I really enjoyed Win Xp. I should set myself up an XP VM.

Virtualbox is free. All you need is an XP installer CD w/ valid license key.

All ready did it.
It took a little digging to find that old XP disk, but it all went without a hitch.

An hour and a half later, you'll have all your updates installed too then. lol

I didn't think about that.
I tried to manual get updates, but it doesn't seem to want to update anything.

I wish they would just go back to XP and call it good. I really miss that platform. :/

Yeah me too...

I resurrected a Vista PC the other day to set up a secondary desktop.

What a nightmare.

It was crippled beyond usable. Not bad specs either - it was upgraded twice, and supposedly optimized for Vista. Granted, it wasn't touched in 2 years, but I know the previous owner always did maintenance on it. Then it took 4 - 5 stinking hours to update. I defragged, did every sort of possible scan / maintenance there is, but performance only improved by 20% (still unusable).

So I decided to do a clean install. Now with everything re-installed from scratch, it's performing a lot better. However, updates still took 4 -5 hours.

But no way will I use it as a primary OS. All my PC's are dual boot with Linux, which I use primarily. My Dad had a lot of modern PC games before I inherited his computers. Luckily I'm not into modern gaming, only retro, and I don't play too much these days.

Not sure what to make of the Windows 10 update. Definitely won't be upgrading my Windows 7 laptop with it, but there's a Windows 8 computer that I think won't do any harm.

Pitty there's no upgrade to stop Vista from being crap though.

A clean install of Vista, Wow!
It was released worldwide back in January of 07, I'm surprised it didn't take days to update.

Oh, all in all it took almost a week to get everything up and running, more than half of that time was wasted. And there's still a few things I've got to do with it before I can use it safely online.

I've always heard bad rumours about Vista, but didn't believe it until I experienced it myself.

I'v heard the same things too and that's why I bypassed Vista altogether.
I was a die-hard XP user right up until the end. Now I'm running it with Virtualbox alongside Win8.1 and hope to be doing the same thing with WinX.

Good luck with that Vista machine.

GIMP does not like Vista at all.

At least XP is around 1.5 hours. I recently (well a year ago now) helped a friend re-install his Visa Machine since his machine got hosed with Malware and I got tired of thinking I got rid of it all. lol

What a freaking joke. After nearly 9 hours, I got to the point where I told him, he's now on his own. lol

It's been a year; his computer still works. Still, Vista's a joke. IF I wasn't so holier then though, I would have put XP on his computer (not saying legal, but...). lol

Personally, I liked Win7 the best. Even have a Win7 VM but enabling Aero on it really taxes the VM (but l like the eye-candy so kept it enabled; you have to go through hoops and ladders to get Aero to work in Virtualbox I might add, but enjoyed the challenge). Still, even now, I am, at heart, an XP guy. Typing this in my XP VM as I do all my entries everywhere. Yes, I risk keylogger attacks, but that's all I risk since I regularly recover my XP from a gold standard often enough. In Virtualbox, it takes only 3 to 5 seconds (no joke) to do so as opposed to 15 to 30 minutes (or longer) using standard image recovery techniques. I like that.

I liked XP as well. Still have my copy floating about somewhere. It matured to near perfection. I still think the XP movie maker is better than the later versions. The theming quality was just right, not too obsolete looking like 9x and not exaggerated eye candy like Aero. Aero was created during the era when MS was holding pissing contests with Apple over which OS looks more modern and "upmarket". In Vista's case, it sort of backfired because of the resource hog Aero was on the hardware of the time. XP on the other hand was definitely a far more productivity orientated OS. Too bad MS put the knife in XP last year, but I'm honestly surprised they supported it for over a decade. I think the extended XP support had something to do with the rising popularity of netbooks.

Since Vista is still supported for a couple of years, I might as well milk it for all it's worth.

For those still using XP, I recommend installing these 2 Royal themes to bring it a bit more up to date:

http://www.softpedia.com/dyn-postdownload.php/bfc67a1e4c2a2518e802f68b4a42bf20/559c1dae/32e3/3/1

http://www.softpedia.com/dyn-postdownload.php/ce5f3c394b211912c05fa4dc8be32f26/559c1dce/d7a1/0/1

You need to install them to:

C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes

They don't require 3rd party software. They where released a few years ago officially by MS.

Those themes also work with Linux Wine (partially). For wine, you need to install them and then select them from the Wine configuration ---> desktop integration:



With Wine, they won't theme the window borders, just the widgets and buttons, and there are some glitches.