I’m curious what you’ve been doing with it, what workarounds and fixes you’ve had to do over the years?
Still using W95 to program some FPGA, coupled to a 8086 with a program written in assembler and Ada. It’s for aeronautics application. It was proven in the 90s and still used/sold nowadays
I know a doctor who’s been running a research project since the 90s using a database application with a proprietary format. Said doctor had the option of upgrading to a version which was a front-end to Excel in the 00’s… but didn’t… and then the company sold their product to Microsoft and closed down, taking their format conversion app with them.
I also know a test lab using a blood gas analyser running off a built-in Windows NT PC. Those things cost an arm and a leg, so they’ll keep running it until it dies and replace it with something more modern.
Frankly I’d trust windows XP over w10/11 for an offline system that is used for only one thing and one thing only
Until the hardware breaks and you can’t find refinements.
Edit: replacements, bloody autocorrect!
I have an old CNC machine driven by an XP laptop. XP runs great, I just don’t mess with it and of course keep it off the internet.
Probably plenty of critical infrastructure and medical systems.
In 2020 I worked for an MSP and we had to fix a broken Windows 2000 machine because it was the only machine that a certain medial office could use to send a receive faxes. They could not afford to upgrade a more modern system, as it necessitate a forklift upgrade of all their systems that would go into the 5-digit dollars. They didn’t have that money and no one could get computers quickly in 2020 so fixing it was the only option. After 20 hours of troubleshooting it got bounced up to me, because managed the team that had to fix it. I went into the office after they closed and everyone was gone, because pandemic. I pulled the machine in question out of the corner of the “server room” (read: poorly ventilated closet) it was in. An old Gateway full ATX tower, it was a sight to behold underneath the dust. Turns out the dust was the problem - it hadn’t been cleaned at any point in the last 20 years and there was a literal quarter inch of dust and lint on top of the motherboard. I cleaned that thing till it sparkled, set up back up and turned it on. Worked PERFECTLY, like nothing had ever been wrong. I was happy, the client was overjoyed and my bosses were happy. Good stuff.
The PSU blew 7 months later, taking down the motherboard and drives. Paperweight. So we took the full backup we made after I fixed it, turned it into a VM, set up a USB passthrough and gave it a USB fax modem. I left that job a while back, but to my knowledge it’s still working. By the time we had done that we had billed over 30 hours of work to the client at $150/hr. That’s a $4500 Windows 2000 fax server with added VM licensing on top of it. Pretty silly at the end of the day.
Don’t know whether you mean that as a joke, but I can tell you it is very real thing world wide still.
Yes, I have a 2008-era build running it. It’s glorious. Not really many fixes other than installing all the updates up to 2019, and making sure to manually run SSD tools to trim my drive.
I have an XP VM that I spin up from time to time to run an old version of AutoCAD.
After my most recent attempt at installing XP on a virtual machine, I am very confident in saying that I don’t wanna deal with it ever again.
Getting VMware tools to work on it still doesn’t fix the incredibly choppy framerate, activating it is an absolute mess, getting software to run on it oftentimes leads to a crash, increasing the DPI settings to match my monitor’s resolution makes it look even worse than it does in the default settings, oh and speaking of looks, the Luna theme is garbage.
I’m pretty sure I never had any of these problems as a kid, so I wonder how it got so buggy. Even Vista doesn’t work as intended (it always worked amazingly in my experience). I ended up sticking with Windows 7 on my virtual machine, since once I installed VMware tools, it works perfectly.
At work we have one old PC on Windows XP for the ancient PBX phone system we are currently using. It runs fine, it is only there to run specific programs so it’s not like we install/run anything else on it. And it’s not exposed to the internet.
The hardware will die eventually but until then my boss is too cheap to spend the money to replace the entire phone system.
You know i woke up today with a furious urge to buy an old Windows XP computer and play old games on it. Of course i wouldn’t ever connect it to the internet.
I suspect i might be setting myself up for major headaches
A virtual machine is still an option.
Airgapped XP Pro on an old IBM laptop (somehow in near mint condition) in order to manage files on a Creative Zen. Linux can see, but not manage. Win10+ can’t even see.
Edit: I checked the model, if anyone is interested. It’s an IBM ThinkPad R51.
We have a few clients that use them to control the CNC machines they have.
The machines are isolated from all other devices on the network and can’t see the internet.
The machinists run their gcode files from USB sticks that are walked from their machine to the CNC
The machinists run their gcode files from USB sticks that are walked from their machine to the CNC
Wait until USB-C becomes the de-facto standard, and new systems no longer come with USB-A, and USB-A sticks are no longer manufactured.
Happened to the floppy drive, too.
True, but add-in cards are going to be around for a long time after that for the people truly desperate for USB-A ports on a new desktop.
For a while at work I had to use a add-in card in a Win 10 desktop just to have a parallel port for the ancient label printer we were using.
If these are machines running Windows XP, I doubt they’re very new.
Wasn’t talking about the CnC controllers as the “new” machines.
Ah, ok. Dongles it is, then.
The machines are isolated from all other devices on the network and can’t see the internet.
Serious question, why are they even connected to the LAN?
I’ve got a number of embedded systems that use a Java client which can’t work on a modern system. I run XP in a VM with an old version of Firefox and Java on it to get into those. Works great!
Up until a few years ago, I had a flight simulator running on Windows 95. It too, ran great and was certified for students to log flight time towards their certifications.
I have a bunch of retro machines, and one of them is running XP. Not long ago I enjoyed No one lives forever on it. Nothing beats the correct hardware.
Regarding fixes, Service Pack 2 is enough. And since Steam is not supporting retro machines anymore there is no reason to connect it to the internet anymore, thankfully gog let’s me download the installers, all the more reason to use gog exclusively. At least for my special gaming tastes.
I’ve got a couple of old laptops running it. Play a few old games on them occasionally. My only workaround is to never connect them to the internet!
I have an old film scanner (was pricy back in its day) that doesn’t have drivers for 64 bit Windows, and anything newer than Vista. So I have an old XP box that can talk to it.
That’s all I use that computer for, so it’s otherwise fine with its circa 2009 configuration. Haven’t had to do any fixes or workarounds.
What kind of resolution do you get?
Consider trying out ReactOS. It is an attempt to reverse engineer a fully compatible Windows replacement which uses Windows drivers and Windows software. It looks verysimilar and works similarly but is completely open implementation of the NT architecture and as such may actually meet your needs while being free software. I would love to hear how it goes if you try it.
Have you tried a Linux distro?
I know it’s a meme at this point but one thing Linux is really good at is support for older hardware. That’ll allow you to get updates and put it on a network too.
