XP went RTM in August 2001, meaning in 8 months it will be 10 years old. Granted, XP today is significantly different compared how it was in ’01 (as in three service packs, introduction of WGA, changeover/makeover of wireless setup, etc.), but how it looks and acts hasn’t changed.
My desktop runs Windows 7 and has been since the OS was in open beta. My netbook on the other hand runs XP, although it has gone through its fair share of OSes itself. At first it was XP, then Win7 beta, then a very brief stint with Linux which I dumped because the touchpad wouldn’t work properly at all with it, then back to XP.
These days when I use XP on my netbook, I’m no longer annoyed with it as I once was. In fact, I actually get feelings of nostalgia when using this dinosaur-era OS. There is no other software I use that’s almost a decade old. Everything else from the browser to instant messaging to office suite and so on are all modern.
I officially classify XP as a retro operating system; it’s really old and quirky but in an endearing way. This is the same OS that was introduced to market back at the time Intel’s Pentium 4, AMD’s Athlon XP and NVIDIA’s GeForce 3 were brand new. This is the same OS that was around years before social networking or YouTube existed. This is the same OS that when new, 40GB was considered a "big" hard drive.
And then there’s you. Yes, you. What was your digital life like 10 years ago? If you use XP, look at that Start button and ask yourself, "What was I using in XP back then, and why?" Were you still on dial-up in ’01? A lot of you were. Was your AIM or ICQ buddy list full of friends you chatted with back then? It probably was. Were you marveled at how cool Outlook Express 6 was and how well it worked? Maybe you were.
When you start thinking of what you were doing in ’01 (like laughing your ass off at trading around an email of an MPEG of Wassup Superfriends), that’s when you realize XP is modern retro computing…
…but don’t go back to using CRTs or ridiculously-sized computer speakers (they used to be huge), that’s a little too retro. 
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I got my first XP computer in October of 2001, where I used my dialup to check my Hotmail account and chat on ICQ. So your article was pretty much right!
I will use XP till I quit playing the games that play on it. If I didn’t have to go through hell to get something old to work on 7 I would use it. I’ve heard the stories. This computer is less than a year old and XP was getting hard to find. All I had was the XP that came with my old VAIO and it couldn’t be used on this one. I found an XP update disk on sale, it had been sitting around awhile for people moving from an older OS to XP. I still had a win 98 serial number card but had lost the disk so I downloaded it just so I could use the XP update disk which won’t let you install without an older windows OS being present. I still use a very old version of ACDSee to view pictures, it doesn’t use much in resources and it doesn’t bother me with questions or telling me I need to update. It says it the year 2000 version.I had forgotten what it was. If it works very good stick with it. Rich is paid to be current in all these things I’d expect nothing different, its his job. After 7 is out a couple of more years I may dual boot it with XP. I still want my games that I have now to play and all I hear is the godawful stories from my fellow players about what they had to do just to get something to play on 7 or vista and then it still doesn’t play well.
I am still using Windows XP in my Core2 Quad system. Works like a charm. Windows 7 will be coming around some time in the near future. I started using XP since November 2001. And yes, I was on dial-up at the time and had a nice list of contacts in ICQ.
I surely agree with you on all counts. I am still useing XP on both computers and will till I end up pushing up daisies. I still say that MS would have been further ahead if they had up-dated xp, fine tuned it some and added a few niceties it would still have been the best and easiest OS in my books. Win7 is way too complicated for the average op and I have heard too many stories about this dog. Many of my older programs won’t run on win7 because they are 16 bit and no good on 64 bit win7.I am a XP keeper and happy to say that way.
I have to chuckle to myself when i read articles such as this. “Dinosaur era…..?” Judging from your comments, I would say you are about 18-20yo and have the attention span of, let’s say 10min…or however long it is between commercials on tv. 10 years is not that old..sorry. May be half of your lifetime at this point. Take a look around you. Most of what you see is more than 10yo. Operating systems…whatever. Does Win 7 do anything special for me that Win98 and XP didn’t do? Nope. But then again, I am not in the business of selling upgrades.
I’m 35 and my first online experience was with MS-DOS and Amiga-based BBSes, thank you very much. A 10-year-old OS is dinosaur-era. Does Win 7 do anything special that Win 98 and XP didn’t do? Yes. It has vastly superior power profile management, supports 4096-byte sector HDDs while your XP is stuck permanently in 512-byte land, fully supports SSD technologies, fully supports 128-bit encryption for shared networking while XP is stuck in 40/56-bit land, and the list goes on and on.
Leave your assumptions at the door next time.