FranceBB

I was watching a documentary made in 2019 about Chinese PCB (Printed Circuit Boards) factories and what happens when an engineer submits its order with the circuit to the factory in order to print it and I found something interesting: our beloved OS, Windows XP. It's funny, though, how factories are relying on Windows XP to produce hardware that is shipped all over the world, most of which doesn't support that OS... Windows XP booting in the background:

I just updated to the last working version for XP (5.63). "Rip CCleaner" I guess, then...

Perhaps your ISP is blocking the most common VPN protocols. Which Internet Service Provider do you have?

I've been using NordVPN for quite some time and their service is pretty good with many server across the globe. The only problem though was that they decided to drop PPTP and L2TP which are mandatory on XP as they are the only two that work with the OS without using external things like OpenVPN. They claimed that those protocols were old and outdated and "not secure enough anymore" so they dropped them, so I ditched the company. A friend of mine had the chance to get a coupon for a very discounted lifetime subscription at FastestVPN, however this service is not very good. I mean, don't get me wrong, I use it on a daily basis, but the servers I'm interested in (the UK ones) are almost always full, so I have to switch to the States. As a pro thing, though, they kept each and every legacy protocol including PPTP, L2TP, IPSec Xauth PSK and they also support new protocols like OpenVPN. I think I can say that they're alright. A friend of mine also went to Mainland China to the city of Qingdao and used it there as my subscription covers many devices. Although many VPN providers were blocked, FastestVPN managed to connect and make him access the internet. If you wanna go with FastestVPN, just remember one thing: they're alright, but definitely NOT the fastest as their server are overcrowded and slow at times. As one final note: please DO NOT use free VPNs or proxy, 'cause you don't know who owns them; in the best case it's some enormous company trying to collect your data and sell it for marketing purposes, in the worse case it's some hacker waiting to steal your bank account or credit card or just your facebook account and sell it in the deep web. (I've seen this happening many years ago with suspicious "free proxy servers" too many times...).

I'm not really a fan of Chinese browsers to be fair... You know, I don't want Winnie the Flu spying on me...

I tried what you suggested, but nope. Nothing to do. Not NewMoon nor Basilisk are updated enough to support Teams: the web app starts loading as I tricked Microsoft by faking the user agent as you suggested, however after a bit of time it stops loading and just says that there's an issue.

Due to the recent outbreak of Coronavirus, I was asked to stay at home and do "smart working" which basically means to work remotely from home. I managed to login to Office 365 and access Outlook 365 with the modern UI by using Chromium 54 spoofed as Chromium 81 and everything works fine except for Microsoft Teams, which is a messaging system developed by Microsoft to be used as a built-in replacement of Skype for Business for chats, calls and video-calls between coworkers working for the same company. It's very well integrated inside the Office 365 Suite, however I have a problem... If I try to access it with Chromium 54 spoofed as Chromium 81 it doesn't load and if I try to use the very latest version of NewMoon made by @roytam1 it says that my browser is not supported. Of course I also tried to download and patch the official x86 Windows Executable but it's closed source and I've got tons of missing calls. Does anybody here use Microsoft Teams? https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads Microsoft Teams (Office 365 Suite) on NewMoon, Roytam latest build: Outlook 365 on Chromium 54 spoofed as Chromium 81 "chrome.exe" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4031.0 Safari/537.36" Outlook 365 on NewMoon (Roytam version):

My mug disagrees

Python 2.x and 3.x are two very different languages not compatible with one another. This led to a lot of confusion at the beginning 'cause developers had to rewrite their code and many of them never did and remained on 2.x (which is why it continued to receive security updates for a lot of time). In other words, I'm not really sure it will compile at all if I target 3.x

January 2020.

Woah, so they kept the support! Kudos to the Potplayer team!

Yes but not its API. Nobody uses vanilla XP, everybody use SP3 whose additional APIs were actually released not so long before Win7 came out. Most of the time the excuse is that XP is from 2001 and it's too old when actually the latest version of the APIs and calls is from about 2008 so not so terribly old as people think. I would agree with them if they meant vanilla XP only pre-SP1; in that case the OS would indeed be so old that it would be a pain to develop a program for it, but not SP3 as I consider it fairly modern.

Would you like to join our Skype group? Perhaps you can talk with Samuel and take what you think can be useful from One Core API as everything is on Github. Feel free to add me: francebb1 - franceopf@gmail.com

Ok so they dropped them both altogether. Classic... -.-

In case anyone was wondering, I tried with my modified kernel and it doesn't run on my machine either. All the missing kernel calls are patched except for "CancelIoEx": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/cancelioex-func The good news though was that there's CancelIo in Windows XP, so I replaced CancelIoEx with its non-ex counterpart and I tried to make a few tests without any positive result. The reason is that the normal CancelIo (the non-ex one available in XP) can't be used to cancel io operations in other threads, so most of time it just hangs on nn_close... On top of that, the new code has several missing calls for the UI as well and I can't fix any of them in Shell32 as I'm not a UI guy... I guess I'm gonna stick with 1.8.15 'till it's gonna work, then I don't know... A few screenshot for those interested: On a normal XP SP4 Installation: On my XP running a custom kernel: Then there are missing calls in Shell32 and User32: I guess that's pretty much it for Telegram, unless someone wants to try to fork it and re-introduce XP compatibility. I'll leave a link to the source code anyway: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop Out of curiosity, is there anyone who can try the official installer on Windows Vista?

That's true, but we like you the way you are.

Windows 7 has been one of the best Microsoft OS; now the support is over, but that didn't stop businesses from keep using it. As a matter of fact, Windows 7 has been the de facto replacement for many Embedded systems who were deployed across the world in a period when Windows XP Embedded was slowly starting to get to the EoS path. This topic is dedicated to the Spotters, namely people who see Windows 7 or its derivatives (Win 7 Embedded) running in the wild and take a picture. We started one for XP as well when support was over: Alright, let's crack on, shall we? The first picture is from a Win 7 system running advertising. The second picture was taken today by me in Milan, Italy and shows Windows 7 in idle on the login screen:

If you are going to install all of them, please do it sequentially. Anyway, as ED_Sln said, I haven't encounter any programs running on .NET 1.1 for years now as pretty much everything targets .NET 4.0 or newer (newer version can't run on XP). I personally kept all of them on my computer just in case, anyway .NET Framework 4.0 is supposed to have superseded all the previous ones so it's probably the only one you need.

Nope, the only reason why I choose "FranceBB" long time ago (in 1998) was because my first name is "Francesco" and the first letter of my surname is "B", however the website I was trying to register to (I don't even remember which one it was) already had that name, so opted for "BB". It was also fine 'cause at the time I used to go to the beach to do surf but not with a regular board and that thing was called bodyboarding, so in that case the two "B" had a sort of double meaning. Little I know that I would have left Italy within few years because of my studies and my job and that my nickname would have created a lot of confusion xD

As I said in PM, please use the Russian patch. Just install it and you'll see that your boot.ini changes pointing to a custom kernel and HAL, however they're NOT called like the Windows default, they're different. It takes advantage of the fact that XP can load a different version of HAL and kernel if you specify which files it has to load. Besides, I would also append another string to boot.ini, call it "Normal kernel backup" in which you specify the Original Kernel and HAL so that you can decide whether you're gonna boot with the Russian patch (up to 64 GB of RAM supported) or with the original one. The Russian patch works like a charm and it will also install you some USB configuration files that fix the bloody problem the original Chinese patch had because of the mismatch between Windows Server 2003 and XP. I don't know why you're using this so called TU kernel, but I don't really wanna test it (nor Jaclaz I think). Anyway if it is replacing system files that shouldn't be replaced it's no wonder that SFC will bring them back and you'll see the 3GB of RAM only back. That's a very poor approach considering that instead of replacing system files you can just specify a different name to use in the boot.ini and that's exactly what the Russian patch does. I've been using it for years now and I have no problem with my 32 GB of RAM, I can send you as many screenshots as you want. I will also send you the link in PM (I can't post it here otherwise @dencorso will yell at me for very obvious reasons), but then please stop reinventing the wheel. There's already an implementation, it works, everybody use it, don't use something else.

That's the saddest slope I've ever looked at... That's right. I'm one of those people faking my user agent, however I only bump the number of the version of Chrome to match the very latest release and many websites are happy with that. Most of the times there's no need to also change the OS. The last thing I want is to increase the share number of the bloody Windows 10! Besides I like the idea of people spitting out coffee when they check their website stats and they see "Windows XP x86 - Chrome 80".

You know what's worse? That it was probably paid to do it as he sold the "slowdown" as an upgrade.

Thank you, as always. You've become my Flash update reminder for quite some time now xD By the way, as we're in 2020 life is gonna be over soon for Flash, although there are still many websites using it and most of them are not going to be rewritten anytime soon, so I kinda fear about what will happen once the EoS is meet. Hopefully nothing, but I wouldn't be so sure for a software who has been suffering from security problems ever since its initial release through all these years... Well time will tell, I guess...

Oh God... 1 GB with Win10 means no RAM whatsoever is left for the user to open up programs and so on: everything is put on the paging files and moved back and forth from the HDD to the RAM and vice versa. Not only it's gonna reduce the life of the Hard Drive, but it's also going to be extremely slow...

Ok so with the new drivers it works absolutely fine! :) Just a question though: every time I get a new network adapter, I always have to memorize all my networks from scratch. Is there a way to share the memorized networks between the network adapters? You know, it's not a big deal, I've been doing this for years, but I'm getting lazier as years pass... :P