Goodbye old friend! You'll be missed...

[ClassicGMR]

I did my last update of Windows XP and GameEx on my NESputer today. Then I took out the wireless card and put the card into storage.

It was really kind of sad and a small bit depressing. After Windows ME passed through my life** Windows XP was fantastic! It's been a tried and true friend since 2002 for all of my family. Every system I built had it. I knew almost every trick to coax it to work even when it didn't want to. I knew where EVERYTHING was.

Yes... Windows 7 is far superior and I really like it. It has less holes and more power than XP. I just can't shake the feeling that one of my best friends has passed away.

Windows XP - you will be missed.

** Side note: I think I had a defective install of Windows ME ... it worked EVERY time. I may be the only person in the universe that has ever uttered that sentence!

[Draco1962]

Funny you should mention it. I had an almost flawless experience with ME while others suffered. Yeah, my experience with XP was longer than my marriage. I proposed to my wife via XP (using the text screensaver) on the PC I built for her.

[DazzleHP]

I'm glad someone said something! XP Pro was the longest relationship i've had in my life. I'll miss her too. Gotta say i'm diggin this W7 floozie though

[Draco1962]

She is a nimble minx to say the least!

[Tempest]

I had (Past tense) XP running on my business computer. I woke up this morning to BSOD. Coincidence? I think not.

It's not a big deal, I made an image when I built the machine, and my company file is backed up to my server. It's time to upgrade to Win7.

[davidj1987]

I had the worse luck in the world with Windows ME. Yuck. The less said the better! Never had any issues at all with XP but can't say that I miss it, been almost three years since I last used it but it lasted one hell of a long time. I remember when it FIRST came out and I was 14 years old everyone was talking mess about it and hating on it at first but six months later it really took off. I thought Windows 7 was the perfect evolution (Vista was horrible).

[Draco1962]

While Vista was problematic due to an over-reaching UAC and lack of drivers, I never really had a problem with it either. Win 7 and 8 are really extensions of the Vista core.

[hansolo77]

I missed XP when I upgraded to Vista. XP was solid then, and hardly (if ever) crashed on me. Vista was buggy and still infantile. Once I got some solid Vista compatible drivers for my hardware it got better. I really only used Vista for it's Media Center experience. My 2nd computer that I used for gaming was still XP. Then 7 came around, and all my app developers for Media Center were demanding the latest OS. So I upgraded to 7. 7 was a whole new ball game. It's never crashed one me once, and I love it to death. The fire we had killed my XP machine so now the 7 machine is all I have left. Now there's 8. 8 seems to me like an unnecessary OS, built strictly for the company to make more money. I can see the advantages to having the touchscreen interface, but you can build an OS replacement for Windows 7 if you need that functionality. I'm sure there's a lot of improvements "under the hood" but as far as the requirement for a new OS? I'm happy with 7, like I was with XP. If the next OS brings something major to the table, I might upgrade then. But I'm sick of upgrading to a new OS every couple of years to stay current. My system isn't new (in fact, the newest hardware I have is some RAM that is 3 years old), so why should I keep having to get a new OS for it?

[stigzler]

Damn - the passage of time...

Windows 95 was me first 'steady' - at Uni. Then parted ways whilst I worked in a fields very anti-IT and poorly resourced. Home PCs cost about £1,498,435.67p at that point.

Then fast forward to 2002. Bought my first home PC - foolishly a Time PC from a full page ad in Computer Active (or summat like that) - it cost £1000!! Paid in monthlies! It came with ... XP!!! Albeit "Kwik Save, no frills, added saturated fat" Home edition.

Great OS, but soon had to upgrade to Pro due to limitations of home.

Been surfing on it ever since. Skipped Vista (thank god), got Windows 7 on a laptop (pre-installed) - nice and solid, but took some 'adjustment' to the new layout/operation.

Most recently, gone to Windows 8 - mainly because of the £50 upgrade offer from XP that was floating about at launch. Gotta say - haven't looked back - it's solid.

But yes, cheers XP - time to buy the cruise and have a peanut.

[tthurman]

I was an early adopter of XP, and still had many of my F@H rigs running it until last week.

MS ran a big campaign to promote it. I still recall so many being relectant to move off of 2000, or 98SE in some cases.

Anyone remember these? The "Go Pro" baseball theme came in a big box, complete with some "Big League Chew".

I guess I finally pitched the box that the ball and Eddy Trustman arrived in, many years after their arrival. Who thiks up this stuff?

[tthurman]

.....and the XP lava lamp!

I believe this was the first promo they ran, or was it the other way around? Either way, the lamp still gets comments when it's on in my office, which is mostly on rainy days.

[tthurman]

Great post BTW!

[Tom Speirs]

Now.. Time to write that malware...

Good post.

[Itchigo]

I never knew a time before xp! Even though I'm 47, I never used a computer until late 2008. I literally taught myself windows through xp and Google. I never used one because I thought they were evil and taking over our lives. Glad to see I was wrong.....

I do have a friend however, who goes back to: Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 in 1968. He's retired from NASA.

[Draco1962]

I never knew a time before xp! Even though I'm 47, I never used a computer until late 2008. I literally taught myself windows through xp and Google. I never used one because I thought they were evil and taking over our lives. Glad to see I was wrong.....

I do have a friend however, who goes back to: Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 in 1968. He's retired from NASA.

He's got me beat. I cut my teeth on the Atari 800XL and SpartaDOS, then made the leap to a 386DX running Windows 3.1 / MS-DOS DOS 5.0. I ran the majority of my programs through DOS until Windows 3.11 came out. which was great after I upgraded to a 486DX4 running a whopping 8MB of RAM.

[Adultery]

My first computer was a TRS-80. I absolutely adored that thing until I got a C64.

[ClassicGMR]

I started with a TI 994/a. Lovely piece of history! My father probably spent $5000 on that thing. He had the PEB, TI monitor, speech, 4 disk drives, pinter, modem... wow. I used to look forward to the magazines that would come in the mail with new BASIC programs to type in and play with!

My first "current" system was in 1992 or 1993. I applied for a Radio Shack credit card and purchased a $1200 386sx/33 Tandy setup with DOS 5/Windows 3.1 and a CD-ROM! Stylin'! It cost me an extra $100 to add the 512k video RAM necessary to play 7th Guest.

Man I miss Jetfighter II. They never fixed it so it could run on a DX machine... I haven't been able to play it since my 386. Even DOSBox can't get the emulation right even though they say it's playable on 0.73.

Oh... and to stay on topic... I miss XP! Yeah that's it!

EDIT: Went searching for a few of the books I used to have and I can't believe I found my favorite! I barely remembered the cover much less the title or author but here it is! More Basic Computer Games by David H. Ahl. How many of you had this book?

[tthurman]

My first computer was a TRS-80. I absolutely adored that thing until I got a C64.

TRS-80 coco here, I remember keying in games in basic language for seemingly days, they digging through it for more days trying to find the typo's!

I had some cool Wico super joysticks too, much better than those crap RS, no centering POS!

We subscribed to a magazine called Rainbow, and what a grand day it was when you could order the magazine, with the accompanying cassette

[hansolo77]

I wish I knew how to do programing. Sure, I did my fair share of BASIC like everybody else (stealing and copying word-for-word into the BASIC file). I really wanted to do my own programming though. The problem with basic was that you had to have each line start with a number so it knew what the order was:

10 whatever20 whatever again30 you get the point

When I was in High School, they made us all buy a Graphic Calculator. Most kids got a TI-82. But they were sold old so my mom bought me a TI-85. It had a little bit more RAM, was capable of doing things a little faster, had some other functions I didn't need, etc. Of course, all anybody did on them was share games. They were all programmed in a BASIC called TI-BASIC. Everybody just copied games amongst each other, but I made my own. After spending days typing out numerous printed copies of games from the TI FTP Site, I soon learned how to do it all myself. I was churning out all kinds of stuff and EVERYBODY wanted a copy! I thought to myself "This is your Future!". I wanted to learn more. Then there was a new kid in school who had a PC-Link Cable and was able to download something called Z-Shell into his calculator. This was a special hacked kernel that would run Assembly language, and gave things like smoother graphics, multiple math functions on screen at the same time, and even sound (via the link cable port). I wanted to learn how to program for that, but I didn't have the cable to transfer my creations to the calculator for "beta testing". So my programming adventures stopped there. I wanted to learn C#, Perl, etc., but never spent any more time on it. A lot of stuff I've been told is written in Visual Basic, which is probably where I should go next. BASIC is BASIC.

Anyway, since we tangent'd off into computer history... I grew up in a household where my dad was a BIG Atari freak. He had 2 Atari 800's (not sure if it was XL, etc). That was where I did all my BASIC learning. Then Dad upgraded to an Atari ST (again, not sure of any XL, etc). Then dad got a hand-me-down 386 PC from a blind guy who needed his house painted. It was his payment for services. At first, all it had was a 5-1/4" Floppy Drive and a 20mb 3-1/2" Hard Drive. Then a few weeks later he got a 3-1/2" Floppy that was in a 5-1/4" Bezel. Then we got a Soundblaster! I installed DOOM on that puppy right away, and even at the smallest window size it CRAWLED! Hehe. Then he got a 2x CD-ROM (read only) drive. This was all still MS-DOS. We didn't get anything with Windows until I found a computer in the dumpster behind a business that went OUT of business. I took it home, cracked it open, "fixed" it, then discovered it was a 486/DX2 with Windows 3.1. Since I found it, it was MIne. But Dad took it upon himself to install a copy of OS/2 on it that the blind guy gave him. I didnt like it, and formated/reinstalled Windows 3.1. Then there was 3.11 (added USB support). I was also given (prior to the 486) a 286 (if you believe it) that a friend of mine found in a dumpster. It didn't work either, but I spent a summer figuring out why and got it running. It had a HUGE (size, not capacity) hard drive in it, and was a POS cash register for McDonalds. I played with the menu for about 10 minutes, ordering a Big Mac and Fries, saying I paid for it with a $5k dollar bill, got my change, and then formated the thing. The monitor was a 4-color CGA, so I didn't do much with it besides put on a bunch of InfoCom's and other Interactive Fiction. I also had an external 9600 baud modem for it that I used to get online with and play MUDs and Chess.com matches. Shortly after all this, the computer industry started booming, cranking out stuff faster and faster. Windows 95 came, then ME, then XP. It's been a short ride getting here. I can't wait to see what's still to come. We'll all look back probably and be like "Windows XP?! Man that's archaic!"

[Tom Speirs]

Wow, you sound young

[tthurman]

Wow, you sound young

I just checked, he is, I'm jealous!

That was one of, if not the best, post I've read here so far.....

[Draco1962]

@Han - ya forgot Win 98 which was kind of the XP of the time, with ME being that bastard version of 98 and 2000 combined - wait, that almost sounds like the Vista debacle after XP.

[tthurman]

Good catch! Personally I skipped 2000 though, and stuck with 98SE until XP launched. I remember 2000 was a real dog for games, but it was before NT went mainstream too. I thought about building a retro 98SE box for some of my old favorites, Battlezone, Pod Racer, etc., but man talk about archaic, I'd forgot how fickle it was. GL-Quake, couldn't tell you how many hours of my life were spent playing that one, but what a game changer that was for gaming!

[Adultery]

You can't get these to work on a modern system? Just curious.

If it were me and that were the case I would just try to build a 98 VM.

[Draco1962]

Have tried Pod Racer and other Lucas Arts titles and they suck in a 98 VM. Pod Racer won't even run. A lot has to do with video drivers and issues with DirectX and 16-bit.

EDIT: I was finally able to run it on Win 8.1 Pro x64 Update with the installer/patch found here. It took a bit of tweaking and the initial load is slow as they note on the site, BUT... it works!