Dave-H

This from the GPU-Z developer. "Grrrr .. all I did was update my Visual Studio 2019 version to the latest, without touching the compiler (still using v141_xp). But apparently they made some change that uses this API call*, which isn't available on Windows XP. Will search for a solution." *AcquireSRWLockExclusive

I queried this on the GPU-Z forum as there's no mention in the 2.41 changelog of XP compatibility being withdrawn. One of their mods said that XP was still supported, and would be "for as long as possible". I unpacked the 2.41 file with Universal Extractor, and when I run the unpacked version I get the message "The helper module .NET Framework 4.6 could not be found" so I guess that's the problem. I don't think .NET 4.6 is available for XP. I've made them aware of this. Whether they can fix this, and will, remains to be seen. Addition - Also I'm getting in the Windows System Event Log "Application popup: GPU-Z 2.41.0_unpacked.exe - Entry Point Not Found : The procedure entry point AcquireSRWLockExclusive could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.DLL."

The very last entry in this list should do you. You might have to register with Oracle to download it. It's no big deal to do though.

Glad to help anyway. Just as an aside, I ran the test again with FF 52.9.1 with uBlock Legacy disabled, in case it was affecting anything. I got exactly the same result, just 5 warnings, no skips.

OK, I ran 360 Explorer, straight out of the box, and this was the result on my system. It looks good BTW! I don't know what that proves, if anything, but the result is certainly worse than Firefox 52.9.1.

Well I've never actually tried any version of 360 Extreme Explorer, so it's a good opportunity to give it a go! I'll report back tomorrow, as I'm about to go to bed here in England! Cheers, Dave. -

The unofficial Service Pack 4 for XP contains all the POSReady updates. I've never needed to use it myself, so I can't comment on any problems with it. Interesting that the fact I have the POSReady updates might be the reason I'm getting different results on the browser test. Of course a POSReady updated installation of XP has had a further full five years worth of security updates compared to a normal installation!

Just tried again with FF 52.9.1 ESR on XP SP3 x86. Exactly the same result.

Well on Windows 10 x64, for me Firefox 90.0.2 x64 scored 9 warnings, 0 critical, 28 skipped. Edge 92.0.902.62 got 16 warnings, 1 critical, 20 skipped. (The critical failure was "cookie set by JavaScript should not be sent over HTTP".) Quite reassuring in a way that a browser that hasn't been updated for three years on an operating system that hasn't been updated for two years (with POSReady updates) seems to be giving one of the best results!

Just for interest, I tried it out of curiosity on Firefox 52.9.1 ESR, and got 5 warnings, 0 critical, 0 skipped.

The developer of Tab Mix Plus wanted to try and produce a web extension version when Mozilla dropped support for the legacy extensions format, but it's never got anywhere. A shame, because it's a fabulous extension. I still use it on FF 52.9 ESR on XP, and I really wish I could use it on Firefox 90 on Windows 10, but sadly it's never going to happen.

@Drugwash I echo what @Goodmaneuver said, please find help. I've been to your country many times, and while I know very well that it's hard for many people in Romania, it's not a third world country, and nobody should be "starving" there in the 21st century. If there is anything we can do to help, even just helping you to pay your electricity bill, please don't be afraid to say. This is a community of friends, even though we will never physically meet, and to find a fellow member in such a position is very saddening. Cheers, Dave.

An interesting thread. None of the registry entries mentioned there are present on my system at all. I did wonder whether I had actually done the registry hack and forgotten about it, but it seems not. Why I'm not seeing, and have never seen, the upgrade nag banner is a bit of a mystery! It could be because my Office 2010 installation is one of the Office Professional Plus ones you can buy very cheaply online, as mentioned in the thread regarding Office 2019. FWIW I gather that the selling of keys for those versions of Office has been declared legal in a court case, much to Microsoft's annoyance I'm sure! That would seem to be confirmed by the huge number of people selling them perfectly openly on legit sites like Amazon.

FWIW I noticed a significant performance improvement on FF 52.9 ESR when I enabled multi-process mode, especially on script-heavy sites like Facebook, which had been almost unusably slow and unresponsive before.

Strange, I've never seen that.

Ah, understood. Sorry to have muddied the waters.

I hadn't looked at Deviantart for a long time, but I just had a look in Firefox 52.9 ESR, and FWIW it still works fine there.

Thanks, I might give that a try, although I'm pretty sure that I tried it on a cleaned SoftwareDistribution folder installation before ages ago and it still didn't work.

That works brilliantly, thank you so much @jumper!

I too remember when there was an enormous price premium on laptops! It seemed to all change around the time that Windows 7 was released, all the computer shops around me suddenly had hardly any desktops on sale and it was all laptops. (Of course all those computer shops are gone now too, but that's a different story!) My issue with laptops is that they are very hard to physically upgrade. My desktop is an evolution of a machine I first bought in 1999, and it has been updated and changed a huge amount since then. In fact it's pretty much a "Trigger's Broom"* but I still consider it to be the same machine for some perverse reason! The point is that it has never been completely replaced, it's always been capable of being updated/upgraded to serve my developing needs. Contrast that with my netbook, which I keep mainly for its small size. It does at least have a conventional drive, which I've replaced with an SSD, many modern machines have solid state storage which is completely fixed and cannot be changed. It does have 4GB of memory, which is fine for the 32 bit versions of XP and 10 which I run on it (it is actually a 64 bit machine) but the processor is a 1GHz dual core piece of AMD rubbish which is like a millstone round the neck of the system and is of course completely non-upgradable. It's just about OK for what I use it for, but a machine like that will never replace a desktop as far as I'm concerned. *["Trigger's Broom", for those who may not get the reference, refers to a character called Trigger in the BBC sitcom "Only Fools and Horses". In one episode he famously declared that he had been using the same broom for many many years, although in that time it had had to have the handle and the brush individually replaced several times, the joke being that of course that meant that it wasn't actually the same broom at all!]

Don't forget that you'll also need the Office 2007 Converter if you want Office XP to read and write modern Office formats.

I guess the motherboard battery's dead, but I'm sure you know that! Can't you change it?

That's brilliant, can't wait to try it out!

The actual error when using that version of MSO.DLL and trying to run Word is - "Application popup: winword.exe - Entry Point Not Found : The procedure entry point GetFinalPathNameByHandleW could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll." That message appears again if dismissed, followed by the "operating system is not configured" message. There is no mention of EnumCalendarInfoExEx but that does look very like a function which was referenced in an earlier error.

Thanks!