it runs all apps,works with all hardware even “unsuppoted” ones with rufus.
it has pretty ui,great antivirus,and its free if you know where to look.
runs all games,can be customized with group policy and registery. gets latest game ready drivers,new gpus and hardware work on it instantly no wait for community to make it work.
no community needed you can just go to microsoft forums,or ai bec most windows problems are easy to solve.
great backwards compatibility.
extremely stable and never crashes
Well, XP was generally less complex, and rarely had any problems in my opinion. I personally think registry edits got riskier past XP up until 10…When it became a bigger gamble (especially using Vista,7,8).
I opted for Pro version and local policy was the safer option. I guess my experience was WAY different. Could be hardware or a few mistyped entries, little bit of both, I suppose.
My basic registry philosophy, aside from the obvious do a lotta fuckin research was to track all the default settings, configure everything the way I want, and save all the registry values for the settings I changed.
My bigger registry philosophy was to research all the possible values under major registry keys, even hidden ones not available as any convenient Control Panel GUI option. Configure all that to my liking as well, and backup my entire configuration. Well, whatever differs from defaults anyways.
Then, whenever I’d install XP on another system, I could just import a small handful of registry files and have 99.9℅ of everything already configured my way.
I could easily merge all that into a single registry file, but I broke it down into major basic categories, like Interface, Services, etc…
I certainly tried my best with the research part and often succeeded on XP more than any other Windows version. I think it was a bit overwhelming for me at the time because I somewhat understood computers, needed human language to demystify the kind computers could use for specific modifications and tasks. I am starting to reach that point with Linux, I didn’t get there 100% with Windows, knew just enough to get by.