By Oluwaseun Bamisile
Publication Date: 2026-09-27 14:00:00
My first-ever Windows experience was Windows XP. So, like most people who grew up using it, Windows XP is still my favorite Windows operating system to date. I might just be a little bit nostalgic, I know, I know. But XP wasn’t just popular because of nostalgia. It bridged the gap between the unstable consumer operating systems that came before it, like Windows 95 and Windows ME, and the professional-grade Windows 2000.
It was so good that many people skipped its successor, Windows Vista (although Vista was actually horrible). Windows XP went on to reign for more than a decade before Microsoft finally ended support for it. In addition to all that, Windows XP also made a lot of us familiar with several major system tools that have somehow survived to this day and are still being used on Windows 11.
Microsoft has replaced or redesigned plenty of Windows components over the years, but these tools keep hanging around because, in some cases, the newer alternatives simply aren’t as…
