If you haven’t heard the news, Microsoft has finally pulled the plug on Windows XP today, which is basically a 12-year-old operating system at this point. To me, Windows XP was definitely one of the best Windows operating system for the fact that it was more stable and secure than Windows 9x and even the horrid Windows Me. The operating system served me well during most of my middle school years until 11th grade when I switched to a Mac and upgraded to Vista on my Bootcamp partition (which is a lot more bloated in comparison).
While it’s obvious that Microsoft will eventually have to stop supporting XP, I felt that they could have handled it better since there is no upgrade path from XP to Windows 7. It does seem that they want to force everyone to use Windows 8, which has been panned by critics as being difficult to use on non-touchscreen devices. To me, Windows 8 is more suited for tablets even though I spend 99% on my Surface Pro 2 on the desktop because most of the Metro/Modern applications are pretty useless to me. Not to mention, if one installs a start menu program, why not just install Windows 7?
In short, I think Windows XP is a good operating system for the fact that it had a long lifecycle and served most people well.