this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Windows 10, the last "sane" Windows. Bruh, this is where the bullshit started.
"last sane windows left"
And the bullshit started a long time before that. I think people were complaining about win95 phoning home to MS.
No XP was where the bullshit started. I quit windows then.
2000 was the last sane (and maybe only) windows.
Why did did it start at XP? I'm too young to remember.
A few things that people seem to have forgotten over the years:
The "Fisher-Price" visual style fiasco. (People claiming XP's UI design choices were too unprofessional)
Extremely unstable on base release, with things only getting better after Service Pack 1.
Activation servers required to install the OS.
The start of Window's Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.
Integration of Windows Update into the OS, which re-enabled Microsoft defaults like Internet Explorer, after patches were complete.
The start of confusing SKUs: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, and Professional x64 Edition which was confusingly a re-badged Server 2003.
I'm sure I am forgetting a lot more. It wasn't all sunshine and daisies like people seem to remember... but it was a lot better than now.
You got these right, and I wrote basically similar things.
But I had to reply because if you remember all of this, you might also remember seeing how long an XP machine could last on the internet before being patched enough.
It was crazy that you HAD to upgrade it offline, because it would be owned before you could even get it patched. At the time we saw 10 to 15 minutes tops before it was infected.
In any case, yes, XP was the start of all the things we hate today. Its interesting how much more push back there was back then: anti consumer advocates, government intervention, class action lawsuits, even the EU got their own version because they got involved.
Now everything is even worse, and only the consumers seem to be the ones complaining.
Wow, yeah I completely forgot that we used to connect directly to the internet. No gateway to shield us.
I used to get OS alert popup windows from random people connecting to the local Messenger Service with all sorts of scams.
XP ruled idk what they're on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO. A new UI people didnt want or like forced down your throat. They started their new hideous and confusing design language, which led to the truly abhorrent Windows 10 half-baked replacement for the control panel. Then the ads. Spyware baked in. Vibe coded start menu that takes 300ms to open. Sigh.
Yeah XP was great. I would even say Windows 7 was the pinnacle. The best modern Windows before it started to enshittify.
I like how everyone glosses over Windows ME existing
Most of the thread just makes me feel old..
WindowsME was what made me switch to Linux.. Sure there has been a windows box around here and there for gaming mostly.. Now with anything I want to play working on Linux, no need for 11
ME was weird, I never had an issue with ME, and I was dual booting with Ubuntu at the time. Boxes running ME were going up in flames all around me. And yet, I never had problems with it. A surreal time for ME, (pun intended).
Windows ME was the cancer of all windows variants. It was slower and less stable then w98, and it was slower and less stable then XP. I don't know what they were thinking when throwing this abortion-type of os at us.
MELLENIUUUUUUUUUM FEEEEEVVVVEEEERRRR
Better DOS program support?
Windows 8 with its over simplified UI style was to accommodate the fact that corporate users wanted to do RDP over slow connections from laptops made between 2007 and 2012, remember how fucked those things were?
GoToMyPC!
I write about this one a lot, because people have forgotten how bad it was, thinking only today is bad. So let me grab my notes and copy and paste some detials:
They started product activation tied to hardware ID. They created tiers of what you purchased. WGA phoned home to Windows servers, and they ran programs in the background to check on your computer. All of the "validate before you download" started with Windows, IE, Media Player, Defender, and Office here at XP, and expanded every year to today.
They started forcing bundled applications and lied to consumers that they could not be separated (explorer and media player for example). They even offered software that would "remove" these types of packages, but it didn't, and this was after they said only third party tools could do it.
They began the cut-off dates to force hardware upgrades and windows upgrades.
They bundled messenger into XP and tried to get people to use MS Passport accounts. If you didn't use passport, you could not download music from the windows store. This was the beginnings of required windows accounts. They used the passport ID's to tie together users and specific hardware.
They used registration screens to trick users into thinking they had to have a passport just to access the internet. An online privacy organization got involved when they realized just how much data Microsoft was collecting.
MSN explorer was pushed into the start menu, and began microsofts efforts of getting people over to MSN to see ads. There was even a time it would do pop up ads for microsoft dial up, msn messenger, and premium subscription services.
Then there is Active X, tied to Internet Explorer. The EU antitrust investigation was on exactly this: was IE + Active X used specifically to keep people hostage in IE.
Telemetry began here as well. Product Keys, Hardware Fingerprint, IP address, Bios info, applications installed, usage patterns and configuration. You could stop this in group policies, but who was looking at those in the consumer space? Several class action lawsuits were filed and Microsoft themselves called their daily harvest of data "personally identifiable information".
tldr; Microsoft began the tactics of telemetry, lock in, restriction of features based on software tied to hardware, and creating a account to use all the features of your computer back in the Win XP days.
Probably they hate XP because it introduced Windows Activation Services for the first time.
That said, XP did suck. Windows 7 and Windows 2000 were the best editions of Windows IMHO.
Vista was OK, once it had its bugs worked out with UAC. XP had tons of security problems. Windows 8 actively hated people who had keyboards and mice for some reason. Windows 10 was shoved full of telemetry, which Windows 11 has taken to the max, plus added AI slop.
I mean Windows ME was shit, but XP and 7 were great. Everything after 7 tho has been shit.
XP was complete garbage for many reasons. Security being the number one. Multi-user being number two (or lack thereof). And boy did it look nasty. I think you have nostalgia.
But my main point is microsoft began everything that people hate about it today in XP. People seem to have forgotten all push back there was at the time.
The only thing I miss about XP was that if it was at a hotel or internet cafe, no matter what they did, you could be admin in about 10 minutes or less. Which was always handy to have.
Eh, this was initially true about XP. By the time SP3 came out, XP was honestly probably the most stable Windows version MS has ever produced.
That would likely be 10. The mandate in 2017 to break up services and require that no one thing could bring down windows made a big difference. Doing this required using more memory, which is one of the reasons it hadnt been done before.
I think you are still being nostalgic about XP! Even after SP3, we called a USB device plug and pray. There were drivers that could take down the whole system. Huge security flaws that never were resolved. A simple palm pilot plugged in would cause a BSOD fairly often. I seem to remember microsoft themselves saying that it could never be stable, the architecture would never be able to be successfully patched.
That's fair. You're probably right. So, what makes Windows 10 the magnum opus?