XP did mature into something that was decent, but the initial release of XP was just an uglier and more system hungry version of 2000. And thus XP drive me to run Linux as my primary OS.
But back when 2000 was around, most other OSs were terrible. Linux was getting close but still had a lot of rough edges. BeOS was awesome but you could tell it was a dying company. Apple were struggling too: MacOS 9 was less stable than Windows 9x (and that’s saying something!) and OS X took a couple of releases to really take off. Atari were dead. Amiga was basically only ram by enthusiasts. Yet Windows 2000 arrived and it felt genuinely like a next generation OS for its time.
Windows 2000 took NT4 and focused on bettering the stuff that didn’t work rather than breaking the stuff that did. Often little changes like adding short cut keys to Notepad.exe. Whereas every version of Windows since has done far too much GUI overhaul (and always to the detriment of UX in my personal opinion) while doing very little to improve my core complaints with the OS.
I get this is going to be my subjective opinion, just like Windows 7 is yours. But I did wasn’t to share a counterpoint to the praise of Windows 7.
Microsofties: Please put them ALL back to match Windows10, acknowledge the heritage of the previous version, and the years of keyboard muscle memory now flushed down the drain
example, let me use the arrow keys again in popup dialogs (arrow left+right keys now do nothing... have to use the tab or shift tab or mouse in dialogs)
Then Windows 8 came along and decided flat squares were the only option anybody could use, removing theme transparency support altogether.
Then the abomination that is Windows 8 came along and took an enormous and terribly corrosive dump on the the party. Windows has been a conundrum to me ever since. It just doesn't feel right anymore like it used to with 2k, XP, and Win7.
I'm a bit sad about the decline, having spent many thousands of hours completely plugged in to Windows.. Every wish, only a click or keystroke away.
R.I.P. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
(for the youngn's: this is the everlasting devils0wn pirate cd key for Windows XP serial number. How awesome would it be if it also worked for a future version of Windows?)
No. 7 was a rollback on Vista. The best one which was not a step back but rather a step forward was Windows 2000. (Some even swear by NT4, which I feel also has some merit.)
Microsoft had to switch the ways drivers work for some very necessary security reasons. This led to many hardware manufacturers just not making new drivers or slapping together the shitiest thing and hoping it worked. Took a few years but eventually everyone had new hardware (with decent compatible drivers), at which point 7 came out which is basically Vista with a new skin.
Hell, at the end its life an up to date Vista was actually pretty decent.
My completely unqualified ranking…
- 2k: excellent, top Windows
- XP: fine, if you turn off all the UI changes, but not appealing over 2k in any way I can recall
- Vista: didn’t use it, but I think it got a bad rep for efforts that should’ve been lauded
- 7: good enough, mostly didn’t suck for web compatibility testing
- 8: I’m one of the weirdos who found it very compelling… but not enough to actually use it. I’m sure it was as bad in practice as everyone who used it thinks, but I really appreciated the bold attempt at a UI for any device. And I’d been very taken by earlier Metro.
- 10: seemed like a perfectly reasonable reversion to evolving 7, but also seemed like it got weirder and worse as they dug into no new versions.
- 11: new version doesn’t seem to have improved things on that front.
- 3.x-98: I didn’t like them, but objectively they were probably just as good as their contemporary Mac offerings just catering to different markets
- ME: lol why even did this exist
No, my Windows 11 system doesn't use a Microsoft Account. No, I don't get ads on Windows (web search and suggestions are off, e.g., turn Windows Search settings to "classic"). All of the annoying stuff takes very little time to disable. And let's not pretend that Windows 7 didn't have people looking to turn off things about it they found annoying. [1]
Don't forget that the system requirements for Windows actually decreased after 7 when Microsoft optimized it for lower spec devices. Windows 7 isn't actually all that well optimized compared to 8/8.1/10/11. Windows 10 and 11 are much better able to take advantage of hardware enhancements on modern chips that are vastly different than the hardware available over 10 years ago. How many x86 processors had big.LITTLE architecture in 2009? Because that's what Intel is shipping now.
Don't forget about all the things that are massively antiquated about Windows 7 like the legacy control panel with no search function, lack of multiple desktops, lack of basic built-ins like a PDF reader, garbage command prompt and powershell, troubleshooting wizard that did nothing, Windows Update still being relatively disruptive and unreliable.
Don't forget about all the things that are actually REALLY good about Windows 11 like the game bar, task manager, Linux tooling and aliases (can you run ls ~/ | grep example in a Windows 7 shell without additional software?)/PowerShell 7/SSH being preinstalled, expanded and improved window management, very clean and minimal visual design, Windows Hello biometrics (I can SSH to my Linux server with a key stored in 1Password, automatically authenticated with my fingerprint when I run the SSH command (I don't have to open 1Password manually), using the built-in Windows SSH client, can Windows 7 do that??)
Windows 7 looked good because Vista was so unfinished and inappropriately matched to the contemporary hardware of the time, but in reality it wasn't anything particularly special and had plenty of missing and frustrating aspects.
[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/disable-annoying-things-in-wi...
But what could possibly be the point of changing something that works?? Buy a new machine, spend weeks or months reinstalling software, try to find alternatives for things that no longer work, and for what benefit?
Yes one can run `ls ~/ | grep example` in a Windows 7 shell, and ok, it requires additional software, but once that additional software has been installed, it is done. What's the point of installing a new OS so that functionalities that you already have, become "native"? Who cares?
Same for PDF (Sumatra) or SSH (putty), etc. etc. I have a stable system that I know intimately, on old hardware that I also know well. I don't see the need to be running after new things like a dog after a ball.
It's actually infuriating.
Ironically, I haven't made the jump to 11 yet just because my decade old Dell has an i7 that's been remarkably resilient for the kind of work I do on it.
My favorite thing about Windows is the backwards compatibility. I had a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with XP. I think I paid $35 for an upgrade to Win7 after running the beta. Had the Win8 beta on there, which upgraded to a full version for free, and eventually upgraded to Win10 freely somehow as well. By that time, it struggled to run more than a web browser, and the internal wifi card no longer functioned, but it was remarkable that the upgrades all just worked.
And I've got some pretty nice Firewire audio hardware that runs flawlessly on Windows 10 despite the last driver for it having been released in 2006.
And that's my baseline for an OS: can it run programs. And thanks to the absolute ubiquitous of Windows for the last 30 years everything was made with Windows in mind.
(Not to mention my computer works perfectly well but since it doesn't have a TPM it can't run 11 at all)
7 Mostly was allright because of huge increase in availabe RAM on laptops.
UWP was great from the point of view that .NET Native is what .NET 1.0 should have been, and C++/CX was the very first time Microsoft had anything similar to C++ Builder.
However it was horrible managed, and asking everyone to keep rewriting their code isn't something that makes Windows dev community jump of joy.
Now WinUI is too late for the party, too buggy, too many features lacking.
I remember going to a MS sponsored talk on campus when it was in beta and we got free beta copies that were labeled NT 5 Beta!
Traded that for a copy of original Starcraft. Now, I wish I would have kept it.
I really don’t understand everyone’s issue. I get they try to push you towards a cloud account, but you don’t have to have one, and the ads can be much easier excised than the bloatware they used to install.
A simple Google search refutes this. Ok, if you count running some cmd magic as meaning they don't require you to have a Microsoft account, we're never going to agree. For Joe Bloggs, a Microsoft account is required and there is no way around it.
Just bury the body already, let winxp rest in peace, please
“The existence of this site shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement to continue using unsupported OSes. You should stick to a supported OS such as Windows 10 or 11 (or, try Linux?!). However, this service exists anyway in recognition that using these OSes is sometimes necessary to run legacy hardware/software, or just interesting to play around with.”
Presumably they knew they would get a lot of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfUEb_neu3U
Indeed, I knew it was an important resource many people would need, but also that I had to make clear that getting fully patched up on XP or 7 is of course nowhere near the same as running a current OS with 10-20 more years of security innovation baked in. Although I do try to assume most of the target audience have this level of understanding about security already.
2020s Microsoft: "Where do we want you to go today?"
If you're running legacy OSes, you're most definitely not playing recent games with DRM or doing anything that can't be done on a recent Linux system.
Is anyone actually writing exploits for these ancient systems? I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually safer from non-targeted attacks.
But, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple large (or important) customers with some special cases have some kind of incident support contracts which basically dictate that MS fixes exploits or bugs in embedded systems/whatever. Its happened in the past, so no reason to think that some nuke plant tied to windows7 can't get a timezone update or whatever in a couple years after paying $$$$$ for it.
Seconds, minutes, hours?
Time to fire up a VM I think.
Maybe they were hosting on XP. Didn’t ask.
This includes the vast majority of ads which are the main way to get such malware. Also chances are even if a bad ad (or other vulnerability) hits you, it wont work because it'd be designed for browsers people actually use :-P.
I wonder how much malware now just refuses to run on XP because it attempts to use functions that were introduced in later versions.
Probably the wrong place to ask, but this seems like such a fun experiment to try but maybe more difficult than I initially thought.
I used to for fun 2001 to 2006 or so, run a fresh install of 98se which I had burned to CD, recovery was about 20 mins perhaps a bit less, (read however long it took to copy a 600 meg image to hard drive) and cruised the net. No security as such, just seeing what was out there, what ports being probed etc. I rarely had any issues. Yes of course when I was tormenting some large wannabe hacker forum (read script kiddies) where one or more had decided to prove themselves by attacking a couple of harmless looking forums, yes I think they managed to get in pretty quickly iirc about five minutes. For giggles after a couple of times (they got quicker) I switched over to a live linux cd ... but since one of their members had outdone themselves and annoyed people who unlike myself quite happy with my new chew toys, ... I figured just a matter of time before my fun would end ... their forum strangely packed it at end of week :) In all of it, my only issue albeit a very serious one, was contaminated backups, which occurred when was when I was "tagged" in 2003 with something, which was so unique that last time I scanned a copy of the infected system in 2009-10, it still didn't raise any flags with the latest anti malware or root kit detection available at the time.
I wear shoes, coats, sweaters that are over 15 years old. My main stereo system is 25 years old; even the Sonos components (that I hate) are over 15 years old and still work ok.
I kept a motorbike for 25 years, and then eventually it was stolen (which meant the thieves still found it interesting).
I don't understand why tech that works should be thrown out just because there's new tech. New tech has to offer incredible new possibilities to offset the hassle of change.
My main system runs Win7 on hardware that's 10-15 years old and it does everything. I also have a couple of laptops running Win10 and I have yet to find what they do better, except being annoying and "different" for the sake of it.
I wonder if there is a sizable position easily identifiable Linux 2.6.x running out there.
For XP I really like the unofficial SP4 service pack which rolls up all post-SP3 updates into a single executable, with or without .NET. The later POS-only patches are also available. It makes it really simple to bring an old system "up to date", even if the last update was a couple years ago.
These machines are just for fun of course and I don't do real work on them, and I'm behind NAT and monitor my traffic, so I'm not really worried about these systems.
I think that the ball is on everyone still sticking on it - It was clear that Windows XP was supposed to be supported only for 10 years and they relent it and extend it to be 14 years. At that point it's clear that the companies who can't move, especially big ones, are the ones who are reckless.
He tried to argue that the kinds of ancient malware that XP would be vulnerable to (Blaster, Sasser, ILOVEYOU etc) were somehow still threats to be concerned about in 2022 (nearly 2023!) against modern operating systems because "I literally wrote my thesis on attacking Windows Defender"
Has anyone (aside from Dancoot on youtube) tried to actually threat model this kind of thing? I find it hard to believe that 20-30 year old malware can even function let alone be a threat either to modern machines or modern networks. There's no way my Windows 98 gaming PC is going to breach the security of my Win10 laptop
I do wish they worked differently though. They're trying to build the entire thing from scratch all at once, but it would've made much more sense if they took a Windows installation and started replacing Microsoft components one by one with their own until there are none left. This would guarantee 100% compatibility with everything imaginable, because you get complete integration testing for free, and probably won't break any licenses either. Didn't the Haiku project use this approach with BeOS?
Instead, being closed source, Microsoft can just force users to update to systems that they don't want, by withholding critical security fixes and features that are required to use the modern web. And there's almost nothing the users can do about it, because they have no meaningful control over the system they are running.
It's pure genius.
to play the devil's advocate, you're saying that microsoft should continuously make critical security fixes for old OS versions, add updates/features with which modern web requires to function, all while not taking any income except for the initial payment purchase price?
No business could do this.
Edit: to make the point, i would say that microsoft _should_ charge a subscription for old versions of windows, and use that revenue to upkeep it, instead of pushing what they're pushing right now.
I've got an old netbook and decided to put back on the OS it originally came with, Windows 7 Starter. I was so surprised when I couldn't run updates; I finally attributed it to having old security certificates, but couldn't figure out how to update them, and some important updates that I installed on other computers (a number of HTTPS sites are impossible to see without the right certs) and copied over would not install. Such a pain.
And here, just like that, Windows 7 SP1 is installing.
To those who made this: Thank you so much!
Edit: would need to pull from https://archive.org/search.php?query=wsusoffline&sin= I guess
Windows 7 ESU ends January 2023
Should be interesting to see what all the corporations still using it do.
Also ATMs
XD
