WDStudios wrote on 2021-06-20, 14:33:I just want to point out that practically every software vendor other than Microsoft still supports Win7.
That is because Win7 still supports all the modern Win32 APIs people use to write programs. Other than the modern app UI (UWP, etc.) there is nothing that Win7 lacks. For most projects, dropping support for Win7 requires actively going and breaking it. No reason for vendors to do it, when it still has a pretty solid user base. For XP, this is not the case. A lot of code compiled targeting Win7 cannot run on XP because of missing libraries, function calls, etc. And a lot of nice APIs are not available if you want to target XP.
For Vista it was sort-of in between for a while, but a few years ago the default settings of Microsoft toolchains changed in a way that made build Vista-incompatible. For a while you could easily restore support, but given that Vista's user base was somewhere around 1% at that point, is is obvious nobody bothered.
WDStudios wrote on 2021-06-20, 14:33:Or is it because WinXP is simply better than every version of Windows that came after it, and we'd use it exclusively if we could, and the only reason why we put up with anything newer is because we're forced to? I think most people are in that latter category.
Well, if you put "we think that" or "we feel that" before 'WinXP is simply better', then, yes, I'd agree with you. I certainly know quite a few folks who feel this way, even though I disagree with them.
BitWrangler wrote on 2021-06-20, 14:59:XP is retro if you wanna do an original release install on a system with 256-512MB RAM and keep it in it's own little world, cut off from the present. XP is modern foolishness if you wanna run it with all updates and service packs up to when they cut off embedded support (ATMs etc) and you wanna pretend it can still cut it. Windows 10 will run on a 1GB/1Ghz system better than the most up to date that you can get XP, it needed over 512MB by the time SP2 was out and it only got worse. Even with a full RAM build out to 3.5GB it's a thrashy POS. At 2GB even Vista seems better than XP, but both 7 and 10 are better on 2GB than Vista. 7 needs 1.5 to smooth out. W10 1GB is about equal to 7 on 1.5GB... mainly the only reason to be on 7 is graphics drivers.
All versions of Windows scale on RAM usage to some extent, and XP is not different. Give it more RAM, it will use more, give it less, it will do the best with what it has. On one hand, there were certainly many optimizations after WinXP, on the other hand, the core OS itself became more resource-hungry, simply because those resources are there. Why would someone bother to strip down an OS to work well on 512MB of RAM, when the most low-end PC has 4GB and 16GB is average? It would be a sheer waste of time.
I still think the trick is 'contemporary hardware'. Take some old P-III with 256MB, and XP can run OK on it, probably even with SP2. It will thrash like crazy if you try to use memory-demanding tasks, but most such tasks would be CPU-bound anyways. But put XP on modern hardware, and it wouldn't know what to do with it. And most likely it will be slow and power-hungry because of lack of optimized drivers. Same in reverse for Windows 10.
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