Ten years ago today, Microsoft launched what would become the world’s most popular desktop operating system – for better or worse. Its interface colours were… Interesting (trying hard to avoid bias here, folks, bear with me now). Its early performance was… Not always entirely up to par. Its security track record was… Well, it sucked hard in that department (I tried). We’re ten years down the line, and thanks to Vista, way too many people are still using this relic.
Improvements and new features
Windows XP was one of the most significant Windows releases to date. While Windows 2000 was the first desktop-oriented Windows NT version which could easily be used by regular consumers, it was Windows XP that brought NT to the masses – finally signalling the end of the Windows 9x series, which had really run its course and was in dire need of replacement.
While the shift to Windows NT as the base for client Windows accounted for most of Windows XP’s improvements, the user interface was also massively overhauled. Luna introduced the blue colour scheme – to much ridicule, and rightly so, in my opinion. While this is of course a very subjective statement, I think Luna is one of the ugliest themes ever to come as a default on any operating system – heck, even CDE is more pleasing to my eyes. Luckily, you could turn Luna off, and switch to Windows classic – the first thing I did on any Windows XP install, whether my own or someone else’s.
Other than mere looks, Windows XP also introduced several useful user interface improvements. The new start menu was kind of a mixed bag – I know people who swore by it, and people who hated it with a passion (I was in the latter group). I was most likely just averse to change, because after Microsoft tweaking it for a few years, I finally embraced this start menu type in Windows 7. Other interesting features introduced in XP are task bar grouping (now the cornerstone of the Windows 7 taskbar), a redone Windows Explorer, ClearType font rendering, and much more.
Other than the switch to Windows NT, other low-level changes were also made which we still benefit from today. A crucial improvement in Windows XP you don’t hear a lot about is Side-by-side assembly, or, as it is more commonly known, WinSxS. WinSxS fixed one of the most infuriating problems of the Windows 9x product line: DLL Hell. DLL Hell is an umbrella term for a number of different problems, including missing DLLs, version conflicts, duplicate DLLs, and so on.
WinSxS addressed all these problems by storing multiple versions of the same DLL in the winsxs directory (in the Windows directory). Executables include an XML manifest (it can also be a separate file) which lists the specific versions of the DLL files it needs – Windows then loads these specific versions.
Of course, Windows XP contained a lot more improvements and new features, but these are the ones that always stood out to me. What are some of your favourite new features and/or improvements in Windows XP?
Criticism
Windows XP was not without controversy. When it first launched, its minimum specifications were deemed too hefty in comparison to Windows 9x, and Windows XP’s performance wasn’t always up to par in its early days. Luckily, Microsoft finally bucked the increasing hardware requirements trend with Windows 7 and windows 8.
Other points of criticism include the activation technologies built into Windows XP, which certainly caused frustrations for users of both pirated and legal versions of Windows XP alike. Furthermore, people who relied on certain DOS programs (I’m looking at my former job here, which used till software which didn’t run on Windows XP) faced problems migrating to XP.
The biggest criticism of Windows XP, of course, is its abysmal security track record. Especially before the second service pack, Windows XP was incredibly insecure, with all sorts of ports open and no built-in firewall. To me, the biggest crime Windows XP committed was squandering its Windows NT heritage, making braindead mistakes like giving the first user administrative privileges. Windows NT was (and still is) one of the most advanced operating systems in the world, and Windows XP could have been very, very secure had Microsoft forced its design principles upon users.
All in all, I have never been a fan of Windows XP. When it came out, I was getting my feet wet in BeOS for the first time, and Windows XP always felt… Well, crappy alongside my beloved BeOS. Especially the lag and lack of responsiveness in Windows XP’s user interface – oh, the tearing! – frustrated me to no end, and as such, I simply never became friends with it. Even when I had long left BeOS behind, I never managed to feel comfortable using XP (and hence why I switched to Mac OS X in 2004).
Happy birthday
Still, Windows 7 only recently managed to overtake Windows XP, meaning that despite its age and flaws, the operating system is still very popular among the world’s computer users (only 12% of OSAlert readers are still using Windows XP). Why anyone would opt for Windows XP when Windows 7, Mac OS X and the various Linux distributions are also available is utterly beyond me – but alas.
So, from someone who never liked Windows XP, a reluctant birthday wish, and the hope that more and more people finally make the jump to something modern. Windows XP needs to be taken ’round the shed.
My bank still uses WindowsXP. Makes me feel like my money is in good hands.
Barclays in the UK were/still using Windows 2000 Pro!
Although i tend to agree with them, i was a massive NT4 and an even bigger Windows 2000 fan, they were both very lean OS’s, which were purely focused on getting work done. Win2k was insanely fast and a lot faster than WinXP.
I put off WinXP until i actually had to use it through software support, but i hated it, it felt and still feels clunky slow and just plain annoying even on a fresh install with SP3 (2GB RAM).
The only XP i will give any credit too is XP x64, it was like Win2K again, fast lean and once you took off that horrible Luna UI, focused on getting stuff done.
Although this post is begining to sound like a big rant against Windows, i love Windows 7, again like Win2k, fast and very productive, im glad to see the back off it and am currently migrating another company to Win7.
I leave this mostly negative comment with a negative last line, the worst thing i found regarding XP was that after 6 months the OS for no reason would slow down, it was visibly noticable on any of my computers and these were clean machines, i.e. no install/uninstall loads of apps, they basically had office, dev tools and that was it, but it still lost it’s speed and got slower and slower, Win7 however has kept it’s running speed and i have had to reformat/reinstall since installation 2/3 years ago!
Running my 1-2 Windows applications in a productive environment got so much more painful in the last years.
Back in the days, I had a relaxed 4GB VM running WinXP and MS Office, resulting in about 1GB free disk space. Today I need a 16GB image for Win7 and Office, and it also consumes about half my RAM. Also, the huge, inefficient GUI elements are extremely annoying (I might have a large screen but kvm/vnc can’t cope with the required resolution. Also, I get a creepy feeling when running Windows fullscreen..)
Open source solutions still barely work for the “standardized” new Word format, while PowerPoint of course does not work at all.
How people can pay money for this software is beyond me. Some day my boss will kill me for secretly preparing all slides in latex. Latex-beamer is a pain, but its nothing compared to Powerpoint in a Win7 VM.
I don’t get the hate, to be honest. XP is still the OS that I spend the greatest amount of time in. It’s never blue-screened on me, I’ve never had an activation problem, I’ve never suffered any security problems, and it still does everything I need it to do.
I’ll be using it until Microsoft kills all support for it.
That’s like saying, “it’s ok for me to leave my front door open because I’ve been doing it all this time and I haven’t been robbed”.
Do yourself a favour and upgrade to Windows 7.
If he’s happy and it works for him, then why bother?
I was running leopard until about a month ago. I was happy and it worked fine for me. The only reason I upgraded to lion is because I wanted to buy a few games on steam that didn’t work on leopard.
Edited 2011-10-26 00:39 UTC
If he hasn’t had any security issues, it’s likely because he’s set it up correctly.
Automatic updates, a firewall, a limited user account and a non-brain-dead user is all it takes to make XP secure enough for most purposes.
Au contraire, there are approximately two million new pieces of malware written every year, essentially all of it is targetted at Windows. The very best anti-malware protection only rates a detection rate somewhere in the 90% range. This implies the creation 200,000 new pieces of undetectable malware for Windows every year. If Windows were indeed secure enough for most purposes, then there would be no point to all that malware-writing effort.
While some people are cautious enough to be able to avoid such malware, for non-expert people who use Windows in conjunction with the Internet (which is the majority of Windows users), eventually the chances are that their system will become compromised.
Of all of the non-expert home users of Windows of my acquaintance, who effectively had the task of looking after their own Windows systems, none of them managed to use Windows for more than a year at a time before their systems were compromised. Some of them have asked me to fix their Windows systems, and others just take their system to a computer store every so often and fork out money to have it “fixed”.
Edited 2011-10-26 04:04 UTC
Most of which is delivered via very specific means, has very specific vectors for attack and most of which gets tripped up by simply not having write access to system files. Unless you’re dealing with a lot of sensitive information, you don’t even need the anti-* software. As a precaution, it’s worth installing a couple twice a year, running a scan and then removing them (since most people still running XP probably don’t have the most robust hardware), though.
I’ll say it AGAIN because it obviously didn’t sink in: “Of all of the non-expert home users of Windows of my acquaintance, who effectively had the task of looking after their own Windows systems, none of them managed to use Windows for more than a year at a time before their systems were compromised. Some of them have asked me to fix their Windows systems, and others just take their system to a computer store every so often and fork out money to have it fixed.”
To my mind, compared with my Linux systems, this is utterly abysmal. It may or may not be the fault of Windows that it is attacked so much, but regardless of where the fault is, the experience of non-expert self-supporting Windows users is lamentable. Despite having to pay appreciable ongoing costs for security software over-and-above the bare OS, their security is still compromised, they face a significant risk that their finances or identity might be stolen online, they have no privacy and are constantly spied upon, they are routinely bombarded by advertising, their systems work against them in terms of imposing DRM policies and the like, and they have to pay, and pay again, to maintain even this poor standard of service.
Edited 2011-10-26 05:03 UTC
No, I got it; it’s just irrelevant. Irrelevant to the person you originally replied to, irrelevant to the point I addressed in my last reply.
Of course it is relevant. You are trying to say Windows XP is secure enough. I’m telling you it simply isn’t, for the purposes of ordinary non-expert users who are expected to maintain their own systems. The XPerience such users face is abysmal, even when they do correctly follow the well-meaning advice they are given. I see it happen all the time.
The popular view is even that “computers get slower after a while”. This is what (Windows) users experience, even though it should not happen (software performance should not degrade with time).
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111016154153AAHD8Rb
PS: It is clear from the above that ordinary non-expert users are not aware that when an anti-malware security extra program they have installed boasts a “98% detection rate”, that also means a 2% failure-to-detect rate. A failure-to-detect in turn means that your system has malware even though your anti-malware security software says it doesn’t.
Someone else was trying to say Windows was stable, as solid as a rock. I had to deal with a crash and a failure to recover properly less than a minute after I read this. I would have fallen about laughing if it wasn’t so annoying to have suffered the crash.
Edited 2011-10-26 05:30 UTC
Which it is – for BeamishBoy and other ‘non-brain-dead’ users, who were the subjects of both our posts and to which you’re replying.
Except this does happen, even on OSX and linux. Config files and logs get messy and/or bloated, becoming harder to parse, data becomes corrupted, there’s the very slow creep of additional services/daemons/’widgets’ as users seek additional functionality and to a small degree, data fragmentation on the filesystem continues to be an issue. Then there’s software ‘upgrades’ that slowly invite themselves to more system resources, there’s the very real degradation in the performance of PC hardware as it ages and there’s users invariably perceiving their PCs as getting slower as they optimise their efficiency with familiar workflows and they get faster.
But I digress – indeed, so do you.
Edited 2011-10-26 08:22 UTC
… and which it most definitely isn’t, for literally millions of non-expert machine owners who are expected to maintain their own machines.
Not everyone is an IT expert, nor should they be expected to be.
The poor performance of Windows has apparently given you some very strange ideas, and low expectations.
On linux, config files stay the same. Log files can be purged with a cron job. Functions do not simply accumulate, unless you deliberately install new functions.
PC hardware performance does not degrade as it ages. A 2 GHz clock is still 2 Ghz 10 years later on. 7500 rpm is still 7500 rpm.
Edited 2011-10-26 09:46 UTC
Err … Electrical components have a lifetime you know … Old hardrives are likely to break … heat and time slowly destroy components.
In a digital computer, if a component is destroyed, the computer doesn’t work. If the computer works at all, it works with its original performance. Digital computer … on or off … working or not working … there is no gradual hardware degradation (gradual degradation is for analogue circuits).
Only software degrades … for example as Windows anti-malware has to check through two million new extra malware signatures every year, yet another upgrade monitor is installed along with all the others, and the registry slowly expands and becomes more and more clogged with time.
Edited 2011-10-26 11:43 UTC
Hardrives get old and wear out (even SSDs) … therefore the computer gets slower. Capacitors in Video cards have a lifetime.
Also Anti-virus programs typically only scan when scheduled or when you download something in your browser or email … Maybe it is your AV?
Do you even know what you are talking about?
Edited 2011-10-26 12:17 UTC
Speaking from personal experience, none of this is true.
As an example, I work at an algo-trading fund; since speed is so important to what we do, we use hardware TCP to handle our data feeds from electronic markets. Over the course of a year or two there’s a measurable decrease in the performance of the hardware that necessitates changing it out for new components.
This occurs in many other types of hardware too: a recent example occurred (http://bit.ly/hEzHl5) when Intel pulled their 6-series chipsets due to time degredation of SATA ports. Note that the chipsets wouldn’t fail outright; instead, as the hardware degraded, the error rates would simply increase to unacceptable levels.
Edited 2011-10-27 00:16 UTC
Speaking from personal experience, if a piece of digital electronics passess acceptance test with a certain performance, and it still passes all functional tests years later (i.e. the hardware components are not faulty), then it will also still pass all performance tests.
Digital electronics either work, or fail. On or off. Go or No go. There is no “maybe”.
This implies transmissions over a cable. Analogue.
Edited 2011-10-27 02:13 UTC
Deary me. In spite of the criticism you’ve received in this thread, I was willing to assume in good faith that you knew at least a little bit about how computer hardware actually works. It turn out, however, that you clearly don’t have the faintest fucking idea what you’re talking about.
What’s even more depressing is that you appear to have spent 6158 posts on OSAlert to get to this stage…
Deary me.
Here you go, here is a description of an ethernet transceiver IC (warning, PDF).
http://isdl.snu.ac.kr/wkim/pdfs/ic/ic68.pdf
In this PDF you will see an overview of how the analogue signals on the ethernet wire are converted back and forth to digital data stream of whatever ethernet serial controller sits behind it.
VCOs. Line drivers and receivers. Voltage conditioning. DAC. Delay cell. Comparator. PLL. Rs, Cs and Ls. In other words … Analogue. Subject to noise and degradation over time. Potential to increase error rates as components degrade over time.
The rest of the ethernet link is digital, and it will either work or not work.
So, in essence, it turns out that you are wrong, and you have embarrased yourself on a public forum. Sucks to be you.
Edited 2011-10-27 05:17 UTC
No it is you who are wrong.
Whichever way you spin it … I/O is the major limiting factor and while SATA does have DAC which apparently degrade … the computer can be as slow as the slowest memory (usually the hardisk) if it is accessing it.
So if the controller is having crappy performance the whole system will suffer since the I/O stream won’t actually get there as quick.
So he is correct … Shall I explain Pages and Frames to you next?
Edited 2011-10-27 18:51 UTC
Err, no. Just no.
Components can drift in their value over time. Resistors can change value, as can capacitors, inductors etc.
For their correct operation analog circuits require that circuit components do not deviate too much from their nominal values. As components drift away from nominal values, the performance of the circuit deviates from optimal.
Digital circuits have “thresholds” at which they switch. As long as the digital signal is within the threshold, the digital circuit will continue to operate correctly, at full performance. As soon as a threshold is reached and the circuit does not switch when it should, the whole circuit breaks down.
Digital circuits in the main employ MOSFETs working in saturation mode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET#Modes_of_operation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET#CMOS_circuits
It is a very simple concept. In the main, analog circuit performance will degrade away from optimal over time. In the main, digital circuits will continue to work at full performance until, suddenly, they stop working. This is why a digital watch can keep perfect time for fifteen years, and then, suddenly, not work at all.
For CPUs, RAM, all kinds of purely digital circuits within a typical computer, the components will keep working at full performance until, suddenly, they fail. There are some parts of a typical computer which convert to and from analog signals, however, and these components can be expected to degrade slowly over time.
So, apart from the ethernet interface, the audio interfaces, and perhaps the signal pickup flying head and motor bearings of the hard disk, a typical desktop computer can be expected to maintain its as-new hardware performance for many years, a few decades perhaps, and then, suddenly, it won’t work any more.
Edited 2011-10-28 00:37 UTC
Why can’t you ever admit you are wrong?
How fast a digital part of the computer works isn’t being debated.
The computer needs to slow down to the slowest memory it is accessing … that we why we have L1,L2,L3 cache, RAM and then a hardisk. That why your computer performance is crap if you are always accessing the SWAP file/partition.
This is pretty simple stuff when it comes to how computers work.
Agreed.
The part you seem to be missing is that, as long as the computer is actually working, “the slowest memory it is accessing” will be just as fast after ten years as the day the computer was bought.
Of course hard drives degrade over time, accumulating bad sectors. The drive can tolerate (mark) and work with bad sectors, but it will still slow its performance.
So no, a computer will not be just as fast after 10 years, necessarily.
Agree with this.
Bad sectors would normally occur via head crashes, so it is possible for a drive to last a long time in some benign environments without getting any bad sectors.
Then too, solid state drives have the potential to be very robust.
But yes, damage to a hard drive can slow a machine marginally.
Not enough, though, to account for the slowdowns that Windows users sometimes report.
No the slowest memory is usually a spinning mechanical hardisk, which develop various problems over their lifetime (bad sectors etc). Then data get sent over SATA that has some DAC conversion going on and We have already discovered that the components have a degradation of performance as time moves on (from the previous intel link).
Lets not get onto overheating GPUs/CPUs/NorthBridge, capacitors with limited lifetime, dustbunnies, PSU components slowly dying etc.
Can we stop pretending that the computer hardware is as as it was on the day of purchase.
No shit.
I’m primarily a linux user.
Ideally, yes. In reality, no.
Says Mr. ‘not everyone should be an IT expert’.
Which is exactly what I suggested people do.
Yes, it does. Performance peaks after a few months of use and then slowly declines. As errors accumulate on that 7500rpm HDD, the read/write times increase. As the circuitry and transistors on your CPU oxidise, actual performance drops, while the reported clock speed remains the same; conductivity and heat dissipation can decline with time, meaning that once stable 2ghz overclock needs to be dropped to 1.8ghz and/or have the voltage ramped up.
Edited 2011-10-26 10:23 UTC
And you will say that ripping XP and putting Linux on there will be some MAGIC fix as per usual …. FFS
Heh, I had XP for a few years, then I got sick of all the problems and migrated entirely to various Linux distros (to inherit a new set of problems) and OSX for a few years, then about 6 months ago I got a new pc that happened to have Windows 7 installed and to my amazement, it has been a pretty solid OS.
If not for my last notebook coming with windows 7 pre-installed I’d still be using XP. Windows 7 is great and all but XP still servers me all right. With SP 3 it’s fast, reliable and secure enough. Aside from driver support I see no reason to move out of XP if you have to pay for it.
But yeah, congratulations windows XP.
Yeah, I loooooove XP, so long as we’re talking SP2 or above
Once I install it and turn on the Win32 ‘classic’ theme, the OS just stays out of my way, and I’m good to go. Never had any stability or security issues with it; was always rock solid.
I find Windows 7 to be just … meh. I hated the dock in OSX, and hate it even more in Win7, which is the first thing that got turned off. The second thing that got turned off was the new theme, as I liked classic better. The third thing that got turned off was the ‘Aero snap’ feature, because I kept having windows snap to the edge of the screen when trying to switch monitors. And don’t even get me started on UAC.
By the time I got finished turning off the new ‘features’ that were pissing me off, I was basically back to XP. Except now the OS is a 15gb install instead of 1gb… WTF did they put in there anyway? There sure as hell ain’t 14gb worth of new features in here
Plus, they moved shit around for no apparent reason… the control panel is a complete clusterf**k now. The only good things they introduced in Vista IMO was the calendar app and the startup manager, and they removed both of those in Win7. WHY!?!
About the only thing I really like better about 7 is the start menu. But other than that, I still like XP just fine.
I can’t agree more. XP SP3 serves well. Once properly upgraded it is reasonably fast, reliable and stays out of the way. Of course, the first things I did was disable its theme, the new start menu, desktop.. turning it into an updated version of Win2000.
In fact, I still think W2k was one of the best versions of Windows ever. WinXP improved it, but also came with a lot of “unnecessary” stuff with it.
That’s not to say WinXP is the best OS, it is one of the most usable Windows versions!
My netbook came with WinXP when Vista was already around for months. There must be a reason…
Didn’t upgrade to it until about 2003. I personally never found anything wrong with the Blue Luna theme, it was actually refreshing change that made the desktop more user friendly rather than the drab gray since Windows 95. Also, you could change the color scheme of Luna Blue to either Silver or Olive and third party themes were available that could make it just the way you want it.
In Regards to the negatives, the only persons Product Activation bothered were those who wanted to pirate it without paying for it. OA activation came into use with Windows XP, which meant that a person who bought a new PC would not encounter product activation at all, even when they reinstall Windows XP.
Businesses don’t have to worry either, because volume license Windows XP never required product activation. Where do you think the bulk of pirated XP installs come from. The few that won’t budge off XP are those who refuse to pay.
Windows XP had a built in Firewall since RTM, I believe it was not on by default until XP SP2. Much of what was experienced with Windows XP in terms of negatives is true of any new operating system.
Mac OS 10.0 which was released in March 2001 was not a stellar performer, it lacked the performance users were hoping for, compatibility, no DVD playback, no CD burning support, not much new useful native apps (in fact, Apple didn’t get OS X right until 10.3). Windows XP on the other hand had all these features working out the box and it worked with a decent amount of legacy applications that most users used and expected to work. I remember my high school lab when I was senior ran Photoshop 6, Office 2000 and 97 on it without a hitch.
The trivial programs when you look back that people complained about like AOL, Roxio CD Burning wizard (a capability already in Windows XP) and the last version of Norton. Come on, seriously.
Linux back then was pretty much something you only associated with geek, hobbyist, waste of time. Windows XP really was a triumph and when I look back on the period, its such an unusual time yet interesting time, it was launched just after 9/11, Michael Jackson was alive and just launched his last major studio album ‘Invincible’, Britney Spears was going into acting with her first movie Cross Roads, lots of great music, my dad was alive and throughout it all, Windows XP was there.
Its ironic, XP stands for experience and if only I could relive some of them again.
But does that really fix the problem? In the past, a missing DLL was one that didn’t exist. WinSxS allows not just for missing DLLs, but missing DLL versions.
Version conflicts haven’t really changed. Windows historically expected that if a DLL had the same name, it must be upward compatible forever (new versions could replace old versions.) WinSxS hasn’t totally changed this – it still follows the assumption that a new version of a DLL can be installed, and applications will magically switch the new and improved version, so that version had better be compatible or things will break.
You can have two versions of the same DLL installed side by side that are not compatible, but this is not as simple as it seems. For one, things get interesting when you try to load both DLLs into the same process. That in turn makes things interesting when you’re building extensibility points and you can’t control what DLLs your extensions might be loading. Developers need to code around these cases with great care.
As a developer, WinSxS creates some interesting quirks. You need to be very careful about servicing Visual Studio, for example. If you build an app one day and have one version of the CRT, your app will run on that version or a newer one. Install a patch to VS and rebuild, and now your app requires the newer one. So if you distribute an update to your app with the newer one, it will stop working on some random set of machines that have the old version without the new version – unless, of course, you understand the situation and always distribute the CRT with every update you ship. And if you were doing that, the historical model wasn’t so bad to begin with.
WinSxS is an interesting thing. It certainly does solve a pile of problems. But I think it’s a little optimistic to assume that DLL Hell in entirety is completely solved.
That is one of the major reasons people continue to use XP.
– Vista is astoundingly slow even on good hardware.
– 7 performs better but still has kind of absurd hardware requirements, and is rather expensive.
– Linux has an unfortunate inverse relationship between performance and user friendliness; e.g. KDE4 is as slow as Vista, while stand alone WMs are very fast but take some geekiness to use.
Now I’ll give you that Linux with Xfce has pretty much the same performance/usability profile as XP (probably better at both, on well supported hardware). But there are other issues:
– Hardware support. Linux support for low-end graphics cards is *bad*, for example. Try any distro on something with a Via Unichrome chipset. *Everything* lags, hardware acceleration or no.
– Software support. There is a ton of specialized software for Windows that doesn’t exist for Linux, and Wine cannot be depended on.
– People don’t want to bother learning a whole new OS, and may just not have the time.
So I can see very well why some people stick with XP, despite its grotesquely bad default security.
You are very much out of date. KDE4 is fast and responsive. I happen to run a KDE4 system and a different XP system (on roughly equivalent six-years-old hardware) every single day. I am very familiar with the relative performance of these two operating systems. The KDE4 system easily outperforms the XP system, by a large margin.
Just buy a Linux system as you would buy a Windows system … buy a system with Linux pre-installed for you. You will then have none of the troubles that some people have with self-installed OSes. *Nothing* lags.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/third-gen-system-76-lemur-laptop…
As for choice of applications, it is true to say that there is a wider range of choice of applications for XP, but it is not true to imply that there is insufficient choice for Linux. Every need of over 95% of use cases is covered by decent Linux desktop applications.
I don’t know why people feel the need to keep spreading this kind of misinformation about Linux, it is getting beyond tiring to have to keep correcting it all the time.
Edited 2011-10-26 03:22 UTC
1. “Buy a new computer” is a stupid, wasteful solution.
2. I have a box with Unichrome graphics, and yes, GUIs are very laggy on it in Linux – and not laggy at all in Windows. Hard to say why, though I have a hunch it’s mostly down to a) bad 2D acceleration support and b) GTK2’s double-buffering habit, which kills performance on older machines.
3. I know damn well how to set up X and video acceleration, and if I didn’t, a distro like Ubuntu would do that for me.
Check your bit-depth. If your Windows is using 16-bit graphics and X is using 24/32-bit that is a huge difference in memory bandwidth usage.
Also double-check that X is actually using the “via” driver and not vesa. I don’t know why it happens, but I’ve seen X autoconfigure to VESA before. Maybe a PCI identifier that isn’t exactly what it was looking for.
Yes, I’ve tried that. VIA 16-bit graphics performance is consistently far worse than Windows 32-bit. As in, windows take three seconds to render to a new size… When smooth resizes are *disabled*.
(And yes, the via driver was enabled. I know how to read Xorg log files too.)
VIA graphics support for Linux is atrocious.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODgxNg
Use anything but. If you have a PCIE slot, do yourself an immense favour, and invest just a few dollars in a low-end ATI graphics card (say one about four years old, should be dirt cheap now).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_…
The open source drivers will auto-configure for you, you won’t have to touch a thing.
Edited 2011-10-26 23:04 UTC
I didn’t claim it was a solution for you … I am pointing out what would be a fair comparison.
“Buy a computer” is what people do in order to get a working Windows installation.
If you wanted a working Linux installation in order to compare the stability and capability of the two systems under the same circumstances, then what you need to do is “buy a new Linux computer”.
If you aren’t prepared to do that, then fine, don’t, but I am pointing out that you are in no position to compare the systems under the equivalent circumstances. You are running a self-installed un-optimal version of some generic Linux distribution running on a machine designed to run (and originally sold with) Windows, and then comparing that to Windows on that machine.
Such a comparison is always going to find that the machine runs Windows relatively well (because that is what it was designed to do). Unless you are an expert, which clearly you aren’t, you are crippling Linux out of the gate by self-installing it on an inappropriate machine. Then you have the gall to try to convince people, from your biased non-test, that Linux isn’t any good.
There you go, QED. If anyone was offering to sell you a proper Linux system
http://zareason.com/shop/home.php?cat=
http://www.system76.com/
… you can bet your bottom dollar it wouldn’t have Unichrome graphics.
Edited 2011-10-26 22:13 UTC
I don’t see why it’s not a fair comparison. If Linux support for X hardware sucks, and lots of people are stuck with X hardware, how is it unfair to call that a major usability issue?
Because it is the “X hardware” that doesn’t support Linux. You have got the “supports” actor and verb the wrong way around. If you want to run Linux, and run it well, then you should get hardware that supports Linux.
If the hardware you have actually supports Linux, then Linux will run even the fastest and most expensive machines on the planet.
http://www.top500.org/
For example, VIA graphics support for Linux is atrocious:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODgxNg
Now if instead all you want to do is try to get Linux running on whatever hardware you happen to have on hand, then you need to accept that, although you may be able to get it to run, it may very well not be anywhere near optimal on that hardware.
If what you want to do is to compare “how good is this OS compared to that one” then you need to run each OS on hardware that supports it. Running one OS installed by OEM professionals on hardware that supports it, and another OS self-installed on hardware that has very very poor support for that OS is hardly going to deliver any kind of realistic, objective comparison.
Edited 2011-10-27 02:20 UTC
Okay, then VIA doesn’t support Linux. Fine. The point is, to the end user, it doesn’t make a difference. Joe Schmoe still has his old Powerspec with Unichrome graphics, he can’t afford a new computer, and Windows XP still works fine for his purposes… So he stays with Windows XP. And frankly, I can’t blame him.
Agreed. Joe Schmoe’s old Powerspec with Unichrome graphics can be made to run Linux, but it most assuredly isn’t ideally suited.
My point is that if Joe Schmoe can’t afford to get his hands on a machine that actually can run Linux reasonably, and he can’t even get hold of a cheap, low-end, four-year-old ATI graphics card (no more than say $40) to replace the one bit of his aging Powerspec with Unichrome graphics computer that has no (or at least, very poor) support for Linux, then Joe Schmoe is in no position to post on Internet forums that Linux doesn’t work, or that Linux is “laggy” when a menu or a icon is clicked.
It isn’t Linux that is lagging, it is Joe Schmoe’s old and not-suited-for-Linux Powerspec with Unichrome graphics machine that is lagging.
Joe was warned about this back in 2005, BTW.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1776251,00.asp
Oh, and in 2005 Joe did buy a machine that was specifically called a “WinBook PowerSpec”. What does Joe expect now?
Edited 2011-10-27 05:50 UTC
You’ve got the wrong Powerspec. Mine happens to be a 1405:
http://www.powerspec.com/systems/archives/system_archive.phtml?sele…
And yes, the OS listed is correct. It came with Linspire, not Windows. And a VIA Unichrome chipset. A Linux geek would realize that’s a sad joke… But Joe Schmoe is not a pro, and at the time neither was I.
I see it has an open AGP slot.
You can probably still squeeze some decent Linux performance out of it if you invested in an ATI AGP card.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_…
If you can find one, it shouldn’t be too expensive.
You will also need more RAM. 128MB just doesn’t cut it these days. If you can’t get more RAM, then with only 128MB, Puppy Linux or similar is just about your only hope.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
If you can’t get more RAM, then don’t bother with the graphics card upgrade.
The RAM was upgraded to 384 MB a long time ago.
As for the AGP slot, IMO it’s silly to have to invest in a new video card *just so you can run a decent OS*. Powerful AGP video cards are for gaming and shit. You shouldn’t need one to run a desktop, unless you’re doing graphics work or something.
At this point though, I don’t know why I’m arguing. My point isn’t that I can’t run Linux on that machine, because I can and I have. My point is that your average user wouldn’t be arsed to because of all the hardware problems, and would just stick with Windows XP.
Oh really?
On my PII 450mhz KDE4 is much faster than XP was.
Edited 2011-10-26 03:31 UTC
With what kind of graphics card, pray tell? Or are you just trolling?
Mind, I’ve used XP on a Thinkpad 600E with 200 MB of RAM. It wasn’t exactly fast, but it was usable and didn’t swap too much.
It has a Radeon 8500le, I don’t run most of the desktop effects as it bogs down fast. It no speed deomon but it is faster and has much more bounce back than XP, 2000 worked better on it.
Interesting, that looks roughly on par with my Intel 945 stuff in terms of performance. Maybe the drivers are better… 2D definitely sucks on the Intel stuff.
(OTOH, 2D has sucked on every chipset I’ve ever used on Linux.)
Have to say I am starting to love XFCE and I am currently using it on OpenBSD. You have to read the README in the install folder … but it is pretty nice.
I’ve set XFCE up similar to Windows XP … and it is a nice desktop.
I ran XP Pro from 2002 up to the Win 7 beta, never had a crash, blue screen, no virus…nothing, stable hell and I build all my own machines. I still have a Pro and Home version running on 2 of the 8 computers here.
Expletive. I just lost an hour and a half of work because MS Office 2010 crashed on my maintained-by-work Windows XP Pro machine. Perhaps it was because I clicked on a ribbon button, nothing happened for several seconds (which happens fairly often), so I clicked again.
It is so very frustrating because MS Office 2010 is so dog slow to re-start on this machine, and when it did come up again surprisingly there was no auto-recovery. I’ll have to do it all over.
Edited 2011-10-26 04:43 UTC
Do you happen to have any add ons installed? Incompatible add ons can make Office unstable. Personally, the last time Microsoft Office ever crashed on me was when used Office XP. Office has been a very stable productivity suite since 2003 version.
The machine on which Office 2010 crashed on me is maintained by the IT department at work. Whatever is installed is minimal, and it is as installed on thousands of machines worldwide in the company’s global network. We are talking about a professionally maintained Windows image here. Office 2010 was rolled out to thousands of machines a few months ago, after many many months of testing.
Edited 2011-10-26 09:38 UTC
In all fairness, Windows XP is 10 years old. I challenge you to run the latest OpenOffice on a Linux distribution from 2001. I’ll be surprised if you get to run it at all.
Is it really Microsoft’s fault that your company is too incompetent to switch to Windows 7? Is it Microsoft’s fault that your company switched to Office 2010, while in fact, they should have stuck to 2003 which is a much better fit for XP?
I don’t know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2010
It claims this:
Are you saying that Microsoft is making false claims for its flagship product?
Edited 2011-10-26 09:51 UTC
I run Office 2010 on XP … works for ME .. trollololo.
Also Microsoft Office has had auto-recovery of documents since Office 2000 … stop making stuff up.
Even Visual Studio 2005 recovers documents code files when it crashes.
Edited 2011-10-26 10:22 UTC
Yes it has.
That is exactly why I was very surprised indeed when Office 2010 crashed, and then it did not auto-recover the file I was working on when I re-started it.
I was very surprised. I had simply not expected such a major failing in a flagship product, but there it is.
When KDE or Linux fails, it’s the user’s fault.
When a Microsoft product fails, it’s the product’s fault.
Always fun to see the principal theories of psychology at work in everyday life
.
Edited 2011-10-26 11:52 UTC
Amen brotha!
It didn’t work for Lemur2 once … therefore it must be broken for everyone … WTF?
Also Learn to save more often, working for 2 hours and not saving your work is pretty stupid IHMO … CTRL+S are friends
Edited 2011-10-26 12:16 UTC
I wonder whether you will actually reply back …
You do the pattern of
1) Pro KDE/Linux.
2) I argue with you because I find it fun.
3) Someone proves you wrong (Thom btw completeled pwned you).
4) You don’t post back at all … because you don’t want to admit you were wrong.
5) When a new Microsoft or Linux based topic comes up … you spam the thread again … until I go to step 2 … I don’t like Lying For Linux …
Edited 2011-10-26 22:39 UTC
I use XP because all of my video game emulators and Netflix works perfectly with it. The only problem I have is that for some reason XP hates my internet connection. So I constantly find my self typing ipconfig /release ipconfig /renew into the console. Because the “repair” option never works.
If I had the choice I would probably would stick with Windows 98. I never felt XP was worth the money I spent to get the retail version used on Ebay ($100).
Windows 7 makes me switch to Mac. I liked XP, its UI is ugly a bit, but it works and its simple. Now this is a good OS for a virtual machine.
I really liked XP (after SP2 of course). It was the last time I used Windows exclusively. When I upgraded to Vista I hated it so much I switched to Fedora and a few years later I found Arch Linux and never looked back. Although I do now dual boot Windows 7 & Arch, but all I really use Windows for anymore is Netflix and occasional gaming. I thought 7 was ridiculously slow when I first used it, probably due to me being used to the comparatively lightning speed of Linux, but then I switched it into classic mode and I must say when you get down to it, it’s not a bad OS. The aero theme is just a resource hog.
Yeah, you’re the first person to mention the stark difference in quality in Xp over its lifetime.
RTM, SP1 => garbage. You could not install patches before your system was affected by malware, when hooked up to the internet after installation without a NAT.
SP2. Incredibly better than the previous one. Drastically more secure and stable. Still sucks compared to the security/stability of win7, but the first sign that Microsoft cared about security.
Side Note: we wouldn’t be lauding XP so much if Longhorn hadn’t died a terrible death. XP was supposed to only be the flagship OS for 2-3 years. When I installed the first version of XP, I had a grand appreciation and respect for Microsoft. Longhorn/Vista ruined that trust. I wanted a revolutionary OS that would fix the problems I had witnessed since win 95, which still exist to this day.
Win2000 was that for me, first MS os that one could call decent. And still the best windows around imo. XP looked like a mockery of 2000.
I hestitated swithing to XP as long as possible.
Win 2000 came about at the end of the age of innocence. When people connected to the internet via dialup & port scanning random machines was more rare. WinXp was win 2000 + Luna & better 9x backwards compatibility and hardware support.
So I guess the availability of broadband really increased the security requirements of operating systems. Win 2000 and win XP pre SP2 were not designed for that kind of an environment. But otherwise, they were decent operating systems. Better than 9x or NT 4.0, but SP2 was just heads and shoulders above in stability and security, due to the refined development techniques Microsoft developed that eliminated most buffer overflows.
software doesn’t age. it doesn’t rust. xp worked. xp works. as other software and hardware becomes incompatible, we move on.
I don’t think the default XP theme was that ugly — it was childish though, like taken out of a Fisher-Price box. But that’s what the Olive Green and Silver versions of Luna were for.
But XP was good to me. It saved me from Windows ME and it taught me (the hard way) about security so now I can run a virus-free and spyware-free Windows 7 system without being excessively paranoid. So cheers for a good OS.
That said, like disco music, Windows XP has a place in history; please, leave it there!
For an OS that has such lovely things in its history as
Nimda,Blaster, MyDoom, Netsky and Sasser
Thankfully Microsoft has became more savvy about security
I like the Windows 7 that is the product of a smarter Microsoft.
Edited 2011-10-26 12:29 UTC
People are not keen to change specially when the position is comfortable enough. XP may have been a malware whore, but the fact that many people would love the colours, and also nobody cared in many countries if it was proprietary or not – and apart that many Linux DE’s have been trying to emulate it somehow, makes XP the king OS of 2000’s. Totally understandable, why not copy XP. Even a project called “xpde” had come up.
I remember seeing it being already deployed as pirated software in Barbadian stores, in 2001. It was heavy. But it was a huge improvement over 9x series. And at that time, Linux having KDE 2/3 and GNOME 1/2 were not potential threats, specially having more difficult installations than today. I remember graduated teachers saying Linux was not user friendly and that Mac was more friendly because didn’t have to install programs as in the Windows way.
–
My wife acquired a laptop recently and she didn’t want Ubuntu/GNOME 2, but XP, because “the folks in the school where I work can print something there in XP and it just works”. And this after converting her to Ubuntu for over 3 years. She even liked GNOME 2 (there was a time I tried really hard after she got some viruses over and over in XP machines).
What makes me mad is “the folks in the school where I work…” up to this day – usually it’s a pirated system, deployed by one of these million small stores with doubtful IT never-graduated people. A rubber stamp on the invoice with the saying “Warning: Software not included” to avoid legal problems.
Microsoft even helped piracy to make this thing called XP popular, naysayers go. Hadn’t Microsoft been any slack, I wouldn’t be sure. None of the computer stores in Brazil have been effectively inspected against counterfeit software deployment. Microsoft never really cared. I guess it is the same for Asian countries and many others.
XP may have had its merits. But it’s hard to make people change. Usually you need to force upon them. (Hello, GNOME 3.)
Edited 2011-10-26 14:35 UTC
By the way, Luna is not the ugliest theme ever to be included with an operating system. That honor belongs to the Vista Basic theme also included in Windows 7. I don’t mean the intentionally-crippled Aero you get when you run Windows Vista Basic or Windows 7 Starter on decent hardware. I mean, the theme you get on hardware that doesn’t support Aero, or when you are running an application that is incompatible with Aero. That without a doubt is THE UGLIEST theme ever!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19004216/VistaBasic.png
Not even close. GEM, Workbench 1.0, Windows 1.0, Arthur …plenty to choose from even among such historically important ones (enough to have screenshots here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interfac… )
One feature of XP that I haven’t seen mentioned is the ease of installing input methods for multiple languages.
I sometimes need to type emails or perform web searches in Japanese. Back in the Win9X/2K days I had to spend extra money for either add-on software to allow Japanese text input, or even more money for a Japanese version of Windows.
Starting with XP, adding additional languages is just a matter of a few clicks in Control Panel.. almost as easy as GNOME.
I work and play in XP, Vista, 7 and OS X. New for the sake of New doesn’t appeal to me – it does to Microsoft cause that’s how they make money (and they have enough money).
Quite frankly Microsoft still does security updates to XP so you drop in your firewall and antivirus (like you need to with all Windows versions) and your good. Overall, compared to Vista and 7 – it stays out of my way the best out of the 3 latest Windows versions (the user experience is much more walled in with Vista and 7, I don’t need or want that and its annoying).
For initial Core 2 duo’s and below it works just fine and the hardware for those older platforms supports it.
There’s very little that you can do on a Windows 7 or Vista machine that you can’t do on an XP machine with the right applications – they all run Win32 applications (compatible on all of them if built that way by the vendors).
Shame that it never got as good as the OS/2 it was stolen from. Lucky for consumers, Windows 7 finally got close.