Warning: the stunts in this article were performed by professionals, so for your safety and the protection of those around you, do not attempt any of the stunts you're about to read unless qualified.
A recent blog post by Julio Merino, and the accompanying demo videos which went somewhat viral on Twitter, prompted The Reg FOSS desk to look into something that we really had not been wanting to do. The results were… not what we expected.
Did you ever do something that you'd been putting off for ages, and find that in fact it was rather enjoyable? The reactions to our story on XP activation being cracked showed that quite a lot of readers are keen on running ancient operating systems, and possibly worse still, ancient proprietary operating systems. Just to put our position into perspective here, back in 2002, it was Windows XP that caused this vulture to switch away from running Windows, and to a mixture of Linux on x86 kit and Mac OS X on several geriatric PowerMacs. To voluntarily go back to XP today, on real physical hardware, was not a task that the writer was anticipating with any great enthusiasm, and therefore it has been a big surprise to find that it ended up being rewarding and even fun.
We don't want to make you wade through lots of verbiage to get to the punchline, so here it is: Mr Merino is absolutely right, and to a quite shocking degree. Even OSes at the lightest weight end of the modern scale, such as recent Linux distros, are sluggish. They can't help it because they are built from flabby, overweight components. What follows are some of the steps, and the tools, that we used to replicate his results. As we said in the previous story about Windows XP, we really do not recommend running XP as your primary OS in the 2020s, and worse still, going online with it. But for your edification and enjoyment, we did. Here is how.
Regular readers might recognize some of the machines in the FOSS Desk Testing Fleet by now. One of them is a Sony Vaio P, a sub-netbook with a unique form factor, which is why we keep it around. It used to dual-boot Windows Thin PC, which is Microsoft's allegedly cut-down edition of Windows 7 for thin clients, and Raspberry Pi Desktop, which is just about the lowest-hassle lightweight Linux for elderly 32-bit hardware. As an experiment, we nuked the sluggish Windows 7-based OS, and replaced it with TinyXP. TinyXP is a third-party distribution of Windows, which omits a lot of bloat from what was already not Microsoft's leanest version. It also has most of the available updates for this long-obsolete OS, and an assortment of drivers to make it easier to get working, both integrated.
The result was both impressive and disappointing. TinyXP is a lot quicker than Thin PC, which is barely cut down at all from standard Windows 7. This sluggish old machine, with a hyperthreaded Atom, a spinning PATA hard disk, and 2GB of RAM, is quite a good spec by Windows XP standards. It should be: it launched with Windows Vista in early 2009 – about nine months before Windows 7 finished gestating. Another benefit is that XP can run Intel's driver for the Vaio P's Poulsbo integrated GPU, for which Linux long ago dropped support.
But one of the snags with running XP today is finding drivers, and this goes double if you're trying to run it on hardware that came out years after XP was superseded. Sony long ago removed its driver downloads page for this nearly 15-year-old machine.
Merely looking for drivers online using XP itself isn't trivial: it comes with a long-obsolete version of Internet Explorer, and the OS's SSL certificates are long out of date. There are some things you can do that will help: the handy Cert_Updater tool will refresh XP's certificates – it's on i430vx's site, for instance. (Look under Files/misc.) It's also worth having a pre-downloaded local copy of Internet Explorer 8, which you can get from various places, such as the very handy OldVersion or WinWorld.
Even so, once you've done that, and maybe installed one of the supplemental web browsers we suggested last time, you're still stuck with some very elderly tools. Which brings us to our first recommendation: a useful program-cum-web-page which we found thanks to Reg reader James, who sent us this tip after our previous XP article.
Legacy Update is a very neat tool for anyone trying to install new copies of Windows XP now that Microsoft's own Windows Update no longer supports this ancient OS. Legacy Update consists of a program that you must download and install. Once installed, you can use the project's own website. It's basically a replacement Windows Update, which can identify, fetch and install all the updates from Microsoft itself that are needed to make the OS as current as it can get. XP is still an ancient OS, it's still got lots of open vulnerabilities that will never get fixed now, but anything is better than nothing. As far as we can tell, it also fetches all the additional updates for POSready 2009, although of course even that was eventually killed off.
For our creaky old Vaio, along with a hundred-plus other updates, Legacy Update also picked up that XP had no device driver installed for the machine's sound chip. It was the single driver we'd not been able to locate by hand. What's more, Legacy Update identified the correct driver, fetched it, installed it, and after a reboot, suddenly XP had working audio.
TinyXP includes drivers for quite a lot of things, and handily it's also pre-activated, so you don't need to generate your own license key. However, TinyXP is based on 32-bit Windows XP Pro. The Vaio P is a fairly feeble machine at the best of times, and it has an awful keyboard to boot. To give XP a better chance to shine, we decided to try it on another veneral steed from the stable, our Thinkpad W500, on which we tested Linux Mint 21.2 and Slackware 15 recently, as well as Alpine Linux and Haiku beta 4.
Our W500 is maxed out with 8GB of RAM, and we recently replaced its ancient 120GB hard disk with a used 240GB SSD which cost the princely sum of 12 quid ($15). It's a dual-core 64-bit machine, just an old one, and XP Pro can't address more than about three-and-a-bit gigs of RAM. That meant terra incognita: the mysteries of the rarely seen XP for x86-64. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition came along in 2005, rather later than the standard x86-32 and Itanium editions of XP. It's based on the kernel from Windows Server 2003, meaning that you can't use most device drivers meant for ordinary XP – or indeed XP service packs, or the standard 32-bit edition of IE. It only ever got to SP2, its own special release.
These days, nearly two decades and half a dozen Windows versions after it was released, you can find multiple copies of XP64 on the Internet Archive, such as here. In our testing, we found that we needed to burn it to a real physical CD for it to get as far as the installer; it boots from USB, but blue-screens before you can install it.
The result worked… kinda. It boots, it installs, and it runs, but the Thinkpad W500 was released in 2008: firmly in the Vista era, seven years after XP and three years after XP64. XP64 has no device drivers for most of the hardware in the W500. Lenovo is better at keeping old driver downloads available than Sony, and we were able to obtain an XP64 driver for its Wi-Fi chip and thus get online, but while Legacy Update had lots of updates for us, it couldn't offer any helpful device drivers. The Thinkpad's big 1920x1200 display was jaggedy and slow, and if we turned off GPU switching and enabled its discrete GPU, we saw some slight screen corruption as well.
Which brings us neatly to the second handy helper for senior systems.
Glenn Delahoy's Snappy Driver Installer Origin is an atypical member of a category of software we normally avoid like an overused cliché. Automatic driver installation tools, for the avoidance of doubt, are generally a complete rip-off and frequently stuffed with malware. We advise avoiding them in general, but SDIO is a little different. It's free, it's open source, and to the best of our ability to tell, it's safe. It's a fork of a project originally called just Snappy Driver Installer, which is still around but under new ownership and, according to some sources, no longer safe to use – which is why we're not going to link to it. Incidentally, the same is true of "registry cleaners" and you should avoid those too.
SDIO is a portable app – it doesn't need to be installed before use. However, it does depend on some large driver libraries, and if you just download the standalone program, it will fetch several gigabytes of these over Bittorrent, which can take a long time. We needed to leave it overnight, and they're big enough that a complete set might fill a smaller disk partition.
We ran it on our newly installed but largely driverless XP64 machine, and it got to work. We had to make about three or four passes through the program: it's still XP, and it needs to reboot if you so much as look at it with a nasty expression. Eventually, it installed drivers for every bit of hardware in the machine (bar one). Card readers, sound, wired and wireless Ethernet, both the integrated GPU and the discrete AMD Mobility Radeon HD 3650, various parts of the system chipset… it identified everything, found the right drivers in its enormous library, and installed them.
Afterwards, the machine ran much quicker, and we had full display acceleration, networking, working audio, and just one lingering yellow question mark in Device Manager, where previously it was a forest of them. (That one being its fingerprint reader, which we're happy to live without.)
Which just leaves the problem of a vaguely usable web browser. IE 8 is pretty much useless today. The old Seamonkey 2.49.5 Source: The register