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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.

That is progress. Every new version of a software product uses more resources, with very few exceptions. Vista was an epic jump in inefficiency. I take issue with the overhauled Event Viewer. Now that is slow with little gain in functionality, considering that it has to list hundreds more items than other parts of the MMC. I read that parts of it now use .Net. If the system is "older", one pretty much has no choice but to use a page file. 4 GB of RAM might be enough for XP with many uses, but I still have a swap file for the occasional overflow. I second going over the services. Totally disabling Prefetch (at boot time) was a pain in the neck. I forgot the exact location in registry where that service had a dependency, that caused the system to blue screen. It's not necessary to disable it. I just went as far as I could in slimming the OS down.

In most cases you could forward a generous range of ports, or all of them, on the limited modem, toward the new router behind the modem, and set up detailed NAT policy on the quality router. If one isn't prepared to do an installation of custom software onto a router and often resort to the command line, but still needs detailed firewall options, a Mikrotik RouterBoard (such as the hAP or the 3011) with a responsive, compact Windows GUI might make an attractive option. In this case, I can't recommend it, because the built-in DNS server can't handle more than about 500 or so static entries, nor directly parse a hosts file. It works for me, I manually add blocked entries and local hostnames as they are needed. They can be loaded via a script; DHCP DNS can be disabled; user's DNS can be redirected via NAT; any MAC can be assigned to a port; wifi can work on any frequency without needing the ddwrt superchannel 'license', and other common options.

The weight of today's web sites appear to be one of the main reasons why the average user would need to upgrade their computer, even if they don't work with graphics or play games. It is easy to get a browser to consume a gig of memory just by opening a couple of typical portals with a complex layout. Pages don't contain that many images anymore actually, since graphic buttons and rounded corners fell out of fashion. Typically I see few images of mediocre quality pulled in by a chain of JavaScript resources, onto a 'chickens*** minimalistic', – ugly –, flat single color background. Sometimes the page elements get repeatedly resized and reflown in response to some script, which again is quite slow. I like to see good quality photos without compression artifacts. Not all websites need them. A list of search results probably only needs one small picture at most. But what actually happens is that the same poor quality pictures of yesterday get pulled in from linked resources at high cost (latency, bandwidth, cpu/ram). They're not always advertisements. I've been quite annoyed by services like Gravatar. I've seen some forums (might have been this very one) contact Gravatar asking for an avatar for each and every member whose post was visible. Vast majority of users did not in fact have a picture hosted there, but my browser kept establishing SSL connections and asking anyway. It is difficult to imagine how people can surf without adblock to avoid "fat asset" nonsense... Opera versions 11 and 12 have been criticised as having decreased stability compared to earlier builds. I'm sure that vast majority of blame lies on web bloat, overcomplicated layouts and scripts, which didn't exist earlier. Websites following "obsolete" design standards are rare nowadays, but is quite ar relief to browse one, such as a good old VBulletin forum, or Project Cerbera. This site flies, its code is easy to read and save to for offline use. I love the attention to detail, how the author has used <abbr> to define terms, instead of a custom popup frame.

In Firefox, I have set this option to run any plugin version: extensions.blocklist.enabled . This setting is non-discoverable, buried deep in about:config, and seems to pertain to scripted 'extensions' and not binary plugins (searching for 'plugin' would yield nothing, and I can only learn about this option after I search on the web). Firefox 27 and Flash 11.4 still working fine. All video sites and casual vector games still work in this Flash. Macromedia has put out 5 major versions of it withing in one year. Omg, the bandwidth that's wasted on those updates... I was seriously upset when I updated to a recent version of Opera (Opium), and it blocked my version of Flash. I was unable to find a setting, hidden or otherwise, to control this beahavior. Opera is not the controllable, power-user's version of Chrome I hoped it would be.

I stand corrected, NET does install EVR and DXVA2. I've no experience with those... Still, the Flurry Screensaver 1.1 by Matt Ginzton is is an OpenGL application, not directX. Very nice small program. Thank you.

I'm fairly sure that .NET is a separate component from video. It can only hurt performance if it starts additional processes that use lots the CPU time. Of course other applications could also be loaded and doing something in the background. OpenGL today comes in its entirety with video drivers. If you replace the video card or driver, new OpenGL DLL(s) will be completely reinstalled. Simple. OpenGL games work even if old DirectX is loaded and never updated. This is different from DirectX where you have to install both the DirectX and also a compatible driver. Maybe your video card driver comes with a control panel with settings that adjust its performance trading some picture quality or power consumption.

I would use Win7 if I absolutely needed recent software that cannot be replaced with an older version, or if the system in question didn't have all drivers (excluding devices without practical use such as 'system management bus', some embedded soundcard on a video adapter, etc). I haven't followed your other threads. If your system is old and has had software added and removed many times in its life, reinstalling XP or 2003 on it would speed it up just the same as installing Win7 would. I think the impression that the latest OS is much fast is mostly based on an experience while the new OS is fresh, and not yet bogged down by fragmentation and bloated applications. If the new OS starts to boot slowly, maybe you can pay attention if that happens after the installation of a particular driver or application, as you add them one at a time. Then find an alternative.

I finally had a chance to test this function. It works as I expected. The triangle is also surprisingly precisely drawn/hinted. Firefox itself doesn't appear to be using FontLink (a different triangle is substituted).

Look the actual NIC chip up by its Vendor and Device ID, which you may be able to see on the BIOS POST screen or using AIDA64/Everest. For example, 11ab 4362 -> Marvell Gigabit Ethernet Controller. The modern chips are usually too small to read the markings on them without holding the board up close. The Windows driver might report the device confusingly as a "family controller", but will usually say if it's Fast or Gigabit "family". Verify that the Speed & Duplex setting in the adapter's Advanced Settings is set to Auto-Sense or Auto-Negotiation to match the setting on the unmanaged switch on the other end. Try disabling Green Ethernet or EEE settings if they are present. If both of PC2 and PC2-Alternate are verified Gigabit capable, connect them (or another computer) together with a short known-good patch cable to rule out a fault in the cable (a pair that's unused for Fast Ethernet). You didn't give a report on what the Alternate's link speed or throughput were. A new PCI-E network would only cost around 14 euros. If Gigabit link comes up, test throughout with FileZilla FTP Server/Client instead of Windows file sharing, which is slower.

The Users control panel has a dumbed down "web" style and seems to be ahead of its time. The older Users dialog is still present in XP and can be called via this command: rundll32.exe netplwiz.dll,UsersRunDll But the Management Console works too.

Looks like I was wrong about there not being a character substitution in Windows 2000/XP. There is at least one practical mechanism called "Font Linking". It doesn't work automatically like in web browsers though. You have to manually specify the list of fonts to fall back to. A configuration change like that might require a reboot to apply. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLinkType: REG_MULTI_SZName: Tahomal_10646.ttf,Lucida Sans Unicodeanother.ttf,Another FontI didn't mean that you should accept the font that Microsoft Word shows as the first option. Rather, go to Format > Font or an equivalent dialog, and cycle through all your fonts to see which ones look good at low point sizes, have the symbol and aren't too large.

25B6; BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE The fonts on my system that have this symbol are: Kepler Std Kozuka Mincho Pro Lucida Sans Unicode * Minion Pro Utopia Std All except one are Adobe OpenType PostScript fonts. Browsers will usually replace missing symbols on a character (firefox) or paragraph element (opera) basis from all installed fonts. I think Opera holds configuration for Unicode Character Ranges somehwere and uses that. Firefox can switch fonts on literally every symbol. If you have a webpage with normal text and one Japanese symbol, that one symbol might get pulled from another font, not excplitly declared on the webpage. The remainder of the paragraph after this symbol might be shown using that foreign font as well. I don't know if WinNT 6.1 also does this. But WinXP most certainly does not. I imagine looking up every character into a table of replacements is a very slow process. Especially since Unicode is quite bloated with funny symbols. The symbol only shows up on the Windows title bar if I choose a font which has this 25B6 in it. You can copy-paste this character into common Unicode capable software like Microsoft Word and browse your list of fonts to see which one has it. ▶

TL/DR: Yes. No. No. I am using Windows XP Service Pack 1 on my somewhat aged Conroe-class computer, which, believe or not, serves and my main computer, and XP with SP3 on my other computer based on the Intel B75 platform. I do not feel a need to update these systems, which are stable, and I do not intend to load any more post-SP3 updates on new Windows installations if/when I make them, unless there is a specific problem that can be solved by replacing one or a few system files. Loading numerous updates onto a customized installation with 3rd party components (drivers) is asking for trouble. It may be that an update fixes what Microsoft perceives to be a defect or vulnerability, but which isn't one actually (like the half-open connections limit). If a service pack, analogous to the Unofficial Service Pack for Windows 98SE, gets released, I'll give that a try. I do not intend to install any update that brings Microsoft bloatware components like MSIE, WMP or Net Framework, which are not need most of the time, and would defeat the purpose of using WinXP in the first place, a systme with small footprint on disk and memory. It would be awesome to have a universal "big hard drive" patch or USB3 drivers (which I do not have on my B75 system). So far I have not had much trouble using recent software on my systems. Most programs do nowadays require at least SP2 and sometimes SP3. But I always try to use the oldest version that still satisfies my requirements, as they tend to use less memory. When downloading software, I look over the version archive, paying attention to when the installation package has significantly increased in size. If I don't see a solid, practical justification for it, I get the previous version, which is usually compatible with more OS versions, old or new. Some software still have separate XP builds, or alternate builds with a lower version of MSVC. I get those. They work just fine on Vista/Seven usually. Older versions often get pulled from author's web sites or made very difficult to locate. Whenever I download an installation package, I always save it to disk, renamed with the full title of the product, its version and required platform (Win2k, XPSP2, etc.) For example, WinMTR (Matt's traceroute) v0.8 - 262,144 bytes, WinMTR v0.92 - 1,783,296 bytes. Improvements: advertisement for AppNor, requires XP SP2 or later. As for browsers, I use Opera 12.11, Firefox 27, and Opera 19 (rebranded Chromium -> "Opium"). Firefox and Opium have since been updated, but so far most sites that I need work just fine in these older browsers. What is a major version of those browsers today, is actualy a minor point-release. There are only 2 browsers to choose from today: Firefox and Chromium. Each have several flavors with mostly superficial differences, which are a matter of taste. Opium doesn't embed itself as deeply into the system as Google Chrome does. The installation package can be completely downloaded, and automatic updates can be disabled. Opera used to be a separate browser until last year, but was discontinued. I will continue using Opera's POP3 mail client. I haven't seriously used Internet Explorer past version 6. My XP systems have MSIE6 installed. Some CHM help files appear broken with this version, as do other software with embedded web content. But software that loads "media-rich" webpages onto its interface is usually replaced with faster, more stable secure alternatives. To access my MikroTik router I use its "proprietary" Windows GUI "Winbox" or the telnet client included with it. The version I have installed right now (6.10) runs on Windows 98 just fine, except that its icons with alpha channel show corrupted. But it's possible to use an old computer to manage routers in an imergency. This beats the "cross-platformness" of most Web UIs.

Is ClearType ON in the second example where we can't see any taskbar buttons? Well, the control panel only affects 3D applications/games and video. Drawing type with accelerable, resizable textures is a new school thing and I don't believe is present in XP in any form. To my eye, it looks like the "choppy" text sample might be overdrawn two or more times for whatever tecnical reason. (One instance of "Standard"-oversampled text drawn directly on top of another copy, which causes an increase in font weight.) And this isn't happening with the other driver. My guessing might not be a technically accurate. That is how it looks. I sometimes see this happening in software not very compatible with anti-aliased text, when moving windows around or making selections. Previously drawn pixels with partial coverage get left on screen, then new text gets drawn again over them, which causes a build-up of a dark border around text characters, until something is done that causes a complete refresh of the screen. Such as when a window is drawn outside of the screen area or below another window. For example the 16-bit version of the "Flying Windows" screensaver does this. The version that comes with Win98 forces AA off regardless of the system setting, and gives a clean output (but not as smooth). The Standard greyscale method of font aliasing might look crude and choppy. I think it has remained unchanged since since Win98 and Pentium II class systems where it ran at an acceptable speed. I don't think NVidia or any other driver can increase the oversampling factor to produce smoother text. If it did, it would apply to all grescale-rendered fonts, not just the Start button. Overall, I prefer to not use subpixel AA, because it adds color to text that should be black and increses font weight. But that is another topic. The Start button looks quite good in ClearType (this particular combination of white, dark shadow and green doesn't give rise to rainbow colors).

That's an absolute truth. For some mysterious reason people are in love with web UIs which work at the speed of a 10 year old computer or slower on the latest system. They usually display only a small amount of data on 1 screen (like 25 emails instead of a thousand or more) and when I interact with the web UI the entire page gets slowly redrawn. Or an empty page with a few words and one big button, which uses 100% cpu. I'm feeling the slowness on a Conroe CPU as well because I use Opera which has a slower engine. But "the web UI is ubiquitous" and it's the "cloudy" future. And every manufacturer has to produce a bloated web UI or they'll face criticism that they don't look modern enough. I'm typing from my old WinXP Service Pack 1 system right now using the Administrator account. If I was to use Seven, I'd still do it from Administrator with all the account control disabled as much as possible. I can't believe the dance with the TrustedInstaller that people have to go through to get things done.

I'm sure Classic Shell is a great program and the best choice for most people. I followed this guide (or a repost of it somewhere) to make the Start menu appear as a cascading tree, without using any 3rd party software. The process involves relocation and renaming of the MSIE shell folder Favorites, filling it with links to programs and adding that to the Start menu. I've forgotten the exact steps. It seems that Microsoft has a function for creating a cascading menu, but has chosen to disable it for Programs. No doubt to guide users into using their computers the right way™. And Microsoft eventually succeeded, same as they have made most people like the Flat UI by now. Related thread with a bit of drama, when people disagreed about which Start menu was the best. Disadvantages of this method are that the contents of All Users and current User menus don't combine into one list (we must copy over common shortcuts manually), and programs chosen from this menu do not get added to the recently used list in the big box. I also ran into an issue where the modified Favorites folder became "associated with Internet" (I think this occurred when I did something in Internet Explorer, which I normally don't use), and I started seeing a warning every time I started a program from the menu. I recreated the folder from scratch to solve this problem.