It’s sort of funny to watch Windows users groveling like dogs for Windows XP, an OS so awful it made me feel like some programmers and UI designers had just taken a dump on Windows 2000 and rereleased it. This sort of silliness makes me glad that I haven’t used Windows as a primary OS in a long, long time.

What makes it “so awful” in your opinion?

Yeah I don’t quite get that. I am a Mac user but I had to set up a PC for my wife. It had XP on it. It was actually much easier than I remember, the last time I had run a PC was a Dell 386. Back then I remember having to specify an interrupt for the audio card I installed, it was a total pain. XP was actually plug and play so I didn’t think it was that bad.

pbc

You have nothing at stake James, so it’s easy for you sit back and scoff at someone else’s misfortune. No doubt you would whimper like a lost puppy if your favorite OS were headed for extinction.

XP may not be great, but what scares me is Vista. MS not selling XP doesn’t mean you can’t use it any more. Besides, Windows 7 was moved up, so everyone can take a deep breath and pass Vista by.

I finally bit the bullet and started using Vista when I bought a new machine recently. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised, but I’m aware that the ’pleasantly’ part of that experience is in large part due to the staggeringly powerful nature of the hardware: this is not an operating system that I would want to be using on a slower machine. But on the whole, I like it, and see many features that I had long wanted in XP (including an ’Install’ option in the right-click context menu for font files, and the ability to overwrite an existing font without first uninstalling the old version, which is like gold for font testing).