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Comment by octorian | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers

I think a big part of this is a combination of two factors: First, most non-tech people never ran Win2k. They went straight from 98/ME to XP. Second, no one remembers WinXP before SP2. (You know, when it was a complete trainwreck.)

FWIW, when I was doing software development in the latter days of XP, I found that I actually liked the style of the UI widgets from the default theme. Its just the titlebar and taskbar styles that I couldn't stand. However, some size tweaks made them more tolerable.

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Windows XP even before SP2 was a _delight_ compared to the true train wreck that shipped on consumer PCs before it: Windows "Mistake Edition" Me.

Windows Me was a strange beast. On some (most?) PCs it was an absolute disaster up to corrupting hard disks, on others it was a solid step up from win98. But you could never say beforehand how it was going to behave, even on 2 identical PCs. I never understood what triggered its abysmall behaviour.

Oh well, who cares now, it lies in its well deserved grave, I guess.

I have similar recollection of ME, on my personal 333MHz Celeron with 128mb of RAM laptop it ran fantastically, never had issues and was stable and while 2000/XP were also stable, ME was fast compared to 2000/XP on the same hardware.

Other people I know couldn't get past a VxD error on the first install, others couldn't get faster K6 or PIII's to be stable with it.

It was a love it or hate it thing--my opinion of Vista and 8.0 are similar.

It was also preferred (by most people, at least) to Windows Vista, the product that usually shipped on PCs after it.

It was an almost undeniable local maximum in Windows releases from the consumer side, which does make some of the fond memories make sense.

What's weird is that I had a laptop that Vista actually ran well on, and I didn't have any real problems. Of course it was a higher-end laptop (similar specs and price to what Apple sold at the time).

It often feels like the biggest difference between Vista and 7 was actually time. As such, the cheap computers 7 shipped on were much better than the cheap underpowered computers Vista shipped on (despite both OSes likely having similar realistic requirements).

Win7 kinda was the SP2 of Vista more than a major version.

XP64, if you had hardware that had drivers, was amazing. Drop it into classic mode and you essentially had a workstation (Ala Windows) version of Server 2003.

Unpopular opinion: I liked XP SP1. Perhaps it's because I used it mostly offline, so its security issues were far less visible than if I had used it on a T1 line. But from a stability standpoint, XP SP1 was a huge step up from 98.

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