Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP

david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."

Laptop Drivers

[JeepFanatic]

But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers.

My Thinkpad R52 at work still has this problem when I'm booted in Windows. I dual boot Ubuntu on the computer had have zero problems when I'm running it instead of Windows. I find that I'm now doing most of my work in Linux instead.

print view

[oscartheduck]

For those not wanting all the crud that surrounds the article on the linked view http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/09/23/AR2006092300510_pf.html [washingtonpost.com]here is the print view.

Re:Windows Wins

[Epsillon]

Right away, Microsoft's revolutionary new revision of the Windows operating system was a hit with home and business users.

Aye, that it was. Why? Because MS had deals with OEMs to keep their OS outlay to a minimum as long as said OEMs didn't use any other operating system. In other words, every fscking new computer sold had, and still has, a copy of this rot on it and people found they had to use it. After all, Joe Sixpack can hardly install any operating system from scratch without help.

Windows is the de-facto standard because MS's marketing department is the best there is. There's nothing technical about it, nor is it the vote of the end users. It's the fact that MS has the manufacturers right where it wants them: With their bollocks in its twenty tonne press and the salesmen, watching they don't break the agreements, ready to pump the handle by making them pay the "going rate" for the OS if they sell so much as one PC with another OS on it.

Dell was bloody lucky the n series with FreeDOS didn't bring the wrath of Redmond upon it. Of course, FreeDOS isn't much use to anyone these days unless you're flashing the odd firmware or two, so they probably weren't worried about Joe Sixpack discovering that Linux et al are just as simple as Windows XP when someone else installs it for him.

Re:WinXP vs Win2K

[Pxtl]

The whole "compatibility mode" is a service available under Windows 2k, it's just disabled by default. So scratch that one. WinXp was 90% just adding UI boosts to 2k to help combat the incredisexiness of OSX that had just come out.

Vista

[JustNiz]

I tried the RC1 (release) candidate of Vista.
Very buggy, very bloated, very slow compared to XP, the GUI has been redesigned to hide (even more) the system from you so now you can't do anything even slightly technical without really digging deep.
Also it kept crashing and wouldn't play a lot of my own media.

I used to think XP had lots of room for improvement. I went back to it after 20 minutes with Vista.

Re:Um, Win2k?

[Wilson_6500]

2k is all the Windows OS you'll ever need on your desktop.

Not if you want to play any new PC games that use DX10.

Re:Windows = the problem

[Overly Critical Guy]

Um, XP wasn't built from the ground up. It's derived from the NT line that began in the early 1990s. Additionally, XP's API layers (Win32, registry, etc.) are the same APIs dating back to the Win 9x line, which themselves date back to the original Windows 1.0.

There is much more that needs fixing than Internet Explorer, so much so that Windows developer Phillip Su called the codebase "overly complicated" and full of dependencies, many of them circular. There are hundreds of layers, and you may only ever understand two or three of them. It's so bad, that after a minor Vista refresh codenamed "Fuji," Microsoft wants to start with a rewrite codenamed "Vienna" and use virtualization technology to run pre-Vienna apps.

Of course, it remains to be seen if any of that actually comes to fruition or how long it will take. In the meantime, Vista is a mess both bug-wise and interface-wise. I count at least five different styles of menus and various conflicting dialog styles...some of them are the same dialogs from XP and even Windows 3.1, like the Install Font dialog. Don't even get me started on how many contradictory light source directions there are on the default Vista desktop's icons and interface. They quickly slapped Glass together to look like Aqua, and it's so obvious, even down to ripping off the OS X save dialog in IE7 all the way down to the disclosure triangle in the lower-left that reveals the filesystem browser. And UAC is absolutely horrible and intrusive, rather than the occasional password prompt you recieve in OS X.

I seriously fear for anyone planning to trust Vista on their machines with all its 1.0 APIs and untested technologies and further bloat on top of the aging Windows codebase. It's five years later, and we're still getting patches for XP and IE6, at an increasing rate, in fact. I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude in anticipating how many pieces Vista is blown up into by black hat hackers on release, like stopping to watch a roadside accident..

Re:Laptop Drivers

[ceejayoz]

Wait... it's Microsoft's fault that Adobe makes a poor quality product that interferes with the normal Windows logoff/shut down procedure?

It's their fault the app is able to interfere with that operation.

Re:Reverse FUD?

[Brandybuck]

You're telling me Linux/MacOS cannot be locked/crashed by a bad driver? I don't have much experience with MacOS, but I know it can happen in Linux.

That's too bad. Because it doesn't happen in FreeBSD.

p.s. Unless you use the *proprietary* NVidia driver, but that's another topic...

Re:W2K FTW

[Simon Garlick]

XP is basically 2000 with added multimedia, games, and hardware support ... As far as I can tell, people who still use 2000 by choice are either ignorant or just dumb.

Or maybe they see no reason for buying a whole new hideously-overpriced operating system for "added multimedia and games" if their hardware is already supported by Win2K?

As far as *I* can tell, there's only one thing that XP has over Win2K: a terminal services client "out of the box". XP Remote Desktop is bloody good.

Re:W2K FTW

[Mistshadow2k4]

Having used both for months, I will tell you what: reliability. XP may be more user-friendly, but the user-friendly components have a tendency to break occasionally. When that happens, they tend to screw up the system until you can fix them. Nothing like that ever happened to me when I used 2k for two years, but it's happened twice in the 6 months I've used XP. I now have XP on this machine and 2k/Debian on my main machine; XP is on the gaming rig.

Re:It just amazes me

[Foolhardy]

You can say that users should never be delving into the registry, but the plain fact is that sometimes it is necessary because software screws things up. Even Microsoft's knowledge base says that certain registry changes need to be made to make repairs.

You should need to manually edit the registry about as often as you need to manually edit conf files. The process, risks and need are very similar.

I can see your explanation for the creation of the registry, but no explanation as to why Microsoft hasn't seen fit to deprecate its use over a better method.

Because it works the way it's supposed to? Almost all the 'problems' people have with the registry are due to misuse; problems that would exist regardless of how configuration storage was implemented.

In comparison to what Linux and OS X has, the registry system simply makes Windows look bad, and indeed, in my opinion, it severely hurts the maintainability of Windows.

How do you figure?

It is also one of the things that make program installation and removal potentially far more problematic than it needs to be.

The Windows Installer has been the only sanctioned installation method for application software since Windows 2000. Do you have evidence that the Windows Installer is causing these problems, or is it third party apps that disregard guidelines? All modern platforms have rules for installation, and disregarding them can cause problems on all of them. If apps are leaving remnants of themselves strewn about after uninstallation, it's the app's fault. How is leaving remnant keys different than leaving remnant files?

Heck, there doesn't even seem to be a validation system to test or correct the registry.

What are you asking for? The structure of the registry is journalled and expected to be self-healing. A fsck type fix is applied automatically if needed. Its recovery is akin to a journalled, auto-fsck filesystem. As for the content of the registry, every software component has its own needs and validity constraints-- there's no way to build a tool that would know about all of them. It'd be like asking for a /etc verifier.

Re:It just amazes me

[tomhudson]

I think its not so much "kernel-level drivers" but that Windows, unlike the *nixes, absolutely requires graphics mode.

If your X server craps out, you can just restart it, w/o having to reboot. Or try a different module. Or you can work from a console. The only option under Windows is to reboot (if it doesn't just halt by itself).

Re:Laptop Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

It was spelled SuSe entirely in order to piss you off. No other reason.
 

Re:Laptop Drivers

[bigbigbison]

If it is just reader, ditch Adobe and go with Foxit Reader [foxitsoftware.com] which is a lot better than Adobe's version (and also free as in beer).

Re:W2K FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I wonder who funded that lab?

Re:W2K FTW

[egarland]

just what is it that you think is so much better about Windows 2000 compared to XP?

Windows 2000 doesn't have activation spyware in it. As long as I can get the OS working on the hardware.. I'm good. I don't need approval from Redmond.

Windows 2000 is much lighter and cleaner out of the box. Everything you need, nothing you don't. You can hack XP to work like 2K but why spend the time when 2K will work just fine?

Windows 2000 is simpler. There are less services, less interdependencies, less things to break and go wrong. There's this strange notion going around that as long as it's "behind the scenes" people shouldn't care about it. That's complete BS. The stuff behind the scenes matters.

Hardware compatibility with XP is also an issue. Not all hardware vendors roll out new drivers perpetually. Sometimes the old software just stops working on new OSs and nobody bothers to fix it.

There are some machines that simply haven't been upgraded since the Win2K days. I know.. it's hard to believe a Microsoft OS lasting that long without needing a reinstall but it happens. Upgrading Microsoft OSs is a crap shoot. Even ignoring the cost of the software and the cost of the time to upgrade there's the risk that at the end of the day it just won't work.

As far as I can tell.. people who can't see the valid reasons for running 2K over XP are.. well.. let's just write that one off to lack of experience and immagination. It's ok though... teenagers often have a hard time grasping points of view outside of their own. You should grow out of it.

Re:Hindsight

[moranar]

There is nothing that prevents HP, Dell or any other hardware company from doing this also...

They (for some values of "them") do, for laptops: you wouldn't want to use one of their laptop recovery discs to install Win XP on another computer.

Re:It just amazes me

[misleb]

1. Kernel Mode Drivers - Once Linux actually gets drivers for something, support tends to be rock solid-- a fair bit better than XP. However, this is the one place BSD-type OSess really outshine Macro-Kernal OSes. Even though my home Windows and Linux PCs are far faster than my work Mac, sometimes I cry when trying to get odd hardware to work on them. Even if you have some crap pieces of hardware with a crap driver, you can axe the driver rather than the whole OS in OSX.

What do you mean by "BSD-type" OSes? All the *BSDs have a monolithic kernel (kernel space hardware drivers) just like Linux does. Darwin is the exception. It has a highly modified BSD kernel. And it certainly isn't any more stable than Linux or *BSD in practice. I use Macs all the time and I don't notice any benefit from the pseudo-microkernel design.

-matthew

Re:MS as a home builder

[njh]

As for the foundation, styrofoam sure can look like concrete blocks with a nice coat of gray paint.

Most houses around here have styrofoam+concrete foundation slabs.

Re:Laptop Drivers

[ceejayoz]

Ah, so it's not a problem at all. That's why Windows Vista is fixing it.

You give the app a grace period and inform the user. It shouldn't be able to halt the shutdown permanently.

YaST anyone?

[TheNinjaroach]

Not to flaunt my SUSE fanboyism or anything, but YaST handles most .conf files very well. A couple of years ago when I first made the switch and was checking out different distros, SUSE was way ahead of the crowd on the control-panel like access to almost all system services and settings.

TCP/IP settings, add / remove users, add / remove software, power management and firewall settings are all available in the same spot. And for the most part the panels they open are easy to understand, offering much more help towards the options than Windows does.

Re:Laptop Drivers

[jZnat]

What Linux (and other UNIX OS's) do is send SIGTERM to all processes which allow them to clean up before shutting down. Then it sends SIGKILL which effectively kills the remaining processes that don't feel like terminating quickly enough.* If Windows would send some sort of SIGKILL after a certain amount of time, programs like Acrobat wouldn't be able to give a shit about being terminated since the kernel would deallocate its memory and shut that fucker down.

* Of course, there's the rc init scripts that need to be shut down in a specific order and possibly some other shutdown shit I'm forgetting, but the SIGTERM/SIGKILL is the last step of the halting process.