At my current job, W10 is staying for the foreseeable future and we are holding back W11 for as long as it could be possible. Because MS is just charging way too much for an spyware and ad free W11. Last year our purchases team sent a request for a W11 without ads, without tracking (we are privacy and security critical) and without AI, or at least reasonable ways for the ICT team to remove them. That option simply doesn’t exists, so it is W10 forever then.
In 2020 I worked for an MSP and we had to fix a broken Windows 2000 machine because it was the only machine that a certain medial office could use to send a receive faxes. They could not afford to upgrade a more modern system, as it necessitate a forklift upgrade of all their systems that would go into the 5-digit dollars. They didn’t have that money and no one could get computers quickly in 2020 so fixing it was the only option. After 20 hours of troubleshooting it got bounced up to me, because managed the team that had to fix it. I went into the office after they closed and everyone was gone, because pandemic. I pulled the machine in question out of the corner of the “server room” (read: poorly ventilated closet) it was in. An old Gateway full ATX tower, it was a sight to behold underneath the dust. Turns out the dust was the problem - it hadn’t been cleaned at any point in the last 20 years and there was a literal quarter inch of dust and lint on top of the motherboard. I cleaned that thing till it sparkled, set up back up and turned it on. Worked PERFECTLY, like nothing had ever been wrong. I was happy, the client was overjoyed and my bosses were happy. Good stuff.
The PSU blew 7 months later, taking down the motherboard and drives. Paperweight. So we took the full backup we made after I fixed it, turned it into a VM, set up a USB passthrough and gave it a USB fax modem. I left that job a while back, but to my knowledge it’s still working. By the time we had done that we had billed over 30 hours of work to the client at $150/hr. That’s a $4500 Windows 2000 fax server with added VM licensing on top of it. Pretty silly at the end of the day.
Yes, I have a 2008-era build running it. It’s glorious. Not really many fixes other than installing all the updates up to 2019, and making sure to manually run SSD tools to trim my drive.
I have a bunch of retro machines, and one of them is running XP. Not long ago I enjoyed No one lives forever on it. Nothing beats the correct hardware.
Regarding fixes, Service Pack 2 is enough. And since Steam is not supporting retro machines anymore there is no reason to connect it to the internet anymore, thankfully gog let’s me download the installers, all the more reason to use gog exclusively. At least for my special gaming tastes.
At work we have one old PC on Windows XP for the ancient PBX phone system we are currently using. It runs fine, it is only there to run specific programs so it’s not like we install/run anything else on it. And it’s not exposed to the internet.
The hardware will die eventually but until then my boss is too cheap to spend the money to replace the entire phone system.
One of my machines at work is still running on XP. Runs a CAD/CAM program and talks to the PLC of a fair sized 2D CNC mill. I prefer it to the machine running on Millennium.
You know i woke up today with a furious urge to buy an old Windows XP computer and play old games on it. Of course i wouldn’t ever connect it to the internet.
I suspect i might be setting myself up for major headaches
After my most recent attempt at installing XP on a virtual machine, I am very confident in saying that I don’t wanna deal with it ever again.
Getting VMware tools to work on it still doesn’t fix the incredibly choppy framerate, activating it is an absolute mess, getting software to run on it oftentimes leads to a crash, increasing the DPI settings to match my monitor’s resolution makes it look even worse than it does in the default settings, oh and speaking of looks, the Luna theme is garbage.
I’m pretty sure I never had any of these problems as a kid, so I wonder how it got so buggy. Even Vista doesn’t work as intended (it always worked amazingly in my experience). I ended up sticking with Windows 7 on my virtual machine, since once I installed VMware tools, it works perfectly.
I used to throw the old AOL instant message and “you’ve got mail!” WAVs on my incoming message alerts every so often for a laugh. It got old more quickly every time I did it.
i don’t necessarily use it, but i mess around with an xp vm a lot. for web browsing there’s mypal (which is old but still mostly functional firefox) and supermium which is somehow chrome 122 on xp. there’s also one core api for running more modern apps, but i haven’t ever tried it.
overall, xp is surprising usable for most people considering “usable” means “there is a modern web browser” but i still wouldn’t recommend it since xp is 23 years old.
Quite a few people here sound like ideal candidates to try ReactOS. It is an open source implementation of the NT architecture and should generally slot in for most software including drivers. It works quite well and plenty of people have managed to get old hardware working on ReactOS that was not otherwise ssfe to connect to a network. It works just like Windows NT and looks very similar but also supports more modern security standards and software.
I tried it twice and not a single time it clicked with my hardware. The idea is great though and might solve few problems for me (old software on modern PC).
Damn, that sucks. What sort of stuff were you trying to keep running? I haven’t got a lot of old hardware anymore after moving a bunch of times, everything I have is modern old, around to 5 to 8 year mark, so no hardware support issues but also nothing powerful enough to do anything fun with.
E.g. I spent a lot of time trying to convince specific old and outdated branch of AutoCAD-like program (never heard the name before or after) to work on anything past WinXP for my dad. He used that specific one at work and can’t get past anything else due to UI and workflow differences. I ended up running it in VM XP, because it was the only sane way…
Very cool. I helped my uncle get a tiny component of an old architecture program he paid a few thousand for working in a VM because literally nobody had made the same type of file converter since them and for some reason nobody minds having one machine running Windows XP on a machine in the corner. His XP machine died so I grabbed the disk and reimaged XP into a VM, brought over the files, and boom, that program runs and will continue to do so on a machine without network access but with a single folder mount point for dropping files back and forth.
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