Please clearly explain why windows xp was the best windows

I see this meme a lot floating around on Sup Forums and on the internet in general. what was it about windows xp that made it special? the fisher price visuals? the NT kernel? what

don't know man, i guess the background, the theme, the good games at the time, everything was great before the normies invaded

Windows 7 was the last great windows

vista didn't replace it (properly) so it was widely used until like 2010

it could run anything basically from DOS tier programs to the newest drivers

it was a connection between the world of parallel port scanners and floppy drives and the age of usb flash drives and gigabit ethernet

lightweight on resources (compared to new os-es) but with updates it got slow while not using new processors' features.

we have to fucking move on.

It's the first Windows they used.

This

>xp
>the best
Nah, was the win2k

I used win98 and mac os classic in elementary school :-)

I clearly remember being able to run my dos games without much fiddling. it came with full dos right, not just the prompt?

Unlike Win9x which actually did run on top of DOS, XP threw it out completely and support for DOS software was quite bad unless you used 3rd-party software.

it didn't came with dos. but simpler programs ran just fine in the command prompt afaik. newer windowses (64 bit especially) didn't give a fuck about 16 bit programs compatibility which is a shame but not certainly a bad thing

Nostalgia

This. Best MS OS made I think.

It was babby's first Windows. Give it 20 more years and people will tell you Windows 10 was the best one because the majority of "online" people will have grown up with Windows 10.

it just werked
everyone of us were young and not pathetic losers yet
life was looking good
so only fond memories
while in reality windows xp crashed every other day for most people and ssd's didnt exist so it was actually annoying

>XP threw it out completely
what is ntvdm?

>it was a connection between the world of parallel port scanners and floppy drives and the age of usb flash drives and gigabit ethernet

This is a pretty good summary. It's the last gasp of what came before, and also the first signs of what will come after. For context, it was the first Windows that required MS-side activation.

Not comparable to just not running Windows at all on your Win9x machine.

No, it had a virtual DOS machine with Sound Blaster emulation. It did run a bunch of stuff, but it was pretty rudimentary and many applications (notably games) didn't work properly. Modern versions of Windows still have NTVDM, but only on the 32-bit version and who the fuck actually uses that?

I had actually been using Windows xp up until a couple days ago when I got a new laptop that came with windows 10.
I feel cheated.

Win XP is basically the last OS with full support built in for older hardware/software without it being gimped in some fashion. While also supporting newer stuff (to a point). ex - can support any phenom II cpu but your limited to only 4GB of ram. Windows 7 is your last hope for broad hardware support but depending on hardware (32 vs 64bit) you'll have to drop software support for dos/early 90s games. Also windows 7 is your last option before MS went for the whole flashy shitty app store fucked up windows 8/8.1/ten. Windows 7 just works, plain and simple. All Windows after it are just garbage.

>everything was great before the normies invaded
What do you even mean?
Windows has always been the normiest OS there is

Because the OS that preceded it was unstable, unfriendly and not suitable for business users, and the OS that followed it was quite plainly a mess. There's a huge gap between XP and Vista, and maybe 1-2 years between every other OS of theirs, for a reason.

Not quite anymore in the XP-era, but back in the 90s you were considered a nerd for even using a PC at home.

That's started to happen again now that everyone's on their phones or laptops.

>not cracking the network of starcucks with his phone

What's sad though is that there's not really any, for lack of a better word, "PC OS". Most modern OSs seem to be built around compatibility with touch screens, media consumption (rather than content creation), or web browsing.

Nostalgia or some shit. When it first came out, it was actually hated.

I remember when XP came out and everyone was bitching endlessly about moving away from DOS, how the GUI looked like it was made for toddlers and whatever.

The moral of the story is that however much whining fucktards bitch about whatever's new, the world will move on without them.

Noobs didn't know about the silver theme, should be the standard one.

There were people who actually didn't use classic theme?

I used green.

I switched to the classic Windows theme. XP one never really sat right.

I'm still using the classic theme on win7. Saves me a lot of screen estate.

Ya know back when xp was released (2001) you could install it on a 300 mhz/64gb/2GB hdd pc. Course it would run slow so no multitasking would be possible but still you could do it. So to go from that setup all the way to muti core cpu's/4GB ram/sata 2TB hdds is pretty impressive. Yes XP supported sata, you just had to load the drivers before you installed the os (ye old hit "F6" during setup prompt). You also needed a floppy disk and drive.

>300 mhz/64gb/2GB hdd pc
No such PC ever existed.

you mean Zune

Superficial bullshit and nostalgia goggles. I'm old enough to remember how much it sucked.

Correct

Windows media edition theme was better.

its just...
theres nothing wrong with it and never has been
probably never will be

it is the foundation of the modern windows desktop, 95-2000 were kinda there, but some of the stuff was more fiddly than it had to be
like setting up network connections or manually installing drivers on windows 98

xp made it easy to where anyone could learn how to be a "power user" in a day

it was so widely used and lasted so long that i dont think anything will come near how popular it once was

64 MB RAM would make more sense.

>never has been
It was an extreme clusterfuck with USBs until the first service pack. Not to mention the mail client, the IE6 and the java vm. Explorer is dumb shit, compared to even the most basic file manager on linux/bsd. The HDD power management is also shit and can't be fixed without 3rd party application, but it's a problem on every windows version.
>it was so widely used and lasted so long that i dont think anything will come near how popular it once was
Since MS screwed up Vista it's not that amazing. Android can be the next XP though. At least Chrome isn't a total clusterfuck.

>Explorer is dumb shit, compared to even the most basic file manager on linux/bsd.
Windows Explorer was fine

Yes it did its job, but i don't miss it at all.

WoW simply can't work on a 64 bit system. CPUs running in amd64 mode don't support the proper legacy compatibility features to run 16 bit programs. Emulation such as with DosBox is an option, but I don't blame MS for not going down that path.

no UAC, superior application compatibility