Windows XP was released to manufacturing a quarter of a century ago

It is a quarter of a century since Microsoft packed Windows XP off to manufacturing, finally drawing a line under the Windows 9x codebase (behind Windows 95, 98, and Me) and making Windows NT something for consumers. Before Windows XP, consumers and businesses lived in two different software worlds. XP was released to …

[Anonymous Coward]

ATM and CNC machines

I saw quite recently ATMs (money dispenser) and CNC machines (to cut metal) using windows XP.

It’s 2026. Die hard indeed.

[Blackjack]

Re: ATM and CNC machines

My bank ATMs got upgraded to Windows 7 at least.

[RobThBay]

Re: ATM and CNC machines

Our local pizza place still runs on their POS terminals.

[Jedit]

"Our local pizza place still runs on their POS terminals."

Don't diss Windows XP terminals.

Oh, you meant Point of Sale terminals...

[trevorde]

How did we get to where we are now?

By comparison, W11 is a bloated mess with a whole lot of features I never asked for. MS should've just fixed what they had instead of 'improving' it.

[williamyf]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

Compared with 98 SE, WinXP was a bloated mess, with steep hardware requirements.

Many people at that era did not wanted to upgrade, even if their machines complied with the requirements (¿sounds familiar?). Consult the tech forums of the era via wayback machine if in doubt.

You are just looking back with rose tinted glasses...

[theOtherJT]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

No, sorry, going to have to hard disagree there.

I remember those days and tragically have had to relive them this week trying to get 98 SE to run in a VM. 98 SE was a horrific, crashy monster and I'd forgotten quite how awful using it was.

Compared to 98 XP was a godsend, but I'll admit that I stuck with 2000 for at least 2 years because compared to that all it seemed to do was make everything look a bit fisher-price.

[Marty McFly]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

Win 98 SE... Power on in the morning. Proactive re-boot coming back from lunch. Shut down at end of day. That really helped stability.

Windows XP x64 is often forgotten as the first 64-bit consumer Windows release for x86. That was a big jump in stability.

Here is a question... If given the choice...return to instability but no OS bloat? Or have stability with gobs of marketing & AI trash thrown in?

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

False dichotomy

return to instability but no OS bloat? Or have stability with gobs of marketing & AI trash thrown in?

Micros~1 relies on our supposedly short memories to make it unthinkable to have stability and make the AI shite an optional extra.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

I want to select option 3 - stability and no OS bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

Most of XP's instability was down to drivers. Windows XP x64 was a lot more stable because virtually nobody wrote drivers for it, only the decent producers actually did so.

Apple have proven that if you control all of the hardware and therefore only need a small set of drivers, stability is a lot better!

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

> Apple have proven

Well, sort of :D. But even if, if you choose apple you are veräppelt.

[doublelayer]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

You're both right. XP did improve on a lot of things, but it also used more RAM and changed how things worked, and there were lots of complaints about both at the time. Pretty much any time anyone releases anything, someone will complain that it's bloated and inefficient. Most code is to some extent, as using the least possible resources takes a lot of time to play, involves deciding on tradeoffs (is it more important to use 5 kB less RAM or 20 fewer instructions per iteration in this loop), but users will often not notice or blame you anyway because they misunderstood one number.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

Quite often writing compact code will both require less RAM and be more efficient/

[doublelayer]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

I assume by "more efficient" you mean in CPU usage. Sometimes, that's true, but there are a lot of those tradeoffs where you can use more computing to use less RAM or more RAM to need less processing. The reason there are sometimes things that fix both of those is that the same kind of tradeoffs exist for every other resource a program uses, be that disk access, disk usage, network, or the often ignored development time. Most of the complaints seem to value development time at zero or close to it, even though it's often one of the more expensive resources in a project. I can often optimize software quite a lot with time, but the question is whether it's worth me doing that if people don't notice the saving.

[ICL1900-G3]

Windows 2000

XP was a relative of Windows 2000, but worse. Much worse. Still better than 9x/ME, though.

[David Hicklin]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

I quite liked 98 SE, certainly it was the peak of that series of Windows , XP64 when I did migrate eventually but there were more compatibility issues than it's 32 brethren which really needed SP3 to be called "stable and finished"

Yeah then came Vista which was rescued by SP1 aka Windows 7 to become peak windows after which it was downhill all the way

[blokedownthepub]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

Yes, WinXP was a bloated mess and the early versions had no protection from malware. Prior to SP2, the average home user's XP would be riddled with malware, info-scraping toolbars and the like. I made a lot of money cleaning up such machines, only for them to come back a few months later.

IMO, Window 7 was the best OS interface MS ever made. Simple and stable.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: How did we get to where we are now?

Not only "unwanted features", it adds a "plethora of dark patterns", even on the professional version. Since both happen on the PROFESSIONAL version as well people run away when possible. Only a few crazy (like me) go the way to switch to a Windows server OS on a gaming PC.

[Just A Quick Comment]

And then there's the XP install music

I still occasionally listen to the XP install music (was it Brian Eno composed?), as it's simply a lovely piece of ambient synth background music.

These days we might possibly get some AI-generated toneless piece of unlikable - and quite probably unlistenable - crap, playing to hide unspeakable things going on beneath it (no, Linux fans, I don't mean the installation of Win 11, although that might be a good point), as well as taking up massive system resources just to generate 'a personalised version just for you as you enjoy the installing experience', or something like that.

[Just A Quick Comment]

Re: And then there's the XP install music

Oops. Apparently it's NOT Brian Eno who composed this, but Stan LePard.

Oh well, better late than never!

[Jedit]

"Apparently it's NOT Brian Eno who composed this, but Stan LePard"

You never thought the LePards would compose your install music!

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: "Apparently it's NOT Brian Eno who composed this, but Stan LePard"

When they should of course be eating your face?

[Admiral Grace Hopper]

Re: And then there's the XP install music

Brian Eno composed the Win95 login tune (and composed it on a Mac ...).

Listen to what Sam Gendel did with it.

[Roland6]

IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

XP only really became the success we remember because of XP-SP2 - released August 25, 2004 - which was effectively a whole new OS compared to the product called XP released in 2001, and SP3 released April 21, 2008 - that everyone actually remembers.

Suspect MS marketing have learnt from this: ship a pick of crap and then update it with new versions carrying the same name and people will only remember how good it was at the end when its replaced by a new pile of crap. So remember however bad you currently think W11 is, W12 will be a whole lot worse and will have you wishing for W11...

[JoeCool]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

YES. The article needs to make that distinction. Everything written applies to "Windows XPSP2". It's a whole different product.

The namesake "Windows XP" was suitable for only one job: installing XPSP2.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

The only wishing for win 11 is for it to be fed into a biological digester, allowed to fester for 10 years, then force fed to the GUI designers in a backwards direction.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

-- then force fed to the GUI designers in a backwards direction. --

I assume you have used the on-line proscription ordering system inflicted here.

[david 12]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

Windows XP SP2 was XP recompiled with a new version of the Visual C runtime library.

That's "whole new" in the sense that old system binaries were incompatible because they were linked to the old runtime library, and the links were broken by the "new" runtime library.

And yes, there was also a new GUI for the firewall, and a new AV API for third-party AV.

Apart from that, ti was sill NT 5.x

The original version of NT 5 (Win 2K) was withdrawn as part of the Java settlement. MS withdrew MS Java and all products containing MS Java. (Even then, Sun kept tight control over Java licensing)

[JoeCool]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

Sure, the kernel is the kernel.

But the OOBE ( to use the period-correct term ) went from "I am crippled here and can't get anything installed or working" to "exactly how a modern OS should be deployable".

[Gene Cash]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

ISTR that Win95 SP3 distinguished itself by having working USB support. It actually accepted when a device was plugged in or removed, and didn't just crash or hang.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

There is no "Win95 Sp3", it was 950B or 950C. Are you an google AI bot which does not check its answers against a google search?

[David 132]

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

>950B or 950C

AKA OSR2 ("OEM Service Release 2") and - IIRC, it's been a while - OSR2.5.

[FIA]

Windows XP was made available in retail channels in October 2001, but arguably represented peak Windows for many.

That's because they'd not used Windows 2000, which was peak windows.

(Or, for me, NT5 Beta 2... had 2K features but with the NT4 no nonsense UI).

[Spazturtle]

They reverted a few things from Windows 2000 and then never brought them back. For example the Windows 2000 which was 32bit only supported 64GB of RAM (36bit PAE), with 4GB allocated per program. XP originally supported 128GB RAM (37bit PAE) with 4GB allocated per program but XP SP2 32 bit only supported 4GB with 3.5GB allocated per program. This 4GB stuck with all future versions of 32bit Windows.

[GlenP]

I remember the launch event I was invited to for XP, as soon as the image came up in the presentation there was a general muttering of, "Tellytubby Windows!" :)

A few years ago I was asked about the possibility of looking at the computer in a tractor which apparently was still running XP (I didn't get as far as checking which flavour). I did say I could try but never heard anything further so they must have sorted the problem or scrapped it.

[Lon24]

It was only a click or two to swap to the silver theme - which looked really good at the time. No need for teletubbies for grownups.

[collinsl]

Or classic!

[williamyf]

«compared to Windows ME, an elephant perched on a traffic cone is rock solid.»

Windows ME was rock solid, if two conditions were met:

Quality Hardware + WDM drivers.

If you had crappy hardware, or if you had a mixture of WDM and VxD, then ME was very unstable indeed.

Problem is, in that era, a lot of crappy mobos were around (think PC-Chips), and people who did upgrades (even on solid-name-brand hardware) oftentimes ended up with VxD drivers, even if WDM drivers were available somewherelese (like the computer manufacturer's website, peripheral Manufacturer's website, and/or the silicon provider's website). Couple that with a not so smooth driver discoverability (that persists even today), and even worse BIOS updates discoverability (and people's reluctance to update their BIOS in the first place), and that was a recipe for disaster.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Nono, Windows Mistake Edition (German Name: Müll Edition) forcibly booted into the Windows UI, with no way to boot "only" into the DOS like you could with Windows 98SE. You always had to go the "Windows first then DOS" way. This took out a lot of diagnosis, backup and rescue possibilities if the Windows was stuck. And it took much longer to get to the DOS after turning it on.

It was made that way for the sole purpose of annoying advanced users, for "Marketing says so", for preferring dark patterns over user feedback. Sounds familiar...

[Bebu sa Ware]

Windows Mistake Edition (German Name: Müll Edition)

According to WikiP, the Dutch had: "Windows Meer Ellende" ("more misery").

XP — eXceedingly Persistent. Even her indoors had XP on her laptop until Win 10 arrived when I updated it to Win 7 which was running until Win 11 arrived. Now a micro PC with monitor and keyboard/mouse with ltsc Win10 - a race between which runs out of support first: her or Windows.

Mac users and those fortunate like YT to have always had a Unix/Linux box on (usually under) their desk seemed to have avoided much of this suffering.

[Anonymous Coward]

I experienced WinME on 2 machines:

1. A dual-boot WinME and Linux. WinME was rock-solid, much better than the 98SE I had been using. Note that ME was installed cleanly, from scratch, not as an upgrade.

2. A machine that started with 95, was upgraded to 98, then was upgraded to ME. (Note - upgraded "in place", not "drive wiped and ME installed".) The machine was schizophrenic - it acted like it didn't have a CLUE which OS it was running, and was definitely as stable as an elephant on a traffic cone. Just leaving it sitting, not doing anything, was enough to get it to crash.

Don't upgrade OSes - replace them!

[David Hicklin]

> Don't upgrade OSes - replace them!

Only time I did an upgrade was Win7 to Win10, otherwise yes build from fresh every time

I was actually fine with 98SE and quite liked it

[Pascal Monett]

"So incredibly stable"

Not really.

Windows 7 was much more stable than XP ever got.

I made it a habit to reinstall XP once a year, just to be sure.

[Lon24]

Re: "So incredibly stable"

Loved XP & 2000 but Vista was the end of MS for me. Never got to 7.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

"So incredibly stable"

Hooold it, has Richard Speed not experiences the SP0 version? The one where Dave Cutler found "the worst code ever seen" ? In his words "unfixable, we tried to mitigate it as good as possible"... XP, in the beginning, was so bad that it even delayed the 64 bit approach...

SP1 was somewhat stable, SP2 brought big improvements regarding security (more than just the firewall)... The follow-up OSes were simply too resource hungry, including Windows 7.

[elsergiovolador]

2000

I had one PC with Windows 2000 and nothing else installed.

I would turn it on from time to time and admire empty desktop. Open few things then close. Turn it off.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: 2000

> admire empty desktop. Open few things then close. Turn it off.

A couple of years ago I installed 2K on a VM to run an old dictionary cdrom (from 9X days) because it wouldn't run under XP or later. The contrast between the clutter of Win10 and the cleaner 2K UI is pretty stark.

Must admit after installing† Win server 2008 r2 on an unused Dell server about 10 years ago I was impressed how minimalist the UI was.

(†Just to run a dongle based license service. Pretty solid too - ran with occasional updates until the service wasn't required.)

[David 132]

Re: 2000

I have Windows 2K running on a VM just to play Civilization II, with the Intel Indeo-encoded Wonders & Council Of Advisors videos. "All the world MARVELS at our superior intellect, Sire!"

[oldandgrey]

Final nail in the coffin

Let us not forget that Windows XP introduced the Windows Product Activation. For me that was the final nail in Window's coffin. You buy a licensed copy of an operating system and to be able to run it you are dependent on Microsoft's willingness to grant you activation? Never!

[anthonyhegedus]

POSready

It certainly was

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: POSready

It certainly was

I saw what you did there ... 8^D

.

[TheMaskedMan]

I seem to recall that early XP wasn't particularly stable, and had lots of driver issues, not least being that, in the early days, there often weren't any drivers for devices that worked perfectly well on 9x / ME. Didn't it have issues with.USB, too, or was that just USB2?

It's a long time ago and I can't remember the details, but I do remember that it really wasn't popular with end users at first, mostly because they couldn't get all their kit working.

It definitely got better, though. It was running on one of my workhorse machines for a long, long time, way after it could have been replaced, purely because it worked, it was stable, did everything I needed and I couldn't be bothered changing. There are still some XP holdouts out there, too, doing little jobs that don't need anything "better."

And it had scroll bars you could actually see, without having to waft a mouse around the screen hoping for one to appear.

[JonnyT]

I remember a lot of issues with Nvidia drivers at the time, mainly nv4_disp.inf BSODs. It took quite a while for anyone outside the gaming enthusiasts to adopt it over 2000

[Sandtitz]

"It took quite a while for anyone outside the gaming enthusiasts to adopt it over 2000"

W2K was not in use at homes really, apart from enthusiasts - because of poor gaming support. Larger companies are always slow to adapt anything new, smaller companies just bought new computers with the latest Windows version, like they still do.

Later, when XP came out, video game companies were on board.

XP had native Wifi, Bluetooth and a firewall. W2K had all the ports open. Recycle bin on XP was private to each user, on W2K every user saw its contents.

[That Badger]

ATI Radeon drivers were unstable too, they were almost the only thing generating bluescreens on my PC, apart from an obscure driver that did SATA over USB, and this was reproducible by mounting a large (100GB+) FAT32 partition on an external harddisk.

[Stanley Toolset]

Unintendedly Customisable

With Windows UC (XP in Microsoft speak) You could at least fire up your favourite binary editor and edit IIRC explorer.exe to improve the desktop experience. Changing the 'Start" button to say "Stop" for example. And its float-over tool tip to "abandon hope all ye who enter here" or somesuch. Which I did. As long as you didn't overrun the string table entries, it was tickety-boo.

[just4this]

What…..

No mention of raw sockets?

And all the good/bad they would bring.

[Anonymous Coward]

Had some fun and games last week with a laser cutter that runs embedded XP. Client has upgraded to Windows Server 2025 file server and the cutter can't access the design files from a share on there. After enabling SMB1 on the server, the cutter can see the files on the share, create new files & edit them. But trying to copy off the share still throws an error.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh memories

We only remember what we want to remember.

[blu3b3rry]

XP sort of passed me by at home

We had a Win 98SE PC purchased a matter of months before XP was announced. First as a family machine, then as my own computer when Dad was convinced of the apple mac route in the mid 2000s (a route he is still on to this day with his second iMac). IIRC it was a pretty decent spec for the era, Pentium III, 64MB RAM, 30GB HDD and a Voodoo II graphics card alongside a Creative Sound Blaster. It even had a DVD drive, posh, natch.

School meanwhile upgraded to XP when SP2 came out. I remember spending some time tweaking the personalisation options on my account to make it silver, with custom font choices that would likely make me shudder now. Mostly it was bunged on the existing Win 98 era PC's, so it was never particularly zippy. Still felt a lot more stable than 98SE and had features like decent USB support and quick internet access that I could only dream of on my home machine.

With the knowledge I have now I'd have probably updated that old Pentium III to XP and pirated an activation code. Equally I'd have been bright enough not to throw it away in 2011 despite it working perfectly well.

[Evil Auditor]

It was a shame that Windows ***** was lurking just around the corner.

Isn't this a family-friendly website? You shall not use such nasty swear words here!

[Dan 55]

By the time the last SP, Platform Update Supplement, was released, it was practically Windows 7.

Or Windows 7 was practically Windows Vista if you want to look at the other way.

[David Hicklin]

Windows 7 was Vista SP1

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

> Windows 7 was Vista SP1

Nope. Windows 7 has several big improvements on the kernel level, especially regarding computer with many CPUs.

Edit: Inside Windows 7: Arun Kishan - Farewell to the Windows Kernel Dispatcher Lock

https://betanews.com/article/pdc-2009-scuttling-huge-chunks-of-vista-architecture-for-a-faster-windows-7/

https://www.osnews.com/story/22501/microsoft-kernel-engineers-talk-about-windows-7s-kernel/

Windows 7 had many improvements at TCP/IP and other networkings as well. It was the first Microsoft OS which, on normal computers, could copy with usually 110 Megabyte per second over gigabit. Without expensive specialized hardware, just the typical RTL* chip. (Windows 8 improved that to 112 to 113 MByte/s, which is very close to the theoretical limit of gigabit ethernet)

(And Vista, to be fair, made is easily to 100 MByte/s, whereas XP usually maxed out 20% to 50% below the Vista level on the same hardware, if you meet some minimum spec for Vista - believe me, I actually know, no speculate)

[Edoc Relbmessa]

I recall a classic quote from the BOFH that still makes me chuckle.....

"I run a Vista simulator."

"Virtual Server?" the Boss asks.

"Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm."

[BartyFartsLast]

XP is sorely missed here, but not quite as much as 2000 and about as much as 7, it's all just been a bit shite since then.

Can we have an option to pay for a non intrusive, non spying, non AI version that's as stable as XP SP2 or 7 please?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It was a shame that Windows Vista was lurking just around the corner. ®"

It was still better than that crap heap of tiles on Windows 8.