W.XP

Of course I noticed.

It was right before I installed a new OS.

Yeah, wouldn't installing a new OS be the most common scenario in which one would "turn off [OS] for the last time"?
- Leave OP be, they just yeet their machine outta window and buy a new one.
  Why do you think MS advises to do that for Win 10?
- Not for me. I have no idea when I last shut off an xp machine. My first free computer came with 98se, and my first purchased PC had windows 7 installed. At some point, I shut off an xp machine, either for school or at the library or whatever, and I have no idea when that was.
- For me it's playing around with an old machine years later.

I absolutely noticed, I was holding a Win 7 install disk with my other hand, how would this come as a surprise?

Oh I definitely knew. I swore off that system after I spent hours repairing a rootkit on my families multiple computers only for it to happen again a week later.

I moved to Unix and only run a bare bones 11 install for games which is almost not even necessary anymore

What are you talking about? Of course I noticed. It was during the upgrade process to Vista. Then the last time I turned that off was when I fully switched to Linux.

ROFL. I still manage a critical system that cannot be moved from XP.

That day, for me, is in the far future.

Healthcare, banking, or military?
- Auto manufacturing.

Well it was two days ago because I found some old VM backups and booted them for nostalgia. Win 7 really was the best

Aero my beloved
- I will always miss it. I love the glass aesthetic. It never went out of style in my head.
If only because it was the last windows to have the windows classic theme.
Yes, but this is Win XP not Win 7. Edit: I suppose there backups could have had both 7 and XP.
- Some old VMs, not one. Had 95,98SE,XP, 7, and 8.1. Also found NT install disks.

One day you released the latch on your 5-1/4 floppy drive and removed the Prince of Persia diskette for the last time and didn't realise.

What have you done, a cruel person. Also, take my upvote

Oh, I noticed.

MFW I use Windows ME
It was a Compaq...and I threw it down a flight of stairs. True story. I was also a frustrated teenager at the same time so this makes sense
All I wanted was to play DosBOX and the fucker froze and that was it..
...bastard still ran after that shockingly enough

I work in a manufacturing automation world. I still use xp.

Yup, I use a million dollar system that runs on XP. We updated the computer last year. They sent us a PC that dual boots XP and Win10. Win10 so it can connect to the internet and pull updates. XP so it can run the control program, which is written in Flash.
- I took courses in actionscript 😂😥😥😂😂
- Flash
  Diabolical
- ActionScript ? or is Flash something else ?
One of our Scanning Electron Microscopes runs Win7. Not great, it's not allowed on the network because of this.
Oh yeah, I swear that two years ago Southwest had a total crash of their systems because they still had NT4 machines.

speak for yourself. I still use XP.

Unfortunately I do too. I work in a lotto office. The lotto machines are over 20 years old and run XP Embedded. Thankfully the computers where we do most of the actual work have modern CPUs and NVMEs running a modern OS.
I hope it is a Virtual Machine? 😮
- it's a physical device. running on an old AMD Athlon X2 64 939.
  I use it to play old retro games on. it is connected to the internet but browsers don't really work on it anymore. Usually I find the old web root or ftp sites on my main and download them directly in xp.
  edit: I forgot about the XP desktop I made my kid too. not connected to the internet, but is connected to the lan. it's in storage right now, which is why I forgot about it.
- hospital, not unlikely

I noticed. This was around 2008-2010. I had a dinosaur of a machine sitting around and wanted to see what would happen if I connected XP to "the modern web."

I did a complete wipe and reinstall, installed either SP2 or SP3, whatever the last version was. Ensured that I had the latest drivers for all the hardware, and connected the Ethernet cable.

Result: Complete system lockdown in less than 5 seconds due to being taken over by bots. The system was unable to reboot on that particular install of XP. I reinstalled XP, got it functioning again, wrapped the computer in an anti static bag, and put it in my storage unit, knowing I would likely never touch the machine again.

I know this might be cliche but you could try putting Linux on it. We have old laptot that can't really run windows anymore but Linux runs fine on it.
- Just switched my win10 laptop to opensuse tumbleweed (trying it out) and didn't realized how accustomed i was to the slowness of boot, opening programs, lagging, etc

The last time I turned off XP was a few months ago when I replaced it with Linux Mint on a PC I use to play old games in my room (because I wanted to play old MMOs and that required internet access, which XP would not have been safe for.)

It is now safe to turn off your computer.

“It’s all safe now… sweet dreams, old friend”

Yeah, I remember that I left Empire: Total War open for a few hours and it smelted my video card.

Next PC came with Vista and I loved it

Ewww, Vista.
That's like stepping in something nasty
- Vista was good, actually.
  Like fuck aero but it was glanced, the chess, the useless performance metric, the ugliness and the final straw before switching to Linux

It happened when Battlefield Bad Company 2 released. XP couldn't support it so I had to bite the bullet and switch over to Windows 7. At least I held out long enough to avoid Vista. Incidentally that was also the first and last game I bought for EA's shitty Origin launcher.

Good news, origin is dead! And the replacement is... worse?
- to the surprise of absolutely no one

me, applying sketchy system tweaks and wrenching control of my PC away from itself so that I can control my own settings again:

"The hell I did"

True, but it booted Win 7 next, so it’s not like I was leaving windows.

I noticed. When Windows XP came out I saw the enshitification right away. Never mind the play-skool colors and complete lack of security. I couldn't believe that people were going to be willing to use that crap.

I moved away from it for me and my business fairly quickly, and that was that.

I did notice over the years as winxp went away in public spaces and hotels. It was always kind of nice to know there were free to use computers out in the wild if one wanted to use them. XP was never able to be locked down, so you could bypass any login and just use it if you wanted to. Never for anything important, but I could always load up some games on the hotel one and let the kids play on it for fun for example.

I hear your security concerns but what timeline were you living on?
95 was revolutionary but buggy AF
NT I didn't have much to do with
98 was a patch to fix the bugs in 95
98 SE was mostly stable and a decent is, plus USB
ME was a piece of shit excuse to something
2000 was decent. XP v1
XP finally made a stable os, because it got rid of the shit we dragged in from 95
Vista was hot garbage
7 fixed vista an imo was the best is MS ever made
8 was more hot garbage because they lost the mobile war
10 was an apology for 8
11 is shareware / adware
Where did you find safe harbour in this shitshow?
- I'd argue that 8.1 was an apology for 8 that never got accepted, 10 was an enshitified version of what 8 could have been if Microsoft shareholders didn't decide they wanted a slice of that sweet sweet mobile market.
  Anyway, anything past 7 has/had unacceptable privacy violations. And that alone makes them shitte, even regardless of everything else.
- Left because of XP. Win 2000 was fine. XP started all of the crap. It was when you needed to have a corporate key to actually control the computer and have all the features that win 2000 did. The colors were awful and the design was piss poor of course, but I could have dealt with that.
  This was when Microsoft began introducing online accounts. They started trying to really wedge explorer into everything. You could buy music online with them, but ONLY with explorer. There were three programs that were forced on everyone (I forget what they are now). People didn't like it so they gave people a "remover", and was supposed to remove those programs. Except they lied, and all it did was hid the icons.
  The writing was on the wall. Win XP was when MS jumped the shark and began the decline. I could see it in real time and wanted nothing more to do with them. So Linux it was.

That one specialty printer at work that's not important enough to upgrade, but still gets used...

At least it's not allowed on the network.

Nah I got a Windows XP VM for work! I love it!

cries in old laser printer

You can pry this peak UI from my cold, dead hands: https://github.com/rozniak/xfce-winxp-tc

I used windows XP today because the phase noise analyzer at work runs on it.

We're not allowed to connect it to the network, though.

Except the last time I turn off an OS it's usually because it was BSOD and never came back. Then it's wiped and something new or it's reinstalled. Is it the same OS if it's reinstalled?

depends,
if you reinstall packages one by one? it is
if you replace it wholly? different
- TheseusOS

There's still an antivirus program out there for 32 bit xp and firefox supports a lot of the usual plugins. I wouldn't do online banking but I browsed the web on bare metal xp (the unofficial "integral edition") ealier this year and it was fine. It's not ideal but for some low level office stuff with little security concerns xp is kinda serviceable even today.

I noticed when I installed Win7. :)

'2016. The computer was offline and connected to a machine.

It never stops to amaze me how many factories still depend on win-xp (yes, win-xp!). It was always too expensive to upgrade the apps and machines. By now many will never happen anymore because now it's a multi-step upgrade and cost even more. And STILL they expect 2025 type, level and quality support.

Are we including the server editions because if so it was an exchange 2003 server I killed in 2019.

I just did a win xp build the other day. I had to make a floppy disk for sata drivers because xp hates installing to sata. Fortunately MSI still has the drivers on their website. I'm still looking for a decent and cheap agp GPU to go along with it.

Pretty much anybody reading this still uses XP at least weekly if not daily.
It's still all over the place, ATMs, gasoline pumps, ticket machines, kiosks, ect, ect... Some of you may even be sitting in a room with XP right now and not even realize it.
You may have forgotten it, but it is still there, waiting, watching, ready blue screen for just no reason at all.

Thanks to Crowdstrike I know that at least the checkouts in shops and some ATMs here use Windows 8 or newer, because of the new blue screen design (don't remember if they had the QR code, which would mean at least Windows 10)

I nearly installed WinXP on an old piece of shit all-in-one computer (old celeron, 2gb ram, very slow hdd), but the CPU was too new to be supported. Installed Mint instead.

One day you turned off a Linux Distro for the last time and didn't even notice

I don’t ever turn off my Linux machines. They turn off when the power goes out, and that’s about it.
If you use Arch or Nix, every day is that last day. One day you disembarked the Ship of Theseus for the last time and didn't even notice.
Jokes on you, my distro hopping goes full circle every couple of months

No, it was when I got out my old high school computer to mess around with it and go "oh yeah" for a little bit. That was the last time I shut down Windows XP.

I did it with joy, because I used it for a few days to implement and test an SMBv3 to v1 Bridge (fuck Trumpf for using embedded XP and using SMB for pulling blueprints, forcing the use of SMBv1), and it (as well as the Windows Server) was hell compared to Pop I was using at the time.

Bold assumption

For my main comp this was actually from Vista RC something - I had enough RAM & it didn't give me any compatibility issues (like Millennium before XP on my gaming rig, bcs manufacturer sux at drivers).

I never really liked XP ... I know, Im sorry!!
\ I loved that it brought gaming to NT-ish stability tho.
\ (Then again Windows classic theme rullz. Tho the og Aero was nice at the time.)

So true...

Was sometime in January 2009, switched to Linux.

It's probably been a few months for me. If I could remember where I put that laptop.

Has not happened yet. I keep a copy around in a VM for old games.

reminds of the poor xp vms ;). I still have disk images somewhere I believe.

(never used xp on a hardware personally though)