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I have not followed the scene for a couple years. Are there any replacement or shim DLLs available for enabling modern software to run on either Win XP or 2003? I'm only aware of KernelEx for Win98, the BlackWingCat's project and DLLs released for one or a few specific missing functions for some games (Crusader Kings), and to fix/extend xp SP1 (EncodePointer) and SP2. I'm looking for small updates that are safe and easy to copy to an existing system, not gigabyte compilations.

Thank you for your releases. Videos and plain sound files seem to work out of the box after I reinstalled the browsers again. I don't really watch news portals myself and tried a few test sites that dind't seem to load at first. I love how Borealis exposes so many options in the GUI.

What is the process for installing h.264 video decoder in recent Palemoon (28.9) or Borealis Navigator? The first post provides DLLs for older PM27/F45, which apparently have no effect when copied into the installaton of the new browser. Replacing mozavcodec.dll has no effect either. It doesn't even complain about wrong version. Nothing.

Unfortunately the QNX theme still has flaws as most of them do, which is why I made my post in the first place. There is quantity over quality, and over-abundance of choice. I made a few small tweaks that restore usability, namely made group box transparent when it's drawn over other controls in many programs, and added classic shadow to disabled buttons to make text readable and of the same style as static disabled text. In the unlikely event that anybody cares, I can provide a link. I noticed that themes include large text files of technical terms that are in Unicode for no reason, like most text on NT. 100 KB for each font size. Unfortunately Windows couldn't load ANSI text here. Original Adjusted

I don't make a distinction between portable or unportable software. A product may change the directory where it writes its settings file in an update, while continuing to work the same in other aspects. Most applications remain functional if they can't find their settings on a fresh OS. All software I have gets installed or manually copied into a directory called c:\bin or d:\apps; only system components that don't offer the choice go into Program Files. I avoid Microsoft-managed shell folders, and have done so long before NT6 and the complications it added. My archive of software is organized by category, such as "communications" or "text editors". I copy a compressed archive or installer in there after I've tested it, and don't run anything from this location. I don't use any 3rd party portability wrappers.

How do you manage file associations on Microsoft Windows? I enter them directly in the registry using Registry Workshop, which allows to copy entire keys in an Explorer-like interface. Earlier I used Regedit. I've defined file types for every extension beginning with "ZZ_" to organize them together. I've added three generic editors (emeditor, winhex, notepad) to the asterisk "*" extension. There is considerable redundancy in commands. Some file viewers are applicable to many types (IrfanView, media players). Other commands are specific to one or two formats. Merging all image or sound files into one file type is not convenient. This would also lose distinct icons for each format. Is there a tool that would allow one to define a command with its name, and then allow to quickly add it to specific file types via checkboxes or similar spreadsheet layout? The tool would be useful for setting up a new computer quickly. Association function in application software is mostly rubbish. They register themselves as the only program with the ambiguous "Open" verb. It is not easy to tell which program would be executed. Sometimes an association is stolen, and it is still called "Open" afterwards. Only some tools offer to add themselves as secondary types. I've tried "WAssociate", which is good, but not much more than Registry Workshop with a Browse function for commands and icons. I would probably use it for the registry tree copying functionality. I have to guess what "Default Programs Editor" does because it requires the NET Framework. These days computers are so obscenely fast that entire games run in Framework, but I don't have it. Looking at the screenshots, it seems that it doesn't allow to share commands between file types. What is the status of associations in Windows 10? When the system was new, word was that associations would only be managed by built-in OS tools. How exactly are they different there? Can you still set them via the registry, or have to do a dance with manifests or hidden accounts?

Thank you. The QNX is the best theme from this selection. The title bar has unique detailed design, and follows the usual convention of dimming the color when inactive. A Windows 2000 icon fits right in that frame. Xi01 and Cold Fusion 2 could have been good, but they look half done. Cold Fusion looks like it replicates some other system, and some colors have been left "undefined". The group boxes are invisible, leading to "flat" appearance. I see many familiar old applications that really whip the epa pollution preventer in the example pictures from "15 years ago". I still use Paint Shop Pro, Tweak UI, Winamp, MPlayer2, ACD See 3.0. : ) MindWood is a good recolor of the XP style.

This new version of the forum is very slow in Opera 12. Scrolling doesn't work work: scrollbar always indicates the top of the page and dragging it down causes a blank screen to show. I have switched to using Firefox on WinXP. I don't see why the forum dedicated to discussing and supporting old operating systems needs this bloated forum engine.

Can you recommend me a professional style UI theme for XP that is as readable as Classic, but still a step up in visual fidelity. There are many themes offered on the web that aim to make Windows look like system or fictional environment X, but they do not have good utility. I'm looking for calm colors of blue and grey shades, rectangular corners, well defined buttons. The main panels should better be some grey to avoid clashing with unthemed controls in older applications. I have installed all official themes: Embedded, Royale, Noir, Zune. Zune is overall the best. But all these themes share the following two flaws. Title bars of active and inactive windows are too similar. it is not easy to find an active window among many. The button-face panel colors are too light (about 230 compared to 210 on Classic or 192 on Win95), which causes unthemed buttons without an additional frame as well as group boxes and raised/sunken panels to disappear. Disabled text becomes hard to read. There is too little contrast with button-highlight (pure white). This also a reason why I find Windows Seven hard to use, as if I was looking through a glass with reflections. A good third party theme that fits most criteria is TangoBU3. But it is a little unpolished with vertical columns of pixels appearing on one side or between column panels and tabs.

I don't see why Wikipedia needs encryption it all, let alone to insist on strong one. It is a public knowledge base, not a bank. My understanding or security is superficial, but the only risk I can imagine is where the password of a Wiki account gets obtained and used elsewhere. A few years ago Wiki only required SSL during log in to secure against this. Why would they limit read-only access to the site? Practically Internet Explorer 8 has long been too slow to browse most modern websites with complex, bloated layout, secure or not.

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.