The laptops still use XP mostly, but my main machines are OS 7 with XP relegated to older gaming rigs.

Robin4 wrote:

Bladeforce wrote:

WindowsXP in a virtual machine, Kubuntu main OS dual boot with hackintosh. Best of all worlds 😀

I red on the i-net running windows xp in a virtual machine wouldnt still be save..

I use it for games, it isnt connected to the internet, i use Kubuntu for that then trasnfer any files to it. I would never have any windows OS connected to the internet 😁

I have one XP game rig not hooked up to the web.

There are still many of you sticking to the good old Windows XP! I also use Windows XP. My PC dealer said XP is already the latest for my system, although it fits in Windows Vista's requirements. I use it to work on web code, raster computer graphics, and tracker music, as well as play casual games (including the PopCap ones). I am also active on creating mods for PopCap games.

My PC is offline.

I run XP SP3 on my laptop, an Asus Eee netbook that I bought in mid-2009. This is my most important computer. I keep all my important personal data, photos, tax documents, etc on it. I don't use it for any testing or for visiting any dubious websites. I have it setup quite securely with Comodo Firewall, Panda free-AV, MBAM, and Private Internet Access. As long as I don't get stupid, I see it working as a production laptop for a very long time. It even plays quite a few older games really well. This is good, because I definitely don't have the cash to be buying a new laptop.

At the end of 2013, I installed Windows 7 Pro on my Netbook. Before I tried this, I researched it a bit online and saw other netbook users reporting a positive experience with Win7. Personally, I thought it ran really slow. Even with aero turned off, it was still painfully sluggish. I reinstalled XP in autumn of last year and couldn't be happier. My netbook, although under-powered, is highly portable and can still do anything I need. XP runs reasonably well and doesn't let me down.

I also run XP on my HTPC, an Athlon 64 3400+ Venice with 1 gig of RAM. It works great there too. The only problem I have is with YouTube running poorly, but SMTube gets me around that issue as well. It has trouble playing videos at 1080p though. I'm stuck at 720p with this PC, but that's OK because my TV is only 720p too.

I know there's a way to get current updates in XP via a registry hack, but I haven't tried that yet. Perhaps I'll test it on another PC that isn't quite so important.

1Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
2
3[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
4"Installed"=dword:00000001

I run Win7 Pro on my daily-usage PC. This is the PC I use for web-surfing, testing, messing around, and goofing off. If this PC gets hosed, I won't cry because I don't keep my important stuff on it. I'll just reinstall Win7 and get it back up and running again. Like ZellSF, I too run Taskbar Tweaker and Classic Shell amongst numerous other small programs and tweaks to restore functionality to the OS. I consider those apps (and others) essential for running Win7.

Even though I run Win7, I can't really say that I like it. It frustrates and annoys the crap out of me more than anything. This is the first version of Windows that has Explorer so screwed up that I was forced to find a 3rd-party file manager. After a bunch of tweaking and using programs like Taskbar Tweaker and Classic Shell, I have beaten, wrestled, and twisted Win7 into becoming a tolerable, but not enjoyable, experience. I also am skeptical of Win7's claims of improved speed over XP. Yeah, I'm sure if you're running an SSD it's a bunch faster. Of course it's faster on an SSD... XP would be too. But I run it on a RAID 0 HDD setup and I can assure you that it is no faster than XP when run from good ol' plain hard drives.

I haven't run Win8 on any of my personal computers yet. I've only played with it in stores and on my relatives computers. I'm sorry, but I can't see even Taskbar Tweaker and Classic Shell saving that messy, ugly, schizophrenic, clusterf**k of an operating system. Win8.1 is not enough of an improvement. Sadly, it looks like MS will triple-down with this foolishness in Windows 10.

In the past, I'll admit to making occasional chicken-little cries of "I'll switch to Linux, dammit!" when Windows would piss me off. However, I've never actually felt forced to really make that commitment and switch. With Windows 10 looking like another mess and Win7's extended support only available for another five years, perhaps MS will finally push me to embrace FOSS. Mint looks really nice for a noob. It could happen...

My wife's Asus EeePC netbook has Windows XP SP3. My main rig upgraded to Windows 7 in summer 2013. Daughter's PC upgraded to Windows 8.1 a couple of months ago. And my spare PC has Windows XP SP3.

I'm still connected to the internet with my XP SP3 system with no problems at all. Using Firefox along with the free version of the Malwarebytes Anti Exploit shield: https://www.malwarebytes.org/antiexploit/ . Also a few addons like NoScript and Ghostery.

I still use it in one of the rigs. The main rig is using Win7. Win8.x only in mobiles and NBs.

I am still usin XP, till it just stops working, my main rig is Core2Duo 3GHz, 4GB RAM, Geforce 9600, and i have dual boot XP and 7, but i hardly use 7. Only for newer games.

I stopped using Windows XP when support ended. I now only use Windows 7 and Fedora Linux. I spend most of my time in Linux though, it's just much nicer for me. It runs faster on my computer and is more fun to use because everything is left to the user, no one holds your hand like on modern iterations of Windows.

KT7AGuy wrote:

I also run XP on my HTPC, an Athlon 64 3400+ Venice with 1 gig of RAM. It works great there too. The only problem I have is wi […]
Show full quote

I also run XP on my HTPC, an Athlon 64 3400+ Venice with 1 gig of RAM. It works great there too. The only problem I have is with YouTube running poorly, but SMTube gets me around that issue as well. It has trouble playing videos at 1080p though. I'm stuck at 720p with this PC, but that's OK because my TV is only 720p too.

I know there's a way to get current updates in XP via a registry hack, but I haven't tried that yet. Perhaps I'll test it on another PC that isn't quite so important.

Copy code to clipboard

1Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
2
3[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
4"Installed"=dword:00000001

I run Win7 Pro on my daily-usage PC. This is the PC I use for web-surfing, testing, messing around, and goofing off. If this PC gets hosed, I won't cry because I don't keep my important stuff on it. I'll just reinstall Win7 and get it back up and running again. Like ZellSF, I too run Taskbar Tweaker and Classic Shell amongst numerous other small programs and tweaks to restore functionality to the OS. I consider those apps (and others) essential for running Win7.

Even though I run Win7, I can't really say that I like it. It frustrates and annoys the crap out of me more than anything. This is the first version of Windows that has Explorer so screwed up that I was forced to find a 3rd-party file manager. After a bunch of tweaking and using programs like Taskbar Tweaker and Classic Shell, I have beaten, wrestled, and twisted Win7 into becoming a tolerable, but not enjoyable, experience. I also am skeptical of Win7's claims of improved speed over XP. Yeah, I'm sure if you're running an SSD it's a bunch faster. Of course it's faster on an SSD... XP would be too. But I run it on a RAID 0 HDD setup and I can assure you that it is no faster than XP when run from good ol' plain hard drives.

I haven't run Win8 on any of my personal computers yet. I've only played with it in stores and on my relatives computers. I'm sorry, but I can't see even Taskbar Tweaker and Classic Shell saving that messy, ugly, schizophrenic, clusterf**k of an operating system. Win8.1 is not enough of an improvement. Sadly, it looks like MS will triple-down with this foolishness in Windows 10.

In the past, I'll admit to making occasional chicken-little cries of "I'll switch to Linux, dammit!" when Windows would piss me off. However, I've never actually felt forced to really make that commitment and switch. With Windows 10 looking like another mess and Win7's extended support only available for another five years, perhaps MS will finally push me to embrace FOSS. Mint looks really nice for a noob. It could happen...

YES. Finally someone who agrees! Windows 7 is a royal pain in the arse and I can't even put my finger on why, but I totally agree with the explorer points. I hate how dumbed down everything is, looking back it's pretty easy to see they've been shooting for something like Windows 8 since Vista.

When you do go and try Linux for the first time I would give Fedora Linux a go, it's not perfect by any means but it's pretty rock solid and the fact that it doesn't do everything for you (like Ubuntu and it's derivatives, Mint I'm looking at you) lets you learn and become comfortable with the system much faster. You may have a few rage quits because of something that wont work right the first time but as long as you can use google you can use linux.

The discovery in using it for the first time is very exciting, it feels completely different from using windows. Whereas windows is a means to and end, using linux feels more like an exciting new frontier (or maybe I'm just a complete geek 🤣). Using Fedora everyday reminds me of how I felt about using computers back in the 90's, everything was awesome. Even if something broke it wasn't an inconvenience but an obstacle to overcome, a puzzle to be solved. Computers used to be fun and it turns out they still can be. 😁

I would stay away from mint, they aren't very regular on the security updates and they are an Ubuntu derivative which means it is going to be pretty unstable. Lets just say I broke my install of Ubuntu within the first minute of playing with it when I first was trying linux. 🤣

Oh btw I would use MATE as your desktop environment instead of Cinnamon since Cinnamon is a bit graphically heavy and it won't really run all that nice on low powered computers. MATE on the other hand is nice and quick on all my computers and it has a more utilitarian feel that reminds me of windows 98. I keep mine set up with a top bar and a bottom bar in the traditional Gnome 2.0 style but it could easily be configured to one bar along the bottom like windows. You might also like XFCE but if your like me there will be something about it that puts you off but you can never really explain. 🤣

That said feel free to try all sorts of stuff! It's all Free as in Freedom. 😜

Used to use it as my daily OS, then I used XP 64 for a while, now I barely ever use it at all. I'm thinking of installing Windows 7, but I've gotten so used to Linux, I almost don't see the point. Micro$oft can suck it, FOSS is the way of the future.

Dagar wrote:

I'm still using XP as my main operating system.
I plan to build a new machine when Windows 10 becomes available, but will also keep this XP system along side the new build.

I'm waiting for AMD chipset to surpass 990. I somehow think it'll never happen. It's been more than 3 years since the cease. FX chips are just totally useless for my requirements. 🤣

King_Corduroy wrote:

YES. Finally someone who agrees! Windows 7 is a royal pain in the arse and I can't even put my finger on why

I can explain why and put my finger on it exactly. Please allow me to bend your ear and spin a yarn...

For me, bitching about new Windows releases has become a tradition that goes back to the very first release of Win95A. At the time, I was a heavy DOS user who also had Win3.1 installed for internet usage. Trumpet Winsock, Mosaic, and Netscape made Windows a necessary evil.

I actually purchased Win95 during the first week of sale. I tried it for a few days, returned it, and went back to DOS/Win3.1. When OS/2 Warp 4 was released, I switched to that and ran it for a few years. When Win95B became available, I ran that up until late 2000. I ran Win98SE for awhile... tried WinME and then went back to Win98SE. When Win2K SP2 came out I switched to that. I finally switched to WinXP around 2006.

In hindsight, I only really hated Win95A because it was buggy and the new "Start Menu" confused me. Win95B wasn't too bad, and it was certainly no worse than OS/2 Warp 4. I also only hated Win98SE because of the new eye candy it introduced and its increased demands for system resources. Of course, nowadays I use Win98SE on all my retro builds. Win2K was really the only one I didn't have much to complain about. It just worked, and it worked really well without any silly bullshit thrown into the mix. If WinXP didn't have prefetching and a few other minor improvements, I probably would have stuck with Win2K for much longer.

With each successive release of Windows since Win2K, I find more and more to bitch about and hate. Now, I'll put my finger on exactly why I've hated each new release:

List of features removed in Windows XP
List of features removed in Windows Vista
List of features removed in Windows 7
List of features removed in Windows 8

King_Corduroy wrote:

I hate how dumbed down everything is, looking back it's pretty easy to see they've been shooting for something like Windows 8 since Vista.

It's not your imagination. Each successive version of Windows really has been dumbed down more than previous releases. However, I would argue that it started with WinME. You can see the trend beginning with that one and ending up where we are today. I can only hypothesize that the iMac was the true cause of it all. It came out and was a huge hit with the unwashed masses. I guess MS has been trying to ape Apple's mainstream success ever since. Unfortunately, all they'll really do is push the advanced users like me to Linux and alienate their business customers. Hell, I think I would rather run Apple's BSD-based OS rather than Win8. When Apple is providing a "smarter" OS than MS, something has seriously gone awry.

Now, here's the ironic bit for me:
When Win98 came out, I hated it for it's goofy eye candy and consumption of resources. I really loved the stark minimalist interfaces of Win3.1 and OS/2 and was totally put off by the "themes" in Win98. Over the years, and after switching to Win2K, I grew to love the various themes that artists around the world were creating. I also came to realize that the hit on system resources wasn't as bad as I had thought. Vista and Win7 have taken the artistic UI to perfection and are really pretty to look at.

So, now that Win8 has gone back to a Win3.1-esque minimalist interface, I hate it and find it hideous. 😒

King_Corduroy wrote:

I totally agree with the explorer points.

They've just dumbed down Explorer to the point where it is worse than useless: it is annoying and frustrating. I can't get to my stuff easily with it anymore. That, and the left pane scroll bug are what drove me to find alternatives. On 32-bit Win7, I use Cubic Explorer. On 64-bit Win7, I like Explorer++. They both have their drawbacks too, but are much better than the gimped Explorer included with Win7.

I've got a few more retro builds to finish before I'll have time to mess around with Linux. You aren't the only one to recommend Fedora, and I'll most-likely heed your advice. I actually messed around with Red Hat Linux for awhile back in 2002, before it became Fedora. I also played around with Ubuntu for awhile before switching to XP. Nowadays, I feel I'm being pushed to Linux out of necessity and I'm not real happy about that. I don't like dual-booting my PC. MS will have a hard time winning me back as a customer, if they ever can at all.

King_Corduroy wrote:

The discovery in using it for the first time is very exciting, it feels completely different from using windows. Whereas windows is a means to and end, using linux feels more like an exciting new frontier (or maybe I'm just a complete geek 🤣). Using Fedora everyday reminds me of how I felt about using computers back in the 90's, everything was awesome. Even if something broke it wasn't an inconvenience but an obstacle to overcome, a puzzle to be solved. Computers used to be fun and it turns out they still can be. 😁

I know I'm in a small minority with my dislike for Windows 7. PCs have just stopped being fun for me. I also really dislike the way the Internet has devolved into a narcissistic privacy-invading tool for governments and corporations. It used to be about spreading knowledge and making communications freely available to everybody, but now it's just about harvesting personal information and building dossiers on citizens/customers. I truly understand your comments about making the experience fun again, and I think that's why I enjoy playing with my retro systems so much. They bring me back to a time when this hobby was still fun, exciting, and enjoyable.

KT7AGuy wrote:

...I also really dislike the way the Internet has devolved into a narcissistic privacy-invading tool for governments and corporations. It used to be about spreading knowledge and making communications freely available to everybody, but now it's just about harvesting personal information and building dossiers on citizens/customers.

^this, well put, for the most part I agree.

I use 32-bit WinXP Pro SP3 on anything fit for it, including the very computer I'm posting this from.

The truth is, WinXP (and likewise 2003) was the very last Microsoft OS that could be successfully tweaked/modified (and native software suppressed and replaced with superior third party's) to be fast and secure (try shutting down every unsolicited connection or unused port on Win7 and you'll see what I'm talking about), and that on the top of providing excellent backwards compatibility for Win9x software (and depending on the software, even with greater stability). The bloat, also, isn't 1% that of the newer systems, which were introduced for the sole purpose of keeping the cash flowing (for both Microsoft and hardware developing companies, which benefit from software sluggishness) and complying to the NSA espionage requirements. In fact, DirectX 10 could have very easily been implemented under the XP architecture as a mere update of what was already established, but they had to kill it, deliberately, to force people to switch.

No reason for me to use anything else, not right now.

I never really understood why people seemed to like Windows 7 while they hated Vista. Sure if you compare Vista to what came immediately before (XP) and Windows 7 to what came immediately before (Vista), Vista is worse than XP while Windows 7 isn't worse than Vista. But except for taking longer to boot up, Vista and Windows 7 have always run about the same for me.

But as far as I'm concerned, Windows 8/8.1 is crippleware. Not only do you need 3rd party utilities to restore basic functionality, but some of the compatibility modes have been removed. Games like Still Life, which ran on Windows 7 with compatibility mode set to Windows NT, can not be run on Windows 8/8.1 because it has had compatibility modes for NT and 2000 stripped out. I have no idea why Microsoft removed it unless they messed up the guts of Windows 8 so much that NT and 2000 compatibility no longer worked.

Around the time Windows 7 was first released, I took a course in Windows. All the students had to get up and say what they liked most about the (then) new Windows 7. A lot of us, including myself, said we liked the Start Search, which wasn't in XP. But if I were taking a course in Windows 8, and were asked the same question, I'd have to say it was the little white balls that go round and round when you're first booting up the OS, because that's the only thing I like about Windows 8.

skitters wrote:

I never really understood why people seemed to like Windows 7 while they hated Vista..

That's easy 😀

I worked in selling notebooks in that period. There are lots of reasons people might state but from my point of view:

- XP was around for a LONG time. People weren't used to upgrading Windows frequently like with 95. 98. ME
- Vista was the pipe cleaner for a lot of new technologies and set the foundation for 7
- Manufacturers of peripherals like printers, 3D mobile broadband dongles, TV tuners, software were totally incompetent in their preparation for Vista. Many printers, sold in stores, TV tuners, sold in stores, 3D mobile broadband, sold in stores, would simply not work with Computers we sold them.
- It took maybe half a year to slowly get beta drivers for Vista. In the meantime many business customers have used downgrade rights to Windows XP
- Nvidia had lots of trouble with Vista graphics drivers
- A LOT of manufacturers used Vista to force customers to upgrade. Scanners, printers and all of that.

It was a cluster mess of epic proportions. Even worse was that technology wasn't quite ready. I mean the cheapest notebooks these days come with a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM. Back when Vista was coming out, the cheap ones had single core processors with 512 MB or maybe 1 MB of RAM and shared graphics. To put it simply you bought an unusable product with Vista on it. With XP these machines were ok. Not fast, but you could use them. With Vista you would be in the store with your customer and it would take 10 minutes just to get to the desktop.

So in short, Vista was the pipecleaner, when Windows 7 came out people were just itching to move on, Vista had such a bad rep.

Now Windows 8, I tried it for a few days and then removed it. Windows 8.1 on the other hand I had no issues with. I really like it and I have no complaints. At work we have Windows 7 and I also like. Both are great for working on, I have no complaints.

skitters wrote:

But as far as I'm concerned, Windows 8/8.1 is crippleware. Not only do you need 3rd party utilities to restore basic functionality, but some of the compatibility modes have been removed. Games like Still Life, which ran on Windows 7 with compatibility mode set to Windows NT, can not be run on Windows 8/8.1 because it has had compatibility modes for NT and 2000 stripped out. I have no idea why Microsoft removed it unless they messed up the guts of Windows 8 so much that NT and 2000 compatibility no longer worked.

It seems strange to me that the game would only run under NT or 2000 compatibility mode and not Windows 9x or XP compatibility mode – the game certainly wasn't written for NT or 2000, was it? I reckon the only apps that specifically required NT or 2000 would be obscure productivity applications. There is surely some combination of Application Compatibility Toolkit settings that will get this game in particular running again.

Anyway, they did fix the scrambled-palette bug with 256-color games (like Starcraft).

skitters wrote:

But as far as I'm concerned, Windows 8/8.1 is crippleware. Not only do you need 3rd party utilities to restore basic functionality

I really don't get this point. Surely everyone has tons of third party software (I count 66 games installed on my computer) and lots of third party software that provides basic functionality (who uses the standard Windows browser or media player?).

What exactly is the problem with third party software?

Oh and for reference, I also need third party software to restore basic functionality to Windows 7: why the hell can't I pause file operations? Don't even want to get into all the software I need to restore basic functionality to a Windows XP computer. It's all done once though, when you setup your computer. Then you never have to worry about it again.

When I reinstall my computer, installing Classic Shell is a few seconds in an hour long process. One that I also do in Windows 7, because the Windows 7 start menu sucks.

I've seen this point repeated so many times and it just makes no sense at all.