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Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

I am sticking with XP for my home PC as long as I can. I really don't have a good reason to move off. Why break things when they work.

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There are a couple legitimately useful new features in the NT6 line. From my POV: the new WDDM driver model prevents a large class of crashes caused by faulty graphics drivers. ASLR and DEP. Moving all the window drawing and compositing to the GPU to free up some CPU time. Compatibility with newer DirectX software. IE9+, or even if you don't use IE, a modern trident for all apps that embed mshtml. The new task manager in Windows 8 is legitimately useful. GetTickCount64() is guaranteed to exist. The wonderful Consolas font.

None of which, by themselves, are a particularly compelling reason to upgrade. But Windows 7 is absolutely a worthy successor if you ever do decide to rebuild your system in the future, and with ~3G of ram the performance implications will be negligible (they're negligible on much weaker hardware than yours).

> the new WDDM driver model prevents a large class of crashes caused by faulty graphics drivers

True. However, the current AMD driver offers something similar for WinXP. It has prevented one restart already.

And my other computer with 7 just froze because of a problem with the video card, so Win7 WDDM driver model is not fail-proof.

I just went back to XP from Seven last month in my home computer (4GB Ram). I'm with you.

- Things I got back with XP:

  Sound 3D acceleration in video games.

  I can force v-sync in my AMD video card.

  The keyboard multimedia keys work again.

  Great performance for more software.

- Things I had to add to make XP usable:

  Launchy

  RocketDock

  Some tool to make the Win+left and Win-right keys work like Win7.

- Things I miss:

  The launch lists.

  The percentage completion indicator in the taskbar.

I still have a Win7 machine with 8GB Ram at work, so I can compare both every day. My next machine will be Win7 too. But with much beefier hardware, to make it worth it.

Microsoft spent how many billions of dollars and how many man hours to improve Windows since XP? My guess is that you'll get a much better PC. Sorry, I can't go into details since I'm a Mac user but for $40, I can still conclude that it's worth it for the average XP user.

My major use of my desktop is my browser and I don't really see a valid need to upgrade (even though I can upgrade any time). You throw additional memory to a decent hardware and things just work. There are people who raise security red flags on XP but I keep things tidy through my browser use (Ghostry, Adblock and occasional Spybot checks along with usual watch of firewall logs).

> Microsoft spent how many billions of dollars and how many man hours to improve Windows

Who cares how much money was spent? What matters whether they have improved something or not.

> but for $40, I can still conclude that it's worth

No, you have to judge the claimed improvements based on their merit alone, not on the price attached to them.

When you identify the merits, you can decide whether they are worth the price asked, but from knowing the price, you cannot deduce how big the merits possibly are, thats a fallacy.

As somebody who is using XP and 7 simultaneously for years now, I honestly do not see why any random end user should invest effort to upgrade to 7. They can just wait till their XP machines break and then just get whatever is preinstalled at the new machine they buy.

Drag to/from the top of the screen to maximize/restore a window. That's worth the upgrade alone. For me, the per application audio volume mixer is worth it alone as well.

Please tell us you use Chrome or FF at least :)

I have stopped pretty much all of the unnecessary services and am running a XP with 3.5 G memory (though it doesn't recognize more than 3.11 due to some hardware limitation). I was using Chrome with Themes service disabled until I realized that Chrome has a consistent bug where it wouldn't show check boxes on the web pages properly and the solution is to enable the Themes and all works fine.

With Windows default Firewall and MS Security Essential, I am pretty satisfied with lean, mean XP machine.

The thing that got me off XP quickly was how difficult it is to find applications. "All Programs" becomes an unnavigable maze unless you spend a lot of time keeping it in order, which almost no one did. Since Vista Windows has had universal search which is very nice.

Search is nice, but for organization linux tends to sort programs much better in the menus(by category rather then by company).

Install Launchy.

Problem solved.

> it doesn't recognize more than 3.11 due to some hardware limitation

Probably because it's a 32-bit OS. This isn't an issue with 8 (or 7 or Vista, for that matter), since it has a functional 64-bit version, which by itself is a great reason to upgrade.

It's not a hardware limitation. Any processor you'd want to use today supports PAE, since it was introduced with the Pentium Pro. Even if some pre-ppro box in some utility closet is still running, its motherboard probably doesn't support anywhere near 4GB, so it's irrelevant that the CPU doesn't support PAE. Linux for 32bit CPUs supported >4GB using PAE page tables for a long time before 64bit consumer processors went mainstream.

It's partially Microsoft trying to segment the market, and partially concern that a larger address space visible in a 32bit OS might/would trigger bugs in device drivers or perhaps other software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Desi...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...

I'm one of the lead devs on the Chrome Windows sandbox, and I can assure you that what we do with Vista+ on the security front is leaps and bounds ahead of what we're stuck with on XP. DEP is unreliable and pretty worthless anyway without ASLR. You also don't have things like SEHOP or other memory mitigations that are the first line of defense between your system and the average stale pointer exploit against WebKit.

As for the sandbox itself, we run as "Untrusted" integrity level under Vista+, which buys a solid layer of defense on top the SID, rights, and job based sandboxing we do on XP. Our GPU process sandbox in particular (used for accelerated graphics) relies heavily on Vista+ integrity levels due to deficiencies in the Windows XP driver and graphics model. Then there's the fact that XP is lacking hundreds of security fixes that Microsoft has chosen not to backport.

Seriously, I've spent many weeks trying to wring every last bit of security I can out of XP, and I really do think that Chrome does the best anyone possibly could on that front. But in the end XP is just an OS that's far past its security expiration date, and running it at all means taking a big risk.

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