ALIIIIEEEEENS!!!1!1!1!11one!!1!!!


also, children, the word of to day is "Hyperbole". Say it after me now "hy-per-bole". Very good Alice... NO FRED! STOP, do not put that pen up there!

Edit:
Nnnnnnnnnope

For me, Windows 7 is the pinnacle of Windows. XP is a close second. From 7 and before, we had some ups and downs but also some really great ones like 98 and XP. After 7, though, it's been literally nothing but trash. Windows 8 could have been good if they gave people the option to toggle between a classic start menu and the Metro interface; I use Classic Shell but that should have been built in. However, starting with Windows 10, it all became a bloated mess of spyware with increasingly uglier UI and features that almost nobody who uses a PC ever asked for.

So yeah, I loved XP, it was a great OS. I prefer 7 over XP, despite the fact that I was hesitant to try 7 (as I assumed it'd basically be another Vista) but once I did, I loved it and have no interest in using any OS after that. Unfortunately, game publishers disagree (screw y'all, you alone could have pressured Micro$oft into continuing support for their most popular OS) but I will never run a PC of my own without a dual boot of 7 and whatever modern OS I have.

Honestly, though, I have thought about building a cheap PC to run XP for some of the games I have discs for that don't run on modern OSes. A lot of retro purists play that way and it would be pretty cool to go back in time and use my second-most used OS of all time.

"Microsoft delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of the source code. XP!!!"

OP should really get into marketing. Every new thread makes me want to grab popcorn and sprint to the nearest cinema.

Wow, I would not be so romantic about it! :)

Windows XP was the real deal? No.

I stand my opinion that all OS were&are a PITA: its a matter to choose the best of the worst and/or adapt... Software engineers have not been able to create a decent OS yet. Add all the crap by the money related topics (profit, budget, marketing...) and we get the state of the art.

Until now, to me the most surprising was the QNX demo ages ago that fit on a 3.5" floppy disk...
and where is now?

AmigaOS

hyperpole?

While XP was definetly a nice system, the real deal was Win7.
Mainly because Windows systems since the good old days always had issues and sooner or later had to be reinstalled, making a clean sweep of you C: disc. Like clockwork - XP had at most 2 years, after that the whole system would collapse on itself.
Not Win7 though. I still have Win7 without any Service Packs on one of my PC's and since 2010 I never had to reinstall it even once.

Windows XP was the first version to introduce DRM in the form of an activation check, so no.

On the other hand, it is the first version marketed at home users that's based on the NT kernel, which is a huge improvement over the kernel used in Windows 9x/ME, as anyone who's used those versions (and had them crash) can attest.

(Also, Windows XP still doesn't do proper disk caching, so, for example, starting the same game multiple times is slow, whereas on later versions of Windows (and on Linux) starting the game again is much faster after the first time, assuming that RAM usage hasn't been too high.)

I would need to try it :)
Is strong enough to be invisible and dump all the spotlights to the programs & peripherals?

New? It's not new. It's an iteration of previous versions, source code going back to Windows 3.1 (and maybe earlier) GUI, point and click, not really different. Different layout maybe. Requiring heavily on the NT kernel, a kernel that originally came from Sun Micro-systems with heavy changes in source code...

But the control panel and location of many things were well thought out i agree. XP was lightweight and fast, though as service packs were introduced fixing things it got slower and more bulky. However there were tools to remove some of the included bloat to make it a very lightweight OS overall, something as small as 70Mb i think.

But XP, 7 and others have multiple programs that you have to go out of your way to find them, to make certain changes to settings. This means it's a patched hodgepodge of multiple layers of changes without a consistent cohesive design on the backend while on the forefront making it as close to optimal as you'd consider for the most part. (Until 8 where 'everything is a tablet'...) XP was pretty much strictly 32bit with Fat32 and very limited file sizes and issues. Oh sure there's a 64bit version but i think Win7 is a clean split where it goes to 64bit as the core OS.

Win7 I've only needed SP1 to handle certain issues in order to install certain dependencies needed for games. Curiously Epic Launcher / UE4 corrected my system making me able to install the later dependencies where i couldn't update it otherwise.

But Win7 is where i think is the best balance of new/old and stability as well as support for hardware and software. Win7 will be a favorite long after Win 8/10/11 switch to different iterations of further Telemetry and spyware 'live service' that they are pushing.

I'm going to regret engaging with another of your car-crashes, but here goes...

Windows XP was literally Windows 2000 with a fisher-price skin on the start menu.

I'll feed Mr. Botty McBottson.

Of Windows, I'd say 7. XPs a close second though. Some of the under-the-hood stuff they did with the driver model and whatnot with the Vista+ core was an improvement. If we could get 10's "core functionality", with 7's UX and XP's stability and respect-the-user/"the owner actually owns the computer and not MS"...

Don't feed the trolls

And XP at the start was awful
Memory leaks and vulnerabilities
Blaster and Sasser for examples.