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Windows XP Professional

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Re: Windows XP Professional

#141

Post by int_19h »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #136
CrimsonCape wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading. Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever. I know this is true because Apple tri…

I would imagine that progress bars generally represent the progression of the task state and not time, for that very reason. Or is that not the case in practice?

It is, but traditionally progress bars were often paired with labels showing estimated remaining time.

That said, back in DOS era, this kind of thing was much more straightforward because most operations that would warrant a progress bar involved some kind of disk I/O, which - if you amortize it - is fairly linear, so one can estimate the completion time relatively well. In more complicated cases - e.g. Win95 installer doing things like hardware detection - those estimates were often wildly off.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#142

Post by int_19h »

whobre wrote: post #140
rayiner wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it better than Win2K?

Multiple users on a same machine out of the box and way faster boot time. Didn't care for the UI, though - looked childish...

Win2K did multiple users more or less the same, the only difference I remember from XP is the login screen that would list all accounts so you didn't have to type the username.

As for UI, it was very easy to switch to classic mode.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#143

Post by dmpayton »

I went through the "Install Windows" option just to hear the Windows XP installation music again. That track is such a vibe, I have loved it since I was a 14 year-old installing a pirated copy of XP in 2001.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#144

Post by int_19h »

rayiner wrote: post #83
devnull3 wrote: post #40

Win XP remains my favourite OS till date. I was in college and getting hands on a pirated copy back then makes me so nostalgic. There was a cambrian explosion of tools to customize the look and feel. TweakXP pro is the one I remember. All pirated off-course.

How was it better than Win2K?

Better hardware support.

Taskbar grouping.

ClearType.

Remote Desktop.

More games ran on it (mostly thanks to higher DirectX version).

From developer perspective, XP was the first version of Windows with registration-free COM and side-by-side assemblies, which (if used properly by app devs) fully solved the "DLL hell" problem.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#145

Post by int_19h »

sangeeth96 wrote: post #26

Real thing is possible on https://copy.sh/v86/ I think but need an XP disk image[1], not readily available at the moment (probably for copyright reasons?). [1]: https://github.com/copy/v86/issues/86

Better yet ditch the browser and get a proper emulator, preferably one that emulates all the period-accurate hardware such as https://86box.net.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#146

Post by int_19h »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #82
hard_times wrote: post #80

We get these cheap recreations semi-regularly on here. Why does stuff like this keep being spammed on here, besides the nostalgia factor?

Maybe this is the "running Doom" of the UI/UX crowd.

Of web UI in particular.

And this game is very old. I remember trying to get native-looking dropdown menus in IE6.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#147

Post by int_19h »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #93
silverquiet wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?

XP or 7 in "classic", aka 2000 look. For practical reasons, like hardware-support, really working USB. If running in some isolated VM for some superspecial APP still supporting running on 2000, why not? Uses much less memory.

I was one of those people who stuck to classic theme all the way up to Win7, but that was the version that finally made me switch because the fancy default theme in it actually looked pretty well after they made the glass effects of Vista more subtle. WinXP looked like some kind of cheap plastic horror in comparison.

It's very funny to look at Apple progressing from "looks like Vista" to "looks like Win7" in its iOS 26 betas.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#148

Post by SkidanovAlex »

mmastrac wrote: post #17

How can you tell that any Windows or Mac clone UI is a re-implementation? Easy: try to move your mouse diagonally into the Send To menu after letting it pop up. If the send-to menu closes as you mouse over the item into the submenu, it's a clone. If the menu stays up even if you brush over another menu item, it's either real or a Good Clone. :) For the fun history, @DonHopkins had a thread a few years back: https://n…

MS Paint though is "either real or a Good Clone :)", because you can zoom to 12x by clicking one-pixel-wide line below 8x.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#149

Post by int_19h »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #19
saubeidl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get an Arch-based distro with KDE.

You mean xfce? KDE is bloated. Yes it’s still bloated even if Valgrind says it has no memory leaks.

It's bloated if you judge it by the standards of the WinXP era. And I'm not saying that's unfair, but realistically speaking, it's not an issue for any modern PC.
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