Windows XP: AnandTech Readers Speak-Out

What are the features you dislike?

Windows XP has been criticized very strongly in many circles recently for unpopular features. While our readers have shown us that there are some very compelling positive new features, it is important to examine both sides of the argument.

A minority of users stated that they saw no major negative features in Windows XP. Most commented that negatives could be circumvented or removed given a little work.

"None really. It's MS's best OS to date."
-- Brandon Hill (NFS4)

"Nothing yet"
-- Christopher Dudek (Nightfall)

We did see a bit more of a consensus on some of the negative features. Again, while certain features may cause inconvenience, a well-informed consumer can remove or change virtually all of them given some time and patience.

"The candy apple new start menu. You can turn all that crap off though."
-- (PepperBreath)

"The desktop is too MACish so I turned it to Windows Classic"
-- (cvlegion)

"All the stuff that comes with the default install, I don't want their CDR software, I don't want IE, I don't want MSN etc etc, and I sure don't want Luna, WPA, and the millions of services/features that are turned on by default. All in all I think it took me like 2-3 hours post install just to clean up the mess that XP is by default."
- (Sunner)

"The default of the pretty new GUI on a "Pro" version of software."
-- Chris T. (Ctho9305)

Other users had problems with included features that cannot be easily removed.

"I dislike WPA and the REQUIRED MSN Messenger (without a hack it is impossible to uninstall)."
-- Scott Newton (Scootin159)

"I dislike IE 6.0 and the fact that it is built in to the OS. The whole media window is annoying and I have had issues playing some streaming media."
-- Brad Halpin (Spike2756)