It was October, 2001.
The United States had just returned the first salvos in the War on Terror by initiating bombing campaigns in Afghanistan, the nation was gripped by an Anthrax scare, and OJ had just been acquitted. Again. No, it wasn’t the case you were thinking of, it was a separate road rage incident in Miami. Oh yeah, and a little thing called Windows XP hit the shelves of your local Circuit City or Best Buy. While support for XP ended in 2014, many die-hard fans, including the Navy have never let their love for XP waver. It was intuitive, handled great, and was quintessentially what one expects from a PC operating system.
It’s also a huge nostalgia trip. I was born in 1998, so by the time I was old enough to sit upright in my dad’s computer chair and power on his Gateway eMachine, Windows XP had colonized the digital landscape. The first computer-image I ever saw was probably the famous Bliss background wallpaper, and I would spend, likely, thousands of hours over the interceding ten years of my life using XP.
Even when my dad bought me my first laptop, a clunky old IBM ThinkPad, it too used the old operating system even though Windows 7 and 8 were out and Windows 10 was just around the corner. Maybe it was the intimate familiarity between man and machine that helped me get through the first months of college on that thing. Alas, as the Christmas of my freshman year rolled around, I had to replace my old computer and, in the process, say goodbye to the beloved OS forever.
That’s where I thought the story of me and XP would end, but then I discovered Classic Shell. Classic Shell was a project to allow users of Windows 7, 8, and 10 to get the stylistic benefits of XP in the form of a theme. It’s more modern form, Open-Shell, is an open source continuation of the Classic Shell project which stopped being updated in 2017.
Using the tools of Open-Shell, which is free to download and use, I was able to get most of the conveniences of XP that I was used to, like the start menu layout, while also keeping the aspects of Windows 10 that I liked (like being able to pin things to the taskbar). Open-Shell will allow you to do a lot more than just make your system look and feel like XP, though. It has a whole host of UI customization tools that go above and beyond what your normal display settings will allow. It was worth playing around with, at least, and you really do notice the change. I feel the punchy responsiveness of XP back at my finger-tips already.
I virus-scanned the file and, as far as I can tell, it’s perfectly safe, but as with all software downloaded for free off the Internet—user beware. I hope you enjoy your trip in the wayback machine and be sure to set that wallpaper to bliss.jpeg.
Photo Credit / Bliss by Charles O’Rear
