tekkaman

The thing is that most of the people that do recommend disabling it do it with the assumption that it will make their computer magically fast. Like they got a new computer. But I don't think that's the case. In your case with 20 gigs, I think 4GB or 8GB is enough.

Many people don't recommend disabling it. I got 8GB in XP 64 and I just set it to 8GB and leave it be. Many do recommend putting it on another drive though. I think that's the best solution and it won't make your main drive work on many things at the same time. https://lifehacker.com/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-5426041 https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/fdvyi8/do_i_disable_pagefile_in_windows_10_with_64gb_ram/

You can also use the tool called autoruns. There you can easy find the startup entries and services in one place.

I preffer DRM free. No hassle there.

The AC adapter should be easy to find on ebay. My father had one of the newer ones that came with Windows 7. But as soon as the internet ditched Flash for html5 browsing the web with it was slow and it would get really hot. I put an SSD and installed Q4os on it with the skin that looked just like XP. With that Linux distro the sytem was actually very responsive and it was usable. It can be found here in case anyone is interested: https://xpq4.sourceforge.io/ It's not a perfect OS any means. It would work perfect for that laptop but for my desktop it wasn't so great. Just try it and see if it's compatible with your hardware. I think if it worked on my fathers laptop it would work with any netbook since they all had the same specs.

I always heard that there was some sort of emulation going on if you partition a native 4K hard drive in XP. And that it would work but at lower performance if it was not correctly aligned. Obviously if you buy an external HDD today it will come correctly aligned and work fine on XP. But if for whatever reason you need to partition the hard drive again you should do it on Windows 7 and then use the drive on XP normally. At first when 4k native alignment was new there were all sorts of software that would check if the drive was correctly aligned. Even HDD manufacturers provided free software for that. All that was done for using the drive on XP. I remember using Acronis from WD just to check if they were correctly aligned. If you partition a 4k drive on XP it won't be correctly aligned and you would lose performance. I just remember reading about that constantly when 4K alignment was new.

As far as I know even external ones couldn't be read because XP 32 bit couldn't handle partitions bigger than 3TB. Or at least that's what I kept hearing back in 2009 or something.

You didn't understand my post. It's been said many times that XP 32 bit can't read HDDs that are bigger than 3TB and you have to patch the OS or something as a workaround. I'm stating that XP 64 doesn't have that issue. Second thing I said is this. If the partition is made on Windows 7 or newer it's already aligned in 4K sector. There's no conversion involved when you use that drive on XP. The difference is this. You shouldn't partition the drive using XP because then you will end up with 512k sectors. And yes the drive will work. But there will be performance loss because of the conversion on the fly. Sorry I wasn't clear enough.

I have 2 4TB external hard drives and they work fine on XP 64. Didn't have to do anything. They just work. Edit: I saw people here talking about 512k and 4k sectors. The thing is this. If you format the drive on Windows 7 or newer the drive will have the 4k alignment as it should by factory. After that, when you plug the drive on XP it will stay that way and it will work without the performance drop you would get if you try to align them to 512 for XP compatibility.

Upgrading the CPU just will just work. In 2021 I upgraded from an AMD Phenom II X4 905e to an AMD FX-8320E. So I went from 4 cores to 8 cores. Windows XP recognized it just fine without reinstalling Windows. You can see all the threads in the Task manager.

Well I had a problem years ago where I tried using aswclear. It did remove it. However after I remove it many programs failed to start because of missing files or dlls. I don't know how that happened. Another thing about Avast is that it doesn't have any cleaning function at all for the infected files it finds. Unless you had the vrdb ready then you were screwed. One time I was servicing a computer and I let it scan at boot. And I it deleted Internet Explorer completely because it couldn't clean it.

As mentioned before. Avast can be really difficult to remove. And it can sometimes even leave a system crippled after removal. I prefer to just reinstall Windows at that point.

From what I've seen, when there are no drives to choose from during Setup it could mean you need to load the ACHI drivers. If you load them, the hard drive should appear. Or you can check if your laptop supports IDE mode for hard drives. Usually when a laptop doesn't support other older OS it won't boot the setup disk at all. Giving you acpi errors or something. If the setup does launch, it's most probably that you need to load the achi driver.

There is one other thing I wanted to mention. It's about document compatibility. I have old OpenOffice documents that were made before Oracle acquired it. I don't remember if it was 3.0 or something. Those documents either don't open or don't look good in any recent OpenOffice or LibreOffice. So be careful while upgrading.

I always found LibreOffice to be unstable. OpenOffice is better.