XP and our psychology
I have gathered that since Windows XP made itself known to the public eye all the way back nearly sixteen years ago, everybody hated it, and it lasted for a good number of years because of it being resource-heavy and the "Fisher-Price" look it sported, and probably the dropping of DOS support for the older generations brought up with it. Then, suddenly, everyone loved it as if these gripes never existed. It makes me wonder... how come some of us hated it back then, only years later we loved it? Was it because of Microsoft providing us with SP2 which had improved a lot of things or, is it because we had failed to know of its great potential? I suppose the market share from late 2006 would explain things when I saw that XP took a whopping 80% of it so, there's got to be something here...
I can't have much a say on this myself because, I actually liked XP back in its day but that was probably because I was younger and never know what was actually wrong with it (and with the transition from Win98 to it was a breeze, personally). Although, my experience with it started in 2003 but still, those were the good ol' days. I hope I'm not the only one who thinks this :?
I can't have much a say on this myself because, I actually liked XP back in its day but that was probably because I was younger and never know what was actually wrong with it (and with the transition from Win98 to it was a breeze, personally). Although, my experience with it started in 2003 but still, those were the good ol' days. I hope I'm not the only one who thinks this :?
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When XP first hit the scene, driver support was as crappy as vista driver support was. Hot on the heels of this, the internet boomed and XP was discovered to have more holes in it than swiss cheese.
Much like how windows 98 had stability problems until Second Edition, XP had these issues until SP2.
SP2 introduced the Security Center and at that time driver support had also matured.
At that point XP became a solid system.
It's a strange thing, but I think it had way more of an effect than we're willing to admit, because on one hand it alienated lots of tech users, because it made it look childlike, but at the same time, it was also what made it sort of work so well with less geek inclined audiences. That and the fact it was around just at the time computers exploded. Even though people always say the 90s was when this happened but I maintain not, more everyday non tech people (your grandma, aunt, etc) got computers post 2000 in my experience.
I remember people on here *despising* XP because of Luna alone, despite the fact that underneath little had changed since 2000.
Or perhaps nostalgia is more at play here, given that everyone has certain points in their lives when they start to look back to "better" times. Think the boomers and the 60s/70s being awesome, Gen Xers going on about how great 1992 was, and with people my age starting to wish it was the early 2000s again.
I was (and is) a damned good OS.
I see it as just a tool. And it was one that could be mastered fairly easily.
"I don't remember anybody "hating" XP.
I was (and is) a damned good OS."
I agree.
After suffering thru W98se on my Compaq Presario 1694, Win XP was stable and worked.
I remember having problems getting diagnostic software in the early years, but this was a minor issue.
Most software ran well and the crashes and sluggishness of W98se were no more.
I have a Dell laptop with 4GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo processor, and it's still quite zippy with XP. I tried installing Windows 7 on it and ran into some driver issues, so it's pretty much stuck with XP. And I'm okay with that.
Looking at store computers with it preloaded I thought "fancy Windows 2000."
However, I decided to give it a try. What harm would a few hundred €€€ for pro be?
It had its fair share of glitches and issues on RTM. Doesn't every OS?
I remember a few back then saying they would never touch XP because of this and that. Still, the smoke cleared and you either had people who hopped on the Xp train early, or stayed on 2000. There were still the folks who wouldn't stop complaining about Xp, sometimes ones that hadn't even used it.
Then along chugged vista half a decade or so later. Same thing, people hated it for this and that. Except that a larger combination of mislead tech magazines, inexperienced and/or gullible users, the grapevine, and standard capitalist OEMs caused the bar to go down further.
And the same "let's stick with the older" sentiment went around, except more rampantly, being fueled by these factors. Like XP, the vista fiasco could've just blown over like normal, but...
Either way I remember the 7 haters, the h8ters, all the way to the all-too familiar modern 10 haters.
Stuff like this happens to pretty much every new thing released: cars, phones, etc. What isn't the same is how it ends.
XP was built on the NT kernel - unlike 95, so it broke compatibility with certain 90s windows games/apps. What's worse, there was very little functional driver support at launch. It was actually very buggy compared to the stable OS it would become after SP2. Finally, as it was the first windows not to have "proper" DOS, only a simulated command prompt. Many DOS games didn't work properly or at all, most didn't have sound. It made for a terrible experience and downgrading to '98SE was the only way to get some stuff to work until DOSBox came out!
...and don't even get me started on that horrible Teletubbies looking UI
If Luna really bothers you that damn much, just use the Classic theme. Problem solved. This post has made me realize just how irrational my dislike of newer UIs really is.
Over time it became comfortable and familiar, like the unattractive girl you end up marrying and come to think she's quite pretty, just homely.
Or something like that.
Also, once again talking about how everyone loved XP, is there any proof that someone can provide about its support being extended from its original? I saw it mentioned here and there and even if I can gather it to be true, I would still like a source proving this.
I don't know about an official announcement from Microsoft, but remember they usually support their products for around 10 years. XP's life lasted 14, quite a bit longer than the usual product cycle.
As for the Luna theme: I always liked it a lot more than the theme that Win95 and Win98 spotted, in part because of the new color scheme. The classic theme was always a bit too grey for my taste.
About that same time, ACT! switched to using MS SQL from the old database engine (was it BTrieve?) and the overhead was killing me.
XP made things smooth as butter. Oh, and wireless. I needed that too.
I've had just about ever flavor of XP including custom builds etc, and I really couldn't tell you which one was Luna or Zune. What I can say is some of them were so dark, I wondered if the kids making them had some sort of psychological disorder.
Here's one pronouncement of when Microsoft announced EOL: