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I used Cygwin to offer me a sane environment that ran most of my code and tools since at least Windows XP. Under it, Windows was a reasonably adequate workstation OS.

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Between 2001 and the arrival of service pack 2, it was a horror due to virus and worms for sys admins and end users. The ignore the problem thing was a resident resource hungry program called "virus scanner" Com & co were great, ms used it,the rest abused it. And Xp feels fast too, it wasn't, 7 was faster, but it felt the other way.

>And Xp feels fast too, it wasn't, 7 was faster, but it felt the other way.

Desktop composition adds a frame or more of latency. If you disable it (sadly not possible in Windows 8 and later) UI interaction feels noticeable more responsive. But most people run Windows 7 with composition on, so for them it makes sense that "XP felt faster"

Windows was a security nightmare by then but either I was cautious enough or I was lucky enough not to experience any major infection problem on any of my machines.

Proper firewalls alone helped a lot.

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