j7n

I have noticed that older versions of Windows will not extract and display an icon from executable files over a certain size (over 600 to 1100 MB). There doesn't seem to be a nice round limit below which icons would be guaranteed to show. Until now, from experience with my own computer, I assumed that size was 1 GB, and I have made self-extracting archives with this volume size. However, on another XP computer the files would show the default blue window icon. On Windows 98, even 700 MB files are without an icon. A Server 2003 installation with only 384 MB of RAM will show icons of all files except one which is 1.17 GB. Vista shows all icons. The actual prepended program where the icon might be located is actually only a few hundred KB, and Windows is aware of it. When running the program over network, only a small portion gets downloaded. Unrelated to the question at hand, XP SP2 appears to download slightly more while searching for the cursed digital signature, and is noticeably more unresponsive compared to Windows 2000 or XP SP1. Neither displays an icon. I am curious where the limit is set, if it is a function of available memory, swap file, memory fragmentation or... ?

I thought everyone on this board knew what nLite was. It is a tool for customizing a new Windows installation image. One of the last steps consists of a long page of registry tweaks.

I usually use the tweak set from nLite, which comes with brief descriptions, and some visual and functional tweaks such as classic theme for the system account of the shut down event tracker to get an extra safety prompt. But those do not affect performance directly. XP absolutely needs to have the networking settings tweaked for performance. I use a registry file for that, because it is quicker to just double-click it and be done with it, rather than drag sliders around in TCP Optimizer. No harm comes from settings that have no effect on the particular OS version. TCP-IP_Settings_for_Win2kXP2k3.reg

Did you check if the profile size counter overflows at 4 GB on XP? A quick check of the screenshots on Google showed some where the profile was bigger, but those seemed to be from NT 6. It would be funny if Microsoft never meant for users to have more than 4 GB of My Documents, My Music and My Downloads. My system partition is 3 GB, so I can't do the experiement. Administrator directory is 339 MB (348 MB with cluster overhead), Local Settings is 83 MB, and Profile Size is 256 MB. Alacran has good advise. In addition to that, I would also move out the largest application caches and user's %temp% out of the system partition to avoid the file system on C: being slowed down by repeated creation of thousands of temporary files. Maybe Local Settings can be redirected entirely, but that probably has unforeseen consequences, because the data in that directiory is of variable pemanence. I've moved web browser caches out separately. This reduced the file count in the profile to 9100 (macromedia flash cookies, various application presets), which is mostly static unless I add or remove applications that add new files in there. I have a separate S: Swap partition of 2 GB (which apparently is a problem, because I encountered one modern program that attemted to allocate memory for a DVD's worth of files in Swap), and a T: Temp partition of 10 GB, which can be wiped entirely without lasting effect. Those two could go on the same volume. Mixing documents with system files always striked me as very odd, but apparently is now the right thing to do on Windows. Logically, only various "settings" which may or may not be part of the Registry, depending on the program, should be stored in that profile.

On my systems, the Profile Size does not include the Local Settings subdirectory. This directory contains mostly discardable temporary caches of various applications, and also the save game of Need for Speed Underground 2, which is very much needed. I guess applications don't use these directories consistently, especially if Microsoft changes how they're supposed to be used with every new Windows version. You could move files into and out of the directory and bring up the profile dialog again, and see which files count. As far as I'm concerned, the total size after any manual cleanup matters if I want to transfer my settings to another computer. I suppose the current user registry ntuser.dat is over 1 MB on any system that has been in use at all. Since I use Total Commander daily, I do Ctrl-Shift-Enter to calculate directory sizes quickly, and then look at the largest ones. Not as readable as a graphical tool, but still helpful.

I have disabled Web Fonts for some time in Opera 12 to avoid their download and visible refreshes of the page. Sometimes the fonts would remain loaded in the system after I closed the respective page. opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebfonts Problem is that many websites now have buttons and icons drawn using font glyphs. Those do not show correctly if I disable web fonts. Commonly the search icon becomes the ligature "fl". Most new downloadable fonts generally require ClearType to look good, with some exceptions. Here the absence of vertical anti-aliasing, breaks up some glyphs. If web fonts are disabled, the page falls back to a system font that is tweaked to look good with standard greyscale anti-aliasing, but the header no longer has an icon for the "user" and "basket" buttons.

I agree with you. I use Opera daily, but avoid heavy javascript-based sites, such as the new MSFN. Windows 2000 or XP is probably just fine for a special purpose built computer, if parts that aren't essential for the application are shut off, such as file and printer sharing and web browser. With every new version, Windows has taken on more functionality, and of course security issues in every one of those components. Luna theme and with clouds and the green start button is a hard to imagine on a military ship...

Surprisingly, I got a readable translation from Google Translate. "When you buy a ship, you do not buy it today, you bought it 20 years ago." I don't see why this can't apply to computers too. Big corporations just want us to throw old technology out and buy new for no reason. I'd replace the boot logo with one of the navy, put the classic theme on, and confuse the journalists into thinking it is Windows 2000.

WinRAR 5.50 beta 4 (since a few versions ago) requires XP SP2, and fails with EncodePointer error on XP SP1, and with "not a valid win32 application" error on Windows 2000 because it demands subsystem Version 5.1. With that out of the way, Windows 2000 still complains about TzSpecificLocalTimeToSystemTime, and would probably get to uxtheme and EncodePointer eventually. If you have a patch for Windows 2000 that extends it so that XP programs run, then it is right to say that it runs on 2000+patchX, but not 2000 SP4 by itself. What is that update by the way? WinRAR does not require SP3. Programs that do, fail with GetLogicalProcessorInformation. I suppose MSIE is by design meant to run only on current versions of Windows. It is unfortunate that is integrated into the system so much, and, among other things, depends on SSL DLLs that the system uses for other purposes. Windows 10 will be very confusing when it comes to system requirements.

I find this attraction to "death" of commercial products by neophiles quite silly and almost in poor taste. The MP3 format also just "died". Layer-2 and AC-3 are probably fossils then. These Youtubers and forum members are doing advertising for Microsoft without realizing it. Disco is dead! I wasn't going to make a post about it alone. But now that I'm here already. Why would you take driver files from Server 2003 and try to transplant them into XP to get more memory & bigger disks working, instead of starting with Server as a stable working base and building up from that?

I future proofed myself and entered Firefox 77.0 in that field, and added few funny messages in the end of it. I'm still using Firefox 27, upgraded from 22 a short while ago, because common sites that have nothing to do with money insisted on TLS 1.2 support. I got no desire to research how to disable stuff in newer versions. The blur of "skia" was a total disaster on my mom's PC; I'm glad I found a solution on MSFN.

Excuse the bump. I too strongly dislike ClearType. The tuning is to a large degree in the fonts, their hinting. Firefox's setting was to use cleartype for downloaded webfonts, and that is usually for the best, because they were designed recently assuming CT was on. But Тahoma and Verdana - Windows system and classic web fonts - do not work with it. If I choose dark type (the first squares in the tuner software), the font weight increases and characters in boldface text bleed together and have decreased readability. If I choose light type, bold menu items look acceptable, but regular text is too light and increasingly purple. Maybe this is why they replaced the system font with Segoe. ClearType also doesn't work on cheap flat screen with either narrow viewing angle (laptop / TN) or poor response time (PVA): if I sit close to such as screen or scroll text on it, vertical lines in glyphs will become distinctly purple and the color will vary across a line of text. These screens were the only types available when XP was released, and the system also didn't have any special fonts until Office 2007, and looked horrible. Also no anti-aliasing in the vertical direction. The letter O has top and bottom pixellated but not the sides.

Maybe it is easier to get any common Ethernet card working in a Win98 computer and connect it with a cable to a Wlan router, which is configured in station/client mode to access the wireless network. This eliminates need for wi-fi-specific utilities that can be unstable or slow the system down.

Has the PDF format been fundamentally changed that a new reader is required to view files made as of now? I don't think so. I use PDF-XChange Viewer 2.5, released in 2014. It is small enough, renders type at high quality, and has good UI design without flattness or ribbons.

I have solved this issue after reading the experience of some users of VMware Tools and mIRC. https://communities.vmware.com/thread/513894?start=0 http://forums.mirc.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/241712/mIRC_7.27_and_7.29_causing_BSO I was surprised that both VMware and mIRC accepted reports about older OS as valid. Respect to them. The culprit turned out to be an overly complicated manifest resource: two "xmlns" values per any element, as well as a section <ms_compatibility:compatibility ... >. Removal of those stopped the crashes. Replacing <ms_compatibility...> with <compatibility><application><supportedOS ... also seemed to work. Copying sxs.dll 5.1.2600.2932 from the KB921337 hotfix into XP SP1 hasn't caused any new issues yet, and also allows software that previously crashed to work. Yes, I still have an installation of SP1 which is heavily cutomized. Getting all settings and applications installed again on a new OS would require much effort. <rant> I have always hated manifests and the winSxS system, because they don't allow to easily copy MSVC runtime DLLs. But I didn't think they would be the cause of crashes, the kind that just don't happen since Win9x. Supported OSs and whether XP themed controls should be enabled could be recorded in a few bits in some header, instead of a big file in text format that needs to be parsed, and contains impossible to remember GUIDs. I just googled sxs sucks or something similar, when I came up to the posts containing the solution. </rant> Long live XP.

A normal desktop, at the time of XP's release, was 1024*768 at full RGB, maybe somewhat less if the picture tube was only 15". Games and videos were played at smaller resolutions which we are not at liberty to pick anymore today and are stuck with either blur or ringing. But you don't see a wallpaper during those activities. Games from 1999-2001 generally had preset options for 640, 800, 1024 modes. Win98/2k/xp all also come with nice 48px icons, which can only be appreciated on a decent screen. Yes, the UI scales well.

I'm disappointed, although not surprised, that they didn't include such a valuable picture in decent quality. The JPEG on the XP CD is about 50 KB (46 KB after optimization) with color subsampling, and looks very poor. I found [url=a better copy via google, which, according to its Exif, was saved recently in 2011 (seems that Imgur stripped it). [rant] Anyway, XP was well into the era of "bloated" software, and could have used some of that free space on the CD for art of lasting value. I have to shake my head whenever I go to a website, which loads some heavy javascript and other "user experience" junk, but has chosen the absolute minimum parameters for the images or music, the actual "content". [/rant] I like the "Autumn" wallpaper more, but unfortunately it is just as pixellated.

The size of software always increases for one reason or another. In case of XP and Seven, most of it is due to dllcache and winsxs respectively. I always disable system file protection, so XP is still relatively lean for me. I do find most improvements in XP over 2000 to be of little substance. It boots a little faster (improvement largely negated by overall increase of size of all components), doesn't require a reboot as often when swapping drivers. I wouldn't have thought of wifi, because I don't use it, good point. Most 3rd party control applications for network are much more bloated than the built in service. What's left... The Fisher-Price Luna theme and themeing in general is nice to toy with for a while. I do recall that the introduction of theming brought compatibility issues, and introduced Manifests as the solution. So better they shouldn't have bothered. In the "multimedia" Windows has the Media Player, which is an insecure ripper without built-in support for modern formats, and Movie Maker, which is another toy, and shell media handler, which can crash explorer and prevent files from being deleted. Home users are better served with 3rd party "multimedia" applications. What do you mean by "modern LAN networking" apart from Wi-Fi? The network interface is mostly implemented by its driver. Most high performance TCP functionality, such as large window sizes and TCP options was alrady present in 2000 but not configured for top performance. The next generation improvement (Compound TCP) only came with 2003. Grandma's NT4 PC is probably not accounted in those statistics above.

I have some doubts about the accuracy of usage share statistics if they are populated by instances of a user downloading some script file that is embedded into a website. Correct me if I'm wrong with my assumption of how these are collected. If older computers with an old operating system are still in use, they are increasingly less likely to browse mainstream websites where these statistics counters are included, because how slow those sites are getting. Those computers either serve some other purpose, or they browse small or private websites, and not contribute to any statistics of this sort.

A couple areas aren't covered by your list. IrfanView or FastStone Viewer for image management, viewing and simple conversion. Foobar2000, or Winamp + Mp3Tag for audio playback and conversion. Exact Audo Copy, FileZilla (older versions). Serif PagePlus Starter, half baked replacement for InDesign. Older versions of the Sysinternals utilities, or Process Hacker + Currports. Many things from NirSoft might occasionally be useful. You could just use Photoshop CS2 (and the rest of the suite) for free. It's faster, more capable and compatible with older plaforms. uTorrent 2.x is much better, with same capabilities, but without ads and cloud/social/mobile BS.

I expect that the version of a browser released today will remain fully functional for at least a couple years. So there is little immediate effect from them ending support. I am using Firefox 22 released in 2013 on one of my computers (I notice there is no copyright year in the About box), as my fallback browser for when Opera can't be used on a certain site, and so far it hasn't yet failed. I have the program customized, and don't feel like going over all settings in a more recent version to check what has been changed/removed. The corporations have needlessly hooked users into the "rapid" release cycle as the only right way. I fear this is part of a grand design to move everyone onto 'the cloud'. The version number race was after all started by Google, an internet-oriented company. Would all other rebranded Chromiums, including modern Opera, also cease compatibility with XP? Perhaps a company like Opera wouldn't want to risk appearing "backwards" by catering to users of older systems. I feel Firefox is the better choice for old systems anyway, because it handles more functionality in itself – certificates and proxy servers – whereas Chromium/Opera[ium] relies on system components.

I have reached the opinion that removing bundled drivers and small components from 2k/XP doesn't make that much difference in practice anymore, once you add modern software post-installation, such as bloated drivers or any web browser. And adding removed components back, once their dependancies are better understood, takes some effort. Currently I have an XP system that doesn't have users displayed in task manager, nor can I search for them to add permissions, because I was over-eager in my removals. XP is plenty fast already when clean installed, with basic tweaks and a couple services stopped (indexing). I would disable System File Protection for a considerable cut in disk usage (dllcache folder) and installation time, and set a great number of registry tweaks that I consider best practice, as a convenience to not go over the long list again. Perhaps I would remove 'totally useless' features: msn, wmp, oobe (with VLK), iis. I have an irrational hatred toward them... But then again if I was to install XP for someone else, they might actually "like" WMP and the unstable shell media extension, so the build with all the registry tweaks ceases to be universal. But most of the things like mosue pointers and sample music just exist on disk passively, without causing trouble. If you want to install XP on a very very constrained target system with around 128 MB of RAM, I'd consider using Win2K or XP SP1, as a starting point, and use it with small period applications only.

My choice is Total Commander. I have tried XYplorer in the last few days. It has some positive aspects. The performance and stability are suprisingly good considering it is a Visual Basic (!) application. I wouldn't even consider it, if it required NET. The visual design is overall nicer compared to TC. Unlike TC, Xyplorer builds upon the win95-type Explorer with a folder tree instead of two panes, which might make the program more accessible to new users. TC has a "DOS/Norton"-feel to its core (down to keyboard shortcuts). I found the initial setup usable, and further configuration quite intuitive. I like how there is a search function for the bulky Settings dialog, as well as an overview of keyboard shortcuts, both of which TC does not feature. Without a heavy-handed license management, Xyplorer is easy to transfer to a new computer. The preview panel is easy to configure to show any media formats via DirectShow. In other ways Xyplorer is quite limited. There is no FTP client in it. FTP is a good OS-agnostic way to connect to any other computer, which cannot be easily done using SMB/network neighborhood. Xyplorer has some MP3 metadata management options, but doesn't support other common formats (including those with simple tags - ogg, ape), which means we need a dedicated software anyway. Built-in archive support only includes ZIP. Even with Zip, we do not get a tree-view of the compressed files. Instead the program launches Internet Explorer in another window to show the file listing. This requires a recent version (>6) of MSIE. XYplorer appears to be fully functional (including media preview) on Windows XP and Windows 2000 (with gdiplus.dll copied from XP). Files and folders with unicode symbols also worked. Xyplorer did start up on Win98, but certain functions showed the expected unreliability of Visual Basic software: New File and New Folder options spawned a dozen error messages and crashed the program. The basic rectangular selection frame didn't seem to select any files. I was a user of PowerDesk 3 by Mijenix Corporation in Win98 days. The included file finder had a few more options, and the explorer featured treeview of compressed archives, also the dialog helper allowed to resize the open/save dialogs and retain their history. Looks like PowerDesk has changed ownership several times. It seems PowerDesk is now marketed by Avanquest. The webpage design is quite repulsive, it seems like a scam site, overly commercial, with big download buttons and meaningless awards. System requirements for this file manager are rather elevated: 100 megabytes of disk space!? Total Commander remains my choice. It starts up quicker than Xyplorer, fully supports WinXP/2000/98, has integrated archive management (RAR3/RAR5 support for Win2k was recently addressed by the helpful forum members and author), and has integrated FTP with advanced configuration options related to codepages and security. So no matter how awful Microsoft makes Explorer in recent versions of Windows, I can get full control back if I can figure out how to load TC onto the system. Configuring TC to feel like Windows software takes some effort.