Comment by jeroenhd

XP had gray boxes and laggy menus like you wouldn't believe. It didn't even do search in the start menu, and maybe that was for the best because even on an SSD its search functionality was dog slow.

A clean XP install in a VM for nostalgia's sake is fine, but XP as actually used by people for a while quickly ground to a halt because of all the third party software you needed.

The task bar was full of battery widgets, power management icons, tray icons for integrated drivers, and probably at least two WiFi icons, and maybe two Bluetooth ones as well. All of them used different menus that are slow in their own respect, despite being a 200KiB executable that looks like it was written in 1995.

And the random crashes, there were so many random crashes. Driver programmes for basic features crashed all the time. Keeping XP running for more than a day or two by using sleep mode was a surefire way to get an unusual OS.

Modern Windows has its issues but the olden days weren't all that great, we just tolerated more bullshit.