It's not ugly, it's nostalgic.
The cockroach of Windows, XP, lives on in London's Victoria Coach Station
Windows XP is coming up to a 20th birthday yet it is heartening to see that the OS can still be guaranteed to take its place as one of the three horsemen of the borkpocalypse. While not actually on a screen of blue, the ugly face of Windows XP has shown itself nestled between a CMOS error and another screen that has simply …
COMMENTS
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Monday 26th July 2021 18:09 GMT DJV
Re: Ironic
Some years ago a friend of a friend asked my advice on the secondhand laptop he wanted to buy. I took one look, saw it was Pentium 4 and said, Don't touch it with a barge pole - it will overheat and burn itself out. So, of course, as he was an idiot, he ignored my advice and bought it. Within a year it had overheated and the CPU died. I took pleasure in saying, Told you so.
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Monday 26th July 2021 12:53 GMT steviebuk
I loved Windows 98se. Never wanted to move to XP. Tried it, wasn't keen but also turned out my PC wasn't that great. This was back in 2004. I think I may have lasted another year before I was finally confident enough about XP that I moved, then loved it :)
Stayed on it until Windows 7. Loved Windows 7. Still using it and only use Windows 10 on work machines. But I might have to bite the bullet soon as there are some quite useful "quality of life" things on Windows 10 that work well that are missing on Windows 7. Native ISO mounting for example.
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Tuesday 27th July 2021 00:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
XP almost forever
I've been using an XP PC as sort of NAS. I had originally bought it planning to put some sort of Linux on it. Turned out it was a mutant Dell that couldn't run any of the Linux way back then. So I stuck with XP and used the mirror drives to give a little extra data security.
I had been doing system wide backups using the DVD drive on it. But alas, the DVD drive started having increasing numbers of errors so now it's just the mirror drives as a security blanket. The backups are now done on the two main and new PCs using their newer DVD's. I don't have that much data at home and I have a fair number of DVD's.
It's only on for data backups and it never is used for mail or web surfing. So it's mostly safe.
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Tuesday 27th July 2021 01:56 GMT martinusher
You can't keep updating embedded kit every five minutes
This message hasn't permeated yet for some reason. Its a fact of life that you can't keep updating devices all the time, especially if they've been certified for some industrial or health related operation. The particular build of the OS and the firmware with it are SKUs for the entire device.
This hasn't permeated to the IoT crew yet. Its why I don't mind connecting my yard lights to an IoT switch but you'd never, ever, catch me putting anything large, expensive, heavy or critical on one of their devices.
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Tuesday 27th July 2021 16:35 GMT Roland6
Well its probably more secure than anything W10...
Given the level of security vulnerabilities found in versions of W10 (and I suspect also in W11 release candidates) ...
Interestingly, I see there hasn't a post yet about how running unsupported versions of Windows is poor security practice; probably because as we've seen in recent months, running a current version of Windows isn't necessarily good security practice....