Less funny when you realize it’s mostly banks, government agencies, and militaries still using it.
I’d say more likely it’s labs, hospitals, and other scientific stuff where you have to deal with old instruments cause lack of money. I’m fairly certain the military uses some other OS, I believe NATO uses Solaris for example.
“Windows for Submarines”
It’s XP for Vanguard subs. I really hope none of them provide any telemetry for these stats though.
doubt they’re connected to the internet. In fact I’d wager 99% of shit running windows XP is not connected to the internet (and shouldn’t be)
As a former banker I can tell you that most ATMs run Windows NT 4.0.
However since the network is completely clamped down and the OS boots via network as well (no hard drives in ATMs), they are pretty secure.
I’ve also indeed seen some Windows XP terminals in use just lately - one in fact in a hospital my current company collaborates with - but it’s isolated and used to run some sequencer that was never ported to a 64 bit architecture, and apparently doesn’t run in compatibility mode either.
Yeah seems about right.
In my lab we have a spectrometer and an HPLC with computers that use windows XP.
Tho I noticed the HPLC one is connected to the internet, gonna have to ask them of that’s necessary
The current company that owns the old model installed in your hospital and sells the new version, bought the company that bought the company that made the version you have and can’t update the firmware and code to work on a modern OS because all knowledgeable staff were lost in the buyouts.
The best they can do is sell you the new version that does the same thing your current working version does for $500,000.
Maybe they even have a new ecosystem that they want you to move to, because they don’t make support/subscription revenue with the current stand alone server that moves the image or telemetry results from the machine to the viewing workstations and records database.
If the U.S. military is anything like it was in the 90s, they may very well still be using Windows XP for all kinds of things. My mother-in-law ran an army reserve center through the late 90s and they were using DOS machines well into the Windows era because the army wouldn’t update their computers.
I highly doubt it. I work for a large bank, and it’s all W10/11 due to the need for continuous security patches/currency updates. Large banks don’t mess around with EOL software that has a risk of vulnerabilities
Mainstream support ended 15 years ago. Extended security support ended 10 years ago. The last version to have any kind of update at all was their embedded OS version for things like cash registers, with the last security update 5 years ago.
So it’s wildly insecure against any new attacks targeting an OS that’s largely used by major corporations, governments, and medical facilities that are juicy targets for theft and ransomware attacks.
There is a service called 0patch that offers live microcode updates for XP. They’ve even won bounties for a few things they caught before Microsoft.
I pay about $30 a year to live micropatch my WIn7 gaming partition and have had no issues despite also being a bit less than diligent when it comes to digital buccaneering on that machine.
It’s moreso that they have some abandonware that only works on windows XP.
Windows XP itself is abandonware and you shouldn’t use it in any other case, just use Linux if you don’t like newer windows. You certainly aren’t doing any photoshopping on XP nowadays so that’s no concern.
After XP, Windows focused on adding crap to their aid that use unnecessary resources for crap things. I remember the Aqua look on Vista that sucked the life out of computers. Let’s not talk about Windows Me. Then 8 was a weird interface that no one liked and also not compatible with older machines. So XP is the most stable Windows os that can run on older devices.
XP still had the designed-by-engineers vibe. Since then, Microsoft got completely taken over by dipshits with marketing MBAs.
They now code Windows to impress executives and shareholders with how much they can harvest data and manipulate customers into using their stupid Store and so on. They stopped caring about the experiences of power users, or even casual users.
They don’t want the OS to work for us. They want us to work for them.
Very well said.
Do you have any suggestions for people wanting to go back to an XP feeling?
A particular distro of Linux, etc.?
I second the recommendation of giving Linux Mint a shot. I didn’t use XP extensively but Mint is low hassle and gets out of your way.
I’m not sure it has quite the same feel, but closest I can think of that is also approachable coming from Windows. Obviously a lot of other distros also satisfy the “built by engineers” vibe.
I have a lot of respect for Linux and use it here and there, but I am by no means an expert on it. The best thing I’ve done with it so far is running a Pi Hole at home.
Unfortunately, my job involves using MS Windows. A lot. After I retire…soonish…I hope to take some time and learn Linux better.
For my day-to-day Windows misery, I find that ShutUp10 does a great job of toggling off the bullshit you don’t want running. And it’s easy to toggle things back on if you ever need to. It’s a free program you can download and run. I send them a little money every year out of gratitude, but donations are completely optional.
Some FUD mongers will tell you that ShutUp10 ‘breaks’ Windows. That’s simply not true. It puts all the Windows settings you can change yourself in one easy-to-find place. Things that are normally scattered all over the UX and the registry.
While you could mess some things up using it if you’re not careful, it’s very good about color coding and letting you know which toggles are best to turn off, which ones are a little questionable, and which ones you should leave turned on (unless you know what you’re doing and can take the risk). I have used it for years now, on multiple PCs, with zero problems. It doesn’t make Windows 10/11 GOOD but it makes them less horrible.
Mint is the usual recommendation for transitioning from windows to Linux.
Though enshittification was coined, I think, with online services in mind, this is a perfect example of the process as it applies to an OS.
To be fair, vista and 7 had a lot of QOL improvements too.
I dont see the point of 10+ though, they pretty much just added fluff.
WinME was that OS I ripped off a brand new laptop and replaced with 98SE so it would function correctly. When it crashes and hangs right out of the box…
I guinely hate windows as a product. But man XP was a banger for it’s time
As usual I think that sentiment was retroactive, certainly once Vista came out. At launch, people hated the Fisher-Price look of the Luna default UI. Like, a lot. The switch to the NT based kernel for the home version of Windows also caused a shitton of people’s hardware and peripherals not to work anymore because they needed new drivers and the manufacturers of said gadgets – if they were still in business – could not be arsed. Some of this could be alleviated by bullying that hardware’s Windows 2000 drivers into working with XP. Some of it could not.
No. It was a crash test dummy for windows 7.
It was a beta that wasn’t stable.
it was as stable as windows 11, but the uac system and other security chnages broke a lot of apps, including some system services. As soon as the apps adapted it became pretty decent.
About the performance, win7 isn’t lighter than vista, vista just came out too early
XP’s stability was a wonder at the time. Not many people remember how unstable Windows 2000, ME, and ALL the predecessors were.
Win98 meant rebooting a minimum of four times a day.
Windows has its ups.
The only problem people should have with it is that it’s on 70% of ALL desktops which is about half a billion too many.
A fair competition should be there. Linux, Mac and Windows should have around 33% market share in an ideal world.
You may count whatever Google is doing or Samsung/Huawei can do as separate in a dream world.
A lot of public infrastructure in the US (powerplants, waste management, etc.) runs off XP or older.
i have several clients with xp systems (or even older), still, mostly for CNC applications, bulk trailer and tanker loaders, and similar. i keep recommending upgrading the systems, they keep balking at the high prices from their vendors.
That seems to be the same decision our company has made on some stuff. In a way the old licensing model really hurt some businesses. They got so used to spending once and holding onto stuff for so long they basically cut the budget for maintaining and upgrading the same systems. Now it’s all considered profit and there’s no way will they let that money be purposed for something that, in their eyes, still works.
Not as prevalent these days, but a lot of EMR/EHR was built on XP. Some of those companies went out of business and the clinics using the software never upgraded because they couldn’t get the data out into another system.
Newest versions of windows 11 make it incredibly hard to find the screen that shows all your network adapters. It is now easier to use device manager to disable and reenable an adapter.
How do I know? Because all the shit tier screens and tools that offer to help you with a network issue didn’t work. ONLY reenabling the NIC did.
Had to do it on my whole network
Learn the ways of the run prompt: ncpa.cpl launches you right to the classic network adapter control panel screen. I have to get in there so often that I’ve taught myself plenty of those little shortcuts because MS can’t leave shit where it was.
…And it all has to be there for legacy compatibility, because some Fortune 500 company somewhere has some rickety piece of shit in-house “enterprise” software that relies on some obscure aspect or another of a past Windows version.
I am sort of partial to those rickity old systems that force them to keep legacy software compatibility.
I can still load up and use a program that was written 20 years ago for windows XP.
It also gives third parties like classic shell or startallback the ability to restore all the functionality that the newest start menu disaster tries to push.
IT person here: this is absolutely correct. I know of two buildings in a ridiculously expensive zip code known for international trade that their entire HVAC system is run by a grey case XP box that MUST always have internet connection.
It was considered a cost saving method at the time as opposed to real building services control panels and the company that wrote and sold the software to the local companies went out of business in 2001. There are more businesses in this position just these are the only two I’ve personally been called to service.
In both cases neither machine had been allowed to reboot for more than a decade because of the legitimate fear that the hard drive bearings would fail if they were allowed to spin down.
And neither were interested in replacing it
Why don’t you just use control panel?
I never use the windows settings menu unless I absolutely have to because, like you insinuated, it’s really not that great.
Control panel on the other hand is still there and will get you exactly where you need much quicker.
It’s definitely looking like a possibility. I do my work on Linux machines but only use win for games. If I can play my main community games it might be time to make the switch for good
You can also just search “network” and the screen they want is either the first or second result. I rarely ever go into any kinds of settings menus anymore, i just search on the start menu.
Why are the settings for a single device spread across multiple sections of the OS though?
Did you use cmd with elevated admin privileges? Try right click cmd and run as admin if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Windoze stopped running cmd with elevated privileges sometime around Win7. From a security perspective it makes a lot of sense to do that as default, even though it can be a bit of a pain for home users that expect to have admin for everything they do.
Kind of feel like Windows 11 is trying to appeal most to people who only use Windows for stuff like Outlook and Excel.
If your job requires any niche or specialized software. Or if you need your Windows system for managing networks and stuff like that, you’re probably better off sticking with older windows or jumping to Linux.
Obviously it’s not as easy as just switching to Linux, especially for larger organizations etc. But it gets easier with every new version of Ubuntu, Fedora etc.
