Lee Ferree

To be fair, those who know me, know I prefer Linux to Windows in almost every instance. But I’ll save that for another post. I will admit, Microsoft has done a good job with Vista SP2, as it cleans up a lot of the major bugs in the OS, and Windows 7 is certainly a major improvement to its predecessor. With that said, I’m not going to sit here and bash Windows Vista and Windows 7, but rather, tell you what works for me personally in Windows XP and why I like it so much.

Lack of DRM (Digital Rights Management): The first thing I do once I’ve bought a new Music CD or DVD is rip its contents to my hard drive. I stream all my media to my computers, TVs and various devices via my home network. This way, I have an untouched backup, should my drives and data backups fail. It’s also very convienient to go thru a thumbnailed list of my media vs flipping thru a stack of discs. I can also use my own 3rd-party audio/video codecs without any hassle, allowing for optimized playback. DRM, which is found in current versions of Windows, makes these tasks difficult, as it assumes anyone “ripping” media content, is doing it for illegitimate purposes. As I refrain from “bashing”, I’ll simply say, this isn’t a workable model for me.

nLite: My friends and I have made thousands of custom XP installation discs. They’ve been tweaked for performance and hacked to include commonly used utilities and features, that you would otherwise have to install later. nLite allows you to add all the latest Windows updates, so there’s no more installing Windows, then waiting hours-on-end to download all those updates.

It just works!: On October 25, 2009, Windows XP retail versions will be 8 years old. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure that’s the longest lifespan between a Windows release. There’s been 3 major Service Packs released for XP, and while that’s not the record, the OS has clearly become very stable and mature during this time.

Security: While Linux, Mac OS, Vista/7 all have enhanced security measures built-in, with very little effort and knowledge, you can have a super stable and secure XP system running. While this isn’t true of all new operating systems, some of the built-in security measures dramatically reduce system performance, which can and should be replaced with better software to complete the same tasks.

More/most software works with XP: While this probably won’t be true forever, it seems to be the case at the moment. Keep in mind, the jump to Windows 2000/XP took some time as well, but it’s become a standard, at least for the time being. Working for a software company in the past, I can safely tell you, it takes a great deal of effort to get things converted and working properly on new operating systems, chipsets and differing platforms. There are some issues with the more recent games only being able to run on Vista. This mainly has to do with DirectX 10, which is not being offered by Microsoft for Windows XP. In contrast, there are tons of legacy games not yet compatible with Windows Vista and 7. To be fair, Windows XP had the same problem initially.

That pretty much sums it up. There may be a few things I left out, but all-in-all Windows XP is still a very good OS. Let me know what you’re using, what you like and dislike and why.