Does anyone else get a nostalgic feeling when using XP?

The title says it all.

I just installed Windows XP on Parallels VM on my MacBook Pro, and holy crap, I get such a nostalgic feeling using it. Haven't used it in about 3-4 years, but XP lasted more than 1/3 of my life.

It's kind of crazy to think back and see how long and awesome XP was for it's time. It lasted, what, like 8 years (it was still more popular and sold more than Vista when Vista came out)?

The green and blue UI is always awesome, the terrible font rendering is just glorious, Internet Explorer 6 is the worst browser but such a memorable one at that...

 

I recently installed XP Pro to test out an older game and as much as I loved Windows XP I find that I like Windows 7 even more and get the feeling how much further down the road we've come since Windows 7.

 

I actually still use Win XP pretty often. The place where I work at still uses XP on their computers, so I pretty much see it everyday. Not much chance for nostalgia there. However, I have to say I quite liked XP, and actually wanted to roll back to it when I got Vista.

 

Nope. Can't wait for that thing to die so that users finally move on and devs can stop supporting an oudated OS.

 

I totally agree, I "Have" to use it daily at work, I am so glad to come home to Win 7

 

I probably will in 15 years or so. Right now, I use 7 at work everyday and XP at home everyday, so like Nilfiry there really isn't an opportunity for nostalgia.

Maybe it's the screen, but on my laptop Vista/7 always seemed to have rather somewhat fuzzy font rendering, no matter how much I messed with font settings, and XP's is much clearer. At work Windows 7 seems to do OK, though. OSX always looks horribly fuzzy to me.

P.S. I'm a developer, so maybe I'm creating more work for myself. But I'm okay with that, it makes me happy. And pretty much everything I write would run on Windows 2000 if not earlier, anyway.

 

meh. doesn't make jack of a difference to me. my computers still connect to the interweb with either. i can still type words and squirt them on to paper with either. actually, the 'new' OS is a pita because they took the 'f' out of 'driver' for my scanner. what's that you say? there ain't no 'f' in driver? that's what i already said....

 

Nope. I remember when I first got this lappy, which is gonna be 2 years this December (damn it's already December, happy B-Day lappy ), it had W7 pre-installed on it. It took me 1.5min to realize that W7 is more awesome than XP. Since then I used XP from time to time and every time I did so, I found that some neat "7" features aren't there and it didn't make me using XP as comfortable as I used it before upgrading to "7".

But still, I had good time using XP. I used it for about 5 years. There is always that time when you have to move on...

Good thing that the have GOG.com . Their games are made sure to work on Vista/7

 

No nostalgic feeling here.

I usually feel the need to punch/break something every time i'm stuck using XP, feels outdated. I cannot live without the start menu search bar anymore...

 

I got annoyed with how XP looked after a few weeks of use when I first used it, but it still looks better than the classic look personally.

I only use XP mode when someone wants to use my laptop and I don't feel like letting them mess with my main OS... although the way I have it skinned it just looks like Windows 7 Basic (which is intended).

But really, no. I still see XP somewhere at least once a week, I wish it would die already.

 

My old XPS 2 has newly installed XP, still works better for some things.. but as usability goes.. Win 7 wins at every front in this matter.

 

Same here.

 

my aunt still has XP on her desktop, whenever she turns it on, I keep thinking I'm in a doctor's office or at the hospital 10 years back.

 

Nostalgia is DOS on a 286 XP is just another OS.

 

When I clicked on this thread it seemed like I'd get the overall view of "ohh I miss those days" but its the opposite!

I have to say I agree. There is so much missing in XP that we have in W7 that I see no reason in using it. If anything I feel 'disconnected' from current technology. I'm a person that has to be up-to-date on everything. I cannot watch old movies when I have no internet, or use my iPod 3rd Gen when I have my 4th Gen. I just get anxious and stop!

 

I realize I'm painting a target on myself here, but why is W7 sooooo much better than XP? what is it that W7 does that xp doesn't?

I run xp sp2/3 and have my system tweaked out how I like it. I've got it stripped down and built up and running great. I don't feel as though it's lacking or there is some functionality missing (except for flick scroll and pinch zoom on my touch screen). And yes, it's older hardware (Toughbook, 1.2ghz centrino, 768mb ram, 120 gb hdd, litescribe dvd+/-r, usb 2).
But i'm not a gamer or a video editor. I use autocad, vlc, firefox, 4 gps programs, winamp, vista switcher, power menu, and a handful of others.
anwyay, please don't flame me; it's a legit question. I've only used W7 a few times; mostly when someone broke their sh!t and asked me to fix it.

 

You don't need to do as many tweaks to get it working, it has dozens of new features that can make things a lot faster to do if you can learn them, has support for newer hardware (and tends to run faster on hardware than XP does anyway).

But if you're using a computer that old then I suppose no reason to try upgrading...

 

It really is a good question, on the surface it looks to be just a User Interface change so I completely understand.

1) Performance:

a) XP was limited to Direct X 9 - for games this is very important

b) Prefetch and Superfetch - Hard drives and RAM are the two main "storage" areas on your computer - RAM is only temporary and Hard Drives are more permanent.

Hard Drives are where everything gets stored pretty much. But they're slow.

In Windows Vista and 7 the OS starts loading up files that get used a lot into memory so that they're instantly available and can be read very quickly. This will give you significantly faster speeds if you have enough RAM.

c) Typical improvements from each OS to make things faster - not a lot of details there for you, sorry.


2) Security:

a) ASLR Support

Without going into confusing details Windows XP had DEP for mitigating exploit attacks. It's a great idea but attackers quickly found a way to make it essentially useless. So XP exploits are very easy to find.

Windows Vista and 7 include what's known as ASLR, which works with DEP to effectively mitigate many exploit techniques.

It is a fairly significant security feature.

b) Integrity levels

Again, without going into confusing details, XP considered all files equal with equal rights (essentially) and Vista and 7 consider some files and folders to be of higher or lower rights. This is fairly significant.

c) IE

Internet Explorer on older machines is not great. I think XP is limited to 8, which is decent, but nowhere near as nice as 9 and 10.




There's probably more that I can think of later. I wouldn't suggest putting 7 on that computer though.

 

I do appreciate the answers.
Not to be rude, but it's nothing really stellar, just regular advancements?
Thank you for keeping the answers simple (no, really). I was once MCP (2k/xp) but have since cared more for rats asses.
I don't 3d game on my pc, so DX is unimportant to me. I hate,HATE, the file integrity for me (I realize it's importance when your 9 year old (or idiot client) is digging into the file system, and makes a mistake).
I never use IE, and most of my programs are.... older, as I see no reason to have bloatware that makes it easier for my 9 year old to use (cause I'll learn the shortcuts or tweak it anyway) and what i've got does what i need already.
And I run my firewall and other security measures...even though ASLR may be a vast improvement, i don't need it right now.

My model of Toughbook is the first in the 29 series (they are making 31's now, with i5's or i7's, and newest/latest/greatest crap), but there are many here on the Panny subforum that run 7 hapily on their CF29s (by the mK5, they went up to a 1.6ghz, with DDR2 ram, I believe).

Anyway, thank you for the insight(s) and please excuse me if I was rude, it was unintended.

I'll upgrade from XP when you all are upgrading to WX or W11.

On a side note: this is how I know I'm getting to be the next "older generation". all the music on the radio sucks, I remember when {anything better stated here}, I can't believe the styles of this day and age, and all this new crap that's coming out is.....crap.

 

No nostalgia here. I still encounter XP quite often on several lab and hospital computers (although the lab's probably going to move to W7 as soon as we get all our data backed up), and it's frustrating how so much basic functionality is missing/inadequate.

And actually, I even prefer the classic theme over the green/blue Luna XP default theme. Media Center's Royale is tolerable, though.

 

Me too, I have XP on many computers at work. Don't miss it at all. I think the W7 user interface is better so I'm just waiting for support to run out on XP so that all these machines get upgraded to 7

 

XP was alot better than vista in my opinion. 7 though is the way to go with a modern computer these days.

I don't agree with upgrading to the newest thing just because it is purely that though. For example the yearly releases of iphones make me laugh. I am still rocking my 5 year old ipod 30gig and it does just fine and the battery last 8 hours at least... if it ain't broke why fix it or replace it just to make more rubbish.

Either way the fact remains. A desktop/laptop computer equipped with a P4 3ghz, 2GB of ram, decent modern IDE HDD and dvd drive along with a basic agp card can perform more than adequately for many many people. XP won't die just yet.

 

I still use XP from time to time, though its now in a form of a Virtual Machine on my Windows 7 OS. I find XP still run some of my legacy apps much better than on Windows 7. Plus advantage is that if I screw up I can just revert back to the original timestamp on my VMWare rather than wait an hour to reinstall. :3