obscure KDE distro, and quickly learned that ATI has no drivers and that unix is useless without internet

>>105621939
That is like saying BSD and Linux are the same operating system because they can both run GNOME. The desktop environment is not part of the OS.

>>105621196 (OP)
this is a spam thread and was posted very recently also.

>>105622252
BSD and Linux are not binary compatible despite sharing a binary format. You can run win9x PEs in NT just fine.

>>105621196 (OP)
it was great compared to everything else on the market
>macOS
bomb crashing pajeet trash that locks up and QUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACKQUACK
if you even look at it wrong
>linux
zero momentum at the time, zero software compatibility

>>105622264
Yeah, I keep seeing the XP threads every week.

>>105622037
>CTF q3 servers
I played so much Quake 3 back then, what's surprising is that it ran fine without a graphics card though I never checked the frame rate at the time. I think it was a pentium 3 or 4 CPU, forgot the amount of RAM, later on ended up getting an ATI Radeon card to play Doom 3. Advancements in graphics were really something back then.

>>105622359
I installed Red Hat once and it actually ran great on my hardware at the time. My stepdad was pissed which I didn't care about. I just treated the family computer like it was mine and did whatever kinds of experiments I wanted with it. I wasn't ready to run Linux as my OS. Not because it wasn't viable but because I wasn't quite skilled enough yet.

>>105621196 (OP)
I was a kid back then. As I remember, it worked, and the default look was soul.

Overrated

It was pretty shit compared to my beloved 2k. I think I finally cheated on her in 2003 and instantly regretted it.

>>105621196 (OP)
Win11 can't sort folders by size but xp and 7 can soooo you tell me

XP was overrated as fuck. Just clicking the wrong pop-up by accident could get you 10 viruses and you’d have to fresh install through the BIOS. Applications would stop responding and even when you clicked end-task nothing happened. Also have fun having to install every single fucking driver manually.

Windows didn’t become truly great until 7.

>>105624001
Can confirm, i started with 95 and 7 was truly the only one i felt confident in running without hassles.

>>105621196 (OP)
Everyone loved it because by the time of SP2 it was a million times more reliable and secure than 9x. Vista was superior but everyone hated it because it required much more horsepower and the UAC was set up to be way too sensitive and nag you every five seconds.

>>105624001
>>105624015
I grew up installing drivers from floppies and CDs, and did so many fresh installs of XP that it still feels weird to be too install a modern OS and not have to install the chipset, audio, network, graphics, monitor drivers.

>>105624001
>Just clicking the wrong pop-up by accident could get you 10 viruses

rare to happen except to idiots.

>Also have fun having to install every single fucking driver manually.
did you ever even use XP more than once? this was not the case at all.

faggot crying about things he barely understands, at best.

when do we get to go home to the old internet?

>>105621196 (OP)
Every OS had its ups and down
Frustrations and disappointments
Bloat and flaws
But XP was one of the last OSes where you as the user itself had near full control over what you could and couldn't do with it. Most wish for a return to XP's time because everything after that has been a shitshow of meaningless "improvements" and updates to take that control away from the general user because every tech giant out there believes the everyday user is nothing but a child that needs to be watched over in a little padded crib.
This timeline is a fucked one and its only going to get worse. AI really is just the beginning to this shit sandwich we're all about to be force fed.

>>105621196 (OP)
It wasn't doing anything you didn't asked it to do. So yes, It was better. Windows 98 was even simpler, but it was very unstable. People say Windows 2000 was solid af so it was probably peak windows. Simplicity, no bloat and stability.

>>105624001
Windows XP with SP2/SP3 was good.

>>105621196 (OP)
It's not that it was great, but that new windows became one horror after another.

>>105621544
worked on my soundblaster live!

>>105621528
friend.jpg >>>>>>

>>105624671
Same iunno what faga didn't hear the song but i sure did

>>105625023
I get the feeling this dog died nearly 20 years ago and it's killing me.

>>105621366
this desu. though i'd say 98 was peak
but to give XP some credit, it was the last system that wasn't just yet another // name in the code

>>105624001
Windows 7 is complete shit. I am using it right now, and I hate it. I feel like my life ended when I "upgraded" from win2k3. The last 5 years have been hell, I exist but I do not live. I wish I could go back but nothing runs on win2k3 anymore.

>>105621196 (OP)
yes, everything else was so shit that XP was unmatched

>>105625189
98 is a completely unrelated operating system.
2000 was peak NT.

>>105625217
XP (and 2000) broke a lot of stuff. 98 just worked, even with some software designed for 7, albeit only 32bit versions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTU-pyQ_anQ

>>105625251
2000 did not break anything, 2000 is the sequel to NT4, 98 is completely unrelated operating system.

>>105625371
>2000 did not break anything
it absolutely broke a bunch of things. for example there was no sound in some games such as Liero (in some cases starting up the game would crash the entire OS)
also 98 never game me 6 simultaneous error pop-ups

>>105625461
You are again comparing two completely unrelated operating systems. You can't break something that never worked in the first place.

>>105625489
no, anon, i am not saying peak NT. i am saying peak Windows
why isn't that obvious to you?

>>105625534
Win9x is garbage. In no universe would it ever achieve the status of best operating system ever made. (Note win2k is the best OS ever made)

>>105625561
>Win9x is garbage
95, was poor i agree
98 just worked. never had problems with it
meanwhile NT descendants had way too many dll problems, internet breaking, hardware/driver issues and other things

>>105621196 (OP)
it was windows 2000 with more programs out of the box, fancy themes and hyper-threading
there was nothing wrong with it, it wasn't overrated because there was nothing to meaningfully compare it to

>>105622359
jeets had nothing to do with classic MacOS back then, the problem was taking the same operating system from 1984 and riding it into the ground for 16 years instead of taking it behind the shed in 1989 then replacing it with something good like they originally intended

>>105624001
>install through the BIOS
>have fun having to install every single fucking driver manually
retard

>>105624248
When Firefox was good.

>>105625217
>>105625371
>>105625489
>>105625561
This is turbo autism, ladies and gents.

for me Vista was the best, I could use the 2000 theme, play Maple Story with 2GB RAM + Core2Duo and watch ad-free HD videos on dont_be_evil_chrome at the same time.
Literally everything I needed was there.

>>105624001
I see people saying this kind of shit all the time, I had viruses maybe like 3 times in the entirety of the 2000s. What the fuck were you people doing?

>>105624214
>rare to happen except to idiots.
Bro Windows XP was swiss cheese. You could get raped by a drive by even if you were being careful. Sure I installed dumb shit on my computer. But I had malware installed onto my computer without downloading or executing anything as a result of browser exploits too.

>>105629000
I've not once had a drive-by download happen in the entirety of my using computers. I'd be very interested in seeing this happen (if ever).

>>105621196 (OP)
It was magnet on viruses and hacks, it was fine besides that but Win7 is much better.

>>105621528
For me it's

>>105629003
I told the story of the worst time it happened multiple times. I was on some cracks/keygen site using a VERY early version of Firefox. It redirected me to someplace that had a FF exploit. It launched IE and directed me to a place that used an ActiveX exploit which was used to install malware onto my machine. I was equal parts impressed and pissed off. I went back to the page to watch it happen again. Then I had to reinstall XP. Something I did multiple times through that era.

>>105629079
I've never had anything like that happen, I started using Firefox around 2004 I think. IE was always slow and shit, and only got worse with each new version.

>>105629086
Well you only needed to experience it once to understand how and why we got to our current situation. Automatic updating that is hard to opt out of can feel totally obnoxious for people like us who want control over our machines. But it's absolutely necessary to protect normies from their own retardation.

>>105629105
It's not automatic updates at that point, it's mandatory updates, normies never disabled that shit anyway so it's not like it was a necessary adjustment.

>>105629144
Well in modern Windows you can turn the shit off if you're not stupid. Tell it your connection is metered and it will leave you alone. But this doesn't seem to be common knowledge. Not even here when I see people discussing it. I'm the only person I've ever seen bring this up. When I do bring it up it's like I'm ignored. Perhaps it's better that way. Unless you're smart enough to figure out how to turn it off yourself you most likely should not do so.

>>105629169
I've tried all of that and I still get updates, even after fucking around in gpedit and all that.

>>105625189
>>105625251
98 was a piece of shit that bsod at least once a day, zoomer

>>105629175
I didn't. I turned it on because I had a metered connection and if they did download I would have been double dog fucked. When I got unlimited internet I still marked my connection as metered. Not because I never want to update. But because I want to download and install updates manually. I don't use Windows at all now so I'll never have that problem again.

>>105629201
I looked into it and critical security fixes still get installed when you specify that you have a metered connection. I never noticed anything. Also these types of fixes have never caused me any issues. I had a feature update brick my machine once. In 99% of cases not installing security patches is completely retarded. If you can find a good justification for doing so, like say you are a security researcher, I am sure you can figure something out. Even if you need to block connections to the servers entirely.

>>105625670
98 was just slightly less shit than 95, with SE got stable.

>>105621196 (OP)
at release it was shit, got good later on but is overrated because windows 2000 did the same thing a year earlier and xp just stole the credit

>>105621196 (OP)
Everything you use now and think is great will be called overrated in 20 years

>>105629199
skill issue

>>105621196 (OP)
XP was shit lmao

>>105621380
win98 was win32 over a hybrid dos-windows kernel. internally it was windows 4.1
win2k on the other hand was win32 over windows nt 5.0, an entirely separate lineage of windows (nt)
they look similar on the surface as they use almost the same ui along with many of the same surface-level technologies like win32 and directx, but the underlying os were completely independent

>>105629998
roflmao

>>105621609
W98 fags called xp bloated.

>>105621609
cute pape

>>105630245
as such a person i agree that is true. xp was the vista of it's time. it had the same issues as vista. new core meant needing new drivers, a considerable hit in software compatibility, greatly increased system requirements, stability and security issues which were arguably worse than vista even, new annoyances like file permissions/UAC, etc.
imo the only reason XP is remembered fondly while Vista was not is because XP stuck around long enough that most people had forgotten those growing pains by the time vista replaced it, and vista was replaced by 7 before it had the chance to do the same. 7 was their way to speed that process up, 7 was little more than a cleaned up vista, may as well have been a service pack, yet here we are, vista permanently hated and 7 becoming the new xp. all they did was split early vista and late vista into two different "os's"

>>105621196 (OP)
it was shit, but it was the only shit that just worked at that time

>>105629086
firefox came out in 2004, but it didn't come out of nowhere. i first used it earlier, because "firefox" was the result of splitting the web browser component off of mozilla internet suite (typically just called "mozilla"), which was a continuation of the netscape source code
it wouldn't make much sense to say you /started/ using firefox if you'd previously used mozilla or netscape, since it's essentially the same browser under different names

>>105630391
When did I say I used either? I never did.

>>105630466
yea i'm talking more generally

>>105630284
Windows XP didn't have UAC

>>105630501
i was talking about xp and vista, and used file permissions and uac as annoyances they introduced
xp introduced file permissions (compared to windows 98/me which it replaced) while vista introduced uac

>>105621196 (OP)
the good
>you could write and sign your own drivers

the bad
>other people could write and sign their own malware drivers

>>105621196 (OP)
>overrated
it was panned to shit until sp2 made it usable. i'm a zoomer and even i fucking know that.