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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is still on XP after having tried all the newer Windows versions (and forced to use some), I don't think it's worth relearning everything and finding out that a lot of the functionality that you used to rely on is now either completely missing or terribly dumbed-down. All the little irritations add up.

We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as things like Chromebooks have shown, but even for not-so-average users like me who do mostly embedded work with some desktop application stuff, it does what I need without getting in the way.

I'd sooner switch completely to Linux, which I've been working with on my servers, than "upgrade"...

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> I'd sooner switch completely to Linux

I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding.

I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a computer running Windows XP, I always offer and implore the owner (assuming they are not dependent on some software that has no Linux surrogate) to let me throw Lubuntu 14.04 on the thing. I do it for free, and offer up to three hours of tutoring also for free, because Windows XP is literally cancer. Its a tumor you don't know is there until it goes malignant and kills you by having some unpublished never to be patched exploit used to wreck your PC and steal all your personal information or lock you out. Its more unsafe than unprotected sex in a sleazy strip club.

Feature wise, Lubuntu matches pretty much perfectly, and even people still using XP often have Android phones, so the Lubuntu software center makes a lot more sense to people than have Play Store experience. Its not like anyone using these computers needs performance out of them - if they were trying to run a business or do anything intensive enough to require proprietary Windows only software they would have certainly updated the machine once in the last decade. They almost always are exclusively doing word processing and email, often not even web browsing because these are systems stuck with IE8 at best. And Lubutu does both of those things much better than XP ever did with auto-updating Firefox / Libreoffice and one click system upgrades every two years for LTS releases.

So yeah, switch to Linux, please. Your OS is hugely insecure and nobody is ever going to fix it.

How often do you see XP SP2 vs SP3?

Windows updater did a good job automatically updating SP2 to 3. I've found a few SP2 (and a few SP1) machines that had Windows Updater disabled... but the other thing is that hardware hit a sort of plateau point around the Athlon 64 x2 era where the hardware got "fast enough" to make you not want to throw the monitor out the window at how slow it is. Not application load time slow, mouse lag, app freezing and churning and graphical glitches from paging on too little memory.

That and mechanical hard drives saw a lot of longevity revolutions in the early 2000s. Last generation IDE and any SATA disk in my experience seem to handle many, many more power on cycles than older models. This was even before SMART, so I can't even test some of these disks for how error prone they are.

I'd say 95% of XP machines I've touched are SP3, and I've dealt with over a hundred of em. Even a few small businesses I've pressured to switch off XP were at least running SP3. IE6 is a much more prevalent issue on those older machines, where end users would ignore the popups and prompts from home pages and websites about how their browser is literally satan.

That's funny, I think the rise of SNI for https everywhere will be the final nail for most XP/IE-old users... At this point even IE9 is going away relatively quickly.

I agree about performance.. a fast machine around when the Core-2's came out is still pretty decent today with sufficient ram, which a lot of them even had.

Stupid users manage to infect themselves no matter what OS they're running. If you do IT you will see the worst of it.

XP is only "insecure" if you're the kind of person who would download and run random executables without any real thought, or use IE on default settings.

The "treat the user like an idiot" "security" of newer Windows is precisely why I'm still using XP. I don't need a nanny of an OS. I rarely need to install new software anyway.

In fact I'd say that malware is increasingly going to target features found only in newer OSs... when the WMF exploit (remember that?) was going around, I was still using 98SE, which was completely unaffected by the exploit code since it used NT-specific features and attackers were targeting those OSs at the time. A lot of the rootkit-y stuff won't even run on 9x because of that.

UAC can be set to always automatically elevate without any prompt even in Win10 (disabling UAC completely would kill Metro apps). I prefer the "Always Prompt" configuration myself and it is unfortunate it was ignored when Win8's task manager was designed for example. Win9x was not affected by the WMF SetAbortProc escape problem at all unless you are printing (I think the escapes were simply ignored). Linux is better on older machines because it gets security updates and has ASLR and other exploit mitigations etc (though not all are useful without NX) and it happened to be free.

Windows XP is technology from 2001. A lot has changed in the last 14 years.

...and a lot also hasn't.

What has changed, has not all been for the better.

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

examples?

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

(There's no article I can find for Windows 10 yet.)

What are the most important ones?

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