Oh I definitely knew. I swore off that system after I spent hours repairing a rootkit on my families multiple computers only for it to happen again a week later.
I moved to Unix and only run a bare bones 11 install for games which is almost not even necessary anymore
What are you talking about? Of course I noticed. It was during the upgrade process to Vista. Then the last time I turned that off was when I fully switched to Linux.
Not for me. I have no idea when I last shut off an xp machine. My first free computer came with 98se, and my first purchased PC had windows 7 installed. At some point, I shut off an xp machine, either for school or at the library or whatever, and I have no idea when that was.
Yup, I use a million dollar system that runs on XP. We updated the computer last year. They sent us a PC that dual boots XP and Win10. Win10 so it can connect to the internet and pull updates. XP so it can run the control program, which is written in Flash.
Unfortunately I do too. I work in a lotto office. The lotto machines are over 20 years old and run XP Embedded. Thankfully the computers where we do most of the actual work have modern CPUs and NVMEs running a modern OS.
it's a physical device. running on an old AMD Athlon X2 64 939.
I use it to play old retro games on. it is connected to the internet but browsers don't really work on it anymore. Usually I find the old web root or ftp sites on my main and download them directly in xp.
edit: I forgot about the XP desktop I made my kid too. not connected to the internet, but is connected to the lan. it's in storage right now, which is why I forgot about it.
I noticed. This was around 2008-2010. I had a dinosaur of a machine sitting around and wanted to see what would happen if I connected XP to "the modern web."
I did a complete wipe and reinstall, installed either SP2 or SP3, whatever the last version was. Ensured that I had the latest drivers for all the hardware, and connected the Ethernet cable.
Result: Complete system lockdown in less than 5 seconds due to being taken over by bots. The system was unable to reboot on that particular install of XP. I reinstalled XP, got it functioning again, wrapped the computer in an anti static bag, and put it in my storage unit, knowing I would likely never touch the machine again.
Just switched my win10 laptop to opensuse tumbleweed (trying it out) and didn't realized how accustomed i was to the slowness of boot, opening programs, lagging, etc
The last time I turned off XP was a few months ago when I replaced it with Linux Mint on a PC I use to play old games in my room (because I wanted to play old MMOs and that required internet access, which XP would not have been safe for.)
I noticed. When Windows XP came out I saw the enshitification right away. Never mind the play-skool colors and complete lack of security. I couldn't believe that people were going to be willing to use that crap.
I moved away from it for me and my business fairly quickly, and that was that.
I did notice over the years as winxp went away in public spaces and hotels. It was always kind of nice to know there were free to use computers out in the wild if one wanted to use them. XP was never able to be locked down, so you could bypass any login and just use it if you wanted to. Never for anything important, but I could always load up some games on the hotel one and let the kids play on it for fun for example.
Left because of XP. Win 2000 was fine. XP started all of the crap. It was when you needed to have a corporate key to actually control the computer and have all the features that win 2000 did. The colors were awful and the design was piss poor of course, but I could have dealt with that.
This was when Microsoft began introducing online accounts. They started trying to really wedge explorer into everything. You could buy music online with them, but ONLY with explorer. There were three programs that were forced on everyone (I forget what they are now). People didn't like it so they gave people a "remover", and was supposed to remove those programs. Except they lied, and all it did was hid the icons.
The writing was on the wall. Win XP was when MS jumped the shark and began the decline. I could see it in real time and wanted nothing more to do with them. So Linux it was.
I'd argue that 8.1 was an apology for 8 that never got accepted, 10 was an enshitified version of what 8 could have been if Microsoft shareholders didn't decide they wanted a slice of that sweet sweet mobile market.
Anyway, anything past 7 has/had unacceptable privacy violations. And that alone makes them shitte, even regardless of everything else.
It happened when Battlefield Bad Company 2 released. XP couldn't support it so I had to bite the bullet and switch over to Windows 7. At least I held out long enough to avoid Vista. Incidentally that was also the first and last game I bought for EA's shitty Origin launcher.
I just did a win xp build the other day. I had to make a floppy disk for sata drivers because xp hates installing to sata. Fortunately MSI still has the drivers on their website. I'm still looking for a decent and cheap agp GPU to go along with it.
There's still an antivirus program out there for 32 bit xp and firefox supports a lot of the usual plugins. I wouldn't do online banking but I browsed the web on bare metal xp (the unofficial "integral edition") ealier this year and it was fine. It's not ideal but for some low level office stuff with little security concerns xp is kinda serviceable even today.
Except the last time I turn off an OS it's usually because it was BSOD and never came back. Then it's wiped and something new or it's reinstalled. Is it the same OS if it's reinstalled?
It never stops to amaze me how many factories still depend on win-xp (yes, win-xp!). It was always too expensive to upgrade the apps and machines. By now many will never happen anymore because now it's a multi-step upgrade and cost even more. And STILL they expect 2025 type, level and quality support.
Pretty much anybody reading this still uses XP at least weekly if not daily.
It's still all over the place, ATMs, gasoline pumps, ticket machines, kiosks, ect, ect...
Some of you may even be sitting in a room with XP right now and not even realize it.
You may have forgotten it, but it is still there, waiting, watching, ready blue screen for just no reason at all.
Thanks to Crowdstrike I know that at least the checkouts in shops and some ATMs here use Windows 8 or newer, because of the new blue screen design (don't remember if they had the QR code, which would mean at least Windows 10)
I nearly installed WinXP on an old piece of shit all-in-one computer (old celeron, 2gb ram, very slow hdd), but the CPU was too new to be supported. Installed Mint instead.
I did it with joy, because I used it for a few days to implement and test an SMBv3 to v1 Bridge (fuck Trumpf for using embedded XP and using SMB for pulling blueprints, forcing the use of SMBv1), and it (as well as the Windows Server) was hell compared to Pop I was using at the time.
For my main comp this was actually from Vista RC something - I had enough RAM & it didn't give me any compatibility issues (like Millennium before XP on my gaming rig, bcs manufacturer sux at drivers).
I never really liked XP ... I know, Im sorry!!
I loved that it brought gaming to NT-ish stability tho.
(Then again Windows classic theme rullz. Tho the og Aero was nice at the time.)