Windows XP is not dead

Years ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. Even today I feel it was the best laptop I ever purchased. It is without a doubt the best built one even if not the fastest or fanciest.

It is still running nearly 20 years later.

So today I haul it out for giggles and start messing around with it, and for no reason decided to put in a solid state drive. Of course this requires a new install of everything.

So I haul out my old XP Pro install disk and install it. I go online to get the service packs...and Microsoft doesn't even have them on their website any longer. Of course you can find them elsewhere.

What I did find interesting is that SP1, SP2, SP3...and a homebrewed SP4 is out there. And even more important, I find a browser that is based on Chrome, called Advanced Chrome is still supported for XP.

I load it all out there and everything is really cool. I remember just how simple things were back in the XP days and it is with some disdain that I ever went to Windows 10.

Anyways...just reminiscing and entering this post using Advanced Chrome on an XP laptop...

I have an HP Mini 2133 that was downgraded from Vista to XP, and it has Chrome on it. Browsing on that PC is a pain, but I've always assumed that it's because it only has a gig of RAM. (I primarily use it for synching Outlook 2003 to my infinite number of CE devices. )

CE Geek, I wouldn't call going from Vista to XP a downgrade! =P

Rich, XP will be with us for many years in the future I think. Mostly because A) People aren't a fan of what Microsoft is doing with Windows and B) People just want a simple OS to do simple things. I think eventually people might adopt Windows 7 as their "new XP" (at least those who can in regards to their hardware).

Which reminds me, has anyone ever tested out that Windows clone ReactOS? (https://www.reactos.org)

I haven't tried ReactOS, but would love to try if it works on low spec laptops.

I've been watching ReactOS since about 2005 or so. Development has been very slow. My only experience with it has been in a virtual machine. It's barebones and still doesn't run much software. I've had better experiences with WINE and CrossOver. For the most part, on Linux, if I need MS Office, I just run Windows in a VM.

I tried the ReactOS live image on my Macbook Pro setting aside 512MB of RAM for it. Worked like a charm.

I might experiment with running a Perl crawler program (.exe) I compiled on it.

Can I think of ReactOS as a sort of replacement for Windows Server 2003?





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@Mobi, running Windows in a VM requires a little horse power. I was thinking about ReactOS as a replacement for Windows XP under older hardware.

@Stingraze, very nice. Would love to hear your thoughts if you do it. I wonder if ReactOS has enough code in place to run the majority of 15+ year old programs without too much fuss?

Here's "ExplainingComputers" video on ReactOS which is a month old. He tries out some programs with varying success. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne88Is2cymQ

Yeah, I know, but officially, it is.

Okay, I'll put it in my to-do list.
I noticed that the .iso for ReactOS (live image) is really small, so yes that is something to figure out indeed.
I like that "classic skin" stype UI in ReactOS.

stingraze, no stress on my end. I'm going to toy around with ReactOS myself just to test various programs like active sync and other older (but useful) software. I'm also going to try some newer software. I'll be using an old HP TC1000 tablet as a test bed for the OS. Just gotta make a copy of the current Windows XP Tablet Edition install.

It'd be really neat if ReactOS could be a straight out replacement for XP on older machines. This way, we'd still run a modern OS with support for modern programs but with an environment we and the PC is comfortable with. I'm also looking at various stripped down Windows 7 builds as I'm intent on keeping older hardware going but keeping somewhat up to date. But if ReactOS would be a much better alternative.

haha I know. I like having several projects going on to keep me busy. :-)

Yeah, it WILL be cool if ReactOS could be straight out replacement. I was trying out ReactOS on Macbook Pro today again, this time not with live image.
The problem with "IE" of ReactOS is that for me, no matter I tried, it couldn't download files. Maybe it was because I was connected via VPN on my Macbook Pro? I will try it out again (I just had this idea now). Update The VPN doesn't seem to be the problem. I switched it off and it still doesn't work.

I hear that Windows XP has too much 0-days etc, so me I "feel" safer with ReactOS.

Edited by stingraze 2018-05-05 3:16 AM

It's an interesting project, but one to be a little wary of (more detail needed)

How long is it going to be maintained for? What's to keep the dev team interested as the need for people to maintain legacy app support tails off (like us here in CE land)?

This isn't a wine solution, they're writig it themselves based on the Win32 API. Just because they're patching their take on known CVE's for Windows code does not mean a) they're actually fixing them, b) not writing in a wave of their own vulerabilities - so while it's open source, how much peer review is it getting? How much bug bounty attention is it exposing itself to? How big is the pen-test community for it? How quickly is the team able to respond when problems are identified without overwhelming the dev team and stopping feature development?

If you want to use it for web browsing, the entire point of why Mozilla,Google etc stopped writing their code for XP was that it didn't expose the newer API's necessary to provide better security. Is this just emulating the XP API and correctly implementing the newer API's or just stubbing them to proxy support? If the latter, then you're actually no more secure!

I just noticed, but many hackers prefer Windows XP...

Edited by stingraze 2018-11-13 10:06 AM

I recently installed XP on an old VAIO Picturebook, but no matter what tricks I tried, I couldnt bypass activation (I installed a legit copy, but the activation servers are down and phone activation also didn't work) :/

Strange…mine activated fine without any problems.