Reply 20 of 93, by dr_st
- Rank
- l33t
My point is that if one goes to apply tweaks to minimize footprint / increase responsiveness and what not, one will find that there are tweaks to apply to NT6 OSes as well, and that at the end, the result will be very similar.
Vista was the worst among those OSes in terms of responsiveness, simply because Microsoft did not bother fine-tuning it. After the backlash, they made a good deal of improvements, some in Vista itself, many more in 7/8/8.1. Vista itself is already good enough for a semi-modern PC, although probably will lose to XP in head-to-head on older hardware. With Win7 and later you will not notice differences in responsiveness of normal tasks, on similarly configured setups. I can attest to that, at least on this Pentium M laptop I have with Win7 and WinXP installed in dual-boot.
Now, even if in the end, you will achieve even 20% increase in responsiveness after countless tweaks, which will probably translate to a few seconds per day, is this really worth all the time invested into messing with it in the first place? Not to mention using an almost 15-year old operating system, without many nice UI enhancements put in starting from Win7 (Vista actually didn't have many of these), and which is already starting to hit the wall in terms of software forward-compatibility (in the sense that modern software already can't or won't run on XP)?
Out of curiosity - what are these "countless privacy and security issues" you are talking about, that bother you so much with NT6-based Windows?
And again, out of curiosity - how much time did you really spend with Vista/7/8 before condemning them so? Did you try to tweak them the way you tweak your XP?
I used to be of similar opinion - XP is great, why do I need this new/bloated/annoying stuff, etc. Until I started using it here and there and realized that most (not all, but most) of the bad things I heard about it was actually nonsense that people pass back and forth without really understanding it / being able to back it up with real experience.
Having logged almost 7 years with Vista x64 on my primary desktop, 4+ years with Win7 on my work laptop, as well as a few other computers, in parallel with XP on quite a few older setups, I can honestly say I like XP the least, even though I can perfectly deal with it.
And of course, again - we are on Vogons, where legacy/hardware software is of special interest. For such purpose, I would probably prefer XP (or even older) over anything newer most of the time. Heck, even Win98 SE has its niches. But for a modern primary PC, which I am sure all of us have - I cannot find a single reason to stay with it.
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