Comment by shevy-java
9 hours ago
"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014".
I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least not most of us. I would more expect current topics to match, e. g. replacing Win11 with Linux.
Also, I found WinXP actually better than Win7, Win10, Win11. At the least simpler to use.
I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.
Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
> This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.
I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise.
I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7.
For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.
WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing.
But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé
XP was inevitably not very stable, but I love it's sound stack.
What was unique about it? (genuinely curious, I'm coming from the Linux side of the pond)
Direct access to the sound hardware makes possible using huge discretization value, that's why Windows XP along with Mac the only OS able to produce a typical pop album.
If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. Last time I tried to do that I could not make it faster that 20ms but it was in 2010. So, I do not use Linux for any multimedia.
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Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.