12 ms·

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 f

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?

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?