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Windows XP Professional

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Re: Windows XP Professional

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows XP start menu sucked, no search function and it was common to have 3 columns full of shortcuts with folders inside folders. It only got better with Windows Vista.

Win 11 has no (decent) search function

It went to shit with Windows 10, yes. But I don't use Windows anymore.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#222
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still nice to use old versions of Office. I think 2003 was my favorite. Simple, usable, no usage-based UI, no pop-ups like "look at this new feature we silently installed!" while you're trying to write.

On a whim a few years ago I wrote an engineering proposal on my Pentium MMX using Word 2003. It opened within 2 seconds via the aging hard disk. Today even LibreOffice feels a bit overwrought. I've found AbiWord delightful recently - it's the WordPad analog of LibreOffice.

Very nice! I wrote a Christmas letter on my Pentium 3 to my partner's family last year, it was very cozy feeling. Not only that, but I was able to print it to my networked Brother printer without a problem.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#224
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge percentage of XP drivers worked just fine in w2k - sometimes you had to edit the ini or inf file or whatever it was.

They often just shipped the same driver for both.

IIRC it was almost always the video card driver; I ran W2K for quite a few years into the XP era before moving to XP with 2K theme. Everything was happy except the video card drivers, which were often "XP-only" but actually worked fine with 2k.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#227

Check out SmolXP [1]. The one I setup had a 340MB qcow2 image, took about ~10 sec to boot to desktop with qemu, and used only 58MB ram idling on desktop. https://github.com/AFellowSpeedrunner/SmolXP

What do you use it for?

I was running it with a VFIO passthrough firewire 800 card to run my RME fireface audio interface, mainly to control the graphical mixer.

It's amusing thinking if I rigged up an electron app for a mixer it would take up more memory than the entire disk+ram.

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