technology Windows XP...how will you remember it?

[BrilliantVenture 334]

Well guys, if you haven't heard...

 

Windows XP, the 13 year old OS, is now ending support completely.

 

I loved this OS, and I still use it to this day, but soon I will be looking to upgrade.

 

The market for XP still holds about a 3rd of PC users today, and I'm sure everyone

 

gets at least a little nostalgic when they remember it...I know I certainly do!

 

So how will you remember this brilliant OS?

 

Positively? fondly? negatively?

 

I remixed the install theme to pay respects,

 

you can check it out here.

 

 

I just felt that since today is the last day, and the official End of Support,

 

we should all raise a glass to one of the biggest technological landmarks in history...Windows XP.

 

 

Edited April 8, 2014 by BrilliantVenture

[Guest90210 3,567]

I've always thought that Vista was superior to XP so I won't miss it

[Windseeker 546]

Lol I'll miss having a massive Weegee in the background of that infamous wallpaper.

 

I'll miss Windows XP, I grew up on it, just because Microsoft finally cuts off support for it doesn't mean at least one of my hobby computers won't have it. I missed using the registry edit to change the Start menu title or boot-up screen, lol.

 

That operating system has stored a couple of gigbytes of my favorite pony pictures too.

[FoxyCryptid 4,328]

I spent a good little chunk in the later half of my childhood and the earlier part of my teen years with it, so it's I'm sad to see it go. I think it will live on for gaming purposes though because it's the ultimate OS for retro PC gaming. A Windows XP with DOSbox will take pretty much any old game you can throw at it.

 

I keep a VM with it setup just for that reason. 

Edited April 15, 2014 by Shoboni

[Acoustic Cloud 2,202]

What do you mean, "will remember"
 

I still have to use it everyday at work.  I honestly think that it's nothing special and windows '95 will always hold that special place in my heart.

[Treble Bolt 1,122]

My high school used XP......I was quite the naughty one. I didn't know anything about computers back then (such as the very existance of Linux), but I found XP to be so simple that I was able to get full access to the school system. I never changed my grades (I was a 4.0 so there was no need), but I used that power to acess Youtube, and my favorite manga sites, as well as archive.org. EVERYTHING was blocked at my high school, from social media to mass information sites. I also played many pranks on teachers, and was luckily never caught. It was quite ridiculous to me. Couldn't even do basic research on the school computers and their real library is laughable to me as of today (I have more books than all their non-fiction).

So yeah....Windows XP, the one system I can turn on its head for the longest time. Once I discovered Linux (my freshman year of college), Windows are out the window for me personally, so now I am no longer familiar with the system.

[Celtore 2,769]

I'll remember it with a certain fondness, similar to Windows 95. My first personal computer was a windows XP machine, I played guild Wars and WoW on it as well as a lot of other games. It was relatively stable beyond its crappy performance when it came to running 3d stuff and I never really had any complaints about it.

 

But I never want to see that hill wallpaper again.

[BrilliantVenture 334]

 

 

But I never want to see that hill wallpaper again.

 

There ya go, is that better? XD

[RED20 289]

I'll remember it by continuing to use it. 

[Gourgeist 262]

I loved XP so much. My dad tried to get me to "upgrade" to Vista but I had to explain how terrible Vista is. It sucks to see it go but I guess all good things die eventually.

[GrauWitz 1,010]

Personally, I don't really give a crap. My family pretty much stopped using XP five years ago when Windows 7 came out. My number one complaint, the default UI design.

C'mon, LOOK AT IT!!! Have you seen anything more ugly in your entire life? I sure haven't! Thankfully, there was the classic UI design which we always used

Nice

 

Anyway, the XP computer we had the time, which was just for typing documents and surfing the web, was just fine. In fact, the very reason my Dad bought was so he could play Half-Life 2. When Windows Vista came out, we were like "Damn, that looks frickin' cool! I want it!" Then we heard about it's major problems... and we held on to the Windows XP computer. Then Windows 7 came out.... and the XP computer was in the attic, never to be seen or touched again.

 

I will always remember Windows XP as the one thing my Dad NEEDED in order to play Half-Life 2 when it first came out XD

[SasQ 1,355]

  My high school used XP......I was quite the naughty one. I didn't know anything about computers back then (such as the very existaence of Linux), but I found XP to be so simple that I was able to get full access to the school system. I never changed my grades (I was a 4.0 so there was no need), but I used that power to access Youtube, and my favorite manga sites, as well as archive.org.

Hacker = c001. Female hacker = 20% c001r

 

Windowses are pretty easy to hack (they seem to be made for that by design   MS guys created lots of loopholes for themselves and their NSA friends, but were not smart enough to hide them better). There's even a lolly way to get into the Web when there's no Internet Exploder icon nor Start>Run or C:\WINDOWS accessible: through the Notepad. Anyone ever surfing the Web with Notepad?   This is not a joke, it is really possible.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOgr3Wq4yq8

 

It is also possible through Calculator

 

There's also a neat trick for hiding files from unauthorized people, using class identifiers attached to folder names. Just create a new folder on your desktop, put some files there, and change the name of that folder by attaching this after a dot: {645ff040-5081-101b-9f08-00aa002f954e} Then your folder will turn into recycle bin and when you open it, you'll see the content of your recycle bin instead of the files you stuffed there. To restore your folder, you need to use the command line and change the name of the folder back to normal through that. Great for hiding pr0n    (if one still needs to hide it). Here's a list of useful class ids.

 

Windows is so easy to hack that I once rebooted one guy's computer several times remotely by just making him go to a website I prepared. First I sent him to a website with some picture. He saw a funny lolcat picture, and I saw his IP number, system version, browser version (IE), and figured out which loophole to use. Then I sent him a link to a website which exploited this loophole: a simple HTML page served as HTA (Microsoft's "Active HTML", which is just HTML augmented with VisualBasic scripts which have access to the system commands). A simple "rundll32.exe user,exitwindows exit" command sufficed   

(Fortunately this hole has been patched with ServicePack 2, so you can sleep safe now.)

 

The sad thing is that Windows is not as useful when it comes to tracking down errors and diagnosing problems, because there are no system logs or console to look through, nor any diagnostic GUI tools. When something doesn't work, one can only reboot or reinstall the whole system.

 

I also played many pranks on teachers

Oh yeah, I loved that too!

Once I attended to programming classes, where an old woman were trying to teach us (or herself) programming in Pascal. I was 16 then, but I programmed in Atari BASIC, LOGO (yeah, walking the turtle) and 6502 assembler since 12 (I taught myself from a book and experimentation). But now I wanted to learn how to program PCs, and this was a whole new ground for me. Nevertheless, the woman have shown us how to draw houses on the screen with Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0, by sending vector commands to the BGI library. I was bored of repeating the same code over and over with just different coordinates, so I looked up through a book and found that I can write this code into a procedure with parameters. So I could simply tell Pascal: "Draw me a house starting from x,y" and I could draw a whole town of houses in a second with just several lines of code.

Then the teacher saw that and she was mad that I used constructs which she didn't taught us yet (and seemingly couldn't understand, and that was the real reason of her being mad), so she forced me to DELETE all my code and write it from scratch "as other students do" (that is, a humongous flying spaghetti monster).

I decided that this is my last time I attend there.

And I decided I need a revenge 

I wrote a simple Pascal program which blocked the keyboard, drew some bombs on the screen, played some squeaky sounds from the speaker, and displayed a progress bar, pretending it is "formatting" the hard drive   (I even opened and closed some random file in a loop to make the hard drive LED flash, to make it more believable). Then I installed this program in AUTOEXEC.BAT on every machine in the classroom.

Next day she couldn't start the classes, and she had to call a technical guy to "repair" these poor little machines. She couldn't do it herself, of course, and she yelled at others which were trying to help: "Don't touch it! It's a VIRUS! It's a serious business! Leave it to the professionals" 

But one smart guy started to unlock these machines and after 30 minutes they were all "clean".

She never figured out who did it to her. And that guy who unlocked it, he became my friend

 

Once I discovered Linux (my freshman year of college), Windows are out the window for me personally, so now I am no longer familiar with the system.

Same with me. I use solely Linux for around 10 years so far. (Gentoo, to be precise, since I'm a coder and I like compiling from sources, looking through them and sometimes modifying them.)

 

Once I bought a used laptop and there was Windows XP on board. I thought to myself: "Well, it works, so don't touch it. When it blows down, I'll replace it with Linux."

I couldn't be more wrong ;P I should have been replace it IMMEDIATELY. It would save me a lot of trouble.

Several days later, suddenly, when surfing the Web, my screen has been locked and I could only see Police logos with a message that I infringed some copyrights and I need to pay the police $100 (sic!) to unlock my computer. I wasn't scared, since I knew this is just another virus (yeah, those two antivirus programs were no use). Police doesn't work like that. (They wouldn't be able to get into my computer so easily, and they would rather send me some official letter than hijack my machine for ransom.) This screen stayed after reboot, I couldn't even get to my data through Windows rescue discs. Thankfully there's Linux. I booted it from some Live CD and copied my files to some safe place, and then ploughed the whole hard drive to the rocks. I installed Linux there, and it even gained some speed and stability, since I could better use my CPU and graphics card's capabilities, compiling the whole system for 64 bits with all the extensions. (Windows XP was compiled for i686 by default.)

Edited April 9, 2014 by SasQ

[M'aiq the Liar 5,804]

Cue one of the saddest songs ever

I will remember you fondly XP, you that bore us through the broken shitstorm that was Vista. You that kept us afloat as we scrambled back away from the terrible UI that is windows 8. You will, and shall always be, my friend. 

[SasQ 1,355]

C'mon, LOOK AT IT!!! Have you seen anything more ugly in your entire life?

 

Sure: Windows 8

 

Thankfully, there was the classic UI design which we always used

 

Have you ever tried Haiku OS?

 

 

Or Fluxbox on Linux? Here's a screenshot of my old desktop:

 

 

They're both very lightweight and minimalistic. (That's what I like.)

 

Anyway, the XP computer we had the time, which was just for typing documents and surfing the web, was just fine.

 

Everything except surfing the Web. Windowseses shouldn't be allowed to connect the Web. It's like coming to the Blue Oyster bar, naked. Just go to Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services and see how much shit is running in the background, never appearing to the user in the task list, and opening your computer for remote access.

 

 

Especially evil ones are "UPnP" (allows remote listing the detailed information about of your hardware) and "Remote Registry" which gives full access to your Windows Registry for anyone who knows the password (and everyone knows how easily Windows passwords could be hacked; there are also master keys). No, I would rather squeeze my balls in a clamp than connect Windows computer to the network.

 

Edit: Yeah! I bunnyfied!

Edited April 9, 2014 by SasQ

[Rainboom Dash 1,055]

I used XP a lot back in the day and while it was good then Windows have evolved a lot more now. 

[A Blithering Div 247]

Haven't missed XP since the Win 7 beta. Though it will always hold a place in being the prime motivator to give Linux a shot.

 

Sure: Windows 8

 

 

Have you ever tried Haiku OS?

 

 

 

Ah yes, Haiku. The last bastion of BeOS. I should give it whirl sometime as I've been fascinated by BeOS since I first read about it but at the time Haiku was early alpha and Yellowtab was C&D'd I believe.

Edited April 9, 2014 by A Blithering Div

[CMQuickfireTK 751]

Bye XP. you were good while I used you. but I am a tiling *nixer now!

[sonicdude558 27]

...By using it systems that are made to be used with a piece of software thats always open and can be left unattended. Windows XP is very lightweight on system memory and CPU usage.

[Doc. Volt 2,561]

sniff.. i already miss it.... all the time spent togheter.. all the beautifull blue screen skies togheter.. sigh.... well... time to teach my brother how to play on Linux

[Lisa 5,552]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nQ2oiVqKHw

 

This sound.

 

Every

Time

I 

Opened

My

Computer

[~Rule 63~ Lyeco 527]

Thank goodness, windows xp support is gone. I hate windows xp today. I'd rather use windows 8.1 and Mac OS better. I love new OS! I hope my school will stop using it and use at least windows 7.

[Kawaii Besu 28,010]

I still have fond memories of XP when my parents had those old Pentium IV PCs. I remembered messing around with it and obliviously deleting some of my brothers, or parents stuff, and getting scolded by them. (I was young back in the day.

 

Though Windows 7 is better in terms of ergonomics and stuff IMO, I'll still sorely miss XP's interface, and it not bitching around on UAC.

 

Well, to all XP mourners out there, here's something to crack you up!

 

[Stormbringer 346]

I'll remember XP as my favorite OS. Never used Linux, never used Apple OS... <--- Ew.

[Lisa 5,552]

Apple OS...

 

Mac OS.

 

pls

 

gt it rite nxt tim.

 

kthnx

[NomDeSpite 452]

While I had some good times with Windows XP in my junior high and highschool years, Windows 7 is superior, in my opinion. I wish I had Windows 7 instead of Windows 8.