XP was complete garbage for many reasons. Security being the number one. Multi-user being number two (or lack thereof). And boy did it look nasty. I think you have nostalgia.

But my main point is microsoft began everything that people hate about it today in XP. People seem to have forgotten all push back there was at the time.

The only thing I miss about XP was that if it was at a hotel or internet cafe, no matter what they did, you could be admin in about 10 minutes or less. Which was always handy to have.

A few things that people seem to have forgotten over the years:

The “Fisher-Price” visual style fiasco. (People claiming XP’s UI design choices were too unprofessional)

Extremely unstable on base release, with things only getting better after Service Pack 1.

Activation servers required to install the OS.

The start of Window’s Customer Experience Improvement Program telemetry.

Integration of Windows Update into the OS, which re-enabled Microsoft defaults like Internet Explorer, after patches were complete.

The start of confusing SKUs: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Media Center Edition, and Professional x64 Edition which was confusingly a re-badged Server 2003.

I’m sure I am forgetting a lot more. It wasn’t all sunshine and daisies like people seem to remember… but it was a lot better than now.

XP ruled idk what they’re on about. Windows 8 really began the death knell of Windows IMO. A new UI people didnt want or like forced down your throat. They started their new hideous and confusing design language, which led to the truly abhorrent Windows 10 half-baked replacement for the control panel. Then the ads. Spyware baked in. Vibe coded start menu that takes 300ms to open. Sigh.

I write about this one a lot, because people have forgotten how bad it was, thinking only today is bad. So let me grab my notes and copy and paste some detials:

They started product activation tied to hardware ID. They created tiers of what you purchased. WGA phoned home to Windows servers, and they ran programs in the background to check on your computer. All of the “validate before you download” started with Windows, IE, Media Player, Defender, and Office here at XP, and expanded every year to today.

They started forcing bundled applications and lied to consumers that they could not be separated (explorer and media player for example). They even offered software that would “remove” these types of packages, but it didn’t, and this was after they said only third party tools could do it.

They began the cut-off dates to force hardware upgrades and windows upgrades.

They bundled messenger into XP and tried to get people to use MS Passport accounts. If you didn’t use passport, you could not download music from the windows store. This was the beginnings of required windows accounts. They used the passport ID’s to tie together users and specific hardware.

They used registration screens to trick users into thinking they had to have a passport just to access the internet. An online privacy organization got involved when they realized just how much data Microsoft was collecting.

MSN explorer was pushed into the start menu, and began microsofts efforts of getting people over to MSN to see ads. There was even a time it would do pop up ads for microsoft dial up, msn messenger, and premium subscription services.

Then there is Active X, tied to Internet Explorer. The EU antitrust investigation was on exactly this: was IE + Active X used specifically to keep people hostage in IE.

Telemetry began here as well. Product Keys, Hardware Fingerprint, IP address, Bios info, applications installed, usage patterns and configuration. You could stop this in group policies, but who was looking at those in the consumer space? Several class action lawsuits were filed and Microsoft themselves called their daily harvest of data “personally identifiable information”.

tldr; Microsoft began the tactics of telemetry, lock in, restriction of features based on software tied to hardware, and creating a account to use all the features of your computer back in the Win XP days.

Probably they hate XP because it introduced Windows Activation Services for the first time.

That said, XP did suck. Windows 7 and Windows 2000 were the best editions of Windows IMHO.

Vista was OK, once it had its bugs worked out with UAC. XP had tons of security problems. Windows 8 actively hated people who had keyboards and mice for some reason. Windows 10 was shoved full of telemetry, which Windows 11 has taken to the max, plus added AI slop.

Plug them into a non-gaming Linux distro like Fedora. It’ll read them no problem unless they’re Bitlocker encrypted. Then reformat them in Bazzite so you can use them for storage.

Ah okay, is it because of Bitlocker?

Luckily there is a new publicly known backdoor so they might be in the clear.

Linux actually can mount Bitlocker drives, even automatically, but you need the key which is usually stored in the TPM which I’m pretty sure you need to boot with secure boot to get working in Linux.

If you still have Windows, it’s way easier to just set a secondary key and use that instead.

On a related note, I would actually recommend weighing the benefit of using LUKS because even with AES-256 hardware acceleration, it can significantly reduce your performance depending on your CPU.

Not Bazzite, this one doesn’t handle NVMe for whatever reason, unless that was changed in the last year. The only distro I’ve seen with that issue, and I’ve used 4 (okay 3 of them were Ubuntu or based on it).

Source: had to reformat my data (games) drive. Fortunately, Pop_OS could do that just fine.