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Telegram still works on XP. Sure you'll have to use an older version and you're gonna get an annoying banner begging you to upgrade your OS, but it still works. Older versions of the TeamSpeak client can also be used as long as the server is also relying on an old version.

Given that a while ago the discussion about email services was brought up, upon logging in to my Gmail account today I've got a big fat warning: "Basic HTML will be discontinued by the end of the year. Switch to the modern version now otherwise you'll be switched to the new version automatically in January 2024". So, for everyone who has been using the classic HTML display version of Gmail using the browser, it looks like we're gonna be forced to move to the new, bloated, totally unnecessary Javascript version soon. That being said, I have no idea yet how it's gonna behave with the Roytam's browsers, but I wanted to put it here so that it's not gonna catch anyone by surprise. Still, I'm very much against this Google's decision, but well... we can't really complain about a free service I guess...

In my spare time I follow Dave Plummer's YouTube channel where he talks about various different things, mainly about his days at Microsoft many years ago (he's a retired Microsoft employee and, for those who didn't know, he's also the creator of Task Manager). Anyway, he visited the IBM lab as recently as last week where they're making new modern mainframes and long story short they're still relying on Windows XP on some of their equipment (albeit the embedded version): In the video, he said: "and here's where I discovered that they're relying on an old friend, something I've worked on, Windows XP. That's right, their stations still run on Windows XP. I guess when you absolutely, positively, need your fill station to work every time you only rely on the very best". for those who are curious about the video, you can go to minute 16:35

Thanks! That did the trick. I backed up the original ACPI.sys in a safe location on my disk. Then, I swapped acpi.sys both in C:\Windows\system32\drivers and C:\Windows\dllcache with the latest one and indeed it worked: I'm now running on version 5.1.2600.7777.8 and everything seems to work just fine. I even tried to use the ACPI Shutdown command and the PC received it just fine and shut itself down. Looks good. Yeah, this is an old installation, so I probably won't benefit from the upgrade, but it was nice seeing that XP reacted well and played nicely once I used the new ACPI driver. The battery % also looks good Thanks for the suggestion, I'll keep it in my utility section.

Right, yeah, it brought back the original one: Is there a non so brutal way to update the driver?

Gotcha! I don't see an inf file, though, do I just swap it with the one in C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers ? EDIT: Well, after backing up I did exactly that and nothing bad happened so I guess it's working xD

I downloaded the package out of curiosity and I can see it going up to 23 - acpi 7777.8 - 2023.04.17 - A5x11+A5x03 which I assume it's the latest one. Out of curiosity, what's the difference between this and the original ACPI implementation available on XP?

Yes, Windows98 indeed supports ACPI, however this is a very very very old installation and the initial setup didn't really install the ACPI support. Reinstalling isn't really an option as I keep it alive (cloned and virtualized) mostly for historical reason as it being my (almost gone) childhood OS from my first PC. I tried the post-install ACPI registry trick, however it sadly didn't work and the CPU was still being used at 100% when it wasn't doing anything. Rain has been my go-to for quite some time (actually many years) as it was indeed executing the HLT instruction when the CPU didn't have anything to do, thus keeping the fan quiet and not wasting unnecessary current, however in the resource monitor Rain was being displayed as the one always using 100% of the CPU (albeit running the HLT instruction) which was one minor inconvenience that always bugged me a bit. Now, with AMNHLTM, the solution is much "cleaner" as it's just a vxd file and once you install it, it just performs its job. No skewed % in the resource monitor, no toolbar indicator/autostart program (unlike rain) and it works like a charm. Indeed, if people can make the official Win98 implementation to work it would be better, but for those who can't for whatever incompatibility reason, this is probably the best solution.

I know I'm late to the party, but thank you for the wayback machine link. I replaced Rain with AMNHLTM and it works like a charm. Not only it does what it's supposed to do, but now I can finally see the right CPU usage with process explorer, while with Rain it was always displaying it as 100% as Rain was "eating up" all the available CPU time to make it idle.

Well, I kinda expected this given the lack of 32bit support from Avira, but kudos to you for actually spending time installing it and testing it out.

I saw it too but I just thought "Uh, it's been updated" and I was too lazy to actually check xD Thank you for letting us know.

I'm not sure what you mean. It's not a matter of being here or not, it's a community, everyone spends the time he has or wants to spend helping others and that's fine, it's not like one has to keep posting over and over again, every contribution is welcome as it's how a forum works I guess. I'm not really sure people are interested in this, but if you *must* know, in my case the fact that I don't post much is mostly because I go to work at 08.00AM and leave at 6.30PM, then I have dinner at 7.00PM at home and I study for my PhD 'till around 01.00AM, then I go to bed, sleep for a few hours, wake up in the morning and go back to work and repeat in cycle. It's 2023, this shouldn't surprise anyone but yes, I barely have any spare time for myself, so my "contributions" to MSFN have been essentially zero lately... This doesn't mean that, if I have an XP related question, I shouldn't go to MSFN as there are many valuable members who can "give up" some of their time for free and answer my questions, just like in this case as the community provided an answer and I'm glad for that. It goes without saying that I'm extremely grateful to all the people who are here and every week decide to spend a tiny bit of their free time to help others. Yes, it's how forum work, but sometimes we take this for granted and we shouldn't. Yeah, I mean, they can stay at 1 Gbit/s forever and it's not gonna be noticeable or make any difference, I'm sure, so it's fine. Yeah, licensing aside, back then even "just" 2.5 Gbit/s was mind blowing in terms of speed, so it's no wonder no one ever had issues 'till 20 years later and even now, realistically, if we consider XP as a consumer oriented OS, 2.5 Gbit/s is waaaaay more than enough for consumers / home users. Well everything still points to a poorly written driver and clearly nobody tested it on XP when it came out in 2017 on anything other than the default 1 Gbit/s speed, 'cause, let's face it, even in 2017 1 Gbit/s was way more than enough for pretty much everything anyway. Anyway, thanks everyone for your answers!

I see! I didn't know it was limited to 2.5 Gbit/s, that could explain why it's not behaving correctly and why it was set to 1 Gbit/s in the first place... Interesting! I think the sensible thing to do is unfortunately going to be to leave the default mode to 1 Gbit/s and call it a day then, I'm afraid. Very disappointing... The storages are connected with several connections going to the switch, each one of them being 10 Gbit/s fiber SFP+ at both ends and an LC cable. This is generally done for real bare metal Server 2019 hardware that needs to pull and send plenty of big beefy files back and forth all the time. In this case, it's just a VM connected to legacy stuff, but it's connected to the switch with a single Myricom 10 Gbit/s SFP+ so it would have been nice if it was possible to pass it through, but unfortunately that's beyond XP... Yes, but those machines are not encoding anything, they're connected via COM passthrough to an RS232 that is connected to very very very very old 1 inch type c physical devices when I need to capture something stored on a very old support for historical/archival reasons. Historically those were Windows 2000 Professional SP4 machines, but we were able to "upgrade" to XP years ago and still maintain compatibility in the RS232 communication. Any newer OS (Win7 all the way to Win11) won't work with the original Delphi software created to drive those (which, to be fair, was already "legacy" at the time). Long story short, they drive very old hardware and save something stored on very old media as v210 lossless which is then shared with the rest of the modern world. I can't go into any further details 'cause I don't think it's appropriate nor of any interest to anyone, but for anyone curious, just google "1 inch type c" and you'll see or, given that Jaclaz is Italian, he might be familiar with the Italian terminology which is "Pollice". hahahahahaha it would have been cool, though! But yeah, "disco" is indeed "disk". It says "beginning of the creation of the physical memory image on the disk". The system is healthy as the VM is running on an Intel 660p NVME and Linux has nothing to say about its health. It's almost definitely the PAE patch making it misbehave. Anyway, thanks everyone for your help, I think we got it now. So, to recap: XP is limited to 2.5 Gbit/s at network level and it can't handle 10 Gbit/s, thus bluescreening. The option to go to 10 Gbit/s mode should only be displayed to Windows Server 2003 and it's an issue on the driver side as it should never be exposed to XP clients. I'm sorry if the solution isn't very interesting to anyone, but still... Thanks for the swift reply, that's what I always expect from MSFN!

Hi there everyone, I'm using virtio-win-0.1.229 on Virtualbox 7.0.97 with Windows XP x86. Once the driver is installed, it can be set in several different modes, namely 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s, 1000 Mbit/s 10000 Mbit/s. By default in Windows XP it's set to 1000 Mbit/s, so 1 Gbit/s. As soon as I change it to 10 Gbit/s, however, I get a bluescreen. I tried to ask on GitHub about this and I also asked the virtio guys whether they were gonna release any updates for XP and they clearly said "no" and that XP is out of support. -.- So the questions I'm asking is: Do you guys actually use virtio on XP in a VM? Which performances do you get? Given that virtio is open source, has anyone actually ported a modern version of the ethernet driver (NetKVM) to XP? (and if so, why wasn't it committed via a pull request?). A side note: I'm using the PAE 128GB RAM patch, so I really hope it's not the one causing those bluescreens... A few more info about the current issue I'm facing and my testing platform: Software environment - Host Operating system: Fedora 38 - Host Architecture: x64 - Host kernel version: 6.2.12 - Host Hypervisor and version: Virtualbox 7.0.97 r156983 - Guest Operating system: Windows XP Professional (with Microsoft Updates 'till July 2019) - Guest Architecture: x86 - Guest libvirt version: virtio-win-0.1.229 Hardware environment - CPU: i7 6700HQ 4c/8th 2.60GHz - RAM: 64GB DDR4 (2x32) - GPU: NVIDIA GTX 950M 4GB GDDR5 - SSD: Samsung EVO 1TB Sata III (OS) - SSD: Samsung QVO 1TB Sata III (Data) - SSD: Intel 660p NVME 1TB (Virtual Machines) Description of the problem I noticed that, when switching to virtio, the default reported connection speed reported was 1 Gbit/s despite the fact that the virtual adapter should support 10 Gbit/s. I went in the settings and changed the reported speed from 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s (it's possible to do it from the registry as well, eventually), however it bluescreened. Steps to reproduce 1. Choose virt-io in Virtualbox as network adapter 2. Boot Windows XP Pro x86 3. Install the virt-io Windows drivers from the latest ISO (virtio-win-0.1.229.iso) 4. Reboot 5. Go to the correctly recognized virt-io network adapter and change the configuration from 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s 6. Confirm, apply, ok, close all the windows and wait for the bluescreen Pictures showing the issue:

LOL Yeah I was as surprised as you when I saw that xD Anyway, all is well what ends well

Speaking of which, the latest version of One Core API for XP x86 supports Avast 18.8 as @Skulltrail fixed it. AVG 18.8 is untested, though, but I would be very surprised if it was broken.

My theory has been confirmed! Despite having quite literally all our Win10 machines installed with EN-US, someone installed the Win11 ones with EN-GB, so I grabbed an EN-GB ISO and it worked:

I know, right?! And yeah I still love 4.8 even though it doesn't get definitions updates any longer. It is still installed on my Windows98SE which, just like your Windows ME, only exists for historical reasons: i.e it was my very first PC whose PATA HDD has now been turned into a VM...

Yep, a huge thank you indeed, but perhaps we don't have much time to "celebrate"... Speaking of Avast, they recently phased out version 11 of their antivirus, which follows the deprecation of other, older versions. They seem to be keeping the trend running of serving 9 years of support per product. The same happened to all the other products, all the way back to some of the famous ones like version 4.8 released in 2008 which was the last Win98 compatible version, which got retired in 2017, again, after 9 years. With a simple calculation and knowing that version 18 was the last XP compatible one, we can expect Windows XP support to last 'till 2027. We're currently on the second half of 2023 and on our way to 2024. This means that, unless the recent Avast merger changes something, we still have effectively 3 years and a few months to enjoy the support with the definitions update and the same is true for AVG (which is Avast with a different frontend).

To be absolutely fair, now that I think about it, it might be that someone installed it as English UK rather than English US by mistake. I'll check on Monday to see which one it is and I'll try again.

Hi there guys, long story short, I have some machines running Windows 11 21H2 Professional x64 in an internal, secure, network that will never ever see the light of internet and, as such, there will never be a connection to Windows Update. Those machines are serving one and only one purpose: they drive the flexicarts of an old tape archive. I've got a notification from the security guys asking me to upgrade, so I downloaded the Windows 11 22H2 x64 ISO from the official Microsoft website, connected it to the machine, opened the ISO from within Windows and run the Setup.exe that was in there. There were three options, the first one, which was to update while keeping programs and personal files, was grayed out, and only the other two "keep personal files" or "nothing" were available. This is a bit of a problem 'cause if I only keep personal files, it means that I'll have to reinstall all the drivers, the programs etc which can be a tedious task. Ironically, I had 4 other machines running Windows 10 20H2 Professional x64 which I was able to upgrade in the same way with a Windows 10 22H2 x64 ISO by running the Setup.exe while preserving all the programs and files. Why is the option grayed out when I try to do the same with Win11 and a Win11 ISO? What am I doing wrong?

Yep ClamAV works but it's also very prone to detect false positives. I've had very bad experiences on every platform I tried it on: Fedora (lots of false positives, it deleted plenty of good files) and Windows98SE (again, lots of false positives, including all the KernelEx stuff being wrongly detected, Retrozilla builds etc). Unfortunately, on Win98 there isn't much else one can use nowadays, so it's either that or nothing as old version of avast 4.8 have the last definitions update from the end of 2017 and haven't been updated ever since. Luckily with XP we still have alternatives, but yeah, one day we might end up on that one, unfortunately... Still, better than nothing and with Clam Sentinel you can have real time scanning too. Still, ClamAV + Clam Sentinel are still light years away from proper, modern antivirus solutions, unfortunately. In any case, it's nice to know that we can rely on free open source solutions when support for literally everything else fades away...

No problem. Happy to help. Remember to update every once in a while with the builds that roytam makes and publishes on that site.

One Core API by Samuel of course, that's the reason why I also can use 64GB of RAM (although with the limitations of the per process allocable RAM). Samuel's nickname is Skulltrail here, but that's another story.

No idea, I just receive the builds, I don't make them nor have access to the source, but it's as close to the original chromium as it could get as far as I can tell from using it. Nope, they work just fine, including ECC and TLS 1.3. I guess it's not using crypt.dll as they probably considered it insecure by now (dunno, just speculations, I'm not in the position of "asking around"). Unfortunately, I run my XP in a VM (same for all legacy OS like Server 2003 etc, we/I have nothing on bare metal any longer), therefore everything is gonna be disabled. On the other hand, I seem to recall that it was gonna be disabled on bare metal too, but I can't really test (but I'm pretty sure it is). Interesting. I expected it to say widevine but it's actually saying "no DRM". I also tested https://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/nightly/samples/dash-if-reference-player/index.html and indeed there's no DRM support, it was falsely advertised by the HTML5 test. Interesting. Correct. lol not really, host is Fedora 39 x64, it has Chrome 116: while this is XP: I know, but I hope you'll understand. I'm very very very lucky to be privately receiving those builds (along other people, one of which is also on this forum even though he didn't mention anything). I feel for you man, but I totally understand what you're talking about, unfortunately... I've been working for the last 10 years (I started in 2013) and if I think about how far into the future retirement is, I'm gonna cry. I'm never gonna be able to get on the property ladder, let alone retire... As for the jobs, if the situation was bad before, the cost of living crisis after the pandemic made it worse as many companies started massive layoffs. People feel for those who have been fired and surely enough it sucks, but I can tell you that for those who "survived Thanos' snaps" the situation ain't that better as the people laid off are never replaced, which leads to a massive increase in the workload... :'( Ok, I'm gonna stop here, 'cause I don't wanna get more depressed than I currently am...