this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
Tbh I think you're letting nostalgia blind you to XP's flaws a little.
If they kept refining Win7 it would've been great.
It was significantly more secure than it's DOS-based predecessor of the time, Windows ME (that's a whole other rabbit hole; if you wanna talk insecure and buggy as fuck - look no further). That's what people don't realize, they look at the past through a modern lens. You gotta look at it from the time it was released. There's a reason mainstream consumer-focused Windows editions dropped DOS and moved to the NT kernel. XP was the first real consumer version of Windows based on ~~XP~~ NT.
They did, it was called "Windows 8" and nobody liked it.
I'm not looking at it through a modern lense. It was very insecure at the time, too. I worked in a PC repair shop and at the time that business was a money printer in terms of getting rid of endless malware.
Later versions of windows cleared up the horrendous security to such an extent that the shop was no longer economically viable, and we had to close.
XP was not the first consumer version based on NT, I don't know why you think that.
Although yes, the DOS versions were even worse. Well, in theory anyway. In practice not, since most people at that time didn't have PCs that old connected to the internet.
I would not consider Win8 a "refinement" of Win7 lol, they changed the entire UX, added an app store they tried to force people into, created a new executable format, etc.
Windows 8 is basically the polar opposite of a "refinement" release!
But before ME there was Windows 2000, with its particularly gorgeous spin of the classical design, and other than appearance - being kinda same as XP, but faster.
On NT you mean, and no, W2K was a consumer system.
Whoops! Yes, NT.
W2K was most definitely not built with consumers in mind; the base edition was "Professional" and was meant to be a workstation OS. It was a bit of an oddball in that a not-insignificant amount of power users preferred it at home over 98/Me - but it was a business-oriented system first and foremost. XP added a lot of features over 2000, including more consumer-oriented tools and applications. That's why I specified XP as "the first real consumer version".
Personal anecdote: When I was in jr high, the "family PC" was a Toshiba laptop loaded with W2K, and compared to the W98 system we had before, 2000 was certainly not meant for "regular" home users. That's what Me was supposed to be, but we all know how that went... IMO, I'm almost certain that the downfall of Me, paired with W2K being as good as it was at the time, was part of the driving force for MS to base future consumer versions on the NT kernel.
But this article is talking about people running Windows 7 today, so comparing current actions through a modern lens is entirely valid
Technically, they did, and it was not great.
You consider Win8 a refinement of Win7?
To me refinement means small changes to make something better. It doesn't mean completely changing the entire UX.