Windows XP's Unjustified Nostalgia
The first computer my family owned was a heavy Fujitsu tower built in 2001 that came pre-installed with the operating system that many users fondly remember: Windows XP. For some reason, however, I wasn't that fond of XP when using it as a child, partially because it ran without an internet connection and also due to its very colorful desktop environment “Luna”, which was noticeably different from the design I became familiar with, namely that of Windows 95/98, which ran on my grandparents' PC.
As our machine could not receive any Service Pack updates due to lacking internet access, this computer remained with the very first version of Windows XP until the OS eventually bricked itself.
Naive as I was back then, I plugged an old modem in just a year or two after finally having convinced my parents to contact our telephone provider to connect our house to the internet due to e needing it for school work. At this tie, I already possessed my own computer, a Hyrican tower running on Windows Vista that already supported Ethernet. Obviously, that didn't do the trick on the old Fujitsu and I was left with two options, those being a hardware upgrade or leaving the machine offline. Somewhat of a wise move back then, I chose the latter, not expecting what would happen sometime later.
Back in 2014, our old Fujitsu wasn't in use for quite some time and by then, I upgraded to a more powerful 64-bit machine. Powering the old machine on and using it for a while suddenly triggered a famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) and locked the entire OS, requiring re-activation. As this system still ran a version of XP that never saw any kind of updates, the only ways to re-activate it were to either connect to the internet and visit Microsoft's official website or call a phone number provided by Microsoft. Having reached End of Life just a few months prior, there was no way to unlock Windows XP anymore. The phone number for German customers wasn't available anymore and the machine itself still could not connect to the internet. Re-installation repeatedly led to the same results and the second-hand installation/recovery disk I purchased from ebay – my cousin borrowed the original disk for whatever reason and never returned it to us – only supported the Turkish language. And installing that one required an activation, as well.
[^¹]: Behind the scenes during data rescue. The machine on the left is my current daily driver, while the exposed one on the right is my old Hyrican tower with the old HDD being “slaved” and covered in spaghetti
Fast forward to 2021. I try one more time to figure out what caused this “self-lock”, yet first had to deal with the fact that many parts of the old Fujitsu tower were rusty due to having been stored outside for years (which wasn't my idea and despite several pleads to put it somewhere safe). Surprisingly, the HDD was unaffected, so I used my old Hyrican tower, unplugged its disk drive and put that old hard drive in.
Before progressing, I booted Windows Vista to rescue some files and games my mother used to play often. This was the easiest part, as virtually no program included DRM (one did but was so poorly implemented that it didn't get triggered). Once satisfied, I then booted the affected hard drive and entered Safe Mode to check the logs just to get an idea what triggered that sudden BSoD that rendered Windows XP inaccessible. Unfortunately, I discovered two disappointing things:
- There is no (legal) way to rescue data via Safe Mode,
- the available logs were entirely useless and only partially accessible.
In the end, I switched back to Vista, continued the data rescue, and did an additional disk check to exclude corruption due to a hardware failure. Despite its age, the 40 GB Seagate drive was perfectly fine and still fully functional.
Back to the drawing board.
The core issue: Microsoft Product Activation
Windows XP was the first operating system relying on “product activation”. As a DRM technology, it is supposed to prevent the piracy of the OS and secure compliance with Microsoft's end-user license agreement (EULA) by requiring the system to submit a key and hardware specifications to Microsoft.
Back during its first implementation and again during the release of Windows 7, it received a fair share of criticism for its inability to prevent piracy and being inconvenient for those using Windows legally. While only offering limited functionality when not activated, a grace period of 30 days is granted to the user to submit the key and the hardware specs. If the product isn't being activated during this month, the operating system either becomes entirely useless (XP) or starts to behave in a way that discourages users from using the OS (Vista and 7). This practice was further reduced to constant reminders and the inability to change the wallpaper with the release of Windows 8. Starting from Windows 10, product activation can be linked to a Microsoft account, with activation keys being stored on the activation server, instead of the activated machine.
The key is tied to the hardware components of the machine on which Windows is being activated and needs to be generated by Microsoft upon activation. The key on the case and the back of the recovery disc is not the key product activation demands, making it virtually pointless.
Once Windows has been activated, no hardware component can be changed without triggering re-activation, as each original component needs to be installed to pass the automatic check during every boot process.
A different disk drive as the trigger?
Way before I made the switch to a 64-bit computer, the old Fujitsu tower required a new disk drive. Funny enough, I broke the original one by manually shoving it back in too many times – and this dumb mistake probably revealed a core flaw of any 21st century operating system developed by Microsoft in particular.
A friend of my father came over to remove the disk drive of another old machine we were gifted earlier from another guy. This machine, a Fujitsu tower that ran Windows 2000, provided enough spare parts for us to use when needed. Once inserted into the XP machine, product activation was not triggered and the machine was fully usable until the sudden crash in 2014.
Right now, I can only speculate, as most of the original parts are either broken or in a fragile state that makes tests a little dangerous. Regardless, it is possible that product activation often was implemented so poorly that it could get triggered randomly or not at all, despite hardware changes.
The “master” key and volume licenses leaks
Shortly after the initial release of Windows XP, crackers and security researchers discovered an universal key intended for enterprise users that can be manipulated to become usable on consumer versions, as well. The master key effectively disables product activation altogether and Windows XP does not get tied to an unique hardware configuration. Naturally, Microsoft did not appreciate this discovery and immediately started to make efforts to get sites hosting manipulated master keys and other cracking tools shut down.
Another way to circumvent product activation involved the usage of leaked volume licenses that were provided to OEM's prior to the official release of Windows XP. Those leaked licenses became invalid with the arrival of Service Pack 2.
Since our version of XP never received any updates, it is possible that both methods still work, though after years of getting headaches whilst figuring out what caused the BSoD in the first place and why the system didn't check its hardware components until that single crash, I have become quite reluctant to even analyze Windows XP in a proper way.
In practice, Windows XP could be just as unstable as Me, 98 and Vista combined
The universally-panned Windows Millennium Edition (Me), the last Windows version from the consumer-oriented 9x series, became famous for its stability issues and often gets called “the worst tech product of all time”.
In retrospect, many issues of Me could be tracked down to misconfigurations on behalf of Microsoft, yet Windows XP's core issues remained largely unaddressed and consumers no longer were interested in such news due to suddenly perceiving issues differently (XP still crashed often but users weren't as annoyed by it as they were with crashes on Me), which briefly changed during the era of Windows Vista, another OS that was widely criticized for having performance issues. Two reviewers highlighted that Windows Me caused less BSoD's than Windows 98 due to the removal of DOS, while the issues affecting Vista largely can be attributed to a disastrous marketing campaign that downplayed the higher system requirements and users being annoyed by User Account Control (UAC). Flawed benchmarking practices by those who should have known better didn't help Vista's reputation, either (the linked test doesn't mention which version of XP was used, failed to acknowledge that XP had lower minimum requirements to begin with, thus naturally running smoothly on a more powerful machine that few regular consumer owned that at time, and that Vista fixed performance issues with the release of Service Pack 1).
Surprisingly, I don't remember my Vista machine ever experiencing a BSoD, probably because the Hyrican tower met the recommended requirements in the first place. Even now, Vista's UAC implementation is no more annoying than UAC on Windows 10. And despite only ever running Me within a virtual environment, it performed no better or worse than both 98 (on bare metal and virtualized) and XP. The beloved Windows 7, which pretty much was just Vista slightly redesigned and UAC being slightly less prominent, only became an user favorite due to hardware manufactures having caught up with the new software demands and being released during a period in which more users began to invest in more powerful computers.
Ironically, the popular Windows 7, which came pre-installed with the laptop I am typing this on, makes the fan go apeshit and gives off a scent that strangely smells like a melting processor or mainboard. So despite the laptop meeting the requirements, 7 damages the hardware the longer it is being used. The only option to keep this laptop operational was to install an Arch-based distribution (Linux) alongside 7 and never booting 7 again.
Windows 10 behaves even more strangely. While my 64-bit machine ran Windows 8 out of the box, I made the jump to Windows 10, only to be confronted with the first Redstone update bricking the entire system and Windows Updates effectively “shitting itself” in 2020. The system cannot update itself anymore due to the EFI partition being cluttered with security keys that cannot be removed manually and don't get checked automatically by Windows Update.
All Windows version that were widely criticized turned out to run relatively well for me, while the most loved ones caused me the most headaches.
My Windows XP just wanted to kill itself
While Windows 7 actively tries to kill my hardware and Windows 10, another nasty piece of OS that is even more tied to the hardware, crapped on its own mandatory update procedure and wholly on itself multiple times, Windows XP at least had the strength to commit suicide without rendering personal files inaccessible. If I happened to be a little more knowledgeable back then, I probably could have saved it, yet unfortunately, I was three years old when my parents bought that machine and 15/16, at that time with little interest and no idea what to do due to having been prevented from getting familiar with stuff like that, when it killed itself.
Leaving personal files intact probably is one of the few positive aspects of Windows XP, in contrast to later versions that would rely on storage encryption (Windows 11). Good luck doing any data rescue on such a system during an internet outage and with the keys being stored somewhere hidden on the OS. Compared to its technical predecessor, Windows 2000, it's just an intentionally crippled and childish variant of the older enterprise version.
Looking back, I was never fond of Windows XP. I loathed “Luna” from the first day and continue to struggle with XP's navigation to this day. Many programs and games suited for XP were so badly programmed that not a single program removed itself entirely when uninstalling it and the OS pretty much normalized lazy software development³, the gradual “dumbing down” of tech out of “convenience”, and vendor lock-in. It's quite a shame that XP still is widely remembered as one of Microsoft's best operating systems, despite its drawbacks in terms of privacy and aggressive promotion of DRM.
[³]: By lazy software development I am referring to the common thought pattern of modern developers that completely disregard the size of their programs and RAM consumption simply due to “storage and RAM being cheap”. Nowadays, software developers aren't a different from the average end-user due to putting a higher emphasis on “developer experience”.