I’ve been building a computer to load my old BBS on for giggles – a Dell E521 running Windows XP.
The E521 is interesting because it’s one of the last machines Dell made with a Windows XP option – so it’s about as powerful a machine as you can run WinXP on – and the restore CD has things like the drivers for the Nvidia chipset included in the OS install, so it can actually see the HDs without resorting to voodoo.
This E521 started life in 2007 as an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ with 2 gigs of 600Mhz DDR2, a 5400 RPM 160G HD, and an Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE video card all running from an anemic proprietary 300 watt PSU. These days it’s an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with 4 gigs of 800Mhz DDR2, raid-0 7200RPM 1TB WD “Black” HDs, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS with a 550 watt modular ATX PSU… That’s more than enough for a DOS-based BBS I think.
I have a 6400+ CPU and an 8800 GTS I could put in the machine to max it out – but the 6400+ is a 125 watt part and I’m not sure the stock E521 cooler can handle it, and the 8800 is a 2-slot card which won’t fit in the case without dremel work…
Anyway, getting back to the point of this post: Windows XP is objectively better than Windows 11.
Kind of a big statement, and I think I need to back that up…
First there’s the UI: WinXP has personality in all of its buttons and bars, and is a bit more “nuts and bolts” than Windows 11’s soulless expanses of flat rectangles and Fisher Price user experience. XP expects you to work with the OS, Win 11 expects you to just paw at the brightly colored boxes to get a treat…
XP is way, WAY lighter than Win11. The machine I have sitting here is a fully patched Dell OEM XP SP3 image – it has 22 processes running and is using about 500megs of ram and zero percent CPU at idle. I’m waiting for the Win11 laptop I’m using to contrast with to finish the weekly .NET security update so I can pull the numbers…
Okay, it’s done (only took ten minutes and a restart…) The laptop I’m using is a fully patched Dell OEM Win11 22H2 image, it has 83 processes running, is using 3.8GB of ram, and 5% CPU at idle.
XP has been finalized and doesn’t suffer from Win11’s “Change for change’s sake”. I have literal muscle memory for doing things in XP’s UI going back like two decades, conversely every time I sit down to use Win11 the last update rearranged things and I have to hunt for what I need before I can perform the function I sat down to do.
XP is a static OS and new apps and features are added as you see fit, and you can remove things you don’t need. Win11 is subject to whatever Microsoft feels like shoehorning into your PC today despite what you might want, and a lot of it – like the Xbox integration – can’t be removed by the end user.
And – just to keep this from being a novel – a ton of effort was put into XP to keep your stuff from being accessed by anyone but you. Win11 is mostly telemetry that tells Microsoft everything you do, see, click on, etc. and stuff like OneDrive will actively try to fool you into storing your data “in the cloud” where good ol Microsoft can digest every byte of it for user modeling.
And that’s why I figure XP is objectively better than Windows 10/11.
Listening to "Heartbeat City" by The Cars