> Windows Whistler/2002/XP logo design concepts by Frog Design
I like how there's a vestige of “Windows 2002” in the little “Version 2002” on the bottom right of all the XP RTM packaging, which disappeared from the later SP2-integrated boxes: https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/-mm-/0e422e4a7e951800d133d6d73...
Encarta quite honestly had a beautiful typography heavy, high contrast interface, one that still shapes my design/ui preferences to this day.
Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.
Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.
It should have been represented in this article and it wasn't. Truly that's a crime against those who have not had the opportunity to experience it.
I have the Windows XP tour music. I keep it in my library and listen to it. You can find WAV files if you know where to look. I keep the OOBE music in the same album (both the original and remastered versions).
Through this incredible multimedia presentation I had the opportunity to learn about wizards and how Windows XP is best for business. I think there was also something in there about how to open a window. Also, it had that beautiful compass icon and those unmarked Luna-style colored buttons that were used to select each section of the tour. They were my favorite part.
I miss those days.
Windows XP also had perfect timing for the beginning era of broadband and a generation spending hours on their computers.
You only need to look at the leadership at Microsoft who were in charge of Vista and Windows 8. They were “suits” who didn’t understand “mobile”, which was arguably confusing at the time. I vividly remember watching the release videos of Windows 8 and the interviews of the leadership clearly showed they had no concept of what they were doing.
An OS should be extremely boring. It’s an app launcher and file organizer. An OS shouldn’t be flashy. That’s why people have fond memories of Windows 2000 and XP.
Windows 10 can also be extremely boring if Open Shell is installed and some other tweaks. Same thing with Windows 11.
fuzzfactor•1d ago
Actually, mostly since Wxp was slow as a dog compared to W98, because W9x still had direct control of the hardware rather than the sluggishness-inducing Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that NT has always had inserted between the OS and the devices.
W95 was noticeably faster than W98 was too, and both of course move like lightning-speed compared to W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit, and W11 is more embarrassing as it continues to further slow with each update (almost every month now rather than only once per year), which makes W10 seem like it was a quite a bit less encumbered than W11.
userbinator•3h ago
cheschire•2h ago
But boy are they sure fast.
But I wouldn’t daily drive one.
sgarland•2h ago
_carbyau_•52m ago
I think part of MS issue is that they keep bundling and pushing "crap useful to some minority" (as well as unwanted ads and features too) by default into ostensibly "your" system and making it hard to focus on what you want it for.
If you want it to focus on gaming performance... well it's more about arcane tweaks rather than having a turn off the shit button.
Maybe the coming Win10 EoL will see a few % points jump to Bazzite or some other linux gaming-focussed distro.
zamadatix•2h ago
fuzzfactor•1h ago
zamadatix•1h ago
From my enterprise image/push creation days one example of something I did find different between x64 and x32 was the specific driver bugs/performance. The thing is it went/goes both ways on that, sometimes it's the 32 bit driver that's bugged, sometimes it's the 64 bit driver, sometimes there was a special patch version of the driver but the vendor didn't post both builds. You get the idea. In this case it wouldn't make sense to blame the <x> bit OS variant as inherently being massively slower, but it sure might seem like that with an n=1 test.
fuzzfactor•44m ago
The consistency is quite good.
It's actually such a simple comparison anybody can try it and see for themself.
Now that you mention it I actually did drive (rental) cars back & forth between airports when I was a student. We went south packed into one car, then came back from the resort areas in a half-dozen or more cars so they could replenish the ones needed in the rental lots hours to the north.
We really would all reach the destination at the same time, traveling at virtually the same speed, but you could easily tell the difference when you had a V8 under the hood compared to a 6-cylinder.
Neither one was a show-stopper and plenty of people wouldn't know the difference anyway.
It's not like some had air conditioning and some didn't, that was by far the most important feature, not performance ;)
zamadatix•2m ago
Same story for the rental cars - if one you drove was really "lightening fast" compared to another rather than something you noticed while testing it up the on-ramp then you probably deserve jail time for the speeding ticket, not just because of how it felt going up the on ramp for 4 seconds or similar.
o11c•2h ago
Yes, SP1 wasn't horrible if you could get it (but who can download something that big on dial-up?), but it still was not great.