It can't be stopped

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.
- Also that machine only works under very specific circumstances, so you fear changing anything in case your entire protocol breaks and you have to start from scratch.
- "Windows for Submarines"
  It's XP for Vanguard subs. I really hope none of them provide any telemetry for these stats though.
- 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.
- 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.
And hospitals. Don't forget those.
- And ATMs. Lots of ATMs.
- I've seen Citrix used a lot in hospitals to host apps. Xp isn't used any longer since it's not supported.
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
- Yeap, on the workstations. In the atms and cash recyclers etc... got bad news for you....
- Large banks don’t mess around with EOL software that has a risk of vulnerabilities
  Well, more complex modern software has an higher risk of (yet unknown) vulnerabilities.
And medical. Suppliers if CT, MRI and X-Ray gear are notorious for wanting to sell new gear and not providing software updates to work on new operating systems.
Why do you think it’s less funny this way?
- 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.
Because they stick with what works.
- 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.?
- 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.
Don't forget about Windows 7. That boy ripped. Too bad they didn't take the good lessons from it.
- They had QOL but I remember my machines running significantly slower. And that was not worth the extra QOL.
XP was a pretty good running OS with plenty of software and games. I held out till 10 was out for a bit and there were programs I wanted to run that required it.
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...
- Haha. Same here my new computer BSOD’d right out of the box with Me. Freaking HP Pavilion.
ME came before XP

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.
- They should've just used the Silver theme instead of blue luna. Unless it didn't exist on launch.
- I liked XP in its own era, it's not just nostalgia. Although computers and the Internet in general were very exciting to me back then.
- No. It was a crash test dummy for windows 7.
  It was a beta that wasn't stable.
- Vista was the warcrimes of OSes
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.
- Why in the world are you being downvoted for that comment?
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.
- I supported a production line as recently as 2015 that had an industrial paint mixer that still ran on NT4 Workstation
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.
- it was always possible to do... just not at the price they were willing to pay.

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.
- JSYK they are planning to drop .cpl support in a future w11 update. I know it sounds like crazytown to anyone who has worked in IT but here we are.
  They hate control panel now and I cannot figure out for the life of me why.
- How do I give lemmy gold?
- Ooh thanks
- ...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.
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.
- i find the best solution to this problem is to install linux
- 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.
- same
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
In cmd stop working?
- This didn't work, I did try at the time.
- If I wanted to use the terminal, I'd use Linux
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.
- Microsoft terminal and wsl are fantastic. Not a replacement for Linux, but they're great.
Even easier in powershell:
Get-NetAdapter
Disable-NetAdapter
Enable-NetAdapter

its

Monty Python's Flying Circus!
- Welcome to the Ministry of Silly Walks.
To be fair, whomever decided to use an apostrophe to indicate possession AND abbreviation clearly didn’t think through all the possible conflicts before going ahead and making it a thing. Should have made a separate symbol for one of them.
- Yes, thousands of years of established language development is wrong ... not the individual who is unable to learn what millions of others have been able to.
Windows XP outliving two of it is successors.

XP was great but for me 7 was the sweet spot.

That Frutiger Aero aesthetic they had going on there felt so futuristic.
- It still looks good on modern resolutions tbh.
I still use 7 in most of my home VM setups.
I think a lot of it has to do with age. I'm probably younger than the average Lemmy user, and for me Windows 10 is the sweet spot. The older versions just feel outdated. I think it depends on the first version we seriously used and learned on.
- I mean... no shit, dude.

When I was working security for a hospital they wanted to send imagery from an MRI (or maybe CAT, I forget) upstairs to be interpreted without allowing any network traffic to be able to reach the host machine because it was running XP. I asked why, and they told me that in order to replace it the vendor was requiring a $7 million replacement of the whole MRI.

That should be illegal and the vendor held accountable for security incidents happening because of this.
I've worked in hospitals that still run DOS based programs for certain things. It's madness.
Same shit is starting to happen with cars. No way to get the new headunits without replacing the whole car. I know Porsche offers electronic upgrade kits, but I can't think of any others that do.

What worries me more is what eldritch horrors await us in other versions

"Please watch this advertising video that is relevant to what you were discussing with your wife in the other room this morning before your browser can be launched."
- Lmao too true
7
- excuse you sir, windows 7 is still one of winblows highest points far from being horror, eldritch? perhaps, but no horror there

Played the heckin' heck out of Lionhead Studios' Black & White on XP. Good Times.

The Black & White games were legendary. I Wish there were more games of its kind.
- I'd love a VR god game of that caliber.
I forgot all about that game! I loved being benevolent and then smashing everything to pieces.

I don't even know why people use Windows 10 (or 11) other than momentum.

I haven't used Windows for years, but my daughter's new online school required either a Windows 10/11 computer or a Mac and we can't afford even a new decent Windows notebook, let alone a Mac, so we ended up getting a refurbished Thinkpad running Windows 10 from NewEgg.

Windows 10. Is. Annoying. As. Fuck.

We are constantly getting interrupted by unnecessary popups (or were until I took the time to disable everything I could think of, which was a pain in the ass).

After running updates, it made me go through a bunch of screens turning down paying for things. Twice. And those popups still asked me about paying for things. Motherfucker, I already paid $300 for the computer, I'm not paying you shit.

And wow is stuff counterintuitive in how to do it compared to either any Linux GUI I've tried or Mac OS. Just trying to figure out how to get to a File menu is baffling half the time.

I don't blame anyone for using XP over that shit. Let alone Linux or even a Mac.

I don’t even know why people use Windows 10 (or 11) other than momentum.
Security updates. That's it, that's the only reason I recommend anyone unwilling or unable to switch operating systems all together to move to Windows 10.
Just wait until they start putting ads in the file menu and make you sit through a 30 second commercial every time you want to open an application unless you join windows premium + subscription only 15$ a month
- Drink verification can to continue your Windows™ experience
For me I use Win11 for one reason: Auto HDR. Fixes every issue I have with HDR in other OSes cause it just works.
- I can see that, but is it really worth running it as an OS other than for that specific use? Because if not, you can just run it in an emulator or on a partition when you need that.

There's tons of legacy shit still running XP and there probably will be for at least another decade.

Yea I think most ATMs work on XP.

I liked Vista.

There. I said it.

Vista Service Pack 2 was a solid OS, XP actually needed a few service packs to get fully to the place people remember it being great.
Vista was fine, apart from the performance. I had a fairly beefy machine for the time so I hardly noticed, but on lower spec machines it was an absolute dog.
Kinda felt like an unoptimised prerelease version of Windows 7
Just when you think you know a guy...
I didn’t use windows from 1999 through 2008, when I bought a laptop which of course came with Vista. I used it a bit and thought, well, for a wintendo, this isn’t horrible.
Same. I had no issues with Vista at all.
Well I also liked Millennium a lot.

I have a copy, I just need to find an old-ass pc to install it on.

Maybe an ATM.
You can install it on a new-ass PC and it'll be lightning fast!

$20 says there's at least one person out there still running Win3.1 daily.

I know of an older couple running 3.11, wife is a writer and she refuses to use anything other than wordperfect.
No internet, and just a printer.
Every time they call me out to service it they treat me like a long lost grandson with food and the occasional knitted gift so I don't mind despite the fact that just keeping their (no joke) Pentium II (the edge slot version) alive is frankly one of the hardest projects I've ever had in my career. And I've had to service government software...
- Set them up with a VM on a newer machine
.
- More like a critical computer running at the heart of a billion dollar company running software written in a long forgotten language against apis that no longer exist.
- Yeah, I have a w3.1 machine and I play with it regularly, but it really lacks as a daily driver. On the other hand, my w98 machine can do basically everything I need for work, except web browsing. It’s fascinating how little have operating systems progressed in the last 25 years, user-facing wise.
- George RR Martin writes all his books on an old ass computer:
  https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/how-george-r-r-martin-writes-on-an-old-school-dos-computer/
  But you are right, if it was his daily driver we'd have more books out by now...
I know one

these are mostly enterprise systems right? like terminals/pos stuff where the system is responsible for just running the ui?

Possibly. There is an embedded version of XP that's meant to be run on kiosks, control panels, thin clients, and such. Its support was finally ended in 2016, but I'm sure there are still machines around someplace still working that have it baked-in. Probably in ROM in some cases.
- in the early 00s there were a few companies that made building services panels based on embedded XP kiosk partitions, things like HVAC and lighting.
  It has been my genuine hellish curse to have to work on two of them.
More likely to mostly be 3rd world countries

This will be 7 one day

I don't think so, main reason is XP was still heavily backwards compatible to 95, 98, even DOS based software. Many control software for industry only support to XP, because jump to windows 7 was too heavy. If anything supports windows 7, it is really easy to port to windows 10. Main reason is the driver support, because win 7 having new driver architecture.
Windows 10 will be the next "forever stuck" OS, because end of Internet Explorer on it means that there are tens of thousands of industrial software that require IE, and cannot ever be ported to win 11.
- Yup, same reason modern games all get ports but some old ones never will. Everything has the same architecture now so it's easy to port an Xbone game to W10 and the new Xboxes.
Already was, ain't it? I think that it was at 2% or something of Steam users until it wasn't supported as of this year.
- You aren’t wrong, I was more saying that when XP finally dies completely 7 will be the oldest man still standing

armenia

What's up with Armenia and terrible PC's tho? I have honestly fished better equipment from literal trash cans than what's offered in most the PC stores over there. Is there like some ill-concieved embargo on electronics in place?

I've been looking for advice. I've been wondering if it was worthwhile to upgrade from 10 to 11. I heard 11 had ads and even more bloatware, a disgusting UI, and just general worse. But i was wondering if those are fixed/avoidable. I was thinking of upgrading before it gets too late, or idk...

No, they're not going to be fixed or fully avoidable and you want to stay on Windows 10 or just go to Linux.
Windows 10 is genuinely better in every single way and it is incredibly sad.
And also, there is no "too late" as you can always upgrade whenever you want.
- Thank you. Just the news of windows 8 being unsupported got me thinking.
  And i've never touched linux. I might have to take the plunge and learn once win 10 becomes obsolete and unsupported.
Windows 11 is miserable. You are now required to add Microsoft accounts at the OS level. Tons of bloatware, embedded ads in start menu, heavy user tracking. Shitty AI implementation pushed on all apps including notepad. And all of the windows 10+ elements are built in the windows 8 base image so all of the settings are nested on top of the new settings UI, on top of control panel.
- local accounts still work, even on home edition
  ads in the start menu work the same way as they do in windows 10 (pinned tiles that download actual apps from the store, you just need to unpin 'em)
  I still don't have any of the ai stuff, and pretty sure they should be controllable with a simple group policy
Win11's telemetry load is significantly higher than already outrageous win10's to the point I feel it is a legitimate security risk.
Things like passing off your wifi passwords in plaintext to MS servers is really only the tip of the iceberg.
When w10 goes End of Life, I'll be buying 3rd party microcode patching from 0patch.
Screw w11 with every fiber of my being.
It's totally fine to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, it's basically the same thing. Overall it's better in some regards (like better HDR support, direct storage is coming and so on) and a bit worse in others (I do hate the new right click menu). No ads though and barely any difference to Windows 10 as far as I noticed in over a year of using it.
Windows 10 already had all that stuff, telemetry, a link to Candy Crush in the start menu, it's the same shit. Windows 11 didn't get worse in that regard at all.
So just do a fresh installation of Windows 11 (don't upgrade Windows versions, it's a mess in the background) and have fun.
Not from what I can tell. While upgrading will not detrimental from what I've heard (since you can upgrade a local account), there's a lot which I personally don't like about with Windows 11 which will make me want to not upgrade. If you have no intention of moving away from the Windows, it may be best to upgrade while MS is offering it.
Otherwise, if you are willing to take the plunge Linux is the better option if you are looking for an OS which has no ads, no adware bloat, and a UI to your liking. Mint or Zorin are a Good Windows like starting point if you are looking to get started.
- MS is offering it
  Massgravel my friend
- Ive used MS my whole life. So im just stubborn to move to linux. But really i think just have to put in the effort and i'll be happier in the long run.
I just built a desktop for Windows 11, unfortunately I need a Windows desktop in the house even though Debian is my main OS. Last desktop was 13 years old and just wasn't working for my needs anymore. Default 11 install is horribly bloated but I actually like the desktop environment now. Here's some stuff I did:
Customized USB image to bypass Microsoft account with easily found steps if you Google. Used Chris Titus Tech's tool to remove a bunch of shit, install apps, disable telemetry, configure windows update to security only. Used "Reclaim windows" script from github and customized for my purposes. After that I confirmed if all the shit was gone and did a remove-appxpackage for anything left, like widgets etc.
So I have a bare bones install, no Microsoft account, no Microsoft store, no "apps," no default associations to builtin tools, and a bunch of common foss utilities and all my favorite windows-dependent apps working. Can't believe it took the amount of effort it did but I like it now, given what my expectations were it definitely exceeded them.
- I think with that much effort, ill just learn linux...
i think it's better.
the only downside is minor visual bugs with the taskbar, and the edge causing issues if uninstalled (may cause update loop or permanently break all pdf files unless you set another handler and previewer beforehand)
explorer got little bit slow ever since the tabs got added but it's definitely not unusable, and I'd rather take 1 second hit to the loading time than an explorer without tabs
Install Windows 11 using UK English and you're basically dodging 99% of the complaints people have, I support 5 computers with W11, no issues with any of them and no adverts bothering me.

Now go donate to reactOS and fund your own rescue.

Why are the percentages in decimals, like this - "0.64%"?
And why does the total add up to 1.02%?

Because you are only seeing part of the chart.
The same reason there are 98 characters in your message.
edit.. Incase you were serious.. how else would you represent less than 1%?