Please, let Windows XP die with dignity

Their will always be a place in my heart for XP just like a old girl friend.
My new girl friend and Windows 7 are both much better and faster.
You just have to take the time to use them properly. My new girl friend and Windows 7 given me guidance and things are working well.

I highly doubt XP will be forgotten about quite that soon but given time. What makes XP unique in it's own is simply being it hasn't been upgraded out of anywhere near as fast as every other previous version mainly due to two factors surrounding Vista as well as the corporate side of the equation wanting to maintain what they have rather kept making big changes every couple of years.

The two factors with Vista there is the delayed launch dates which allowed people to get "more settled in" with XP over time. And then you have the initial issues of hardwares not up to speed due to the MS goober of understating the 2gb minum actually needed over the 512mb of ram?! MS goofed that one up on their own there!

Diosoth said:

Tonight I started my Gateway W7 and Dell XP machines at the same time. By the time W7 reached the black "windows is starting up" screen, my XP computer was already loaded to the desktop and ready to go. That's less than 15 seconds for XP to boot to desktop, and well over a minute for W7 to get to Desktop- and another few minutes for the OS to do a bunch of background stuff.

Weird.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

I never had an XP machine boot that fast and a Win 7 machine that slow.

Agreed.

I'm triple booting (therefore all are using the same hardware):

• Windows XP (average 45 - 60 seconds)
• W7 (average 35 - 45 seconds)
• Linux Mint 14 (average <30 seconds)

My W7 boot time is highly variable though.

I've seen it (Event Viewer) boot up in:

• < 30 seconds.
• > 90 seconds (when it is not configuring updates)

As a pimply faced youth my virgin-IT-birth was with punch-card main frames.

I was the turkey who had to wheel 120lb (60kg) of punch-cards around for the geek-gods, and then days waiting for a report.
(Good fun wheeling uncontained cards down a windy street, but what was the loss of a card or two?!!! ... I wasn't very long in IT.)

My first "Word processor" was a glacial Amstrad 256KB ... incl the OS. We thought it was rocket science.
Character coding .... aaagghhh!! The pain.

With each incarnation of Windows .. 95 and on.. I tore my hair out, trying to get my head around the gremlins attached to my finger tips.
Until recently XP and I have had a deep affection for each other.
And those who recognise me will know, I have had a struggle with Win7 since Dec-2013 -- eleven months of climbing the wall of longing for XP.

I hate Win7 default UI and Win8 ... thank god I am in semi-retirement.
And thanks for "Classic Start and Classic Explorer"
(Touch screen in AutoCad is laughable, we all eat greasey food in this office for starters)

BUT A CONFESSION ... bless me father for I have had a closed mind.
(Don't tell anyone)
Bit by bit I find gems about Win7. Technically superior to XP ... there I said it !

The XP UI is the most accessible (I don't look at a UI to fondle it or have lascivious longings)
In my business as a consulting engineer the PC is a tool -- not a mistress.
Training employees and new software can be a very expensive cost, both in time and $$$.

Why do MS insist on only having one UI? ... to suck the fanboy$ in, with their credit card$ !

There is a place for both old and new, and in my life I am amused how history repeats itself.

gregrocker said:

Diosoth said:

Tonight I started my Gateway W7 and Dell XP machines at the same time. By the time W7 reached the black "windows is starting up" screen, my XP computer was already loaded to the desktop and ready to go. That's less than 15 seconds for XP to boot to desktop, and well over a minute for W7 to get to Desktop- and another few minutes for the OS to do a bunch of background stuff.

Establish a Clean boot to get the freeloaders off your Startup.

Preinstalled WIn7 is also the worst possible install one can have. Start enjoying Win7's native performance for the first time by doing what most tech enthusiasts do and Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to shed the bloatware and duplicate utilties which interfere with better versions built into WIn7.

Totally agree !
Dell Win8 Pro preloaded -- in process
Toshiba Win7 preloaded -- is next

Layback Bear said:

Their will always be a place in my heart for XP just like a old girl friend.
My new girl friend and Windows 7 are both much better and faster.
You just have to take the time to use them properly. My new girl friend and Windows 7 given me guidance and things are working well.

Touche !!

The OS will still work just fine, just no more patches, I was never planning on it be reinstalled on new hardware anyhow.

I have it still on one old PC that rarely ever is powered on, saved for any certification exams that might requiring it's use in depth.

Besides, if I really wanted it later, VMWare.

It's not the end of the XP.

For anyone planning to keep running XP as a second OS or on an older machine if you are using an old XP cd I would suggest either shopping around now for a few sites where you still buy Vista as well as XP media with SP3 or download the service packs and even burn them to disk to have onhand once the support is gone.

If you have already an XP/SP3 disk then you are set for however much longer you can run it later on a physical drive. Any OS even the old legacy versions can still be run on a VM once you get the installation problems that can come up for bootable set up floppy images(3.1, 9x, ME, even XP is some instances). I had some fun getting 98SE onto VBox a few years back without any floppy image to load. It still went on however.

For an alternate VM program I mentioned the open source program called Boch's earlier I will get to try out sometime. And as for boot times lehnerus2000 called it correct as far as the average boot times for each OS with Linux Mint and Linux Mint Debian seeing a much faster start up time having less overhead in the other OS there to begin with. That's one reason I prefer using LMDebian for live data recovery sticks preferred over ubuntu or a few other distros for that purpose and just to look over a second OS on VM at times.

I use XP mainly for games that can't be played in W7.

My XP install disc was a SP3 slipstreamed copy, and I needed to install Dell drivers- the HDD in this computer died a few days after I got it so I had to swap it out. My W7 Gateway has their install of W7 on it, I have recovery/factory install discs.