Technology evolves, and Windows has evolved with it — for the most part. As much as Microsoft's operating system has gotten better at multitasking and offering a wide range of features that make my day easier, it's important to note that there are also many things I loved that have been left behind, lost to time, and forgotten. In some ways, these older features can be better or more interesting than what we have today, and it's hard to realize what we've lost.

Admittedly, there are far more things in Windows 11 that I prefer over Windows XP than the other way around, but it's always worth looking back to see what could be done better today. So here are just a few things I miss from the Windows XP days.

5 Disk defragmenter

Hear me out on this

The disk defragmenter used to be a fairly important tool in Windows, and it still exists in Windows 11 to this day, albeit with a different name. So why do I miss it? Well, ever since Windows Vista, Microsoft streamlined the disk defragmentation tool and made it mostly text-based, with progress indicators shown in percentages.

Back on Windows XP, the Disk Defragmenter features a cool UI that showed you a visualization of the data on your disk before and after defragmentation. As a kid, I remember staring at the screen mesmerizes, seeing the bars move to the appropriate place. It really made the process feel more impactful and more fun, and I never fully understood why that was taken out in Windows Vista.

Of course, nowadays it wouldn't be as useful since defragmentation only makes sense for HDDs, and most computers now use an SSD, but I think it would still be cool to have. If you want a more visual tool these days, something like Piriform's Defraggler may be for you.

4 Fun games

Where did we go wrong?

If you grew up with Windows XP, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I can't go without mentioning the games that shipped with Windows XP and how they felt so much better than what we have now. Windows XP included a bunch of card games like Solitaire and Hearts (a personal favorite), plus classics like Minesweeper, and my personal favorite, 3D Pinball.

The card-based games are still included with Windows 11, but the UI for these games has been made so much louder and cluttered, it feels like the app is always trying to sell you something, even when it's entirely free. And everything else is either available to download separately (in the case of Minesweeper) or it just doesn't exist. 3D Pinball was a core childhood game for me, I spent so much time trying to clear missions, turning on more lights, and making them change colors. It basically made me fall in love with pinball in general at the time, I wanted any opportunity to play a pinball game. I wish there were something as memorable or fun in Windows 11.

3 Windows Media Player skins

Customization was different back then

Over the years, Windows customization has become more and more streamlined, and the options to make your PC look unique have severely diminished. There's no better example of this than Windows Media Player, which back in the XP days, was very wacky and fun. It supported skins, and these skins made your media player look... interesting, to say the least.

Sure, they have no practical use, but Windows Media Player skins really added a ton of personality to your PC. I specifically remember one called Headspace — though admittedly I only found the name now while researching this article. But if you look at the website WMP Goodies, you can see a ton of examples of fun and unique skins that you could use to impress your friends back in the day.

2 Windows Movie Maker

Before Clipchamp was a thing

This isn't the first — and it probably won't be the last — time I talk about Windows Movie Maker, but I truly do miss it on Windows 11. Microsoft now ships Windows with Clipchamp, a web-based video editor that is definitely more advanced and capable than Movie Maker was back then, but something still rubs me the wrong way about it. Clipchamp's UI feels condescending, like it's trying to tell you what you should do, rather than just being an editing tool. Plus, being a web-based app immediately knocks off a few points, in my view.

Windows Movie Maker was a great tool for making videos, it ran natively, and it had a UI that fit the operating system. Admittedly, I used later iterations of Movie Maker a lot more, but a lot of the principles of its design and features were already there in Windows XP, and it worked really well for simple video edits. To this day, I don't think Microsoft has a proper competitor to Apple's iMovie, but Movie Maker was as close as we got, and I wish we got something like that again. An app designed to run natively on Windows with a modern UI and capabilities.

1 Windows Messenger

When messaging used to be fun

Nostalgia probably plays a huge role in this, but Windows Messenger, and its successor Windows Live Messenger, are still the best communication apps Microsoft has had, in my opinion. I really liked how you could easily organize friends into groups and easily see who's online. I remember how customizable chats were because of custom emoticons you could create that would replace just about anything. Some people replaced almost every letter with a corresponding emoticon, which was both annoying and fascinating.

When Microsoft acquired Skype back in 2011 and eventually replaced Windows Live Messenger, I was very upset, and it feels like the company has been spiraling ever since when it comes to its messaging efforts. Skype tried to adapt to Windows 10 and then reversed course, and then Microsoft introduced Teams, which very slowly caused Skype's demise. And none of these services has really elicited the same feelings of joy for me. Maybe it's just because I'm older now, but I really miss the era of Windows Messenger. It just worked and had so many interesting features.

Windows XP still has some benefits

There's no reason to use Windows XP nowadays, but just looking at this list, there are clearly still some things that Windows 11 could learn from this version of Windows that's almost a quarter of a century old. In some ways, it feels like Microsoft isn't trying anymore, at least not as hard as it should be, and Windows has gotten boring, and in some ways, objectively worse than it used to be. I don't expect these features to make a return, but it's nice to imagine what it might be like if they did.