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I'm a bit late, but a new post popped up in the Avast Forum saying that as of October 1st 2024, they're no longer gonna test updates on Windows XP. As you probably know, the last version of Avast to run on Windows XP is version 18.8, however that one has been receiving not only definitions updates to update the various detections but also occasional patches when new security flaws were identified in the internal modules/components. Up until October 2024, Avast tested all those updates on every version of Windows starting from Windows XP upwards, however they're no longer gonna do that. This means that they're still gonna release definition updates and eventual security updates for version 18.8, but nobody from the Avast team will test them on XP, so they might or might not work and they're gonna rely on user feedbacks for this. To be fair, I'm a bit surprised to see such an announcement given that version 18 from 2018 is supposed to be supported for 10 years like other versions of Avast, so until the end of 2027 and it's the last x86 version before they moved to x64, so I thought they were still gonna continue testing up until the end of support. On the other hand, I do understand that resources and time are limited, so as long as they're still gonna push updates and they're gonna listen to user feedback, I'm "fine" with that. I also appreciate the openness about this as they clearly stated that they're not gonna have XP machines to test this, rather than just rolling out updates and saying "sorry" afterwards like what some other companies have done. We'll see what the future holds, but for now I haven't noticed any issue / incompatibility in any of the last updates. So far so good. What I can say, however, is that if you're using Avast and if you notice anything unusual on your XP, please reach out to the support team so that they can fix it, 'cause unfortunately they're no longer testing it.

Chrome forces everything to be HTTPS these days even when you click on an HTTP only website it silently "upgrades" you to HTTPS, thus causing issues like in this case. The link: http://sweetlow.orgfree.com/download/usb20_win9x.zip does exist, but when Chrome fetches it, it changes it to https://sweetlow.orgfree.com/download/usb20_win9x.zip which clearly doesn't exist. Using Firefox the link stays the same and I'm able to download the patch. It works like a charm. I also added the two .reg entries just to be sure. Kudos to the developers of this driver keeping Windows98 alive!

Not really, when I'm at home nothing should be connecting to anything. The only other device in the network is my smartphone and that one is running Android 15. In theory the router shouldn't be exposing ports to the outside world, but at this point I'm beginning to think that it might just be doing that... Anyway, once I'm home I'll try to run some scans through the network just to make sure and I'll let you know.

I looked at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and I found a file called hosts, but it's completely empty (0 KB), so... I guess no?

Hey guys, yesterday I was sitting at home, spending time on my PC before tuning to itv to watch a certain sporting event I don't wanna comment on / wanna forget really quickly. Anyway, I have Avast Premier 18.8.2356 from November 15th 2018, the last XP compatible version. I've been a long time Avast user as most people probably know and I'm totally happy with it as it's still receiving up-to-date virus definitions via normal updates and streaming updates. Anyway, the reason why I'm mentioning this is that I was pretty surprised to see a very unusual entry in the firewall that Avast reported as "Blocked": I really suck at networking, but seeing it like this it looks like someone or something tried to RDP into my XP! O_O Well, let's first say that I'm not dumb, so RDP is indeed disabled on my XP, so it wouldn't have led to anything anyway (probably), but this is pretty worrying. What's worse is that I can't see anything in the "Remote address", nor "Remote Port" or "Local address", so if it actually was an attacker, I don't even know who tried that. To make matters worse, I wasn't using a Public Wi-Fi or anything, I was sitting on my chair, at home, connected to my router. How is this possible? Is this a false alarm and the entry is a red herring? Or... perhaps... did someone actually try to RDP into my system? I'm confused.

Yep. That and the fact that they're phoning home as if there was no tomorrow with lots of telemetry (and don't even get me started on the new Microsoft Recall spyware I mean "feature"). If we add to that the new CPU requirements, mandatory TPM 2.0, secure boot, UEFI and - on Professional/Enterprise editions - mandatory full disk encryption with Bitlocker, it just makes you not want to use Windows 11. On top of it, using Win11 on anything other than an SSD makes everything stutter. As for the new UI, I just hate the fact that they redesigned the whole explorer.exe, the fact they almost entirely killed the old Control Panel by moving (almost) everything to the new dumbed down settings menu, the new dumbed down right click etc... Why Microsoft, why...?

Thank you Dixel! There's unfortunately one entry despite having unticked everything with the program posted before: I went on to check the registry at the path you highlighted, namely HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger but under WMI there's only Security, there's no "Autologger". Weird. O_o

Well I got rid of them all (including the OS ones) and my XP is still going strong, so I don't really think there's any adverse effect in getting rid of them.

Excellent program, I disabled the performance counters on everything. Thank you guys!

To be fair, even if it's fixed now, I don't really care that much about having performance timers measuring stuff as I don't really look at them anyway, so the follow up question is gonna be: how do I get rid of them? You know, the less things I have in the background sucking up resources the better. I tried with CMD: DISKPERF -N but it says: Both Logical and Physical Disk Performance counters on this system are automatically enabled on demand. For legacy applications using IOCTL_DISK_PERFORMANCE to retrieve raw counters, you can use -Y or -N to forcibly enable or disable. No restart is required.

Thank you both. I do have another XP machine laying around, but the other fix seemed a bit cleaner. Following the discussion linked by AstroSkipper, I 1) Headed to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\WmiApRpl\Performance 2) Deleted the First Counter, First Help, Last Counter and Last Help entries 3) Headed to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib 4) Set Last Counter to decimal 1846 5) Set Last Help to decimal 1847 6) Rebooted It worked like a charm.

Hey guys, every time I start my XP I get the following entry in the EventViewer Event ID: 3012 Type: Error Source: LoadPerf The performance strings in the Performance registry value is corrupted when process Performance extension counter provider. BaseIndex value from Performance registry is the first DWORD in Data section, LastCounter value is the second DWORD in Data section, and LastHelp value is the third DWORD in Data section. Then I get two info messages: Performance counters for the WmiApRpl (WmiApRpl) service were removed successfully. The Record Data contains the new values of the system Last Counter and Last Help registry entries. Performance counters for the WmiApRpl (WmiApRpl) service were loaded successfully. The Record Data contains the new index values assigned to this service. And when I reboot, the same thing happens. By reading on the web they all seem to suggest the LODCTR /R command from the command line, however on XP it seems to be returning a list of commands and in particular I can see: LODCTR /R:<FileName> restore perf registry strings and info using <FileName> So... the question is: what's "filename"? I tried to cd %Systemroot%\System32 lodctr perfci.ini and then rebooted, but it didn't work, I've got the same message back.

I'm not sure about the registration 'cause I'm on Avast Premier which I renew every 3 years as it also covers my Android mobile phone beside XP for my family and I. Up until now, I haven't had any issues and it happily accepted the key every time. Even in this very moment, I'm with Avast. I'm not sure about the free version key, though, but if it doesn't work, try posting on the Avast forum or ask the support, I'm sure they're gonna help you.

I watched the whole video and what he managed to pull off is amazing. I know that he started backporting .NET Framework 2.0 to Windows 95, but then he saw that he could get all the way up to .NET Framework 3.5 which is one release before .NET Framework 4 (the last XP Compatible one). Now, I don't have Windows95 as my first ever computer was with Windows98SE in 1999 which is the one I cloned and I still run - albeit in a VM. The thing with Windows98SE is that it only really supports .NET Framework 2.0, so the real question at this point is: can I use his installer on Windows98SE to make .NET Framework 3 and 3.5 work or am I going to screw the whole thing up?

Yeah... it still baffles me to see phishing websites getting a perfectly valid certificate from Let's Encrypt. I mean, what's the point of having Certificate Authorities at this point if scammers can just get their ways around it...