Happy Birthday! Windows XP is 10 Years Old Today

and it should have lost support the moment that Windows 7 came out

You would think, but Windows XP is a fairly stable and usable OS compared to Microsoft's predecessors.

Unfortunately, several software companies have yet to update their products to support Windows Vista/7. And due to that lack of support, corporate America has held on to Windows XP. We have *several* very expensive apps at work used in various departments that just flat out will NOT work with Vista/7, which forces us to maintain XP in various areas. It's not that we want to support XP, but we're forced to because there's no upgrade option with those particular vendors yet.

No reason to fix that which is not broken...

happy bday XP, you served me well for some time

This is like celebrating my dead relatives birthdays. They were kind and reliable, but no longer with us.

Some day we will upgrade from XP to 7 here at work.
I've had a budget meeting where I pitched Windows 7 to our CFO... then the question comes up on where Microsoft extended support to 4/8/2014... now I'm stuck with XP until the 2013 budget year.

Why Microsoft!?!? Why?!?!? If you keep extending support, venders wont have any reason to develop support for Windows 7! ARG!!!

This is where companies should be re-hiring us programmers to update/remake their programs rather than being cheap and holding on to ancient software. Just sayin'...

I wouldn't upgrade to Windows 7 either.... Windows 8 is coming out next year. You would be better off holding off until then.

keep up support for xp and give consumers more choice =)

i still got xp installed on my second HDD, i use windows 7 as my main OS

Happy Birthday XP you've seen a lot of hardware changes over the years and kept up. You serve the world well.

It takes years for a proper deployment. If companies keep holding out for the next best thing, they'll be using XP for eternity.

Windows ME sucked. That is why Windows XP didn't sell well right out of the gate. People were skeptical that the new OS would be any good. (Plus no one made drivers for it.)

Vista also sucks. Just like Windows ME techs didn't like it due to excessive issues so most companies did NOT implement Windows Vista but Windows 7 is similar but more relyable, plus Windows Vista drivers are (for the most part) compatible with Windows 7, so no waiting for drivers to be made for your hardware to work.

While trying to upgrade to Windows 7 I got to a point where I couldn't even get Windows Vista to boot. It was a dual boot OS and XP worked fine. In the end I just wiped the Windows Vista drive and did a fresh install of Windows 7. I grabbed the windows vista disk and slapped it on my knee hard enough to make it shatter then threw it in the trash because that is what is was.

XP is an amazing OS and has aged very well over the years.
I think Win 7 could have been the same if it wasn't for Win 8 coming out next year, but that's M$ for you.

Happy birthday XP!

I never 'liked' XP. Always more clunky than either 98 or 2000. Just as stable as 2000, but more sluggish on hardware available until around 2004. I didn't upgrade until my hardware choices basically de-supported 2000/98. I never liked the activation scheme they introduced (Windows Vista's and 7's activation scheme of any disk, 1 key, makes much more sense than loosing the media, but still having a now worthless COA). Driver installation was a pain. So were SPs. Loved the 'partially supported' XP SP3 thing, with incompatibility for AMD chips, even from Microsoft Updates, that auto-downloaded it... The only thing worse than XP was that Vista was such a resource HOG that it make XP seem downright spiffy, despite Vista being much easier to install, with better auto driver support, even though Vista also lacked a lot of legacy support...

I am so happy with 7. I can't wait for XP to die. I love that even old old systems and underpowered netbooks work better with W7 than they EVER did with XP... Even with a gig of RAM and a 60GB HDD...

I celebrate XP independence day... Do you?

Go XP Go!!! I think we'll be seeing the same headline after another 10 years..... only difference is going to be the added 10 for XP years.....

Right, and piss off countless vendors and customers. Good thinking there!

Win 8 will bomb. It gives very few reasons to switch from Win 7. Most couldn't care less about ARM or touch screen support and most people have only just switched from XP. This is why ME and Vista both failed, very little reason to switch from a stable and viable os just because a new and shiny os is released.

XP still makes tons of sense for people who just use a computer or laptop for minor tasks. For these people upgrading to 7 will only use more system resources and slow their PC's down. This is the crowd that still uses XP when it comes to non business purposes. XP is a solid OS that I believe will be remembered favorably by most. I think it will take Windows 8 to finally make it no longer a impressive % still using it.

Vista was like AMD's bulldozer.

Actually, most people find it less stable, slower, and more resource intensive than Windows 2000. NT 4.0 was also very stable.

Except that AMD's Bulldozer is selling really well and still has performance levels of around a 2500k in many benchmarks?

XP is still needed for old legacy games. They can be had for next to nothing at places like Amazon.com and many are still really good.

An Im still trying to install it

Not true. I often tell people to upgrade even old systems from XP to W7 for a performance gain. Everything from old P4's to Atom netbooks...


So true... I hated having to switch to XP from 2K... 2K ran stable. Not to say that 2K didn't have it's own issues: It wasn't a very secure OS...


Sad, but true... Hell, you need a DOS emulator to play the truly great games... Things like C&C, Warcraft, and Tie Fighter (never did work right in Windows).

XP is decent OS. It takes long time to support new OS. Many quite expensive software products ($5000-$15000) still don't run under Vista or Win7 at all (specially 64bit) and some that do are often just limping.
It cracks me up when someone thinks that using computer means being able to run handful of cheap video games or that support can be withdrawn because their games run fine. Many computers are used for far more serious things and messing around is just not an option. This is why companies pay big bucks.

an example of "be careful what you do with computer":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

That's like 1000 in MS years.

What would vendors and customers do? Switch to OSX or Linux? Psh.

Microsoft isn't at a bargaining table. At this point, they have the power to do as they please, and still weather the shitstorm that may happen. And in this case, it would have been beneficial to both the company and the IT world as a whole.

Anyone remember back in the 2K/XP days? Win2K was just beginning to really gain ground and then this 'cartooney' 'child's play thing' which was a total resource hog was released. It broke several networks because it was the first attempt at a 'secure' networking infrastructure (meaning it plugged a bunch of holes which people used as features).
I remember holding on to win2K for years because it was the difference between being able to do video editing, and not. Plus the driver issues with XP were awful!

All that said, by SP2 it was a great OS that was rock solid, and the defacto standard to PCs until win7 came out. And even now it is a question of taste. The XP fans love the small resource footprint, while the win7 fans love the modern support it brings (and the pretty interface). XP is still great (I use it fairly often), but it is quickly loosing relevance in an ever changing world.