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Comment by nivla | Hacker News Reader

>Why do you feel that way?

Because it is a very old OS that lacks new features, stability and security improvements. I am just curious, is there a reason why you haven't upgraded to Windows 7? If it is the feel and look, there are themes you can use to revert it back and if it is compatibility, Windows 7 is backward compatible for most XP apps.

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> is there a reason why you haven't upgraded to Windows 7?

Kind of an odd way to put it. I need a reason to upgrade, not a reason not to upgrade.

A Win7 upgrade license costs about twice as much as the X41 is worth.

Win7 is much bigger. The HD in this machine is ~55GiB. XP only takes up 6x GiB of that. Win7 takes 3x - 5x as much in my experience.

I'm not aware of any new features that would substantially improve the user experience on this machine. I use it for writing in a text editor and checking HN from behind a NAT connection. I have zero concerns about security. The evidence I've seen of performance of Win7 vs. XP on very old hardware is mixed.

Best case, I would spend £100 and take a couple of hours reinstalling, finding drivers etc. for some likely imperceptible benefits.

Gotcha. I can relate. It took me a long time to move to Windows 7. Moved because my laptop gave up and I had to get a new one which came pre-installed with win 7. There was no point in downgrading it to XP. I admit to feeling uneasy about the new UI for a few days but then I grew into it. One thing that still awe me is how stable it is. In the past half a decade, I only had one BSOD crash!!

Also on a similar note, a few months back I did upgrade my media center machine from XP to Windows 8. I can can vouch that Windows 8 feels a lot lighter than Windows 7. XBMC+Windows 8 is great combination.

Here's a good reason: in April 2014, Microsoft stops issuing security patches for XP. At that point, any exploits people find(and they will find them) will never be fixed. Your computer will be the easiest target out there.

Not just will this be bad for you(assuming you value your files or do banking on your laptop), but if your compromised computer starts hosting a botnet or attaches viruses to your emails to friends, it's a problem for everyone.

It's a similar problem(though not nearly on the same level) as people who refuse to vaccinate their children.

XP is slim and minimalist.. the standard user just want to use the tools they are used to.. also XP will be economic about the machine resources it use..

Security for instance its more of a hacker thing.. to a more technical aware audience.. and we are a minority, in the tech consumer market..

I i were MS CEO i would have created a branch from XP and advanced in two lines of OS.. win 7 family and a XP family, of a more bare OS with less obnoxious things and that could bootup fast with a minimal UI..

I dont know what happen with tech companies down the road, that with time they forgot this minimalism, this zen way of doing technology that probably was the thing that make them sucesfull when they were tiny and irrelevant..

I think, thats one of the secrets that have maded Steve Jobs so sucesfull in the things he were doing..

So if we think well about why people stick with XP, its not just about the OS they got now.. but because of every "evolutionary" step in new OS's nothing really appeal to the real life user (not us, tech people and power users)..

Sometimes even the "new new" sometimes its a step behind, in terms of what the OS really offer.. (compare what you got with XP for instance versus ChromeOS)

If you're looking for a minimalist system, you should totally look into Linux after XP. It's not that hard to do the basics, and the installers really guide you through everything. If you do a lot of writing, browsing and emailing, Linux is just as easy to use as Windows. More advanced things like, say, file permissions, yeah I cannot say that they're easier, but you had to learn how to use that on Windows as well. That's something people often forget since they're already used to it. Anyway, if you need any help (pre or post install), there is contact info on my profile.

Im writing this post right now in my Linux OS.. actually i created Linux based internet providers in the nineties when i was a teenager, since Linux was just a baby :) (I actually prefer Freebsd, but the billions of dolars invested in Linux drivers standout sometimes and leave me no option)

Actually i dont touch a XP for years.. i was just doing a analisys.. sometimes we need to put the things we love or hate aside, to look through the eyes of others..

Most people here at HN are creating things for other people to use, so its good to understand good and bad points even if its not the tech-fashion of the day, are closed and come from a company with dubious practices like Microsoft..

When compared with Linux, XP look definitely bad and old.. but the post was more about people updating the old with the new, when the new was also windows.. so sorry for provocating such a misunderstanding.. i deserve it :)

Anyway, thank you for your support and friendly help! i hope with this good attitude of yours you can convert more people to the open source world, and make somebody free even when they dont know about it.. thanks!

(Bonus: Im creating a crazy sort of "OS" based on Linux(+ Chrome) right now.. and that was just to emphasize how i love it :)

Oh a Linux/FOSS user already, nice!

> i hope with this good attitude of yours you can convert more people to the open source world

I too hope I can convert people to FOSS over time, the issue is that things still need to work. Things that work, win. If people think iOS works better, they'll just use it. Still, as a coder I can contribute to the alternatives and I'm surely planning on doing so.

Good luck writing that OS you mentioned! Be sure to post it on HN :)

Except Vista (and consequently 7) did massive reworkings of things that were fundamentally broken or obsolete in XP.

Things as they were in XP are not worth keeping or branching as it is an old outdated OS and fixing it would basically produce Win 7 (or even Vista).

> Because it is a very old OS that lacks new features, stability and security improvements.

It doesn't lack anything I use it for.

Not sure if it has changed but when I was using XP, chrome and firefox were still using the SSL and TLS stacks from the OS, which meant no support for SNI. Most webpages would fail to connect at this point. Also BSOD once a month was common, not sure if it had anything to with me running Visualization softwares regularly. However, with Windows 7 I have seen maybe one BSOD crash in the past half a decade.

Fine, you have a problem. But XP lacks nothing for what I use it for.

Also, I don't think most sites are using SNI.

Of course they aren't, they can't, because way too many people still use XP (and a couple of other obsolete OSs, like Android 2.X).

As far as I know, Firefox has never used SChannel (the Windows native implementation of TLS); it has always used Mozilla's own implementation, NSS. And Chrome has used NSS for a while as well. So SNI support shouldn't be a problem for Firefox or Chrome under XP.

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