We continue our annual tradition of looking back at Microsoft's wins, fails, and WTF moments: its victories, failures, and things that left you shaking your head. There's no other way to say it: Microsoft had a bad 2025.
XP was the first consumer OS with the NT kernel which was far far more reliable than win32 in the previous ones. I remember people bragging that they could leave their computer running and it wouldn’t crash -and that seemed crazy. I used windows 2000 for many years as a stripped down XP, but not many people got it. I think the interface peaked around 95, but the kernel was terribly unreliable.
98* was pure garbage. You could literally bypass the login screen on 98 because it had no real user account and tokens, just profiles for convenience.
Driver support was awful, there was no memory protection so drivers constantly caused bsod. XP was the first time the consumer desktop got the NT foundation, meaning real user/session security, far better stability under load, and way fewer “one program crashed, so the OS is toast” moments.
XP had its problems too, it’s still Windows afterall and Windows was always garbage. But 98 was awful.
I think peak was XP.
Vista was shit. 7 was alright, but not better than XP. 8 was terrible. 10 was worse than 7, but still meh. 11 is dog shit.
XP was when everything went to shit. It was awful and all the enshittification began right there.
XP was the first consumer OS with the NT kernel which was far far more reliable than win32 in the previous ones. I remember people bragging that they could leave their computer running and it wouldn’t crash -and that seemed crazy. I used windows 2000 for many years as a stripped down XP, but not many people got it. I think the interface peaked around 95, but the kernel was terribly unreliable.
My main focus (apart from zero security and horrible multi user) was all the anti consumer additions they put into it.
XP was so bad, that I left it for linux shortly after it came out.
98* was pure garbage. You could literally bypass the login screen on 98 because it had no real user account and tokens, just profiles for convenience. Driver support was awful, there was no memory protection so drivers constantly caused bsod. XP was the first time the consumer desktop got the NT foundation, meaning real user/session security, far better stability under load, and way fewer “one program crashed, so the OS is toast” moments.
XP had its problems too, it’s still Windows afterall and Windows was always garbage. But 98 was awful.
Yes 98 was terrible. 2000 wasn’t so bad.
But XP started the data harvesting, the lying to users, the forced applications, and so much more.
On top of even worse security than 2000 (also nt) had.
I could go on for days how bad it was.