Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs.

Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.

Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.

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steve1977 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.

I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.

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rbanffy 5 days ago | parent [-]

Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu.

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lproven 5 days ago | parent [-]

I decided the same, but for myself.

I liked Windows 2000.

XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X.

10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.

	▲	rbanffy 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed. From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.

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BirAdam 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network.

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BeFlatXIII 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

7 was basically a Vista service pack but after the hardware vendors had time to cure some cerebral rectitis and give proper hardware.