Why do you stay with Windows XP?

Exactly why I'm on XP 90% of the time. I triple boot XP/7/8.1 on my system, and I can tell u, if you thought Win7 restricted your productivity with mysterious background tasks, 8.1 is even worse, but the biggest elephant in the room in 10, which I had on the system at one point!

 

I will not drop XP. I know it so well. Everything hums. I run two dell three screen computers in a busy sign and design workshop.
Everything is so predictable. I know where files are kept and how to change settings.
I tried upgrading and hated it. I tried macs, but they are no longer any good for design due to some wierd mouse acceleration algorithms which make the cursor very inaccurate.
So I am sticking to XP. We are still a giant community. More numerous than Macs, I am told.

 

I know XP is a great community. This and Vista are the only two OS's I've seen a real community form, XP being slightly better of the two, I love the userbase here.

 

I am keeping my XP machine around for a few reasons.

1 - It's nostalgic, since 98 and XP is what I grew up with.
2 - It plays some older games better than the newer versions of Windows, and even better than WINE on Ubuntu (which is what I use on the rest of my machines).
3 - It's so fast and easy to use, even on an old Pentium 4 3.06GHz (made sure to upgrade to the fastest the mobo with handle) with only 1GB of ram. Just so easy on resources. Even Linux doesn't run this well on the old machine.

 

I find it easier to use, examples: the fact that you have the common folders tasks and the tree navigation pane is amazing, the shutdown button and logoff button make a big box that are faster than the newer version boxes. It has the best design, like the colorful icons in notification center while in newer versions theyre plain white which do not go good with the third party software icons. Its also faster than newer versions,uses less ram, doesent need a processor nearly as strong even though newer versions dont add that many big features.

 

XP, I have XP in VMware partly for nostalgia, the simplicity and clarity, knowing that what I want XP to do, it will do. Partly for some older programs that will not run under 7, 8.1, or 10. This is the area where 7, 8.1, and 10 fall down a bit. Even though a program may be from the Microsoft stable, no go under the newer Windows builds.

Even under VMware (I have allocated 3 GB RAM and the highest graphics pack) XP is, in my opinion, far faster than the later Windows builds for some applications. Running XP as a virtual machine in full screen takes me back to discovering all we liked, loved about XP all over again.

Sure, I don't use XP every day but when I do I begin to forget that I am using XP in a virtual environment and just use XP to take me anywhere I want. I am really surprised that YouTube works and works very well, to me no difference, to YouTube under Win 7 64 bit.

I will probably never tire of XP.

Next project, run XP 64 bit as a virtual machine. Should be fun.

Cheers,

Mark.

 

Well to start, I have been stuck using public computers for many years. I began on XP Pro, and learned to do the internet, email, and so on. I was quite happy. Then the Library Ogres switched the PCs to Vista. Hated it! Then they switched to Win7. Hated it more! Now they are talking of another switch. Win8 or the even worse Win10? Don't care, cause I now have my first home PC. Got it used off Ebay, and only looked for those with XP Pro. I'm back! Why? Many reasons. Its a old comfortable pair of shoes that don't give my feet blisters. Its the OS I am most familiar with and know the most about. I don't have to fight it (it does pretty much everything I want it to, and seldom does what I don't want it to). Using XPLite, I can uninstall all the corporate crapware (Telnet, IRC, DRM, Remote stuff, and so on), which makes it quite customizable.

 

I'm very nostalgic for XP as it was my first OS. I'm also rather interested in tech such as netbooks and ULC PCs, a trend that never really took off that much after a few years but I really liked the idea, much better than a stupid tablet.

I'm using it almost as a daily driver on this netbook, a Compaq Mini CQ10-101SA.

 

XP is screaming fast on an I7 4 core 8 thread, SSG drive, 8Gb ram computer.
I can shut down all but a few services unlike newer versions of Windows.
This computer cold starts fast like if it was hibernating.
I have an XP software collection that can not be replaced. If it's not XP it's a dog.
XP Posready 2009 updates until 2019. Updates are like Fake News, I don't need them.
Windows updates ruined Vista. Try it out. Install Vista with it's XP like start menu.
It's fast and smooth until you update it then it become a dog like Windows 10.
Many wannabe know it alls bad mouthed Windows Me. Yea WinMe was a dog when installed with 8 or 16mb of ram! Windows Me was a great improvement over Windows 98se. Try it with 192mb of ram!
I have no problem with XP 64 updated until 2014. Most root kits only effect 32 bit computers.
New windows Installations are designed to slow down and sell new hardware.

 

I stay with XP because I simply love it. For me it is the best Windows Operating System ever made. Never even considered giving it up. Please don't laugh about this....one of the many things that I love in XP is the cute little doggie, Search Companion

 

Eventually, I'll move to some flavor of ubuntu for the internet, anything for XP can be dl'd with ubuntu & transfered with a thumb drive. But XP will never leave my house, , , ,


[much the same as familiarity with XP, I still use (occaisionally) ubuntu v. 11.?? as it is/was the last to mimic (I say this loosely) XP]

 

I love the simplicity of XP. I developed software for XP and know it fairly well. I like a hands on system. So much of the newer system is just XP with a new wrapper where you can't find anything. Seems such a pain to use. I love Outlook Express. A clean, simple, fast email program. Never found one I liked better. Plus lots of legacy software here which would cost thousands to upgrade. I wish MS would simply offer a paid service to keep the security patches up to date. With XP still holding 7% of the PC market, especially for businesses, I think MS could make money and keep XP running into the future.

 

Hi Gail, I love to hear from someone who loves XP! What protections do you use to safeguard it?

 

I'll likely be using XP the rest of my life... you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands. That doesn't mean I'm not using other OSes- At work I suffer all day with Windows 7; I use it on several of my boxes at home for GPT drive support, usually over VNC. I use Linux in a virtual machine for safe web browsing. My music jukebox uses Windows 2000. There are 8 other boxes on VNC at the moment. But it's all controlled from my main box which runs XP and every possible performance bottleneck has been eliminated (ahh.. fresh air). Why I still use XP:

On XP, adding your username to the Admin group really makes you an admin.
On Windows 7, it doesn't. UAC popups are frequent. Having to use Run As Admin when you are already an Admin is just insane... being unable to browse to some folders in your profile is insane. I'm a fricking ADMINISTRATOR on the PC. Doesn't Windows 7 know what that means? To me it means access ANYWHERE. On XP it just works (as least in a no domain server environment). Being an Admin really is an Admin an XP. Access to almost anywhere. No restrictions (except System Volume Information folders, that does drive me nuts). And with great power, comes great ability to really mess things up. Running XP as Admin is a bit like driving... one mistake and you're dead... well on a PC you do have Acronis to save the day... you do image your boot drive regularly right? Yes I know you can disable UAC on Win7... doesn't matter because of the other major issues.

On XP, you have full 2D GDI hardware acceleration. This is not available on Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10... that's right, something critical that has been available since Windows 1.0 is not available post XP. Only the introduction of the powerful Core2 architecture saved Microsoft's butt by making software 2D rendering reasonably fast. Still it affects some users severely, to the point that they may one day toss their PC out the window:

Autocad users (me) are severely affected by the lack of full GDI acceleration on Win7. I can personally attest that it takes 2 to 3 times longer to create Autocad drawings on Windows 7 compared to Autocad on XP. At work a new company policy went into effect in Dec 2017, removing all remaining XP boxes from the domain server... I was the last holdout, having a KVM and 2 boxes at my desk, 1 Windows 7 and 1 XP box, both with Autocad. Even though the Win7 box has 16GB RAM and 8 CPU cores, vs. 3.2GB and 2 cores on the XP box, Autocad LOSES MOUSE CLICKS on the Windows 7 box if you work too fast. I literally have to force myself to work at half or less the speed I used to, so no mouse clicks are lost.

My boss and the local IT folks are aware of my reduced output, but it's our parent company's policy that forced the retirement of my XP box, so their hands are tied. I would be happy to work via USB stick on an island XP box, but they'll have none of that (partly due to one of the IT staff throwing the Autocad 2009 DVD in the trash and they don't want to go find another copy on eBay). I have to suffer all day with this issue and the project backlog grows. If you experience some lengthy internet or phone outage or slowdown, it may be due to the growing queue of fiber optic cables I draw... (all the major US internet and phone service providers buy from the company I work for and I do most of the fiber assembly Production drawings).

Autocad is also severely affected by the page faulting issues Windows 7 has. Windows 7 aggressively pages right after boot. Put the task manager on your second monitor, load a large CAD file, pan or zoom and watch the page fault delta shoot through the roof. Response is jerky, not smooth like on XP. This might be possible to fix with 32GB and a single pagefile on a RAMDisk. I'm hoping to test this eventually, to see if Window 7 supports this tweak. It might also work on Windows 10 to speed it up.

The search function in Windows 7 is severely crippled. I can't right click a folder and open a search dialog. The search box available has MAJOR issues with dashes. Our filenames typically have dashes.... XP could handle dashes no problem. The use of screen space for search results is inefficient on Windows 7. We use very long filenames in our drawing templates, with certain keywords used, to help find relevant templates for new drawing creation. As half the filename is cut off in Win7, this makes it slower to find relevant templates.

File renaming doesn't work very well in Windows 7. Often I have to right click the file and select rename. In XP, you click, wait a moment, and click again to initiate. Makes a huge time difference when renaming many files.

Selecting folders or files is awkward in Windows 7. Ctrl click just doesn't behave well. When I purge my backup HDTV recordings located on my 96TB box (Win7), I delete the ones I've watched and keep the rest. I always do this purging from XP (over the LAN) as selecting and deleting stuff goes much faster.

I wrote a program using AutoIt that controls my windows (my WC script). It works very well on XP. I use it to organize my main screen with a 4x3 ratio space for apps with and the space on the sides has various sidebars used for launching things. These are just tall and narrow Windows Explorer folders with the left pane closed and set to list view. I have like 10 of them filled with apps or shortcuts to documents, web pages, or folders to quickly open something. Apps launched are resized if necessary and moved into the 4x3 place for apps. With a crtl-2 press, I can move an app to the right monitor. A ctrl-1 moves it back. Having the windows width below the minimum 4x3 ratio width removes it from the controlled windows and I can freely move it anywhere.

In the script, I program what windows are controlled using the title to identify them. Window Explorer windows are identified by title and process name- such that the side bar launch WEs work properly and new full sized Window Explorers are opened full size and put into the 4x3 space automatically. It's a program I created when my CRT died in 2014 and I was forced to get a LCD. The 16x9 ratio simply didn't work for my brain (except when watching HDTV full screen), so I created the program. The LCD I run in strobe mode at 120Hz to simulate the CRT "look". It really does look like a CRT at 85Hz, just more clarity and extra space efficiently used by my WC script.

The WC script doesn't work too well on Win7.... actually the latest XP version doesn't work at all on Win7. I have to use an early version of the script, to get basic functionality (at much higher CPU usage). The moving to another monitor isn't implemented in this early version. Not sure if the code would even work. The changes MS made to Windows Explorer in Win7 essentially cripples the script. Sidebars and 4x3 app space sort of work... but no way to make it work proper like the XP version without rewriting it as a full blown app in Lazarus or C++. AutoIt could probably do it, but creating GUIs is a pain.

External USB drives on Windows 7 cannot be shared on the network. It's a known issue that MS has not fixed with a patch... Online I found a few fixes, but none of them worked. As I save all my recordings from my HTPC system (5 PCs and 110TB online, 150TB offline) to external USB drives over the LAN, those drives must reside on a XP box. I'm nearly out of drive letters on my main box, so they go on my backup recording box (I use a small RAMDisk and mountvol on each PC, to bring each machines' drives to a single drive mapping, and just use UNC for some shares).

I have 2 HDTV recording boxes and 13 tuners (14 if you count the one in my main box for live TV). XP is the only OS that can properly handle 7 HDTV tuners simultaneously writing to a single spinning disk, and only Hauppauge tuners behave well with multiple tuners (and only on XP). NextPVR does the recording which I post-process with Videoredo v2.5.7.604 (only recompresses around edit points)- ancient but fast and stable with mpeg2 streams. It has a COM interface and various command line inputs, so I've fully automated it with AutoIt, Lazarus, DOS bat files, and VBS. I use its Quickstream fix function on every recording. The automation parses the VideoRedo log file for the quality info and put that in the recording filename- a0v0 is what I like to see. Means zero bad audio frames and zero bad video frames.

I initially tried Windows 7 for my recording boxes, but could not get a flawless recording from any tuner. All had many bad frames. I gave up and tried XP. Various issues with other brand tuners, but flawless recordings with Hauppauge tuners.

Windows XP agressively pages out program data as soon as commit charge goes past 1.5GB. Windows 7 does the same immediately after booting (it may be using the same 1.5GB parameter, which it exceeds during boot). XP32 can support having a pagefile on a RAMDisk, a RAMDisk using unmanaged RAM not visible to XP. I've run my main box with a 5GB Superspeed RAMDisk and 5GB pagefile.sys since 2011. It's fast and stable under any load (as long as commit charge stays below 5GB). I can have 20 instances of VideoRedo open, all reading/writing at the same time, while watching a video with MPC-HC + FFDShow with no frame skips. Plus 200 other Windows and tabs open (50 of them Windows Explorer), 2 VMs running, and 8 VNC connections (to my other PCs). I can copy 200GB of files somewhere at the same time too, yet any background window is immediately displayed should I click on it. Page fault delta briefly goes through the roof for that process, but so what. It's page faulting from a RAMDisk so it's instantly responsive. This is my typical Saturday morning workload... I reboot once a month and that's only to do an Acronis image. I initially implemented a pagefile on RAMDisk when I changed the boot drive to SSD in 2011, to extend the life of the SSD. Little did I know that the tweak would become mandatory once my typical 1.2GB commit charge grew to 2-4GB.

Note I was the first person to post on the internet about the pagefile on a RAMDisk tweak in 2002 (for Windows 2000). I didn't invent it. Inspiration came from the Commodore 64 and the Geos operating system which requires a pagefile on a RAMDisk to work. I posted about it to 2cpu and storagereview forums. Everyone thought I was crazy until a few folks did the tests, and confirmed it sped up Photoshop page faulting from 45 seconds to 1/2 second. Gamers caught wind of the tweak in 2007 and found a way to implement it on XP (using Superspeed, as Cenetak didn't create the RAMDisk soon enough). I'm very thankful for the threads they generated on XP implementation (or else I'd probably be suffering with Windows 7 at home too).

I use Askarya Taskbar Manager (company went OOB a few years back) for rearranging the taskbar buttons. It works ok but has a bug- don't move anything while a WE is copying something or it'll cancel the copy. Windows 7 has the ability built in but it doesn't work too well. I believe another company now offers a taskbar rearranger for XP. Anyone know what it's called?

For email I'm still using Forte Agent (ancient version that has very limited html support). I'm thinking of switching my main email to Thunderbird on the Linux box as Agent has caused issues with email verification when the html renders improperly enough that I can't find the link or code.

I had GDI and User object leak issues on the 2 boxes with the POSReady 2009 mod, so I reverted in Sept 2017 to Acronis images I made before implementing the mod. So no updates post April 2014. Yawn...

Lastly... it takes a huge amount of time (years) to set up a new box- all the installs, configs, stuff breaking and only fixable with Acronis reimaging. I've used imaging ever since Ghost came out in the 1990s and Acronis since 2010 (Ghost 2003 wasn't working with Win7).

Number 1 reason to keep using XP: If it's not broken, don't fix it.

 

Try Taskbar Shuffle, it has been around for a while:

http://nerdcave.webs.com/

 

Lex24- thank you for the link. I tested Taskbar Shuffle and it's a winner! No issues rearranging WE's taskbar icons while copying big files. It does have an option in the settings to disable the middle click function it assigns (in case you are using middle click for something else- I have mine set to double-click, which I use frequently). I AV tested the 32bit files ok on virustotal.com (links to the results):
taskbarshuffle.exe
tbhookin.dll
ts2.5_setup.exe

The site's download links no longer work, but archive.org has them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100328044159/http://nerdcave.webs.com

Here's a few more reasons I've stayed with XP on my main PC:

On XP, shift key held down while inserting and automounting a USB stick prevents any possible autorun virus infection by disabling autorun.

This no longer works on Windows 7 and I haven't found a way to get it working. I sometimes need to sneakernet something big from a computer I don't trust. It is theoretically possible to have a virus on Windows 7 undetected, that infects a USB stick plugged into the machine and is only nefarious on Windows XP boxes when autorun happens.

And sometimes I just don't want autorun to happen but sometimes do want it (usually with an install CD or iso).

TweakUI and other various MS PowerToys. I haven't found a similar package for Win7 and ended up googling and modding the registry for a few of the changes I wanted on Win7.

Acronis image sizes are 2 to 3 times bigger in size on Win7. Possibly the XP 32bit vs. Win7 64bit has something to do with that.

Windows Task Scheduler. What were they thinking with the Win7 redesign... You need to be really really smart to figure out the one on Win7. As I use it on most of my XP PCs, easy task creation and enabling/disabling is essential. Each of my HDTV recording boxes have like 7 or 8 tasks in the scheduler for the automation processes and database backups, and sometimes I need to quickly enable or disable several tasks.

I run in classic mode and my taskbar looks much the same as Windows 2000, 98, 95. Some folks call that "dated", I call it "classic" and highly functional. I can get Win7 close to the same look (with a real show desktop icon), but it takes some time to do so. I may be a relic living in a time capsule... so be it.

I get the warm fuzzies when booting XP- seeing the XP startup screen while it loads. Don't get that with Win7 or 10... warm fuzzies are important.

 

It is actually a portable application. I try to use portable apps as much possible on Windows, to keep the registry clean. The original direct download link to the zip file is still working:

http://nerdcave.webs.com/downloads/taskbar_shuffle_2.5.zip

taskbar_shuffle_2.5.zip
516,979 bytes
MD5: 6794d50613233e1ecfe2ae2f7fb768c7

taskbarshuffle.exe - 818,176 bytes
tbhookin.dll - 165,376 bytes

If you have TS already installed then the zip file is not really needed, you can just copy the two files listed above to a backup drive and later use them in another Windows installation.

 

Before you commit to Ubuntu, check these out:
https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83578.html
https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/top...q4os-the-linux-distro-trying-to-be-windows-xp

 

On my 2006 pc run windows 7, but i instaled windows xp and its holy shit fast !

 

My computer is not very recent so if i install something like windows 7 i feel like it will be slow and the computer will be pushed to its limits, its a low powered White emachines desktop computer