Sweet, maybe I can roll back all the way to windows XP now /s
I actually briefly used an XP machine a few months ago, for the first time in many years. It was weird, it felt like I was revisiting an old childhood home or something. Everything was right where I remembered it, everything worked the way I expected it to.
I kinda want to go back. We never realized how good we had it.
The only thing I miss from XP is the classic lock screen where it had your wallpaper and a login window in the air
I find it weird that people look back fondly on XP. I remember at the time thinking it behaved like crap, had an interface that looked like shit, and was extremely easy to compromise.
I guess Rose colored glasses for some people.....
For me, I was enamored with the simplicity of it. You click Start and the Start menu just appears, without having to spend 10 seconds connecting to the internet to refresh a bunch of tiles that I never wanted in the first place. There wasn't any half-baked "assistant" trying to suggest new spyware for me to install. It didn't try making me sign into a Microsoft account just to open the photo gallery. The only "bloatware" it came preinstalled with was Outlook Express. The whole experience just made the computer feel like a tool to use for a purpose again.
It's funny, because I remember thinking when Vista and subsequent versions of Windows came out, that it was amazing we ever survived with something as primitive as XP. But these days, all I want is to go back to that.
My current environment - and one for many years, is just like you describe. No ads, instant launch (either from a launcher, or just type what I want and it pops up). No spyware, no account, no assistant. I even have a modern file manager that windows STILL hasn't surpassed.
But I remember at the time when XP came out, Windows 2000 already was all those things, Beos was all those things, Macs were all those things.
Without the nasty (and limited) XP colors and theme, the 10 minute exploits, the huge waste of space in all the dialogs, and the beginning of the Pro vs Home licensing, where they started with the bullshit of home has: only 1 processor, no remote desktop, no 64 bit, they even removed windows backup!
You could exploit and gain admin in a Windows XP machine right to the end, it could not be locked down if a user sat at it. Which, I know, if you have access to the machine usually all bets are off, but for a multi user machine it was less than acceptable.
No mitigation method... am I reading this right?
Installl Linux, be done with paying for mediocre spyware
Jokes on them, I'm out of date anyway
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