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Comment by devnull3 | Hacker News Reader

Win XP remains my favourite OS till date. I was in college and getting hands on a pirated copy back then makes me so nostalgic.

There was a cambrian explosion of tools to customize the look and feel. TweakXP pro is the one I remember. All pirated off-course.

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I remember being extremely envious of the "Alienware theme" that you could only get with an actual Alienware machine.

That was surprisingly short-lived though, such custom experiences are uncommon these days. Seems like nobody is theming Windows- they just fill it with crapware.

I remember those themes - the sleek "glowing" blue accents on shiny silver and black UI elements looked so fancy back then. There was a Windows Media Player skin too if I recall correctly.

I preferred the Media Center Edition theme myself... kept a copy of it for a long time to drop into XP and other windows flavors.

> Seems like nobody is theming Windows

We found more fun in ricing our linux desktops :) https://reddit.com/r/unixporn

Specifically to look like Windows XP: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pdd4o6/xfce_windo...

Why theme it? For many people, it has three main functions: starting a game, starting Chrome, and starting MSO. All three kinds have their own custom look, or theme support. The native UI is barely visible, unless you're a heavy Explorer user.

How was it better than Win2K?

Lots of relatively small UI improvements that all added up. I honestly never noticed them until years later when I had to use a slightly older machine and had an "oh wow" moment.

For me the look and feel of Win XP was breath of fresh air compared to Windows 98. WinXP was more user friendly and I was not a power user back then.

It had Pinball, Solitaire and other games we never really understood.

Multiple users on a same machine out of the box and way faster boot time.

Didn't care for the UI, though - looked childish...

Win2K did multiple users more or less the same, the only difference I remember from XP is the login screen that would list all accounts so you didn't have to type the username.

As for UI, it was very easy to switch to classic mode.

> Win2K did multiple users more or less the same

No, it didn't. You had to use some 3rd party software for that.

Better hardware support.

Taskbar grouping.

ClearType.

Remote Desktop.

More games ran on it (mostly thanks to higher DirectX version).

From developer perspective, XP was the first version of Windows with registration-free COM and side-by-side assemblies, which (if used properly by app devs) fully solved the "DLL hell" problem.

A huge percentage of XP drivers worked just fine in w2k - sometimes you had to edit the ini or inf file or whatever it was.

They often just shipped the same driver for both.

IIRC it was almost always the video card driver; I ran W2K for quite a few years into the XP era before moving to XP with 2K theme. Everything was happy except the video card drivers, which were often "XP-only" but actually worked fine with 2k.

Win2k Pro was peak Windows.

Vectored Exception Handlers.

Better support for dealing with "we never tested outside of windows 98" apps.

early version of SxS.

Various small enhancements.

Did you have the devils0wn copy though?

FCKGW-RHQQ2... is the first thing that pops into my head upon seeing that name.

There was a time I had that whole thing memorized - even when I had legitimately obtained licenses it was easier to type that in …

OS/2 is the nostalgic one for me.

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