Some (if not all) of the recent updates to WinXP are designed at least 
in part to make WinXP slower and more bloated, with the intent that the 
user get tired of it and upgrade to Win7.

Regards,
John

Post a reply to this message

John VanSickle wrote:
> Some (if not all) of the recent updates to WinXP are designed at least 
> in part to make WinXP slower and more bloated, with the intent that the 
> user get tired of it and upgrade to Win7.

That doesn't even make logical sense.

Win7 is many, many times more bloated than WinXP will ever be. What 
you're claiming is something along the lines of "The government have 
secretly fitted devices to everybody's 8L sports cars in an attempt to 
get them to upgrade to a 1L Suzuki Swift".

Besides, I haven't noticed any significant speed difference. (I *have*, 
however, noticed a significant stability difference. When WinXP first 
came out, nobody would touch it because it was so damned unstable...)

Post a reply to this message

> (I *have*, however, noticed a significant stability difference. When WinXP 
> first came out, nobody would touch it because it was so damned 
> unstable...)

Personally I (and many others) found XP very stable even from the beta 
stages.  I thought we came to the conclusion (when this subject came up 
before) that you had some buggy hardware drivers or something on your XP 
installation (didn't it blue screen during boot or something?).

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> (I *have*, however, noticed a significant stability difference. When 
>> WinXP first came out, nobody would touch it because it was so damned 
>> unstable...)
> 
> Personally I (and many others) found XP very stable even from the beta 
> stages.  I thought we came to the conclusion (when this subject came up 
> before) that you had some buggy hardware drivers or something on your XP 
> installation (didn't it blue screen during boot or something?).

It hit a BSoD 14 seconds after first boot, yes.

I wouldn't mind, but lots of other XP computers seemed unstable and 
crash-happy too. Yet today, it's quite unusual for an XP system to 
crash. I guess all those service packs fixed one or two bugs.

Post a reply to this message

> It hit a BSoD 14 seconds after first boot, yes.

I guess in those days (if you were used to Win98 or WinME) that would seem 
completely normal, whereas today a BSOD usually means something is seriously 
wrong (either hardware fault or seriously buggy driver).

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> It hit a BSoD 14 seconds after first boot, yes.
> 
> I guess in those days (if you were used to Win98 or WinME) that would 
> seem completely normal, whereas today a BSOD usually means something is 
> seriously wrong (either hardware fault or seriously buggy driver).

It was more the fact that XP seemed to do that for everybody else as 
well. When it first came out, it was legendary for crashing on people. 
The company I work for avoided upgrading to it for a long time because 
NT was so much more reliable.

Today of course, it's highly unusual for either OS to crash - unless 
something is really wrong...

Post a reply to this message

> When it first came out, it was legendary for crashing on people.

Really, do you have any references for that fact or did you just make it up?

I only ask because it is the complete opposite of my experience of several 
computers using XP (and I guess most of the other half million beta 
testers).  It's also odd that Wikipedia doesn't list "instability" anywhere 
when talking about XP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_XP

You'd think if early releases were "legendary" for crashing it would be 
mentioned somewhere?  In fact all I could find were references to how stable 
it was.

> The company I work for avoided upgrading to it for a long time because NT 
> was so much more reliable.

Of course a new OS should be fully tested with all the existing software 
before being rolled out, that's different to the core OS being unstable and 
crashing though.  Wasn't XP based on the NT core?

Post a reply to this message

>> When it first came out, it was legendary for crashing on people.
> 
> Really, do you have any references for that fact or did you just make it 
> up?

It came out around about the time I was at uni, and everybody was 
complaining about it. How it was so much slower, and how it crashed so much.

When I started work, we had no XP systems at all. We resisted using it 
as long as possible, but eventually we had to start using it. We had 
lots of stability problems with it. (And this is running on lots of 
different hardware, so it's not just one rougue device driver or something.)

However, as the years have gone on, it seems to have become more and 
more stable. Today it's so reliable that I can count the number of BSoDs 
I've seen all year on one hand.

>> The company I work for avoided upgrading to it for a long time because 
>> NT was so much more reliable.
> 
> Of course a new OS should be fully tested with all the existing software 
> before being rolled out, that's different to the core OS being unstable 
> and crashing though. 

> Wasn't XP based on the NT core?

Yes. Windows has gone through several "generations", if you will.

The first generation includes Windows 3.x and its ilk. That's not even a 
propper OS, it's just an application program.

Then there was Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. They have a lot 
more features, but they're very unstable. (There are technical reasons 
for this, mostly to do with incomplete hardware protection.)

And then there was Windows NT. It added real security features (e.g., 
NTFS), propper hardware protection, and generally worked a lot better. 
The initial release was a bit buggy, but by the time you load all the 
service packs, it's very stable.

Windows 2000 uses basically the same kernel. I haven't actually seen 
many people use it, for whatever reason, and I haven't used it much 
myself either.

Windows XP again uses the same kernel, and adds a few more features. 
(Most notably that obnoxious blue plastic skin that I seem to spend half 
my life turning off...) Initially it was very unreliable, but these days 
it's pretty solid.

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe Vista and its twin Win7 have a 
fairly radically rewritten core. I don't really know much about it though.

Post a reply to this message

John VanSickle wrote:
> Some (if not all) of the recent updates to WinXP are designed at least 
> in part to make WinXP slower and more bloated, with the intent that the 
> user get tired of it and upgrade to Win7.

I thought that some of the updates were inducing flakiness on my Vista. I 
decided that next time I upgrade, I'll stop turning off any optional updates 
off on the old OS as soon as the new OS comes out. I don't really need the 
half-assed cutting-edge Win7 stuff backported to my Vista.

Then I looked in the event log and saw hardware errors, so I ran a 
chkdsk/f/r overnight and haven't had a problem since. Kewl.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    C# - a language whose greatest drawback
    is that its best implementation comes
    from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.

Post a reply to this message