Comment by ryukoposting

I have a small collection of period-correct laptops running various Windows versions. Some of them represent history we love to look back on (a Compaq with an AMD K5 running Windows 95), others... not so much (a centrino T41 Thinkpad running Vista SP1).

My opinion of XP is a little more mixed than yours.

XP was great, but I maintain that 7 is actually the high water mark for Windows' usability. There's a lot of stuff you take for granted nowadays that XP never had.

Dragging a window to the side of the screen to snap it to one half of the screen. You probably do that a lot now, but XP doesn't do that.

XP has no search function in the Start menu. Hell, I don't recall Vista having that, either.

Explorer (the file browser, not the browser browser) in XP is far more simplistic than you remember it. Again, limitations mostly come down to search and quality-of-life stuff that we now take for granted.

Snipping tool. Being able to smack Print Screen and quickly crop and annotate a screenshot is awesome. XP doesn't do that OOTB. Greenshot really was the freeware gem you remember it being, to be fair.

XP does get a lot of things right. Highly legible and consistent UI elements with clear visual feedback and color coding. Control Panel being a unified portal for all Windows settings. Fast user switching was a big innovation vs previous Windows versions. No ads (besides mostly benign MSN promos), no online accounts, no cloudshit.

I encourage anyone reading this to go grab an old laptop and an XP Pro CD-ROM. Try using XP the way we used it in its own time, on era-appropriate hardware. In some ways it's as great as you remember it. In other ways, it probably isn't.