TrevMUN

I know you said you've resolved to move on, but I just wanted to point out ... I've got Marin, a Gateway P5-120 IBM PC, that's still kicking; all original parts save for the CD drive that I swapped out for a DVD-ROM a decade ago. No bulging capacitors, she seems to have escaped the capacitor plague. The CMOS battery of course is dead, but that's a minor annoyance and I'm not bothered enough to replace it yet. Also, The 8-Bit Guy has a video guide on picking the best laptop for playing MS-DOS games, most of which are from the 80's and early 90's. So, computers can survive for longer than that. As far as operating temperatures go, this article says that 40 C is the point where hard drives will start to experience shorter life spans if they remain at that temperature or higher for long periods of time. Safe operating temperatures for RAM will depend on the type of RAM your laptop had. Admittedly though, laptops are more difficult to maintain than desktop computers; my personal laptop, Etesia, is a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 431; I specifically sought out that model because they allow for easy replacement of the hard drive and RAM, as well as the optical drive. But even so, I've had to RMA Etesia several times due to physical damage I couldn't fix. (Despite my best efforts she always seemed to get banged up ... ) The OEM company that I bought Etesia from has, as of my recent RMA, really, really pushed me to trade up for a newer model. But new laptops lack a lot of the features I want ... Anyway, if you're not interested in @Mr.Scienceman2000's advice to get a refurbished laptop or get second-hand replacement parts, I second @ArcticFoxie's recommendation on W10 LTSB. Lightweight, gives you the most control over disabling telemetry. A friend gave me his old gaming PC before Palouser got her 2019 upgrade and that's what I use on that machine. (Ironic that I would come into possession of a Windows 10 machine shortly before Microsoft announced that the supposedly "last version of Windows" is now on borrowed time.)

Judging from the list of Intel CPUs, Palouser's current build didn't make the cut. Linus at LTT said that the cutoff point is Skylake. Years ago I saw someone post a picture on an overclocking forum showing Windows XP running on a Ryzen system, but at the time he did not elaborate how he pulled it off. I haven't seen any news on getting XP to run bare metal on any systems newer than XP64 on Intell X99-based ones.

Honestly, since I was able to find that Technet article describing the KBs which give the various XP versions SHA-2 functionality, I wasn't worried. Far as I'm concerned, we had our answer: XP may not have initially come with SHA-2 support, but Microsoft provided some functionality in later updates. Especially once people tracked down the relevant updates and put them up for download. If something happens, I've got the installation on hand. And we've got @legacyfan and @erpdude8 to thank for that.

Wait ... huh? I read through that thread and I'm a bit confused. Are those guys saying that updates after KB968730 also discreetly provide SHA-2 functionality to XP, and updates all the DLLs that would require the upgrade for said functionality? Or ... are they perhaps saying the updates can be verified/code signed with SHA-1 and SHA-2? EDIT: I think it's the latter. I just hunted down the relevant URL for that update. Of course, it required going to the Wayback Machine, but if you take a look you can see that the relevant installation files have both an SHA-1 and SHA-256 hash.

I haven't yet applied the Server 2003 SHA-2 update on my rig, so I just tested this as well, setting the date to May 10 at 1:25 AM. On New Moon and Firefox ESR, I get "SEC_ERROR_OSCP_OLD_RESPONSE" on some HTTPS sites but not others. The same sites are still accessible on Advanced Chrome and Chrome 49, however. I tried to see if anything changed if I set the date to May 17, but the same sites would still break on the same browsers, while the other sites that did not break remained unbroken. That's very peculiar.

I had this nagging feeling that there was more to the story of SHA-1 troubles than just not being able to use Windows Update anymore, but given how little I understand of how all this works, I didn't think my concerns would be taken seriously. This is part of why I had nagging concerns. Consider: how many developers go out of their way to support XP for any length of time once dev kits stop providing support by default? Most would just consider it not worth the trouble, I presume. Only in enthusiast circles would you actually see people taking care to make sure XP users can still run applications that might be affected. Also, there's that whole code signing aspect. This is all why I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss this as "paranoia mongering." It's why I actually spent time looking into this and seeing if XP ever did get SHA-2 support, and how to get it if so.

I just took a look at my rig's DLL, too: version number 5.131.3790.5235. I wonder if that's different for XP64 though? Does XP64 have a different version of crypt32 by default, and after the hotfix?

I don't know. I tried looking into what this means for XP. Over on VOGONS there was some talk about the Windows Update issue, and this was mentioned: Microsoft Technet has a blog post from 2010 saying this: No information's provided for XP64, and my rig doesn't appear to have either hotfix. I'm not even sure which one would apply to XP64.

Damn, Arctic ... what you've got is exactly the kind of setup I hope to have! I have a growing collection of machines that I want to set up like that, or something like the U-shaped desk The 8-Bit Guy made for his studio. (My aforementioned daily driver, Palouser, is XP64; my main personal laptop, Etesia, is XP32. The Gateway2000 machine I mentioned previously is Marin, and the Windows 10 hand-me-down is Levanter. I also have an OpenBSD machine I've been toying with using Palouser's old 2009 hardware, Ostwind. But I have still more machines for future projects ...) Having a computer room like yours also requires that I own a home somewhere ... right now I can only afford to rent rooms, can't even afford an apartment. I make do with a lot of folding/easily disassembled/collapsible furniture. Maybe some day I can realize this dream.

OHRRPGCE! Damn, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Back when I was in high school in the 90's I used to run with a group that worked on making games with that. Something rather charming about the way BAM conversions of MIDI sounded. That and Verge and Megazeux. What a time that was. I wonder about Visual Studio. I know that newer versions up and dropped support for compiling to XP; is it possible to re-implement support somehow?

So this may or may not be a niche topic, and I'm only just now learning about this even though I had just done a quick run to a nearby Fry's to get some tech accessories and anti-static bags; but as of February 24th, the electronics store franchise up and went out of business. In many ways, the writing has been on the wall for a two or so years, and there was a lot of speculation about the franchise's pending death. I remember things seeming some of the aisles bereft of goods in mid 2019 and being told by employees there were issues with the supply chain, as inventory slowly dwindled further and further. BitWit had done a video about this just before the pandemic locked everything down. In recent months I had noticed the stores here had set up barricades cordoning off over half of the available space. And yet, in spite of the worst months of the pandemic killing off many other stores, up until the last business day last month the franchise was still going. Welp, in spite of a lot of warning signs, the end came suddenly. Unlike, say, Toys R' Us which gave lot of warning about the pending permanent closing and went through a whole liquidation process, apparently Fry's employees were suddenly told that the whole company practically ceased to exist on the 26th. It's a damn shame, because Fry's Electronics stores are very whimsical and tend to have unique themes. The one in San Jose had a Mayan temple theme, the one in Campbell was like an Egyptian pyramid, the one in Fremont had a very 19th-century "World's Fair" Victorian theme. I've seen photos of other stores, such as one in Dallas that was (of course) very cowboy-themed while another one in the Southwest had a very Area 51 feel, complete with a giant flying saucer crashing through a wall. These stores often had their own in-house cafes, long before Starbucks dominated that scene. They apparently tried to do the Costco and IKEA thing of selling food on the cheap as a way of enticing people to stay and shop. It's a damned shame. Especially for the Bay Area, where you could find a lot of these stores. It seems like a lot of the appeal and quirky side of Silicon Valley is quickly vanishing. I found out too late, for example, about Weirdstuff Warehouse. Google bought the building where it was located, and so the store went out of business for good. A similar store, Excess Electronics, recently had the same happen thanks to Amazon but is trying to find a new site.

Yeah. I was looking into it and, at least at a cursory glance, Dell actually didn't support XP64 for the Latitude E6430. Even though XP32 is explicitly supported. The only available driver/software downloads are for XP32. I'm a bit surprised. That might not be the be-all end-all; there could be drivers out there which Dell doesn't have listed on this page. You might try asking @XP-x64-Lover for help; if they're out there, she might know where.

What motherboard do you have? Or is there a motherboard you're looking at getting?

I think whether or not it'll be worth it to you depends on what you like to do with your XP machine and what parts you're able to get. During XP's support period, XP64 had a reputation for not being supported by hardware/software. I personally have rarely run into that issue ... at least until after XP lost favor with Microsoft, and compilers stopped providing support for XP, thus causing newer programs to not work. But that's a hurdle all XP OSes face. The main advantage with XP64 is the ability to run 64-bit programs. If you're doing things that require a lot of RAM (e.g. running a web browser with a ton of tabs, video editing, rendering complex 3D scenes, gaming, etc.) you will definitely appreciate this feature. It's not just XP32 that is (normally, without the PAE mod) limited to 4GB; 32-bit programs in general, I believe, are also unable to use more than 4 GB of memory. 64-bit programs can use much more than 4 GB; I'm not sure what the upper limit is. And if you're like me and you max out the (normal?) memory cap of XP64 with 128 GB (because I'm nuts) your 64-bit programs will have a LOT of real estate to use. (I'm not sure if XP64 can go higher than 128 GB. Windows XP64 is technically more kin to Windows Server 2003, and Server 2003's Enterprise and Datacenter editions can take up to 1 TB of RAM.) The main drawback will be that you'll lose the ability to run 16-bit programs. If you've got some favorite 16-bit apps and you upgrade to XP64, you'll either need to have a spare machine running a 16 or 32-bit OS, have your computer dual boot with such an OS, or run those in a virtual machine.' The other question will be sourcing parts that are known to work on XP64 and have driver support. When @XP-x64-Lover located drivers for the X99 SABERTOOTH motherboards, I used that opportunity to give my daily driver some of the best hardware I could find for such a system: i7-6950X CPU, 128 GB of RAM, and with the .inf driver mod described at Matt's Repository, a GTX TITAN X (Maxwell version). It was a long-needed overhaul and damn worth it for what I do. I don't know offhand if we have a database of motherboards with known driver support for XP64, so before you take the plunge you'll want to do research. Odds are if your desired parts have XP drivers, they should have XP64 drivers or at least their chipset will. However, you will want to be sure before you try anything.

What kind of gamepad is it?

We'll see what the future holds, but like most of the other responses so far, I've no intention of giving up Windows XP for my daily driver computer. Even when I had decided to stick with XP back in the Vista days I knew that would mean eventually needing other machines for certain tasks. After all, Microsoft first tried to force gamers into upgrading to the newest Windows OS with Halo 2's release (and with deciding to make DX10 Vista-only, a tactic they've repeatedly used since). So I knew even back then I'd need a dedicated gaming PC not running XP at a certain point. Yet here I am, still running XP64. (I still don't have a dedicated gaming machine either ...) The main hurdles I foresee in regards to using XP64 indefinitely are hardware-related. Whether that's the market replacing x86 with ARM and thus ensuring new hardware is wholly unusable to x86-based OSes, or a new power supply standard making power supplies compatible with XP-friendly motherboards uncertain, there may come a time where we just can't run XP on bare metal because the hardware just won't support doing so. And it won't simply be a matter of someone finding or writing working drivers. On the other hand, that doesn't mean I'm pessimistic. When official support ends, the enthusiasts step in. Take a look at the communities for 8-bit computers; those guys are continually teaching old dogs new tricks as it were. They have, for example, made a wi-fi adapter for the Commodore 64. You can find all sorts of bonkers hardware and upgrades out there for 8-bit machines. Granted, 8-bit machines are simpler than what we deal with here, but I think the same spirit of, shall we say, innovative backwards compatibility is there.

Although it's been half a year, I'd just like to add for @FelixPls1's benefit (and anyone else looking for help with slow XP installs on older hardware) there was an old thread I posted years ago when I was having a problem with a Celeron laptop that ran XP, overheated very easily even when idling, and was generally sluggish. @tomw gave me a link to a tutorial at AskVG which might help increase system responsiveness even if none of these remedies actually address the problem. The guide helped make the laptop much faster to boot and not as quick to overheat. I'd also check some of the other advice given to me on that thread, if applicable to your machine.

That's a good point, I didn't think about the possibility of someone making adapters for an ATX12VO power supply for pre-ATX12VO motherboards and equipment. I have no experience with electrical engineering, but I wonder what such an adapter would look like ... As for storage devices, I'm not certain, but I think that the motherboard will take responsibility for providing 5v power for the devices that need it. I guess you'd be hooking those devices up to the mobo for power rather than through the power supply.

So I've been hearing about this one since last year. Intel's working with motherboard manufacturers to introduce a new power supply standard that's probably going to up and replace power supplies as we've known them since the mid-90's. PSUs on this standard will only supply 12V power. Intel touts this as a way for computers to lessen energy usage when idling. Here's Intel's design document for ATX12VO. KitGuru also has an article about this in a more easily readable format. That's going to come with an overhaul to how the connectors work, and also require motherboards to handle converting voltage that don't take 12v out the gate. The end result: ATX12VO requires entirely new types of motherboards. Because of that, we can probably expect this technology to supplant existing power supplies in the coming decade. As for why that's important: it's going to be another hurdle to overcome for us legacy OS enthusiasts. It's one thing to hunt down motherboards that support 9X, 2K, XP, Vista and such; it'll gradually get even harder once the power supply market adopts the ATX12VO standard and stops producing current form factor power supplies. That's, of course, assuming that companies don't build backwards compatibility into their PSUs, but I doubt that even if some did they wouldn't keep it up for very long. Whether or not we can rely on the existing stocks of power supplies out there to work reliably for pre-ATX12VO equipment in the future, I can't say for sure. The [H]ard forum has some debate about that, with one user noting "A sealed PSU is never going to last 30 years of service, no matter the usage, without being completely recapped at least a couple of times. Head on over to the vintage computer forum where we have PSUs from the mid 90s and older with dead electrolytics and exploding tantalum caps." This bridge is still quite a ways down the road, but it's something to think about. We'll see how things play out, I suppose.

Speaking of that, has anyone seen MattKC's video where he deliberately tries to infect Windows 98 with viruses? He went into it expecting to get viruses immediately, but got more and more frustrated that he couldn't no matter what he did. Granted, Nostalgia Nerd was able to mess up Windows 10 with DOS-era viruses, 7,000 of them, ultimately. Though unlike MattKC he actually went and deliberately downloaded a huge bunch of "zoo viruses" rather than just trying to be a particularly careless about his Internet habits. Either way, it does show that there is an element of security through obscurity for the older OSes. I don't rely on that alone, of course, but I didn't give into the FUD when tech journalists heralded the impending "XP Zombie Apocalypse" in 2014 and I don't intend to do so now.

Oof. I'll have to keep that one in mind. Are you talking about this happening if you happen to just power the system off rather than shutting down through the menu as normal?

I'm of a similar mind to Tripredacus. I have a Windows 10 machine a friend donated to me when my XP64 daily driver's old setup had RAM issues. The Windows 10 machine stays powered off most of the time, except when I have no choice but to use Windows 10 for something. For example, I used that machine to conduct job interviews due to videoconferencing software/websites not wanting to work with XP64. I'm wary of the telemetry crap in Windows 10, even though I took all the steps I could to mitigate it. I also prefer XP64's lighter memory requirements, giving me more room to work and multitask. Still, having a machine that DOES run Windows 10 is nice to have as a fallback when necessary, I will admit.

I imagine that the differences are much greater since the time that this article was written, but this one says CC 2014 introduced Focus Mask selection, two new types of motion blurs (path blur, spin blur), smart guides from Illustrator and InDesign, and the ability to link or embed Smart Objects, which allow you to treat imported images the way you would use a Symbol in Flash and other Adobe products. (That is to say: you can import instances of a file to other Photoshop files, and then if you update or change the original file all the instances will change as well.) Content aware tools had some refinement in CC 2014 as well, according to that article. Adobe's site does detail new features in the latest releases of Photoshop CC, too. Some are useful, others are just cloud crap.

Current mood:

Man do I miss the pre-Eclipse version of DeviantArt. I know I'm not the only one. So many pointless and irritating changes, and it broke compatibility with a lot of older browsers. There wasn't any reason for them to overhaul the site design, and they blatantly ignored their userbase. Then again, that is par for the course for a lot of these places. They know that their users won't stop using their service no matter how much they dislike the overhauls. Oh the other hand, I'm not sure how much of the bloat and sluggishness can be blamed for CSS3. My personal portfolio page uses both HTML5 and CSS3, but I will admit I made a huge effort to ensure that the site is capable of graceful degradation as far back as IE8. Maybe even earlier. Also, my page doesn't call in a ton of scripts off-site. That might be the major issue; most of the big sites which are clunky and slow seem like they call from many different resources off the page. Often NoScript will say there's a half-dozen or more off-site scripts in play. More than that, I think that a lot of these sites have been deliberately sabotaging usability in order to encourage people to use app versions instead. Many of the worst offenders keep hounding you to download their app when you try to visit their site on a mobile device. One wonders how much that's costing them in terms of hosting and traffic, and how much they could save by focusing on a leaner, faster, more usable design that doesn't require a bunch of off-site services.