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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

What a cool article to have at the 30th anniversary of Windows 95's release (24th of Windows XP's).

Windows XP was about the time I started moving away from Windows more definitively, even as a secondary OS. It was the product activation crap. My OS on my computer should serve ME, not be beholden to the vendor after I put it on. Of course, we didn't realize back then how bad things could/would get...

So for that reason, I'm not really nostalgic about Windows XP, or subsequent versions, the way some people are.

Although it is interesting to see what many now consider to be the bad ideas of Windows 8, get their start in "Neptune"...

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I feel the same way about Windows XP. Windows XP may have brought NT-based Windows to regular consumers, which is partly why there's nostalgia for XP, but for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time, Windows XP wasn't that much better than its predecessor, Windows 2000.

To me, Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Windows XP introduced activation, which I find an annoying hindrance, and weird UI decisions in the form of the Fisher-Price Luna interface and the search dog. It was all downhill from there, though Windows 7 was solid and I greatly appreciate the introduction of WSL in Windows 10.

> for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time,

Exactly! Well said.

It was shockingly better than Win98/ME but not if you were already running NT. Then, it was a step backwards.

The advantage XP had targeting consumers was that gaming peripheral makers were more interested in developing drivers for XP. Win2k itself was pretty stable but its hardware support was suboptimal and its DOS emulation needed some work.

Win2k was excellent if it did everything you needed from it, though. XP had some advantages (like better search capabilities) but most of them came later in the form of service packs.

The only XP had over 2000 IMO was 64-bit support. Which isn't even part of the XP most people are talking about since it was an uncommonly used variant based on server 2003.

Same here. XP was an absolute security nightmare and the internet felt like the most dangerous place ever. Everybody and my mom were constantly passing viruses around.

I haven't looked back switching to Linux back then.

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