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I have very good memories from Windows XP. I moved from Windows ME (which was absolutely terrible) directly to XP and it was so much better. I even liked the overall appearance. But then I guess nostalgia and being less critical myself back then plays a role...

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Ehh not really XP was a great Windows OS for the time it came out.

For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4.

For the home users it was a move away from the old 9x kernel line and into the NT kernel line, which was infinitely better.

XP's problem was that with Longhorn's delays and then Vista sucking so much, it took until mid-2009 for a suitable replacement to appear, and by then XP was really outdated. But at the time it came out ? It was great.

For a long time I ran Windows XP x64, which was basically Windows Server 2003 x64 without the server components, that worked great (and server grade patches, becoz they just send the server updates). It was free as well, as they we're testing the ground for x64 OS'es.

Quite a lot of people did also run 2000 at home as well. It was actually a damn good OS given it's era: Linux wasn't ready to be used as a primary OS for most people, 9x/Me was total garbage and OS9 was somehow worse. Apple hadn't yet released OSX (that came a year later IIRC) and there were some inevitable compatibility and onboarding issues when that was released. The only real contender was BeOS (which did support x86 by that point) but sadly that didn't have the momentum to challenge Microsoft.

> For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4.

Windows 2000 definitely wasn't "mostly the same" as NT 4. They were as different as Vista was to XP. 2000 and XP (pre-SP2) were very similar though.

I miss NT 3.51 - it was rock solid (it didn't have a compromised driver model) and smooth even on 486 hardware.

Windows 2000’s stability was something else coming from 98SE and Mac OS 9. My family’s shared/house PC back then was a Dell Dimension 4100, which was actually pretty great in terms of hardware but was chained down by 98SE. The increase in usability that thing had as a result of being upgraded to 2000 was staggering. It went from “ok” performing and bluescreening every so often to a rock solid powerhouse in a single step.

If only all OS upgrades went that way…

I think XP SP2 was the high point of Microsoft OSes. But don't forget that the initial releases of XP were chock-full of massive security holes

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