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I just did this, as Avast no longer works at all on XP, or at least my registration expired and seemed impossible to renew it. One issue with removing: it hung at deleting the file aswFW.sys. (which does not exist in the free version.) I found threads in Avast's forum saying they waited a few hours and it finally completed. But after 3 hours i had no progress. I assumed that "aswFW.sys" is a firewall. So I rebooted to "safe mode with networking". Ran avastclear again and now it did complete in a few minutes, rebooted and it did a clean up and now Avast is finally gone.

I have a new Motorola phone running Android 14. I want to transfer files between it and my WinXP PC. My older phone, I just connect it via USB and it appears as a drive. This, the phone pops up asking what USB mode it should use, "File transfer" or "Photo and video transfer". But at the same time, Windows has popped up "Camera detected" and shows a camera in "My computer" and offers to connect it to Photoshop. No change regardless what I choose on the phone. Anyway to get it to be a drive? I did transfer files over wifi using Airdroid, but that is much slower than USB.

I've been using the free version of Avast for about ten years. A few months ago it gave its annual warning that I needed to re-register it. But that didn't work, it just hung. Tried to register at their website, that also went nowhere. So now it's completely non-functional, but still sucking up resources, particularly on booting it takes 50% of the CPU for several minutes. I turned off all shields (which weren't working anyway) and the self protection. There is no obvious way to uninstall it in the program. The Control Panel "Add or remove programs" doesn't do anything. Avast has a program "avastclear.exe" to remove Avast which will not run on WinXP. Is there an older version of that anywhere that does work on XP? Or any other way to excise this program without reinstalling Windows? I did search the forum, but there are 600+ posts mentioning Avast. I skimmed a few dozen without finding anything relevant. But if there are any, please point me to posts that are if you can. And are there any AVs that still work on XP now? The only one I now have is PCTools Threatfire, which being "behaviour based threat scanning" doesn't need signatures. In any case, no viruses the last 10 years I've been running XP.

@Dietmar Sorry, didn't get notified of this reply. The new CPU is 4 cores. So sure it will work, one way or another. Still yet to install it, will advise on the result when I do. Mobo is Intel DH61WW. Current CPU Intel Pentium G2020 New CPU is Intel i5-3570, 3.4GHz 4 core RAM is maxed at 16GB, though Win XP only using 4GB. (Have a disk with Linux Mint to transition eventually.)

Planning on upgrading my CPU from a 2 core to a 4 core one. Are there any settings in XP that need to be changed, or will it just recognise and use the new cores?

I have a PC about 5 years old with a 450W PSU. I've been using the onboard Intel graphics, but concerned that the video socket may be damaged. I have a video card I'd like to try as a backup. I don't want to overstretch the PSU. If it is drawing too much,, how would that show? Just suddenly dead screen? What is a good way to estimate power consumption? Tools like HWmonitor show temperatures and voltages, but not power.

OK, I went with that as I used "original" Palemoon back when it was compatible. Now I can get to sites that were bouncing me. It was a real drag using my tablet to do anything online other than read passively. Thanks for hooking me up.

Haven't tried that yet. Not much point if the hardware didn't recognise it. Currently using MyPal 29.3. When development of that stopped I couldn't work out what the successor if any was, seemed a lot of argument between developers was going on. Now getting glitches at archive.org, Every time they revise the site, something breaks for old browsers. Banking sites reject me, Cloudflare sites tell me to go away. At your link there are plenty of download links, not much explanation of what they are. Where is the discussion? Or which is the most updated Firefox descendant that I could hope to upgrade to?

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Well, I recently checked the BIOS and saw there were several updates since the existing one, so updated. Didn't expect it to affect the RAM issue, as there was no mention of that in the notes on issues solved. But I put it back to give it one last try before I tried to sell it off, and now it works perfectly. The BIOS shows 16GB, and I ran memtest86 and that checked them out 100%. Booting to XP, Windows properties shows it having 3.35GB RAM as before. But CPUZ shows 16 GB and the correct specs. Has been working with no glitches for a day now. So now will try setting up Linux Mint as the primary OS, and run old Windows apps in "Wine bottles". Running XP alone is too restrictive. Every week now I find another website has locked me out because my browser is unsupported.

Well, I bought the RAM but not smooth sailing. I installed both 8GB chips and the BIOS boot screen didn't come up, just black, and beep-beep (which is not documented as a beep code in the manual). I took one stick out and then BIOS seemed OK, showed 8GB RAM, but on booting to XP (32 bit), it lasted about one minute then crashed hard. Same happened if I used just the other stick. Anyway, the motherboard is vintage 2012. Intel DH61WW. According to the spec, it supports up to 16 GB DDR3 RAM, and 1333 MHz. The new RAM is 1600 MHZ (Kingston) , but should be backwards compatible. There are a few revisions to the BIOS I can do though the notes don't mention anything about fixing RAM issues. But not now, since I have work to do and can't risk bricking the PC. Will try a 64 bit OS and see how that works later as well. Can live with 8GB, many new PCs come with that, just annoyed at missing out on the big upgrade. Need to wait on a new PC for that. And Intel are jerks; they've "archived" (taken off their site) all relevant docs, BIOS files and forum posts for these boards. But got them via the Wayback. HP has docs for every printer they've made back to the 80s. Doesn't cost anything to just leave stuff there to help people who bought stuff from them. Intel goes to my "last choice" option now.

That's for "WineVDM" aka "otvdm". There is info about that and other "Emulators and compatibility layers for old software" here: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/emulators.html I've found other useful utilities for running old software on this guy's pages. (https://mendelson.org/edwardmendelson.html)

16 bit software is a main reason I've stuck with XP 32. But there is other software I want to run that needs a more recent OS. So upgrading the RAM (and bigger SSD) as the first step to exploring ways to do both.

Thanks, that's reassuring.

I'm currently running XP 32 bits on a PC with 4GB RAM. Planning to upgrade the RAM, to eventually run Linux and XP in emulation. But in the meantime, if I just plug in the new RAM, will XP run with 16GB installed? Happy if it just sees 4 and ignores the rest. (Haven't bought the RAM yet, or would just suck it and see.)

Actually, after a bit of weirdness, unresponsiveness, all was normal, and I've rebooted a few times since with no issues. Still uneasy, not knowing what caused it. Am overdue to install a new system on a new SSD, this a another reminder of why I should get around to it..

Booted up XP SP3. Had a shutdown tab on the toolbar, but nothing responsive, did a power reboot. Now I get a popup with this message "services and controller app encountered a problem and needed to close" as screenshot, with subsequent popups.. Am pretty nervous. Is this just Windows being cranky, this install is about 4 years old, or is it actually likely to be malware? Googled with the error message, found nothing useful. Currently backing up all my work and email files. Found this: "A BEX error is a “Buffer Overflow Exception”. This error is typically raised when Microsoft Windows detects that a programs tries to put more data than possible in a region of memory." Can be used by viruses, but also just bad code. That it occurred in a core Windows app is a bit concerning. Or I guess "Services and Controller" loads other code. I have a few startups. Avast for one, which didn't throw a warning..

Currently I'm on WinXP. I run some old software: DOS GEM, a bunch of command line, and some older Windows programs from c 2000. I want to keep running all these, but also want to use some current software that has dropped support for XP. Have got a 512GB SSD and ready to try to move to a new(er) OS. Probably will set up VMs to run old software that won't run native. Was planning on Win 7, but I see that's also now losing support. Is Win 8.1 any better supported, or any advantage to that over 7? Disadvantages? How much space should I allocate for an install of Win 8 on a desktop PC?

I've been using Dropbox in XP using MyPal 29.3. But today I find it just doesn't work, I can't log in. Anyone have any way to access DropBox from XP? I have resorted to using an iPad and transferring from that to my PC. Which is a real drag.

I tried Victoria, while the interface is English, the help files are only Russian. So I can't get very far with it. The "test and repair" section has a "remap" button which sounds promising, but don't know how to use it. Maybe will try to translate the Russian doc.

I picked up an oldish (I think c 2014) 2TB USB external drive; model SRD00F1, contains a 2TB Seagate. Did a check with HDTune and there were a few bad sectors. Did a reformat as NTSF. I ran chkdsk H: /F/X/R from Win 7 and after a few hours it completed, marking a few bad sectors, and HDTune now shows no bad sectors. But the test pauses a few seconds on a few sectors. Copying files to it, it also paused on a few files. So is there a way to put any marginal sectors as "bad"?. I know the disk can never be trusted 100%, but it runs smoothly, can hear no clicks when accessing. So I think I can use it for moving data, etc..

My current system is WinXP, installed on a 64GB boot SSD with a 1TB storage HD on desktop PC, been running about 8 years. I've bought a Crucial MX500 500GB SSD, and want to install Win7 on it and then transfer and reinstall my apps from the XP system. Hopefully get them all working, under Win7 or work out virtualisation. -- The motivation is the increasing number of apps I would like to use that won't install on XP. But I have some vital old apps with no updates that may not work on Win7, I thought I'd partition the SSD to two 250 GB partitions and install win7 on one. Is there a good way to do this under XP? I have access to a Win7 and also a Linux laptop. I formatted it under XP disk management as a single NTFS volume. And what's a good version of Win7 to use? I do DTP, some graphics, no gaming.

Thanks to all, I have a few things to try now. This guy: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ has a few interesting options. That seems to be mostly about lack of file locking, so several programs can try to write to a file without being aware of each other. Particularly bad news for databases. With a single user running a DTP app, unless you absentmindedly start two copies of a program, this isn't a big problem. Yet another reason to backup your files periodically though. It's primarily DOS. But I also have a couple of Win3.1 apps I have missed. XP apps might run as-is, or I can update to later versions.

Yes, I understand the concept. I was hoping for some specific recommendations.

I'm currently running XP, but I'm not in love with it. I do it because I have some old software I really need to use and this is the last Windows that supports it. Oldest is Ventura GEM, a DOS DTP app from the 80s that uses VGA graphics. This does run fine on XP, full screen. I also have some Win3 and 9x programs I'd like to keep using. I also run some more contemporary software, and most of that is now updating to be non-XP compatible. So I think finally time to update to Win7 (yes, I know that's also obsolete, but seems likely to be supported for a while). What are the options for running old programs under Win7? Not like a sandboxed game, but where the program has access to my filesystem, where I can switch between the old program and others without shutting down and restarting? I have other graphics and text editors I need to share the files with, not to mention up and downloading them.