XP with 16 GB RAM

[Skulltrail]

With One-Core-API, that's works fine with Windows XP.

[dmiranda]

Chech this thread: https://msfn.org/board/topic/181447-what-to-do-with-8gb-of-ram-on-xp/

[Asp]

On 8/20/2023 at 11:18 PM, FranceBB said:

That's weird. Windows properties should also show 16GB.

Are you actually using One Core API or some other patch?

Haven't tried that yet. Not much point if the hardware didn't recognise it.

On 8/20/2023 at 11:18 PM, FranceBB said:

Which browser are you using? Are you using the builds from here?

http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/search/label/browser

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?

 

 

 

[FranceBB]

4 hours ago, Asp said:

At your link there are plenty of download links, not much explanation of what they are.

Yes, apologies, I see how they can be counterintuitive without an explanation.

Quote

which is the most updated Firefox descendant that I could hope to upgrade to?

The download page I showed is where the roytam1 publishes the builds of his browsers, which are forked version of common browsers.

As a straight on replacement for Firefox, you can go with Basilisk (Serpent) from the list of builds, which is exactly an XP compatible Firefox fork by roytam, nothing more, nothing less.

Other browsers like Palemoon are XP compatible forks of other Palemoon which in turn was a Firefox fork.

I personally use the company oriented x86 non public builds of Chromium 108 ESR (yes, on XP, not-so-recently upgraded from Chromium 92 ESR) which I'm very lucky to receive on a regular basis, but whenever I need to browse the web with something else I use Palemoon (which ain't great, but it gets the job done unless you wanna stream some DRM protected content).

Some other friend of mine use Basilisk (Serpent) which is alright.

To put this into context, Chromium 108 ESR vs Palemoon 28 (roytam1):

Edited August 23, 2023 by FranceBB

[UCyborg]

11 hours ago, FranceBB said:

I personally use the company oriented x86 non public builds of Chromium 108 ESR (yes, on XP, not-so-recently upgraded from Chromium 92 ESR)

So not very helpful for mere peasants of MSFN. How does the core of the browser compare to 360Chrome builds? Does it also have problems with certain certificates due to relying on XP's crypto libraries (if it does rely on them)? What does chrome://gpu page look like? Does it implement hardware acceleration? WebGL works smoothly? HexGL game should tell. What does HTML5 DRM stream test say?

On 8/20/2023 at 3:18 PM, FranceBB said:

Welcome to adulthood. And I'll tell you a secret: it will just get worse once you'll get to the point of having a job and going to the office every single day with as little as two weeks vacation per year that you won't really enjoy as you're an engineer so they'll be calling you for literally any little thing that happens to any of the systems you either made/coded or that you manage.

If you get a job, that is. I have it, it's a never ending misery. Same crap I don't want to be doing Monday to Friday, weekends end like it was nothing, wake up, get there staring at the screen all day and deal with customers' crap any by the time it's over, most of the day is gone and batteries are low.

No energy/will for non-passive activities anymore, as if getting interested in anything in the first place wasn't hard enough. Just waiting to die at this point. I survived COVID-19, Vladimir didn't bomb us, no floods where I live either. So the suffering continues.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

14 hours ago, FranceBB said:

I personally use the company oriented x86 non public builds of Chromium 108 ESR (yes, on XP, not-so-recently upgraded from Chromium 92 ESR)

Based on your screencap, it appears you are running from inside a VirtualBox VM.

If you are running "seamless" then you may not really be running v108 or v92 from XP but rather from the VM "overlapping" your XP.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

2 hours ago, UCyborg said:

If you get a job, that is. I have it, it's a never ending misery.

I'm the OPPOSITE.  I've had jobs that I hated and even one once that put me to "near tears" every time I drove into the parking lot.

That d#mn job treated us like SLAVES, like we were property that they owned, "threatening" us every chance they got with "points".

I resigned that position and all they asked was "where are you going?".

Told them "No where!  You MANDATE overtime and I'm good with my money, I can live a year just off of all the overtime money that my coworkers just throw into a brand new car every two or three years.  I'm OUT.  I'll sit at home and watch Netflix until something comes along that doesn't MANDATE my WEEKENDS and that RESPECTS their employees!".

Took me two months which is longer than I was thinking it would take.

Downright LOVE my job.  Been at this one over a year.

LOVE it so much that I work 50 to 60 hours every week without being asked to, come in when I want, leave when I want.

No lunch on some days.  Two hour lunches on other days.

I've never been HAPPIER even though I'm "working" more hours than the SLAVE SHOP ever had me work.

It's not "work" when you LOVE what you do!

[FranceBB]

11 hours ago, UCyborg said:

How does the core of the browser compare to 360Chrome builds?

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.

Quote

Does it also have problems with certain certificates due to relying on XP's crypto libraries (if it does rely on them)?

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").

Quote

What does chrome://gpu page look like? Does it implement hardware acceleration? WebGL works smoothly?

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).

 

 

 

Quote

What does HTML5 DRM stream test say?

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.

8 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

Based on your screencap, it appears you are running from inside a VirtualBox VM.

Correct.

Quote

If you are running "seamless" then you may not really be running v108 or v92 from XP but rather from the VM "overlapping" your XP.

lol not really, host is Fedora 39 x64, it has Chrome 116:

while this is XP:

 

 

 

11 hours ago, UCyborg said:

not very helpful for mere peasants of MSFN. 

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).

11 hours ago, UCyborg said:

If you get a job, that is. I have it, it's a never ending misery. Same crap I don't want to be doing Monday to Friday, weekends end like it was nothing, wake up, get there staring at the screen all day and deal with customers' crap any by the time it's over, most of the day is gone and batteries are low.

No energy/will for non-passive activities anymore, as if getting interested in anything in the first place wasn't hard enough.

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...

Edited August 24, 2023 by FranceBB

[NotHereToPlayGames]

I kind of have to assume that your XP VM is using an extended kernel or something.

I don't know how to test for that as I don't use extended kernels (at least not yet, never know what the future brings).

We should be able to tell by OS file timestamps, but I wouldn't know what files to compare timestamps.

[FranceBB]

1 hour ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

I kind of have to assume that your XP VM is using an extended kernel or something.

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.

[UCyborg]

12 hours ago, FranceBB said:

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").

Yeah, not sure what's in the background, as far as I can tell, many web sites still work on XP in 360Chrome builds without certificate errors if you used one of those root certificate updaters (unsure if any has the option to skip installing the ones that are incompatible, so you end up with a bunch of redundant non-working certificates).

But this website for instance shows an invalid certificate error. Back when my bank still required to identify with a certificate rather than having to use an app for 2-factor authentication, that must have been cca. 3 years ago, 360Chrome couldn't be used, just showed an error page without a possibility to continue. I'm unable to find any website for a test, it requires web server to be configured certain way. Everything happens before any HTML can be fetched, only Mozilla-based browsers worked for it. I tried with roytam1's Serpent 52 build of the era where it worked.

12 hours ago, FranceBB said:

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).

I suspected so.

I'd probably run modern Chromium based browsers on Linux in case I wanted to use Chromium based browser for anything and had a problem with Win10, fonts come out clearer (part of the reason AFAIK that many fonts these days aren't web-safe/optimized and require tricks - smoothing - to come out right and not totally garbled) and render with more correct contrast out-of-the-box, videos play smoothly at HD resolution @ 60FPS if you have at least half-decent CPU, you can probably even get hardware video decoding working with certain builds if you have the GPU with good open-source drivers and WebGL content should work as smooth as OpenGL drivers allow. I noticed in recent years some WebGL content still renders significantly faster on Windows when it's being wrapped from OpenGL->D3D11. At least those are my experiences.

12 hours ago, FranceBB said:

Interesting. I expected it to say widevine but it's actually saying "no DRM".

Along the same lines as GPU acceleration goes, imagine there was a company that went out of their way to port Widevine CDM for employees to watch Netflix on XP. That's even more undoable since Widevine is proprietary.

12 hours ago, FranceBB said:

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).

Understandable. It's more of a disappointment for others that have a harder time letting go off XP as a daily driver rather than those of us with certain historical interests that drive it on Sundays to see what still works or simply mess around with period-correct software/games.

12 hours ago, FranceBB said:

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.

Aye, it's just too much, then days turn into months, months turn into years, you're just getting older and start to wonder what's the point...

@NotHereToPlayGames seems to be like my father was in that regard. He was on his feet from dawn to dusk, ran his own company, loved what he did, I remember he tended to get ill if he broke the usual pace. Even though we lived under the same roof, he was almost like a stranger to me due to his absence most of the time.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

<OT>

I've only ever had one job and one job only that scheduled employees to work weekends.

80% of us, myself included, only had two days off per month (a Sat and Sun), MANDATED to work all but 24 days per YEAR.

Would even be MANDATED to work New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, and Easter.  SOME were even MANDATED to work Christmas (I did have the "luck" of not having to work Christmas) - worst job of my entire life!

I survived two rounds of layoffs but resigned after just over five years all on account of mandated overtime.  Resigned without another job already lined up.

BEST THING I've ever done, that job had a way of turning everybody into "sour" people, "mad all the time".

I also always keep late afternoons and evenings free.

I'll do anywhere from 8 to 13 hours in a day, but I get there at 2 or 3 in the morning and out the door when the kids' school lets out.

I've had to basically retrain every boss I've ever worked for, "We can't have you here at 3am by yourself."

I've involved HR at three different jobs over bosses telling me that, "Explain to me why so-and-so can work at 8pm here by themself but I cannot do the same thing at 3am?"

HR takes my side each and every time!  Because there is no difference!  You either don't let anybody work outside of a standard "8 to 5" or you accept the early arrival and the late departure EQUALLY.

We don't do family stuff every day of the week, but I am by no means absent.  I have half a day in before anyone else even wakes up.  

Edited August 25, 2023 by NotHereToPlayGames

[Asp]

On 8/23/2023 at 6:57 PM, FranceBB said:

Other browsers like Palemoon are XP compatible forks of other Palemoon which in turn was a Firefox fork.

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.

[FranceBB]

No problem. Happy to help.  

Remember to update every once in a while with the builds that roytam makes and publishes on that site.

Edited August 27, 2023 by FranceBB