Less funny when you realize it’s mostly banks, government agencies, and militaries still using it.
I’d say more likely it’s labs, hospitals, and other scientific stuff where you have to deal with old instruments cause lack of money. I’m fairly certain the military uses some other OS, I believe NATO uses Solaris for example.
“Windows for Submarines”
It’s XP for Vanguard subs. I really hope none of them provide any telemetry for these stats though.
doubt they’re connected to the internet. In fact I’d wager 99% of shit running windows XP is not connected to the internet (and shouldn’t be)
if it’s not connected to the Internet, it won’t show up in the stats
The current company that owns the old model installed in your hospital and sells the new version, bought the company that bought the company that made the version you have and can’t update the firmware and code to work on a modern OS because all knowledgeable staff were lost in the buyouts.
The best they can do is sell you the new version that does the same thing your current working version does for $500,000.
Maybe they even have a new ecosystem that they want you to move to, because they don’t make support/subscription revenue with the current stand alone server that moves the image or telemetry results from the machine to the viewing workstations and records database.
If the U.S. military is anything like it was in the 90s, they may very well still be using Windows XP for all kinds of things. My mother-in-law ran an army reserve center through the late 90s and they were using DOS machines well into the Windows era because the army wouldn’t update their computers.
And hospitals. Don’t forget those.
And ATMs. Lots of ATMs.
I’ve seen Citrix used a lot in hospitals to host apps. Xp isn’t used any longer since it’s not supported.
And medical. Suppliers if CT, MRI and X-Ray gear are notorious for wanting to sell new gear and not providing software updates to work on new operating systems.
Why do you think it’s less funny this way?
Mainstream support ended 15 years ago. Extended security support ended 10 years ago. The last version to have any kind of update at all was their embedded OS version for things like cash registers, with the last security update 5 years ago.
So it’s wildly insecure against any new attacks targeting an OS that’s largely used by major corporations, governments, and medical facilities that are juicy targets for theft and ransomware attacks.
More funny in my book.
Might not be so funny when you’re slowly dying of radiation sickness.
What? First time I hear XP gives radiation sickness.
It does when someone hacks the nukes that it controls.
Because they stick with what works.
It’s moreso that they have some abandonware that only works on windows XP.
Windows XP itself is abandonware and you shouldn’t use it in any other case, just use Linux if you don’t like newer windows. You certainly aren’t doing any photoshopping on XP nowadays so that’s no concern.
After XP, Windows focused on adding crap to their aid that use unnecessary resources for crap things. I remember the Aqua look on Vista that sucked the life out of computers. Let’s not talk about Windows Me. Then 8 was a weird interface that no one liked and also not compatible with older machines. So XP is the most stable Windows os that can run on older devices.
XP still had the designed-by-engineers vibe. Since then, Microsoft got completely taken over by dipshits with marketing MBAs.
They now code Windows to impress executives and shareholders with how much they can harvest data and manipulate customers into using their stupid Store and so on. They stopped caring about the experiences of power users, or even casual users.
They don’t want the OS to work for us. They want us to work for them.
Though enshittification was coined, I think, with online services in mind, this is a perfect example of the process as it applies to an OS.
Completely agree. For some reason that word tends to trigger a few gatekeepers on here. But I think it fits.
The enshittification of windows is because of its online services. Copilot AI, “telemetry”, ads, etc.
Very well said.
Do you have any suggestions for people wanting to go back to an XP feeling?
A particular distro of Linux, etc.?
I second the recommendation of giving Linux Mint a shot. I didn’t use XP extensively but Mint is low hassle and gets out of your way.
I’m not sure it has quite the same feel, but closest I can think of that is also approachable coming from Windows. Obviously a lot of other distros also satisfy the “built by engineers” vibe.
Linux Mint is definitely the closest interface- and vibes-wise to XP imo, of the big distros worth considering
I have a lot of respect for Linux and use it here and there, but I am by no means an expert on it. The best thing I’ve done with it so far is running a Pi Hole at home.
Unfortunately, my job involves using MS Windows. A lot. After I retire…soonish…I hope to take some time and learn Linux better.
For my day-to-day Windows misery, I find that ShutUp10 does a great job of toggling off the bullshit you don’t want running. And it’s easy to toggle things back on if you ever need to. It’s a free program you can download and run. I send them a little money every year out of gratitude, but donations are completely optional.
Some FUD mongers will tell you that ShutUp10 ‘breaks’ Windows. That’s simply not true. It puts all the Windows settings you can change yourself in one easy-to-find place. Things that are normally scattered all over the UX and the registry.
While you could mess some things up using it if you’re not careful, it’s very good about color coding and letting you know which toggles are best to turn off, which ones are a little questionable, and which ones you should leave turned on (unless you know what you’re doing and can take the risk). I have used it for years now, on multiple PCs, with zero problems. It doesn’t make Windows 10/11 GOOD but it makes them less horrible.
Mint is the usual recommendation for transitioning from windows to Linux.
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Britec09 from the video there is quite skeptical - sounds like he prefers ShutUp10. With Atlas, he worries about large security impacts for small FPS gains.
Good watch, thank you!
Don’t forget about Windows 7. That boy ripped. Too bad they didn’t take the good lessons from it.
XP was a pretty good running OS with plenty of software and games. I held out till 10 was out for a bit and there were programs I wanted to run that required it.
To be fair, vista and 7 had a lot of QOL improvements too.
I dont see the point of 10+ though, they pretty much just added fluff.
They had QOL but I remember my machines running significantly slower. And that was not worth the extra QOL.
ME came before XP
I guinely hate windows as a product. But man XP was a banger for it’s time
As usual I think that sentiment was retroactive, certainly once Vista came out. At launch, people hated the Fisher-Price look of the Luna default UI. Like, a lot. The switch to the NT based kernel for the home version of Windows also caused a shitton of people’s hardware and peripherals not to work anymore because they needed new drivers and the manufacturers of said gadgets – if they were still in business – could not be arsed. Some of this could be alleviated by bullying that hardware’s Windows 2000 drivers into working with XP. Some of it could not.
I liked XP in its own era, it’s not just nostalgia. Although computers and the Internet in general were very exciting to me back then.
They should’ve just used the Silver theme instead of blue luna. Unless it didn’t exist on launch.
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Windows has its ups.
The only problem people should have with it is that it’s on 70% of ALL desktops which is about half a billion too many.
A fair competition should be there. Linux, Mac and Windows should have around 33% market share in an ideal world.
You may count whatever Google is doing or Samsung/Huawei can do as separate in a dream world.
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No. It was a crash test dummy for windows 7.
It was a beta that wasn’t stable.
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Vista was the warcrimes of OSes
This and Windows 8 and 8.1: either crappy or confusing
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It really was though. UAC didn’t actually work until windows 7.
A lot of public infrastructure in the US (powerplants, waste management, etc.) runs off XP or older.
Not as prevalent these days, but a lot of EMR/EHR was built on XP. Some of those companies went out of business and the clinics using the software never upgraded because they couldn’t get the data out into another system.
Newest versions of windows 11 make it incredibly hard to find the screen that shows all your network adapters. It is now easier to use device manager to disable and reenable an adapter.
How do I know? Because all the shit tier screens and tools that offer to help you with a network issue didn’t work. ONLY reenabling the NIC did.
Had to do it on my whole network
Learn the ways of the run prompt: ncpa.cpl launches you right to the classic network adapter control panel screen. I have to get in there so often that I’ve taught myself plenty of those little shortcuts because MS can’t leave shit where it was.
How do I give lemmy gold?
…And it all has to be there for legacy compatibility, because some Fortune 500 company somewhere has some rickety piece of shit in-house “enterprise” software that relies on some obscure aspect or another of a past Windows version.
I am sort of partial to those rickity old systems that force them to keep legacy software compatibility.
I can still load up and use a program that was written 20 years ago for windows XP.
It also gives third parties like classic shell or startallback the ability to restore all the functionality that the newest start menu disaster tries to push.
Ooh thanks
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
In cmd stop working?
This didn’t work, I did try at the time.
Did you use cmd with elevated admin privileges? Try right click cmd and run as admin if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Windoze stopped running cmd with elevated privileges sometime around Win7. From a security perspective it makes a lot of sense to do that as default, even though it can be a bit of a pain for home users that expect to have admin for everything they do.
If I wanted to use the terminal, I’d use Linux
Disabling and enabling a network adapter using a GUI is trivial on most Linux desktops. So not helping Microsoft’s case.
Why don’t you just use control panel?
I never use the windows settings menu unless I absolutely have to because, like you insinuated, it’s really not that great.
Control panel on the other hand is still there and will get you exactly where you need much quicker.
i find the best solution to this problem is to install linux
It’s definitely looking like a possibility. I do my work on Linux machines but only use win for games. If I can play my main community games it might be time to make the switch for good
if you dont play games that use anticheat you’re probs okay.
most everything else either works with proton out the box or with some small tweaks.
protondb is the best resource for linux gaming imo
Yeah, my primary is Kubuntu. I have windows on the side for the few games I have that I need it for.
You can also just search “network” and the screen they want is either the first or second result. I rarely ever go into any kinds of settings menus anymore, i just search on the start menu.
Why are the settings for a single device spread across multiple sections of the OS though?
Because windows 11 is an updated version of windows 19 and windows 10 is an updated version of windows 7/8.1.
Each one of them has had holdovers of previous versions of windows. And each one has tried to bring in a new standard to bring them all together but they’ve always moved on to the next standard before finishing it. Windows 11 has actually came the closest but we’re not there yet and because it’s actively replaced old methods of doing things in this process it feels more fractured than before because we’re not used to looking in the new places for them.
I feel like making important changes was easiest with XP. It feels like they’re trying to obscure administrative functions behind layers of abstraction.
same
Kind of feel like Windows 11 is trying to appeal most to people who only use Windows for stuff like Outlook and Excel.
If your job requires any niche or specialized software. Or if you need your Windows system for managing networks and stuff like that, you’re probably better off sticking with older windows or jumping to Linux.
Obviously it’s not as easy as just switching to Linux, especially for larger organizations etc. But it gets easier with every new version of Ubuntu, Fedora etc.
Microsoft terminal and wsl are fantastic. Not a replacement for Linux, but they’re great.
Even easier in powershell:
Get-NetAdapter
Disable-NetAdapter
Enable-NetAdapter
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its
Monty Python’s Flying Circus!
Welcome to the Ministry of Silly Walks.
Windows XP outliving two of it is successors.
XP was great but for me 7 was the sweet spot.
That Frutiger Aero aesthetic they had going on there felt so futuristic.
It still looks good on modern resolutions tbh.
When I was working security for a hospital they wanted to send imagery from an MRI (or maybe CAT, I forget) upstairs to be interpreted without allowing any network traffic to be able to reach the host machine because it was running XP. I asked why, and they told me that in order to replace it the vendor was requiring a $7 million replacement of the whole MRI.
I’ve worked in hospitals that still run DOS based programs for certain things. It’s madness.
Same shit is starting to happen with cars. No way to get the new headunits without replacing the whole car. I know Porsche offers electronic upgrade kits, but I can’t think of any others that do.
What worries me more is what eldritch horrors await us in other versions
“Please watch this advertising video that is relevant to what you were discussing with your wife in the other room this morning before your browser can be launched.”
Lmao too true
7
excuse you sir, windows 7 is still one of winblows highest points far from being horror, eldritch? perhaps, but no horror there
Played the heckin’ heck out of Lionhead Studios’ Black & White on XP. Good Times.
The Black & White games were legendary. I Wish there were more games of its kind.
I’d love a VR god game of that caliber.
I forgot all about that game! I loved being benevolent and then smashing everything to pieces.
I don’t even know why people use Windows 10 (or 11) other than momentum.
I haven’t used Windows for years, but my daughter’s new online school required either a Windows 10/11 computer or a Mac and we can’t afford even a new decent Windows notebook, let alone a Mac, so we ended up getting a refurbished Thinkpad running Windows 10 from NewEgg.
Windows 10. Is. Annoying. As. Fuck.
We are constantly getting interrupted by unnecessary popups (or were until I took the time to disable everything I could think of, which was a pain in the ass).
After running updates, it made me go through a bunch of screens turning down paying for things. Twice. And those popups still asked me about paying for things. Motherfucker, I already paid $300 for the computer, I’m not paying you shit.
And wow is stuff counterintuitive in how to do it compared to either any Linux GUI I’ve tried or Mac OS. Just trying to figure out how to get to a File menu is baffling half the time.
I don’t blame anyone for using XP over that shit. Let alone Linux or even a Mac.
I don’t even know why people use Windows 10 (or 11) other than momentum.
Security updates. That’s it, that’s the only reason I recommend anyone unwilling or unable to switch operating systems all together to move to Windows 10.
Just wait until they start putting ads in the file menu and make you sit through a 30 second commercial every time you want to open an application unless you join windows premium + subscription only 15$ a month
Drink verification can to continue your Windows™ experience
Microsoft reserves the right to collect and sell any genetic information exposed to drink verification can via bodily fluids.
Proceeds to transmit your entire genome to their cloud servers in plaintext
For me I use Win11 for one reason: Auto HDR. Fixes every issue I have with HDR in other OSes cause it just works.
I can see that, but is it really worth running it as an OS other than for that specific use? Because if not, you can just run it in an emulator or on a partition when you need that.
Well I play a lot of HDR games and watch a lot of HDR movies, so for me the use isn’t exactly “specific”. I’m using HDR all the time.
But to be honest, I’d love nothing more than to switch to Linux fulltime. The game support is finally good enough for me, but I need my HDR. Emulation isn’t an option cause HDR doesn’t work that way, and I already dual boot Mint and Win11. But right now my usage is about 90% Windows and 10% *Nix. Can’t wait for the day when I can finally switch those percentages around.
I liked Vista.
There. I said it.
Vista Service Pack 2 was a solid OS, XP actually needed a few service packs to get fully to the place people remember it being great.
Vista was fine, apart from the performance. I had a fairly beefy machine for the time so I hardly noticed, but on lower spec machines it was an absolute dog.
Kinda felt like an unoptimised prerelease version of Windows 7
Just when you think you know a guy…
Well I also liked Millennium a lot.
I have a copy, I just need to find an old-ass pc to install it on.
You can install it on a new-ass PC and it’ll be lightning fast!
This will be 7 one day
I’ve been looking for advice. I’ve been wondering if it was worthwhile to upgrade from 10 to 11. I heard 11 had ads and even more bloatware, a disgusting UI, and just general worse. But i was wondering if those are fixed/avoidable. I was thinking of upgrading before it gets too late, or idk…
Windows 11 is miserable. You are now required to add Microsoft accounts at the OS level. Tons of bloatware, embedded ads in start menu, heavy user tracking. Shitty AI implementation pushed on all apps including notepad. And all of the windows 10+ elements are built in the windows 8 base image so all of the settings are nested on top of the new settings UI, on top of control panel.
Not from what I can tell. While upgrading will not detrimental from what I’ve heard (since you can upgrade a local account), there’s a lot which I personally don’t like about with Windows 11 which will make me want to not upgrade. If you have no intention of moving away from the Windows, it may be best to upgrade while MS is offering it.
Otherwise, if you are willing to take the plunge Linux is the better option if you are looking for an OS which has no ads, no adware bloat, and a UI to your liking. Mint or Zorin are a Good Windows like starting point if you are looking to get started.
Ive used MS my whole life. So im just stubborn to move to linux. But really i think just have to put in the effort and i’ll be happier in the long run.
They way I see it is this. I look at my computer as a tool and ask is it working for me right now? What software do I need for it to work? Is that software Windows only, if so can I move to an alternative software that cross platform?
Your computer is a tool that lets you do things. If some software, even the OS is holding you back take a look at what is holding you, and see if its worth the negative of staying to keep that software.
For me that answer was Yes Windows is holding me back, but for years I was shackled by Professional Software, games and Legacy apps which kept me to the platform.
Steam with proton fixed the games issue
Swapping myself to different cross platform software helped with my Professional software.
Legacy was managed with a cheap $20 thrift store laptop with Windows xp installed.
Imam now free to move away from windows, I chose Linux since I idealize a “do it all” pc, but Mac OS is also a viable alternative.
MS is offering it
Massgravel my friend
I just built a desktop for Windows 11, unfortunately I need a Windows desktop in the house even though Debian is my main OS. Last desktop was 13 years old and just wasn’t working for my needs anymore. Default 11 install is horribly bloated but I actually like the desktop environment now. Here’s some stuff I did:
Customized USB image to bypass Microsoft account with easily found steps if you Google. Used Chris Titus Tech’s tool to remove a bunch of shit, install apps, disable telemetry, configure windows update to security only. Used “Reclaim windows” script from github and customized for my purposes. After that I confirmed if all the shit was gone and did a remove-appxpackage for anything left, like widgets etc.
So I have a bare bones install, no Microsoft account, no Microsoft store, no “apps,” no default associations to builtin tools, and a bunch of common foss utilities and all my favorite windows-dependent apps working. Can’t believe it took the amount of effort it did but I like it now, given what my expectations were it definitely exceeded them.
I think with that much effort, ill just learn linux…
Yeah pretty much, most linux distros are at a usable state by default and you spend productive effort learning how to manage it, it’s probably easier than Windows at the end of the day especially for general use. I’m a heavy user of Ableton Live with plugins and using Windows is the only way to run it on your own hardware. Also becomes my gaming machine, but everything else is Debian.
Install Windows 11 using UK English and you’re basically dodging 99% of the complaints people have, I support 5 computers with W11, no issues with any of them and no adverts bothering me.
