11 ms·

Unofficial Windows XP SP4

169 points by bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
Yes, one shouldn't use Windows XP. But it's still handy to keep a working XP virtual machine with some basic tools to run ancient programs that one encounters from time to time get the job done...
- txdv 7y ago
  windows xp running on modern hardware is lightning fast.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I'd love to have Windows XP with security patches and modern drivers.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
    The inevitable cost is zero security. Most desktop OS are not designed with security in mind and are vulnerable in different ways, but it's safe to say that Windows XP's security is effectively zero at this point. Personally, I only use Linux and BSDs on my machines, haven't use Windows for years. But I keep a Windows XP VM, I only need to use it for not more than once or twice a month, sometimes it's ancient hardware supporting program, sometimes it's ancient government program. There's no confidential information in the VM.
    - mr__y 7y ago
      > The inevitable cost is zero security When using VMs you could have a separate VM for each application. This will not improve security per se, but at least will isolate the effects of a vulnerability. This of course assumes that sufficient RAM/disk space is available
      - throwaway8941 7y ago
        With overlayed storage images and KSM, one can run a lot of VMs using a modest amount of memory. Basically you pay the memory cost of the guest OS once, and there's some (much lower) additional overhead per each VM. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Overlay_storage_images https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Overlay_storage_im... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Enabling_KSM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Enabling_KSM
        mr__y 7y ago
        Thanks, this sounds very interesting. On the other hand, are there any security implications? (especially if one assumes that hypervisor is _not_ bug-free) edit: I did some initial research and yes, it may have some security implications. However I believe it is not a major concern since the original idea was to use VMs to isolate instances of Windows XP which right now should be considered unsafe anyways
        pstch 7y ago
        KSM is also not totally free, a good amount of CPU time has to be spent to search for merging opportunities (this amount scales logarithmically with the amount of pages to scan). There is also a simple security implication, since you now have the possibility to over-allocate your physical memory, and suffer great consequences if many pages are unshared at the same time. Merged pages can be swapped out, but since they need to be scanned again when they are swapped in, BEFORE being merged, there is a great potential for memory pressure spikes in some configurations.
  - vwuon 7y ago
    Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware. [] if we don't count accesses to the disk, of course
    - bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
      I didn't realize how broken Windows 10 is, until I tried it on someone else's computer... At this point, it's unsuitable for any computer without a SSD: M$ has made a huge amount of background system update & housekeeping activities as integral parts of the system and they will continuously SEEK your disk to death, it doesn't need to be 20 MB/s, just 2 MB/s random seeking will render it useless for doing any actual work at any time. It's laughable that high-end commercial laptops are still being sold with those 5,400 RPM, 1 TB HDDs, totally unusable. You'll never see this kind of bullshit disk access on *nix (as long as you turned off your desktop search index service), or, for this matter, Windows XP...
      - vwuon 7y ago
        When I didn't have an SSD, I spent a lot of time configuring the system so it wouldn't do as much IO in the background. Lots of services, as you say, do that by default, and it's unbearable. You'd be using the computer normally and all of a sudden it would start crawling for no apparent reason.
        mcny 7y ago
        I try to do the same on a work desktop but it doesn't matter because xagt.exe Who knows what it is reading and writing that can't wait while I do npm install
      - hamilyon2 7y ago
        Well, it doesn't match my experience. I have 8 gb of ram and spinning rust disks and performance is bearable. For gaming even.
        matharmin 7y ago
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    If it even runs instead of BSODing?
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Linux with a lightweight WM (LXDE or Xfce) is even snappier, in my experience. It does need quite a bit more RAM (0.5 GB for a bare XP-like experience) but that's about it.
    - mr__y 7y ago
      FLWM has even lower mem usage (the usability suffers though)
- naushniki 7y ago
  Ironically, XP had issues with running legacy software back in the day, as it was the first NT-based OS targeted on desktop computers.
  - laumars 7y ago
    > [NT] was the first NT-based OS targeted on desktop computers In the mainstream home computing sense, yes. But it wasn't the first NT-based OS to target desktop computers. Windows 2000 had a few desktop releases and was even available pre-installed in some high street computer stores. Also NT4 did have a "Workstation" release specifically for desktop computers albeit that was aimed at businesses. Prior to NT4 I don't think there were separate desktop/server releases of NT but it did have enough software to run as a desktop if one wished. Though I think those people might have preferred OS/2 or Windows 3.1 instead (or a non-IBM PC; because there were plenty of options back then)
    - EvanAnderson 7y ago
      Every version of Windows NT (and later derivations) has had separate server and desktop-targeted releases going back to "Windows NT 3.1" and "Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server".
      - laumars 7y ago
        Ahh. I wasn't sure about NT 3.1 as it's the only version of NT I've not had to manage. In fact quite possibly the only version of Windows I've never used even once.
      - coredog64 7y ago
        One could change an NT4 workstation install into a server install with one or two registry changes and a reboot. There may have been a few binaries on the AS install media that were harder to come by, but in general the editions were licensing segments and not really different products.
  - marcoseliziario 7y ago
- kinleyd 7y ago
  I totally rely on my WinXP vm to run Office legacy stuff, an old scanner for which I only have XP drivers, and to keep alive accounts used by my daughter when she was little. Perhaps I should update it to SP4... Edit: It was a p2v vm of a desktop I started running in 2005. By 2009/10 it had started to crawl: 5m+ for boot and shutdown compared to seconds as a vm on Linux!
  - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
    I've recently started using VueScan for old scanners - it started when we got donated an old 35mm film scanner but it seems to cope with most hardware thrown at it. Not free, seems very good though. Cross-platform support too: https://www.hamrick.com/ https://www.hamrick.com/
    - kinleyd 7y ago
      Thanks, I'll certainly try it out. Edit: Yup, it covers my Visioneer 7300. Thank you indeed.
      - microcolonel 7y ago
        SANE claimed in 2005 to support the Visioneer 7300, for whatever that's worth. Though VueScan seems very cool, especially supporting IR dist removal, which is not present in SANE (which tends against any processing whatsoever).
        kinleyd 7y ago
        I do have sane on my system. However, I found the interface very rudimentary.
        microcolonel 7y ago
        Yeah, and the first-party SANE command line frontend (scanimage) is the only one that works reliably for me. I was just thinking of looking in to why none of the third-party frontends are reliable, I think I'll at least post an issue about that on the GitLab. XSane may work better than the GNOME and KDE SANE frontends.
- lightedman 7y ago
  I have a full XP machine because some games simply will not work under a VM with newer hardware. Example, the original Metal Gear Solid on the PC uses 8-bit acceleration. Pretty much every GPU dropped that support in the mid-00s.
- sah2ed 7y ago
  True, I also occasionally run XP inside a VM. The only issue is that the version of IE bundled with Windows XP cannot be upgraded to a newer engine, so for software such as Office that defer to the IE browser engine shipped with the OS to access the web, it is unable to access HTTPS-only websites like GitHub that use modern ciphers. GitHub also doesn’t downgrade the SSL connection to use old ciphers that are still supported by a few large websites. Firefox shows a startup warning it no longer supports XP and Chrome wasn’t usable IIRC. I wonder if there’s a way to upgrade embedded IE on Windows XP?
jacobush 7y ago
Date should be updated to (2019), the latest fixes are from POSReady updates from May this year.
perlgeek 7y ago
Is this reputable / trustworthy?
- neonhat 7y ago
  Only if it's open-source, which I doubt.
- rzr 7y ago
  No clue, but if it can be reconstructed from officials URL, I assume it's the best you can expect. Or just compute checksum of its contents and try to find the sources of binaries ?
outime 7y ago
I have very good memories from Windows XP. I moved from Windows ME (which was absolutely terrible) directly to XP and it was so much better. I even liked the overall appearance. But then I guess nostalgia and being less critical myself back then plays a role...
- nolok 7y ago
  Ehh not really XP was a great Windows OS for the time it came out. For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4. For the home users it was a move away from the old 9x kernel line and into the NT kernel line, which was infinitely better. XP's problem was that with Longhorn's delays and then Vista sucking so much, it took until mid-2009 for a suitable replacement to appear, and by then XP was really outdated. But at the time it came out ? It was great.
  - degski 7y ago
    For a long time I ran Windows XP x64, which was basically Windows Server 2003 x64 without the server components, that worked great (and server grade patches, becoz they just send the server updates). It was free as well, as they we're testing the ground for x64 OS'es.
  - laumars 7y ago
    Quite a lot of people did also run 2000 at home as well. It was actually a damn good OS given it's era: Linux wasn't ready to be used as a primary OS for most people, 9x/Me was total garbage and OS9 was somehow worse. Apple hadn't yet released OSX (that came a year later IIRC) and there were some inevitable compatibility and onboarding issues when that was released. The only real contender was BeOS (which did support x86 by that point) but sadly that didn't have the momentum to challenge Microsoft. > For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4. Windows 2000 definitely wasn't "mostly the same" as NT 4. They were as different as Vista was to XP. 2000 and XP (pre-SP2) were very similar though.
fsiefken 7y ago
I wonder if ReactOS is by now more lean and mean then XP_SP4, would be nice to run Office2010 in Parallels as I don't really grok the MacOS Office365
- _fzslm 7y ago
  You could also run it in Wine.
- aasasd 7y ago
  There's offline Office 2011 for Mac. It seems to be available on Ebay. And apparently the 2016 version also has an offline edition.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    IIRC volume licensees have access to fully offline 2016 and 2019 Office versions.
cheeze 7y ago
Oh man, this brings me back. I used to love making those streamlined XP installs where I stripped out as much as posisble. Was insane how fast you could get XP. Don't even get me started on when Longhorn leaked. OS ended up sucking but the Longhorn leak was amazing.
- jmkni 7y ago
  I always enjoyed slipstreaming the drivers onto an XP disk, and then going through the install process at 1280x1024 with full graphics/sound/network support.
- cco 7y ago
  I never heard about a Longhorn leak, what was amazing about it?
  - Macuyiko 7y ago
    If I recall, those first Longhorn builds found a great middle ground between the foundations of XP and the few good parts of what would became Vista, including some nice ui concepts. Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end.
    - kompakt 7y ago
      Longhorn concept was awesome. I remember how crazy and advanced this Longhorn promo was https://youtu.be/b9ifQvQCO7Y https://youtu.be/b9ifQvQCO7Y >Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end. Maybe with the first versions, but after a few service packs it was really usable. Hell, Windows 7 was referred to as "Windows Vista SP3" :) But I do agree that Vista wasn't as Longhorn. I think they realized it was too demanding and too advanced so they decided to milk the concept ideas for later versions.
      - pstch 7y ago
        In the video, is the last application that opens when Longhorn starts up a package manager ? I've never really understood why both Microsoft and, especially, Apple have never tried to adopt a model similar to the one used by Linux distributions, positioning themselves as the intermediary between the end users and application developers. I suppose this is because they were focused on enterprise customers, and there was already a model in place for shipping software to such customers. However, for home users, installing applications have always been a tedious process that is full of risk.
pjc50 7y ago
Ah, POSReady! The special version of Windows XP for point-of-sale systems and ATMs. They have a service life target of something like 15 years, since the companies using them don't want to go through huge replacement cycles if they can possibly help it.
- myu701 7y ago
  Windows POS Ready 2009 is the Windows-7 based product that we still use here. Supported until 2023 by contractual obligations. No wonder they are offering ESUs to businesses and maybe even consumers - gotta write the updates anyways, might as well push em out to a few other skus?
joering2 7y ago
How hard is it to write your own OS ? Based on experience of Gates and Torvals, I think someone will eventually write an owesome Operating System that will be beautiful abd flashy yet yseful and wont steal user data to make extra money.
- n0rbwah 7y ago
  You'll need to have strong backward compatibility with a popular system for it to have chance to become popular. MS-DOS was compatible with CP/M when it came out and MS kept working on backward compatibility since then. Linux was unix-like and filled a hole for a FOSS unix-like OS at the right time. The GNU utilities were among the first things that were made to work on it and it was kinda source-compatible with other unixes. If your new system requires that everything under the sun gets ported to it before people can use their favorite tools, it will fail. BTW, Gates didn't write his own OS, he bought it and got people in his company to work on it.
  - toyg 7y ago
    It’s so ironic how Gates, who looked and acted as a stereotypical übergeek, found ultimate success by... being a shrewd businessman and doing as little own work as possible. And still, most non-IT people think he was some sort of hacker genius.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  Writing an OS isn't that hard. After all, Lion's Commentary on Unix is only 250 pages. But if you actually want the OS to be useful and have modern features, then you're looking at hundreds or thousands of person years rather than a couple months. Plus all the time you'd need after convincing the world to port their software to your new OS.
293984j29384 7y ago
It might just be nostalgia but I really liked the GUI for Windows XP. The Start Menu was a clean and intuitive interface to find things you've installed. Windows 10 seems to be a huge step backwards in terms of usability. I tend to use xfce or lxqt on all my Linux systems. These days, all the action is happening in the web browser and I want my operating system is just work.
- the_af 7y ago
  I liked WinXP -- possibly the last Windows I liked -- but if I remember correctly, the first thing power users did was de-XP-ify the GUI and switch it back to the classic, cleaner look :)
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I used to do this up into Win7 days, avoiding the "Aero" theme. A shame they took that option out of 8 and later.
    - to1y 7y ago
      Classicshell.net is quite good for that
      - asveikau 7y ago
        It doesn't make the window borders feel like the 90s, or get rid of dwm.exe.
  - csdreamer7 7y ago
    Part of it was just resources. XP ran a lot faster and better without the theming. Another part of it was due to buggy graphic drivers. But once you started getting XP on much faster computers you tend to leave it on or turn it off out of habit.
    - the_af 7y ago
bbmario 7y ago
How can I make a VirtualBox VM out of this?
heelix 7y ago
I stayed on Windows XP-64 for a very long time. It shared code with the Server 2003 if I remember right. Drivers were solid... if you had them. God help you if you did not. (most of the quality parts did, however) I miss the days of nlite tuning an ISO. As an OS, it did what I'd hope an OS would do - just stay out of the way and let me run my apps.
rzr 7y ago
Is this pack refreshing SSL/TLS Root certs ?

169 points by bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago

Yes, one shouldn't use Windows XP. But it's still handy to keep a working XP virtual machine with some basic tools to run ancient programs that one encounters from time to time get the job done...

txdv 7y ago
windows xp running on modern hardware is lightning fast.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I'd love to have Windows XP with security patches and modern drivers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
  The inevitable cost is zero security. Most desktop OS are not designed with security in mind and are vulnerable in different ways, but it's safe to say that Windows XP's security is effectively zero at this point. Personally, I only use Linux and BSDs on my machines, haven't use Windows for years. But I keep a Windows XP VM, I only need to use it for not more than once or twice a month, sometimes it's ancient hardware supporting program, sometimes it's ancient government program. There's no confidential information in the VM.
  - mr__y 7y ago
    > The inevitable cost is zero security When using VMs you could have a separate VM for each application. This will not improve security per se, but at least will isolate the effects of a vulnerability. This of course assumes that sufficient RAM/disk space is available
    - throwaway8941 7y ago
      With overlayed storage images and KSM, one can run a lot of VMs using a modest amount of memory. Basically you pay the memory cost of the guest OS once, and there's some (much lower) additional overhead per each VM. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Overlay_storage_images https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Overlay_storage_im... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Enabling_KSM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Enabling_KSM
      - mr__y 7y ago
        Thanks, this sounds very interesting. On the other hand, are there any security implications? (especially if one assumes that hypervisor is _not_ bug-free) edit: I did some initial research and yes, it may have some security implications. However I believe it is not a major concern since the original idea was to use VMs to isolate instances of Windows XP which right now should be considered unsafe anyways
        pstch 7y ago
        KSM is also not totally free, a good amount of CPU time has to be spent to search for merging opportunities (this amount scales logarithmically with the amount of pages to scan). There is also a simple security implication, since you now have the possibility to over-allocate your physical memory, and suffer great consequences if many pages are unshared at the same time. Merged pages can be swapped out, but since they need to be scanned again when they are swapped in, BEFORE being merged, there is a great potential for memory pressure spikes in some configurations.
- vwuon 7y ago
  Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware. [] if we don't count accesses to the disk, of course
  - bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
    I didn't realize how broken Windows 10 is, until I tried it on someone else's computer... At this point, it's unsuitable for any computer without a SSD: M$ has made a huge amount of background system update & housekeeping activities as integral parts of the system and they will continuously SEEK your disk to death, it doesn't need to be 20 MB/s, just 2 MB/s random seeking will render it useless for doing any actual work at any time. It's laughable that high-end commercial laptops are still being sold with those 5,400 RPM, 1 TB HDDs, totally unusable. You'll never see this kind of bullshit disk access on *nix (as long as you turned off your desktop search index service), or, for this matter, Windows XP...
    - vwuon 7y ago
      When I didn't have an SSD, I spent a lot of time configuring the system so it wouldn't do as much IO in the background. Lots of services, as you say, do that by default, and it's unbearable. You'd be using the computer normally and all of a sudden it would start crawling for no apparent reason.
      - mcny 7y ago
        I try to do the same on a work desktop but it doesn't matter because xagt.exe Who knows what it is reading and writing that can't wait while I do npm install
    - hamilyon2 7y ago
      Well, it doesn't match my experience. I have 8 gb of ram and spinning rust disks and performance is bearable. For gaming even.
      - matharmin 7y ago
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  If it even runs instead of BSODing?
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Linux with a lightweight WM (LXDE or Xfce) is even snappier, in my experience. It does need quite a bit more RAM (0.5 GB for a bare XP-like experience) but that's about it.
  - mr__y 7y ago
    FLWM has even lower mem usage (the usability suffers though)
naushniki 7y ago
Ironically, XP had issues with running legacy software back in the day, as it was the first NT-based OS targeted on desktop computers.
- laumars 7y ago
  > [NT] was the first NT-based OS targeted on desktop computers In the mainstream home computing sense, yes. But it wasn't the first NT-based OS to target desktop computers. Windows 2000 had a few desktop releases and was even available pre-installed in some high street computer stores. Also NT4 did have a "Workstation" release specifically for desktop computers albeit that was aimed at businesses. Prior to NT4 I don't think there were separate desktop/server releases of NT but it did have enough software to run as a desktop if one wished. Though I think those people might have preferred OS/2 or Windows 3.1 instead (or a non-IBM PC; because there were plenty of options back then)
  - EvanAnderson 7y ago
    Every version of Windows NT (and later derivations) has had separate server and desktop-targeted releases going back to "Windows NT 3.1" and "Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server".
    - laumars 7y ago
      Ahh. I wasn't sure about NT 3.1 as it's the only version of NT I've not had to manage. In fact quite possibly the only version of Windows I've never used even once.
    - coredog64 7y ago
      One could change an NT4 workstation install into a server install with one or two registry changes and a reboot. There may have been a few binaries on the AS install media that were harder to come by, but in general the editions were licensing segments and not really different products.
- marcoseliziario 7y ago
kinleyd 7y ago
I totally rely on my WinXP vm to run Office legacy stuff, an old scanner for which I only have XP drivers, and to keep alive accounts used by my daughter when she was little. Perhaps I should update it to SP4... Edit: It was a p2v vm of a desktop I started running in 2005. By 2009/10 it had started to crawl: 5m+ for boot and shutdown compared to seconds as a vm on Linux!
- BuildTheRobots 7y ago
  I've recently started using VueScan for old scanners - it started when we got donated an old 35mm film scanner but it seems to cope with most hardware thrown at it. Not free, seems very good though. Cross-platform support too: https://www.hamrick.com/ https://www.hamrick.com/
  - kinleyd 7y ago
    Thanks, I'll certainly try it out. Edit: Yup, it covers my Visioneer 7300. Thank you indeed.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      SANE claimed in 2005 to support the Visioneer 7300, for whatever that's worth. Though VueScan seems very cool, especially supporting IR dist removal, which is not present in SANE (which tends against any processing whatsoever).
      - kinleyd 7y ago
        I do have sane on my system. However, I found the interface very rudimentary.
        microcolonel 7y ago
        Yeah, and the first-party SANE command line frontend (scanimage) is the only one that works reliably for me. I was just thinking of looking in to why none of the third-party frontends are reliable, I think I'll at least post an issue about that on the GitLab. XSane may work better than the GNOME and KDE SANE frontends.
lightedman 7y ago
I have a full XP machine because some games simply will not work under a VM with newer hardware. Example, the original Metal Gear Solid on the PC uses 8-bit acceleration. Pretty much every GPU dropped that support in the mid-00s.
sah2ed 7y ago
True, I also occasionally run XP inside a VM. The only issue is that the version of IE bundled with Windows XP cannot be upgraded to a newer engine, so for software such as Office that defer to the IE browser engine shipped with the OS to access the web, it is unable to access HTTPS-only websites like GitHub that use modern ciphers. GitHub also doesn’t downgrade the SSL connection to use old ciphers that are still supported by a few large websites. Firefox shows a startup warning it no longer supports XP and Chrome wasn’t usable IIRC. I wonder if there’s a way to upgrade embedded IE on Windows XP?

jacobush 7y ago

Date should be updated to (2019), the latest fixes are from POSReady updates from May this year.

perlgeek 7y ago

Is this reputable / trustworthy?

neonhat 7y ago
Only if it's open-source, which I doubt.
rzr 7y ago
No clue, but if it can be reconstructed from officials URL, I assume it's the best you can expect. Or just compute checksum of its contents and try to find the sources of binaries ?

outime 7y ago

I have very good memories from Windows XP. I moved from Windows ME (which was absolutely terrible) directly to XP and it was so much better. I even liked the overall appearance. But then I guess nostalgia and being less critical myself back then plays a role...

nolok 7y ago
Ehh not really XP was a great Windows OS for the time it came out. For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4. For the home users it was a move away from the old 9x kernel line and into the NT kernel line, which was infinitely better. XP's problem was that with Longhorn's delays and then Vista sucking so much, it took until mid-2009 for a suitable replacement to appear, and by then XP was really outdated. But at the time it came out ? It was great.
- degski 7y ago
  For a long time I ran Windows XP x64, which was basically Windows Server 2003 x64 without the server components, that worked great (and server grade patches, becoz they just send the server updates). It was free as well, as they we're testing the ground for x64 OS'es.
- laumars 7y ago
  Quite a lot of people did also run 2000 at home as well. It was actually a damn good OS given it's era: Linux wasn't ready to be used as a primary OS for most people, 9x/Me was total garbage and OS9 was somehow worse. Apple hadn't yet released OSX (that came a year later IIRC) and there were some inevitable compatibility and onboarding issues when that was released. The only real contender was BeOS (which did support x86 by that point) but sadly that didn't have the momentum to challenge Microsoft. > For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4. Windows 2000 definitely wasn't "mostly the same" as NT 4. They were as different as Vista was to XP. 2000 and XP (pre-SP2) were very similar though.

fsiefken 7y ago

I wonder if ReactOS is by now more lean and mean then XP_SP4, would be nice to run Office2010 in Parallels as I don't really grok the MacOS Office365

_fzslm 7y ago
You could also run it in Wine.
aasasd 7y ago
There's offline Office 2011 for Mac. It seems to be available on Ebay. And apparently the 2016 version also has an offline edition.
- lloeki 7y ago
  IIRC volume licensees have access to fully offline 2016 and 2019 Office versions.

cheeze 7y ago

Oh man, this brings me back. I used to love making those streamlined XP installs where I stripped out as much as posisble. Was insane how fast you could get XP. Don't even get me started on when Longhorn leaked. OS ended up sucking but the Longhorn leak was amazing.

jmkni 7y ago
I always enjoyed slipstreaming the drivers onto an XP disk, and then going through the install process at 1280x1024 with full graphics/sound/network support.
cco 7y ago
I never heard about a Longhorn leak, what was amazing about it?
- Macuyiko 7y ago
  If I recall, those first Longhorn builds found a great middle ground between the foundations of XP and the few good parts of what would became Vista, including some nice ui concepts. Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end.
  - kompakt 7y ago
    Longhorn concept was awesome. I remember how crazy and advanced this Longhorn promo was https://youtu.be/b9ifQvQCO7Y https://youtu.be/b9ifQvQCO7Y >Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end. Maybe with the first versions, but after a few service packs it was really usable. Hell, Windows 7 was referred to as "Windows Vista SP3" :) But I do agree that Vista wasn't as Longhorn. I think they realized it was too demanding and too advanced so they decided to milk the concept ideas for later versions.
    - pstch 7y ago
      In the video, is the last application that opens when Longhorn starts up a package manager ? I've never really understood why both Microsoft and, especially, Apple have never tried to adopt a model similar to the one used by Linux distributions, positioning themselves as the intermediary between the end users and application developers. I suppose this is because they were focused on enterprise customers, and there was already a model in place for shipping software to such customers. However, for home users, installing applications have always been a tedious process that is full of risk.

pjc50 7y ago

Ah, POSReady! The special version of Windows XP for point-of-sale systems and ATMs. They have a service life target of something like 15 years, since the companies using them don't want to go through huge replacement cycles if they can possibly help it.

myu701 7y ago
Windows POS Ready 2009 is the Windows-7 based product that we still use here. Supported until 2023 by contractual obligations. No wonder they are offering ESUs to businesses and maybe even consumers - gotta write the updates anyways, might as well push em out to a few other skus?

joering2 7y ago

How hard is it to write your own OS ? Based on experience of Gates and Torvals, I think someone will eventually write an owesome Operating System that will be beautiful abd flashy yet yseful and wont steal user data to make extra money.

n0rbwah 7y ago
You'll need to have strong backward compatibility with a popular system for it to have chance to become popular. MS-DOS was compatible with CP/M when it came out and MS kept working on backward compatibility since then. Linux was unix-like and filled a hole for a FOSS unix-like OS at the right time. The GNU utilities were among the first things that were made to work on it and it was kinda source-compatible with other unixes. If your new system requires that everything under the sun gets ported to it before people can use their favorite tools, it will fail. BTW, Gates didn't write his own OS, he bought it and got people in his company to work on it.
- toyg 7y ago
  It’s so ironic how Gates, who looked and acted as a stereotypical übergeek, found ultimate success by... being a shrewd businessman and doing as little own work as possible. And still, most non-IT people think he was some sort of hacker genius.
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
Writing an OS isn't that hard. After all, Lion's Commentary on Unix is only 250 pages. But if you actually want the OS to be useful and have modern features, then you're looking at hundreds or thousands of person years rather than a couple months. Plus all the time you'd need after convincing the world to port their software to your new OS.

293984j29384 7y ago

It might just be nostalgia but I really liked the GUI for Windows XP. The Start Menu was a clean and intuitive interface to find things you've installed. Windows 10 seems to be a huge step backwards in terms of usability. I tend to use xfce or lxqt on all my Linux systems. These days, all the action is happening in the web browser and I want my operating system is just work.

the_af 7y ago
I liked WinXP -- possibly the last Windows I liked -- but if I remember correctly, the first thing power users did was de-XP-ify the GUI and switch it back to the classic, cleaner look :)
- asveikau 7y ago
  I used to do this up into Win7 days, avoiding the "Aero" theme. A shame they took that option out of 8 and later.
  - to1y 7y ago
    Classicshell.net is quite good for that
    - asveikau 7y ago
      It doesn't make the window borders feel like the 90s, or get rid of dwm.exe.
- csdreamer7 7y ago
  Part of it was just resources. XP ran a lot faster and better without the theming. Another part of it was due to buggy graphic drivers. But once you started getting XP on much faster computers you tend to leave it on or turn it off out of habit.
  - the_af 7y ago

bbmario 7y ago

How can I make a VirtualBox VM out of this?

heelix 7y ago

I stayed on Windows XP-64 for a very long time. It shared code with the Server 2003 if I remember right. Drivers were solid... if you had them. God help you if you did not. (most of the quality parts did, however) I miss the days of nlite tuning an ISO. As an OS, it did what I'd hope an OS would do - just stay out of the way and let me run my apps.

rzr 7y ago

Is this pack refreshing SSL/TLS Root certs ?