Windows XP: Looking back, looking forward

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	TOP STORY[/size][/font] Windows XP: Looking back, looking forward[/size]
	By Fred Langa On October 22, Microsoft pulled the plug on sales of Windows XP, ending the operating system’s spectacular nine-year run. With no new copies being sold, support for XP will start to decline. Fortunately, XP’s long run has produced a ton of collected wisdom: everything you need to keep your copy going strong and — when ready — to help you move on.[/size]

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The full text of this column is posted at WindowsSecrets.com/2010/11/11/01 (opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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Fred —

I liked your appreciation piece about XP, but I found one thing lacking. XP’s immediate precursor, about 18 months before, was Windows 2000. Business oriented, some said, but a swift and useful operating system — and certainly the one to choose instead of ME. Eventually, a couple of years after XP’s initial release, I found there was good reason to shift to XP — features that 2000 would never get, for example, and enough speed in new PCs to handle XP well (2000 was certainly less demanding of power, RAM).

Gee, I’m feeling strong enough about this that I might go convert a 2002 vintage computer (a Shuttle XPC) back to 2000 — which would be fine for that unit’s service at my work bench! I had been proud that I could load Windows 7 Home Premium on the XPC (only problem was USB ports, solved with a 4 port PCI card), but pride isn’t necessary now — I’ve done it. Back to 2000!

Don Schwab (a long time reader, LangaList, W.Secrets)

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Donald, I have to agree. I’ve used all the Windows versions and felt that 2000 was the first time that MS got it right. It was rock solid compared to earlier versions. Thanks to Fred and many others there was always an answer to a problem published somewhere.

Jim

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Fred, your brief review of the history of Windows failed to mention the OS which made it possible for many businesses (I know, as I was head of support at a large company) to postpone upgrading to XP until SP1 came out: Windows 2000. XP matured into easily the best OS that Microsoft has released, but it wasn’t mature out of the gate. It was a year later, late in 2002, that it was worthy of taking the place of W2K.

I realize that MS never intended W2K for home use, and maybe that’s why you left it out. Still, it played an important role for business computing and for a great many home users who ignored the advice and went to Windows 2000 despite MS’s intent. In fact, the difference in reliability and supportability between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 was greater, in my opinion, than the difference I saw between W2K and XP.

Example: we were able to support over 300 computers running W2K with only a couple of techs. Those same two techs were kept fully occupied by less than half that many — 120 — Windows 98 SE boxes. There was nowhere near that kind of improvement in supportability when we went to XP.

With the exception of the omission of W2K, I found your review to be right on target. I’ll bet that XP will still be in use a decade from now, too. Admittedly, it will be in the nooks and crannies by then, not a leading OS by a count of PCs using it, but it is that good.

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I suspect that 60.03 % you mention would be quite happy to stay with XP if given a choice. Unfortunately the game is to force users to upgrade. Planned obsolescence, true with most consumer items.
You mention the option to run in XP mode with a free “Windows XP Mode” software for Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate. Great… you just paid a lot extra for the Professional or Ultimate and they throw in a freebie. The folks that likely need to run XP stuff because they could not afford to upgrade all the peripherals or software are the same one who can not afford the deluxe version of Windows. Typical pricing policy of Microsoft though, they need to make that obscene profit.
You imply that Windows 7 is to Vista what XP was to ME. What issues that made people unhappy with Vista have been resolved with 7? I suspect Vista was unpopular because it was seen as an unnecessary upgrade just as is Windows 7, except for a very small percentage of users.

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I have two machines with XP Option. Although most XP programs will install and run successfully, I’ve already run into one that does not (sorry, I don’t remember the name). Also, if you read Microsoft’s description of the XP option carefully, you”ll see that they don’t claim full compatibility with all programs that run successfully in a true XP machine.

njw

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Yes I have super fond memories of Windows XP, particularly Professional! My desktop runs a still fresh install of Windows XP Professional with all the goodies, Service Pack 3, which made XP capable of everything Vista could do only with better resource management and speed. In fact it was Service Pack 3 that extended the life of XP. That made my machine what it still is in my network, the one connected to the big 100-watt audio amplifier that drives my 5-foot high tower speakers! All of my music resides there on Drive D which is a big 500GB IDE drive! I listen to streaming audio from all over the world on Internet radio using the powerful Winamp media player which is the heart of my audio setup! I watch video on it’s acer 20″ ultrawide screen monitor and when I go crazy with digital images that dive under the side toolbars of my Gimp image manipulation program, (my digital darkroom!), of my Windows 7 Home Premium laptop I transfer it over the network to my version in the XP desktop with that huge amount of desktop space and it even handles the big files with 1.5GB of RAM installed! Windows 7 needs 4GB to do the same thing! It’s even got the excellent Symantec Endpoint Protection corporate security suite that keeps it nice and secure! Then there is 3D Pipes! I can watch them for hours on end, especially when you have a DVI-D connection with the monitor. I will never forget that! I ran Ubuntu Linux for awhile and there was even a version of it in there…just not the same of course! Ah yes, screensavers are passe with LCD monitors but I will miss Pipes even though! Alas, Windows XP Professional will die away once we implement IPv6! There is and will not be support for IPv6 in Windows XP! All is not lost however. The tried and true network trick called Network Address Translation may just save it for even longer! Outside your network you run IPv6 and you translate to an IPv4 private address inside your network! Yup, XP can live on after all!

I want to correct the author on something. The first non business version of Windows that ran in an NTFS 5 partition was Windows 2000 Professional. That OS was very close to XP Professional in fact! It was way better than anything Millenium could ever have been! I actually ran Windows 2000 in 64MB of RAM on a Windows 98SE machine in FAT32, and it ran, although s-l-o-w-ly with a lot of swap file action. I was totally surprised by that! Another thing about XP versus 2000 was that XP would not immediately blue screen you if you failed to properly eject a USB storage device! Boy 2000 sure would! Then you had to wait for Scandisk to do it’s thing! Remember Scandisk?

Yes, I love Windows 7, but I will always have fond memories of Windows XP! How the install program comes up! How you create the partition, format the drive. How the screen looked as the operating system installs. How you installed the drivers to run all your hardware. The Classic View of the Control Panel. The icons in the System Tray. How my taskbar autohides when I’m not using it. Ah yes, I learned all of the things I know about computers and have some of the best hours of computing experience behind the screen of a Windows XP machine! These I shall never forget. all from an operating system that refuses to get long in the tooth! I love you XP and I always will! Still alive and kicking after all these years. My hat is off to you!

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I ran into a problem accessing information in the ”Windows Secrets XP setup/maintenance articles” section. The link in ”How to move a Windows XP installation to different hardware” cannot be found at Microsoft. Has anyone else tried this link and encountered the same problem?

I am attempting to install new hardware in my cases, but XP SP3 does not want to run on them. i had to replace both MBs and video cards several years ago and had no problems using the same HDDs and OSs. Aside from having to reactivate, everything went smoothly. Now with the problems I have encountered, I am looking for methods to do the same with the new equipment and thought the information Fred cited might be helpful. Unfortunately, I can’t get there from here.

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Well, i had to laugh out loud when i read:

Before I joined forces with Windows Secrets, I wrote a column called the “LangaLetter” for InformationWeek.com. Please excuse the vanity, but I believe XP users will find some of the following articles of interest.

Well, yeah, the LangaLetter rocked. I miss it, as do many. Packed solid with usable information, well-written, no filler, just like Fred still does. I always looked forward to getting the langaletter. I have all my old langaletters archived, but I only archive Windows Secrets when Fred has the lead article. Sorry, that’s the way it is.

Yeah, i know, I’m a Langa fanboy. Tell me I’m wrong.

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Well, i had to laugh out loud when i read:

Before I joined forces with Windows Secrets, I wrote a column called the “LangaLetter” for InformationWeek.com. Please excuse the vanity, but I believe XP users will find some of the following articles of interest.

Well, yeah, the LangaLetter rocked. I miss it, as do many. Packed solid with usable information, well-written, no filler, just like Fred still does. I always looked forward to getting the langaletter. I have all my old langaletters archived, but I only archive Windows Secrets when Fred has the lead article. Sorry, that’s the way it is.

Yeah, i know, I’m a Langa fanboy. Tell me I’m wrong.

I couldn’t agree more, Dennis!!!
Look, Ma! I’m finally a Fanboy, too!!!

Rob M

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I cannot even begin to accept your characterization of Win95 and Win98 as Stellar OS’es. Did you ever run these other than for word processing your columns? They were awful. I am sure they caused a lot of Linux and Mac conversions. And it does seem a shame to diss poor Win2K which really did work pretty well.

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Does anyone know if I can download Windows XP Mode on my machine containing W7Ultimate 32, then copy it and install it on my machine running W7 Home Premium 64? How big might the file be?

And yes, W2K was an excellent upgrade from 98SE and I stayed on W2K until about 2005.

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Does anyone know if I can download Windows XP Mode on my machine containing W7Ultimate 32, then copy it and install it on my machine running W7 Home Premium 64? How big might the file be?

Hello Glen,

XP Mode can only be run on Windows 7 Professional or higher. The XP you will download to your Windows 7 Ultimate machine is licensed by Microsoft for use only on the computer on which your W7Ultimate is running. Even if it were possible to copy and install it on Home Premium, Microsoft would never validate it to run on two computers.

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Microsoft has stated they will continue to offer Windows 7 with XP downgrade rights for the full life of Windows 7. So, as long as you can find hardware with XP drivers, you’ll still be able to install XP until late 2014.

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Hello,
I value Windows Secrets and found the Windows XP top story very interesting. However I too was struck by the omission of any mention of Windows 2000 and signed in here to comment. I see several others have beat me to it! The first computer I ever bought for myself was a Gateway Solo notebook (then regarded as one of the best) which shipped with then brand new Windows 2000 Professional. I thought Win2000 was excellent and appreciated it both as a profesional developer and a personal computer user. Win 2000 was the first OS with power management – a big advantage for notebook PCs – and also a built-in disk backup tool, and many other neat things. I still use that computer occasionally for old times’ sake, and to make sure it still runs OK. The second computer I ever bought was a 2008 Macbook and I doubt that I will ever buy another Windows PC again! The Gateway still runs Win2000 SP4 and will do so until it decides not to run anymore.

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I do have Win7 64-bit and I like it very much, but paranoid I am so I figured out a foolproof way to protect my OS. I’ve repaired way too many PCs due to viruses and I came to the conclusion that you will never be protected while browsing in your native OS. I came up with a rock solid method involving VMs and went one step further and use Sandboxie inside my XP VM. Trust me; I already went to some known malicious sites and laughed at them. I know that Win7 (well supposedly Vista too) have safeguards and their supposed own way to virtualize the browsing, but I do not trust that; sorry Microsoft. It’s a little inconvenient, but what I said does work. I created shares between my VM and Win7 when I need to share data and that works quite well. What I am a little concerned with is when XP will stop being supported, but I should have until 2014 to really worry about that. Sandboxie only recently began supporting 64-bit OSs but tzuk himself said that he couldn’t 100% protect the 64-bit environment like he can the 32-bit environment (being simplistic with my explanation of course) because Microsoft has not been up front with all the information that he needs to do so, so you get a little better protection then no virtualization at all; to me, that is not good enough (I want 100% protection). Anyway, just wanted to pass on my technique; sure others here use a similar protection scheme. I do have a trojan protector (Threatfire) running in my XP VM (only protection besides built in firewall that I use in my VM XP; probably don’t even need that, but I do want just a little protection just in case; lol). My Win7 is protected by MSE.

As a side note, I do use VirtualBox for my VMs. I have an Ubuntu, XP, and Win98se VM that I use for various reasons. Use Microsoft’s Virtualmode XP for one of my Dad’s programs that, for some reason, could not get to work in my VirtualBox XP (and it won’t work at all in Win7). There is a weird interaction between Virtualmode and Virtualbox XP so I have to close that session before I start Virtualmode. Just don’t forget to do your OS updates for you VMs (that includes Virtualmode XP) either.

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I’ll not upgrade for a couple of reasons.
First of all I have a ton of software that will not run in Windows 7, and it would cost thousands of dollars to update the software that can be updated.
The second, and most important reason, is I do not want to give Bill Gates anymore money. Ever since he became the richest man in the world he joined the Bilderburg group which is the secretive group of the richest people on Earth who, because of their great wealth, believe that gives them the right to rule the Earth and control the rest of us. Bill Gates will never see another dime from me.

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I’ll not upgrade for a couple of reasons.
First of all I have a ton of software that will not run in Windows 7, and it would cost thousands of dollars to update the software that can be updated.
The second, and most important reason, is I do not want to give Bill Gates anymore money. Ever since he became the richest man in the world he joined the Bilderburg group which is the secretive group of the richest people on Earth who, because of their great wealth, believe that gives them the right to rule the Earth and control the rest of us. Bill Gates will never see another dime from me.

But the next richest man is Steve Job. Are you not using Apple product too?

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After watching the flop of Vista and poor reception of Windows 7 I bought a MacPro tower and life is good again. So long Microsoft it has not been fun and I laugh at your floundering market share and stock price, try as they might they can’t even do a good job of copying Apples OS-X.

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After watching the flop of Vista and poor reception of Windows 7 I bought a MacPro tower and life is good again. So long Microsoft it has not been fun and I laugh at your floundering market share and stock price, try as they might they can’t even do a good job of copying Apples OS-X.

Poor reception? Windows 7 is selling at a pace which rivals the introduction of Windows XP, the last MS OS which was well received (although folks did not initially like Windows Activation). Far outpacing Vista at the same point after its introduction, Windows 7 is generally regarded in the IT community as a marketplace success.

That fact having been recognized, I still have one laptop which runs Windows XP Pro, and I see no reason why I would need to discard that computer if there were security support for Windows XP Pro for a few more years. But if any of the hardware in that laptop fails, I will be glad I upgraded to a Windows 7 laptop and began learning how to use 64-bit Windows 7 before any crisis might have forced a crash-course upon me.

Windows XP was and is a fine Windows version, and I am glad I skipped Vistas, but Windows 7 has not posed any serious issues for me, except that in the Home Premium version, I sure miss the Group Policy Editor!

-- rc primak

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I have been a Network Engineer professional for well over 18 years (remember CPM, OS2, and Token Ring anyone?). I tend to agree with people on Windows 2000 Professional. I kept it going here in my 9 computer office until about 6 months ago when selected software upgrades no longer ran. The same goes for XP Pro. I have just one windows 7 machine — it sits in lab, not in production. I also have Server 2008 R2, but in real production, however some of the caveats for Win7 apply to 2008.

The code is enormously bloated for both, with speech dictionaries and code in well over 34 languages I will never use. (Lituanian, Russian and Ukranian?). I have convinced several customers to simply shift to Apple OS X when it came time to get a new machine, stating that the learning curve is the same or shorter, than that from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.

I have added OS X to my working setup and Ubuntu server as well as dual boot Ubuntu workstation with XP and find the Ubuntu community manages to avoid the off-putting problems LINUX people have demonstrated in the past.

Of Office products, I retain Excel 2000, but only for reading and modifying charts previously done with Office. I also keep Powerpoint 2003 and versions of Outlook, but entirely for customer support reasons. All real production work is now done with OpenOffice from Sun.

Look, I am happy Mr. Gates is a wealthy man. I do not hate him or Debra Chapatry, or Steve Ballmer. They worked hard and earned their dollars. However I do remember when one chose the tool to accomplish a work task, and the OS followed in support of that.

Not the other way around.

It is counter to the interests of your customers to inflict expense and the upset of changes against their wills. If your business is selling fine lace, manufacturing valves, repairing Masarati and Testarossa engines, printing brochures, or fixing broken hearts, you engage in that business because the problems and issues involving that business is what you want to wrap your head around, not bits and bytes and relearning menu items.

Imagine if you were forced to replace all your crescent wrenches every few years with ever more complex and larger multitools. It’s ridiculous.

Microsoft is not the only one forcing customers to “upgrade” at cost. A lot of other software and hardware giants do similar things. The difference is that a CISCO 501 PIX or a 1900 switch will still continue to work, allowing leeway for gentle replacement years down the line.

Anyway, that’s my curmudgeonly opinionated opinion. And thanks to Fred for coming back to work. He is a lot more engaging on the human level than the NTsysadmin newsletters!

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I have been a Network Engineer professional for well over 18 years (remember CPM, OS2, and Token Ring anyone?). I tend to agree with people on Windows 2000 Professional. I kept it going here in my 9 computer office until about 6 months ago when selected software upgrades no longer ran. The same goes for XP Pro. I have just one windows 7 machine — it sits in lab, not in production. I also have Server 2008 R2, but in real production, however some of the caveats for Win7 apply to 2008.

You mention OS2, IBM’s _real_ 32 bit operating system. In fact, before the split, the IBM and Microsoft “partnership” saw IBM do the real heavy lifting in the development of
Win 2K. Win98 was a 16 bit OS. The dll’s had a “thunk layer” to convert 32 bit to 16 bit and back again, and that along with some other reasons was why Win98 was so anemic.
OS2 was 32 bit when Win3.11 was just being developed.

If you recall, in Win 2K, there actually was an “OS2” and “Merlin” directory on drive C. That pretty much tells you what you need to know.

We still have one box running IBM OS2 Warp 4, and it has run 6 days a week for 12 years with no problems of any kind. Had internal politics not lead IBM’s infamous
Lou Gerstner to order OS2 killed, Microsoft would have gone down in flames for the pathetic software they produce.

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Welcome back Fred! I am sorry to say that I am mad as hell at MS and will not take it anymore.

My plan to deal with the coming end to XP is to learn and migrate to Linux. I primarily use the internet for writing, research and email. 99% of my programs are freeware. It seems that 7 is a fine program, but to be forced to switch is an excellent opportunity to change to a stable, fast, freeware solution that will help me keep my computer updated for years to come.

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I happily used Windows 2000 on my main home computer right up until the hard drive died last year. I’m currently using Windows 7 since there’s no other reasonable expectation of updates for drivers and security on older Windows systems. However, I also have a netbook purchased just last year which still came with XP. I understand this is a streamlined version just for such machines, and was told Microsoft will continue support for these a longer time. I sincerely hope so! Even if support is pulled, however, I’ll just shut down the internet features and use it as a stand-alone for the applications needed in a machine shop.

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First, let me qualify myself. Recently retired, I was a computer consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost 25 years. My experience goes back to DOS 2, Lantastic, Novell, all the various incarnations of Windows, Ubuntu, and Windows networking. I’ve written programs, setup networks, remote access, repaired hardware, etc, etc. I think I know whereof I speak at this point.

The first semi-stable version of Windows, in my opinion, was 98SE. Everything the preceded it was experimental and unsuitable for business, which represented the bulk of my clientele. So I used 98SE exclusively, all the while experimenting with NT. Once NT reached SP4 it was pretty solid and I implemented it for 95% of my clients…the other 5% didn’t want to make the investment in upgrading, despite my pleas that it would save them service calls. When 2K came out, it also needed (if I recall correctly) SP3 to reach stability, but it was an excellent system, solid as NT…really it was NT with plug and play. I refused to move to XP at first after witnessing all the growing pains people were experiencing with it, but by the time it reached SP2 it was pretty solid. I still have several 2K servers chugging along, running terminal server on some, and none of these clients see any reason to upgrade themselves into oblivion. I have to agree.

I’m one of those old school guys to whom ‘new’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘improved,’ so I need to see some solid reasons to upgrade anything, be it my OS or my toaster. I had several clients who used custom-written proprietary software to manage their businesses, and there were lots of growing pains anytime the OS was changed, even from 2K to XP. Device drivers, accounting programs and other vital pieces of the pie often were a struggle after an OS upgrade. So I’ll continue to use XPPro SP3 on my home units. My little traveling HP notebook has XPhome on it and it seems to do everything I need; Outlook, Quicken, FireFox, etc. In fact, I looked far and wide for a notebook that still had XP instead of Win7 to avoid software clashes.

Just my opinion.

Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage

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I, too, have been following Fred for a long time, including the reports on his long trip on the Honda Goldwing. Great. After the trip I’m glad he came back to work instead of retiring, as was the original plan.

I tried Win 7 RC, then a few months later I tried the real thing. After 7 hours I had one failed install, 50% of my freeware/shareware would not run and I couldn’t find good substitutes, 80% of the purchased software would not run, and I couldn’t network it to my three other XP machines. I gave up. That copy sits on my shelf and, except for the lost 7 hours, I don’t feel I’ve missed anything since.

I figure WinXP will have to be pried out of my cold, dead hands. Fred, thanks for the recent info on XP. I hope you keep helping us deal with XP for as long as we and you can.

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I had been around PC since 1986. Most of the time I use Windows but I now use an iMac running SL. I find it humorous that people saying MS is forcing people to upgrade to W7. Actually, they are not forcing you to upgrade to anything. What they won’t do is pushing out more fixes for XP. Your XP will still work! It’s just that MS will not make fixes for it. It is like a 20 y.o. car, the original manufacturer is not oblige to make any more parts for it after 20 years. There are a lot of new features in W7, some of them features wise and some of them security that cannot be retrofit into XP. Look at it this way, XP last 10 years while Mac’s went from OS 9 to OS X (from Cheetah to Snow). Unless you buy a new mac everytime Mac OS changes, you have to buy a copy of OS X for $ 30 to 100. If you add all that up money up, that is $ 450 while you only paid MS $ 150. That’s on top of extra $ you have to pay for a Mac of same computing power. W7 actually run very nicely on my 3 years old Thinkpad, except for replacing my mechanical hard drive with a solid state one( $ 130 including taxes, it actually runs FASTER than when it was running XP. It take 45 seconds from the screen go black to when the machine is ready to use (and that includes starting Outlook 2007!). Yes, there is a learning curve and some software won’t run but that’s price of progress. W7 is more secure than XP, For example, a non-admin user can run the computer without major inconveniences. Give W7 a chance, it is new and it will have some growing pains. But that’s progress!

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Ah – I see the demise of XP is also triggering a love affair mention of Win2000. I’ll chime in on that. I still have one very aged Dell running W2000. I’ve kept it because I had some very specific programs that won’t come forward easily and their data which is used infrequently enough to make this a good solution. However, I’m finally going to have to figure out bringing the stuff forward. Still running several systems with XP and a few with Vista. Much prefer XP. Need to buy several new so obviously will be trying Win7 soon. I loved 2000 because I could really use it, fix things if they didn’t work. I’ve gotten used to XP and like it. I really do not like Vista so I will be keeping the XP systems around – probably until they all die. We never have less than 6 computers around because something is always going wrong with at least one of them and it takes a lot of time to fix them which I often don’t have. So Long Live XP.[/size]

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Fred, and other Lounge Lizards:

First, qualifications: I’ve been a computer professional for over 20 years, owning my own consulting company since 1996. I’ve seen the worst of Windows (ME) and, in my opinion, the best of Windows, that being XP Pro.

Recently, I obtained a PC powerful enough (isn’t that curious) to run Windows 7 Pro so I installed a fresh copy (not an upgrade) onto a clean partition as I’ve had plenty of experience with upgrades gone bad. I’ve been playing intimately with it, configuring, running standard apps, utilities, built-in tools and such for over a week. Quick summary: 30% frustration and negative perceptions, 70% favorable. Much of the 70% is just eye candy really, with the real, useful computer utility being an “also ran”. I find no improvements in performance, “practical, productive” capabilities or ease of use. Granted, much of my frustration is due to familiarity of using XP. But, isn’t that what 90-95% of Windows users do, i.e. “USE” Windows! I cannot find easy ways to do some of the simplest things (very counter-intuitive) such as tweak the appearance of Desktop items, look and function. Ever try to search for a file, by name, at a particular place? Don’t even start with me on the silly topic of “Libraries”!

So, today, I happened to be looking for something on my “old” Windows XP Pro box — I RDP’d into it and fell in love again with simplicity, speed and ease of use!!! In and out in less than one minute, including doing what I had to do.

There you have it, still in love with XP….

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Interesting stories. I will add my own, although less interesting than many. I need to buy a new laptop and ended up Win 7 HP 32 with it, this was back in March. Since then I have had to upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 due to issues with IMAP, seems like a deliberate ploy by MS to force incompatibility and upgrades for $$$.

Well it has been a tough few months. The biggest issues for me have been the look and feel of Win 7 with far too much unproductive eye candy, extremely distracting to getting real work done and finding things. Second issues has been stable security, surprising.

Ultimately I am now reverting to XP but in a virtualbox under Linux Mint, an Ubuntu derivative. This gives me the a combination of a familiar and trusted interface of XP whilst in the very solid (but not infallible of course) security of linux. It seems a win-win at the moment!

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