I did a clean XP (actually it was XP Professional N, TY technet subscription 
) install a couple of days ago and what was thought to be feature rich 10 years ago, is totally bareboned in 2010.
I forget if I'm the one who told you about it originally but I'm glad to see a fellow technet appreciating what an awesome resource it is
On top of coming with two mistakes of the time, IE6 and Outlook Express
To be fair, IE6 wasn't so bad in it's heyday. Before I got on board the Firefox bandwagon at "Firebird" 0.7 I never really had any huge complaints with IE6. Firefox was just "that much better" and the corporate world made IE6 last forever
the other included programs (Notepad, Wordpad and Paint) are terrible.
Truth. I'm pretty sure there were better free/OSS alternatives even back then.
You can't play DVDs or even MPEG2 files, natively and then, there was no easy way to get around that freely so you can forget about any of the "newer" file formats, both audio and video.
Ah that takes me back. I think I used to use a free MPEG decoder called dscaler (I might have the name wrong) to play MPEGs (either torrents or rips) and various combinations of codec packs (all of which I consider to be awful these days) for everything else. Not that there was all that much else back then. Just divx/xvid, really.
But after about an hour of adding, removing and rearranging, you can turn it into a still, very usable OS, almost 10 years after its release.
It definitely can be made useful, though modern hardware (SSDs, Core iX CPUs, very high MHz CPUs) have really outgrown it. Most driver support for it has become second tier, esp for newer specialty hardware (video cards come to mind) and the security is still a lot worse even with a full suite of protection and patches, but it's overall longevity and market share for it's age are still unprecedented.
