That's why XP was/is a hacker's wet dream. Piss poor 64bit kernel, plug-and-play malware, network share worms, and a whole cornucopia of shenanigans. Why are people so nostalgic for this OS? Only reason why it remained "mainstream" for so long was because companies deemed it unnecessary to pay to upgrade. Because of this numerous government offices and hospitals were compromised across the globe.
Does a poor 64 bit offering change much here? The lack of such a thing certainly sucked for a lot of what I wanted, especially with their reluctance to use PAE, but the path for the malware pusher was not really changed any.
Equally is network share driven fun and games unique to XP? I saw it on plenty of other things.
Anyway it probably was unnecessary -- requirements for most things stagnated such that my core2 machine I built back in 2007 continued to run a browser, an office program, a media player and otherwise remain a functional machine, probably would been to this day if it had not be run into the ground before then, and indeed I have still have a few such machines in service. That would be almost unthinkable in the years prior.
Said browser also started to be the frontend to more and more programs and functions said businesses needed, and today it is arguably a brave choice as a software dev to make a client side program rather than a web frontend.
Some of said browser stuff was unfortunately tied to older browser standards (be it activex or general rendering anomalies) which played into desire to push upgrades to a future date. Actually I might even place more blame on the need for legacy rendering tech than most other things.
At the same time Vista was either sluggish on lower end hardware (to say nothing of the "vista capable" debacle) or wanted something serious to run which did not help matters.
In turn many newer versions added things to make life theoretically easier for some, but often got in the way of those that actually fixed things and made it all work.
During the same period I had learned to use nlite to mod isos from the start, got a process going on post install (these days even easier thanks to
https://ninite.com/ ) and generally learned the programs and tweaks necessary to make it really sing. These days I can just about do it for 7 as well but not quite to the same extent.
Stock XP, even SP3. Not very fun.
XP as bastardised by FAST6191. Lean, fast and capable of doing all the common tasks and more besides.
