So many memories. I am one of those who grew with WinXP (though I usd Win95 at school and for a few years Win98 at home), and as someone said in another comment, what else could a teen geek want besides WinXP with a bandwith connection?
I still feel that seeing a XP Desktop screenshot invites to much more experiences (possibly online) than a Win10/Win11 screenshot. It may be with the fact that I associate it to different internet eras as well. With XP I used to browse websits, fansites, blogs, forums, chats, MSN messenger/Yahoo Messenger/etc, whil now everything seems to be the boring social networks where almost everything is generated/shared.
Internet used to be much fun back then, and it may be the reason why most of the people have good memories about XP. I think the main reason (and I wanted to write an "essay" about this for a while) it's that we were offline by default in our lives, and we used to "go online" for a few hours durnig the day. Then you had your experience in the real world and went online to talk about them. Now it is the other way around - we live online by default, sharing photos and videos from a concert almost in real time, photos from a museum, etc. I think it took away its novelty.
>With XP I used to browse websits, fansites, blogs, forums, chats, MSN messenger/Yahoo Messenger/etc, whil now everything seems to be the boring social networks where almost everything is generated/shared.
That 2005-2009 period was absolutely the swan song of the pre-corporate internet.
> That 2005-2009 period was absolutely the swan song of the pre-corporate internet.
Try pre 2000. Nearly every website was made by an enthusiast of some type. Banner ads just barely existed, and you could reach out and talk to almost anyone who was online. There was also an assumption of politeness and civility.
Totally unknown people randomly met on IRC in 1994/1995 would send you CDs of their own music, strangers from other countries would invite you to come and stay a couple weeks at their place (that existed again for a while at the beginning of Couchsurfing), etc.
The level of trust and friendliness was incredible: There was maybe 0.1% of the population online and we were in awe of this new world.
I find that HN roughly equates to that 0.1%, and there are definitely some other high quality corners of the internet where enthusiasts of whatever topic can have excellent discussions, but it's tough to find them among the ever-increasing noise.
Now that roughly everyone is online to some extent, what's the next frontier -- what can provide that sort of hidden community? I don't know that "power user" or "computer nerd" will ever be the means of gatekeeping that it once was, so what's next?
Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but the closest modern equivalent might be the various VR games / apps that are centred around socializing with other random people (like VR Chat).
Even back in the BBS days in the 80s, there was always that one guy who was the asshole and trolled people on forums. Once you talked to him one on one, he was actually pretty normal.
They felt like they could get away with anything because they could!
I think one difference was that you could hide a little friendly community fairly easy and because the meanness and abuse was seen as an expression of real world powerlessness rather than an enforcement of real world power structures.
Oh there were banner ads, but most were for link exchanges. Remember those?
You'd browse someone's website and a banner ad would promote somebody else's. You could get lost for hours!
That assumption of politeness and civility was well on its way out around 1998.
That was the year I recall netnews turning into something resembling an open sewer. By 1999, I had dropped off netnews completely. It had gone from a wonderful community of spaces for almost any topic imaginable, to a constant stream of trolling and porn.
I feel like it was just as corporate, but it was at a different point in the lifecycle. Like, early on, companies had to make the best software they could to get people using computers and communicating over the internet. Now that everyone is hooked, the corporations can switch to extraction mode.
You know, nobody actually needs to participate in this rat race for few seconds of attention (of people you don't care about much), there are no real gains at all in it, not long term, not anything in say quality of life lived or happiness.
I used to be like that, posting 50+ albums of beautiful curated adventure photos per year (basically every weekend trips to alps, backpacking plus ie some evening climbing outdoors on mountain nearby and rest of life like concerts etc). Literally tens of thousands of photos at this point, sometimes stuff NatGeo would be happy to use. Backpacking around the world in wild places relatively few visit, always having full frame camera (+ diving cam + often gopro) with me.
I got told I should start Instagram, get followers, create 'brand' etc but never went that way since that wasn't the reason for doing it.
When first kid came, I toned down everything, stopped some things, less time to curate all those photos in lightroom. With second child, I practically stopped using camera and currently use just good phone (Samsung S22 ultra). My public photo stream basically died since I don't feel the need to share my kids/family photos, they feel much more intimate than just myself doing something cool/extreme. Close family still gets quite a few of those, but that's it.
And you know what? I am fine, I don't miss this at all, and I definitely don't miss similar feeds coming from other folks (especially if they go to some place / experience something and then for a week there are photos dripping 1 by 1 about the same single thing, I began to hate that). Actually I am more than fine, unplugging quite a bit, reversing this process, having more time for much more important matters in life.
Unplugged from quite a few social circles around those activities (but not all). So online life became similar kind of novelty you describe.
> we were offline by default in our lives […] Now it is the other way around - we live online by default, sharing photos and videos from a concert almost in real time, photos from a museum, etc. I think it took away its novelty.
We’re probably the same age, and I definitely see people matching that description.
Just to note, there’s also a decent number (most I know?) that went almost the opposite way:
“online” was a novelty but also the only place to share their experiences and participate to their community. With a group of friend we pestered the local com. company for broadband and were among the test group when they decided to start, and spend a crazy amount of time on IRC/ICQ/usenet.
I recently met again with some of the old friends, and our facebook accounts are stubs to keep our name. We’re still on other anonymous SNS but it’s clear we don’t want to share more than needed, and don’t want to spend too much time on it overall.
Basically now that “online” can be used anytime from anywhere, there’s no need actively seek it and novelty is gone so we’re more restricting what we do there.
Similarly I was 'online' much more during my teen years than I am today. I think two key things changed:
1. I started enjoying things outside of the internet more and more, partially due to how the internet has changed, partially due to how I've changed.
2. There's less FOMO due to as you mention, being able to be "online" anywhere. This creates an entirely different atmosphere, I won't miss something because I'm not at my computer. This actually leads me to being online much less, I can be out and about doing things and get ping by my friends on Discord. Very different than when I didn't want to go out because I couldn't talk to my friends.
> Internet used to be much fun back then, and it may be the reason why most of the people have good memories about XP.
To some extend, but I think most people enjoyed XP mostly because it came after 98/ME, and before Vista, which I think are both much worse for different reasons.
The thing is all of these are still here. There are a ton of artisanal websites, blogs and fansites. Lots of communities on IRC, MUDs... Yes it is a small percentage compared to all of current internet users, but still enough for you to spend several lifetimes reading and long hours participating into.
I have warm memories of Windows XP, upgrading to it from ME at about 11/12 years old, where I truly began my independent journey into SWE. I used to switch to the silver theme every now and then to keep things fresh. Windows XP + an internet connection, what more could a 12 year old geek want? Thanks for helping provide that!
Windows XP was actually the trigger for me to move to Linux full time. There was an option to let windows verify you owned the media files on your computer via a third party service when you set up Windows media player. Since this was slightly after all the hoopla about Napster and copyright law, it struck me then that perhaps Microsoft wasn't one of the good guys.
I was slightly older than you though, so perhaps that gave me a different perspective.
Windows Media team made a lot of bone-headed decisions. This was at a time when WinAmp was taking off. WinowsMedia could have leaned into MP3 culture while giving a very basic nod to DRM, instead they created a bunch of confusion. At the time Microsoft was considered the "evil empire" so being considered not one of the good guys would have made the marketing team proud at the time.
I never got on with Linux for a workstation, though I've tried. I used to use Windows XP for my workstation, and I had Gentoo running on an older computer for my home server. This was around 2001/2002, as I remember being on IRC during everything that followed 9/11, and it was during that time that I was learning to compile Linux. Strange time, lots of mixed memories, but also, such a sense of wonder — the internet, Linux, programming, Windows XP.
I am with you on that. Almost same timeline. Plus the amazing art work, icon packs, editing shell32.dll (or whatever it was called, sorry I dont remember accurately) to make it look like Aurora (or longhorn). Those were the days for a geek.
I held out on Windows 98SE for awhile because of games, and then went to Windows 2000 for the classic UI when I learned you could often get XP drivers to load in 2000 with a bit of INI fiddling.
It wasn’t until nearly 2003 that I finally moved over to XP.
I built and installed and repaired a lot of XP machines (tens of thousands, probably), but ran win2k myself until Windows XP x64 Edition came out, and then promptly installed that. Other than in a VM, i've never actually ran windows XP 32 bit myself. win3.11 "wfw" -> 98SE -> 2k -> xp x64 -> 7 'ultimate' -> 10 pro for workstations. In the gaps i used MacOS (7,8,9) and then redhat, then gentoo.
I also ran NT4 as a fileserver because it had the best SCSI controller support. had almost a year of uptime on that before a blackout took it offline.
Similar story, except instead of 98 for me I held on to Win2k (and the laptop running it, the first laptop I ever bought with my own money) as long as I possibly could. Absolutely loved that release.
Yep, the last Windows version I used was Win2K. It was my fave version of Windows by far. After that I switched to Linux on the desktop, warts and all.
I think when it comes to big companies of any sort, not just big tech, a lot of unloved initiatives are also not well-liked from within, but even fairly critical people tolerate it as long as they’re not in close proximity to it. I can only imagine others here can relate to the pressures of trying to balance pressure to prioritize short to mid-term business success vs investing in long-term gains and user trust. Maybe Google is a bit of a weirder case, but I was there when Dragonfly was uncovered and though some people quit, most people just complained. (To be sure, I definitely understand that some company culture would be more aggressive against internal dialogue like this. I’m somewhat neutral on it as it definitely had its ups and downs.)
I used to work in a field that clashed with my personal ethics. Took me a decade to figure out it. More than enough time to be culpable. Life is interesting.
Keep in mind that at the time Microsoft was being sued for being anti-competitive behaviour by Netscape and there were a lot of attention on the company for being a bad actor. Most of Microsofts's patents were defensive (they rarely used them offensively to my knowledge). There was a group of execs that were nervous about Linux but the lack of UI/UX/Usability strength put most of the focus on server capabilities. To this day many people want Linux to be a broader desktop OS but the only strong and focused effort on this are ironically ChromeOS and Android.
Interesting, from the outside it definitely appeared like there was a lot of effort into destabilizing footholds Linux and FOSS were making. There was the whole 'true cost of ownership' advertisement FUD, attempts to paint the desktop experience as poor (as you just did) when it was and continues to be a superior experience ever since KDE 3.5 (imo, of course), the sabre rattling about patents at the start of android, numerous institutions switching to and then back from FOSS equivalents of office repeating Microsoft PR verbatim as if it was facts... From the outside, it looked like a big deal.
Very interesting to hear it from the other side though, thanks.
My comments were objective, rather than subjective. Microsoft had a competitive OS lab and regularly tested off-the-street users on common tasks using Linux, OSX, Sun, BeOS, and others. In the XP days Mac would win on brand metrics and Microsoft would win on Usability. Linux won on power features but this was a detractor for more novice users.
Windows XP was my first operating system when my family got their first computer. At the time our school computers were running Windows 98. I felt so special having the new "XP" system at home haha. The login sound still brings back memories. Thank you for your contributions!
There's a name I haven't heard for a long time. I used to work in POS and remember getting big license packs of POSReady in the MS Gold Partner Program loot packs.
nLite was popular in the carputer scene. I ran a stripped down XP version on a low power industrial PC (Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, laptop disk) hooked up to a Lilliput touchscreen up front.
I credit nLite with improving my understanding of Windows. I was educational to see all the components listed with tooltips about their function and dependencies. It was like building your own custom copy of Windows. At one point I think I had a copy of XP running using 50MB of RAM at the desktop.
gentoo (and begrudgingly, i'll admit ubuntu server) are really light. I run web app servers on mostly gentoo, ubuntu if it requires docker, and a base install is 30-50MB of ram used. Right now my cgi, syncthing, and web fileserver is using 125MB. misskey server is using 725, i think it uses 175 on boot, so possible memory leak there. matrix server is using 363MB. Mattermost server been up for 3 months and is using 383MB.
if you remove all the source files and cruft from a gentoo install when you're done setting it up, the actual system is less than 1GB on disk, and as mentioned, 30-50MB of memory used. Ubuntu is similar, although it does include more helper apps so the disk weight is higher.
definitely installed xp netbook edition, and it was faster than full boat xp but still a chonker compared to whatever the popular linux distro for netbooks was back then
Additionally, I'm not sure if it's still true, but in 2014 Microsoft offered paid updates for customers who couldn't migrate from XP after EOL. A lot of businesses and governments still used it at that point.
Thank you for sharing this link. The Internet Archive is truly a marvel of unequaled value. Didn't know it had such a trove of warez without the risk of pwnage that warez and torrent sites came with.
If the ISOs are untouched (so it won't work for the posted "Delta Edition"), you can search the SHA hash of the version from MSDN. Relevant search keywords are "Microsoft SHA1 Hash Archive" :D
Microsoft themselves offer a freely downloadable software compatibility tool which internally contains a full Windows XP virtual machine. There's instructions online for how to import the imagine into Virtual Box.
I wonder if it has to do with the common practice of using a stripped down windows install as a live bootable environment to run recovery tools?
Even if you have a licensed copy of WinXP, MicroXP is useful because it is a stripped down version that has been tested. That represents quite a lot of work.
You can get a ton of old, abandoned, or unsupported, software from Archive.org. I have no idea if the original authors are aware of it but if they are they don't seem to care that much.
Everything on archive.org is user uploaded. So I think authors don’t event know. I just recently uploaded an old Pocket PC / Windows Mobile game that I found on an old disk drive. It took me less than five minutes to register and upload it and it was immediately available.
It's not that, archive.org has a DMCA exemption for being a library. It makes it legal for them to host the data, but that doesn't mean it's legal for you to download it. Weird I know... I mean why else would they store it if it's illegal to access? I've never gotten a straight answer to that.
> I mean why else would they store it if it's illegal to access?
It's not permanently illegal to access. In the US, there's a constitutional requirement that copyright and patents be time-limited, so eventually all that stuff will be public domain. And the copyright period is current so absurdly long that by the time XP is public domain, it will be hard to find outside of dedicated archives.
An ordinary library can not scan a copy of a book and allow unlimited downloads of that scan from the web. The DMCA exemption doesn't allow that. Actually, archive.org got in trouble pretty recently because they were accused of doing almost just that. Their response was not that they had the right to do it but rather that they had never been doing it to begin with - that each copy given out was merely "lended" and backed for the duration of the lend by an actual physical copy in a partnering library.
Similarly, you will find a bunch of copyright software on there, including for recent DRM-free and cracked video games. Unfortunately, my impression is that the archive managers simply do not care about copyright. Anyone who wants to get something they own taken off the site has to put in quite a bit of work, similar to the old wild-west days of YouTube.
As far as not caring, Jason Scott has said himself that they take a "ask forgiveness instead" approach because getting permission is too difficult and time-consuming. In 2016 they were adding 15TB per day with a total storage volume of 30PB, and by 2020 that total was 70PB.
I wonder if the custom Windows image scene will get a revival when they start to force online accounts. I'm not looking for a way to avoid paying for Windows, but I'll do what it takes to keep a local account.
For enterprise, sure. But they've already shown a willingness to gimp their operating systems for common consumer use. For instance, you can't use virtualization features on Windows 10 Home edition. I wouldn't be surprised if you need a special license key to use Windows offline (past activation, at least) in the future.
Running a virtual machine. Something you could do on Windows 7 Home Premium, without having to purchase a "Pro" edition.
My point is that they're slowly gating features behind their more Enterprise-y editions, which at some point won't be available to the general population. If they can force you to make a Microsoft account at some point, they will.
Home Premium is what came bundled with the computer that you bought at Best Buy/Walmart/wherever. You didn't need to pay for any upgrade at all, it was stock.
I thought that was Home Basic. Only the better specced PCs came with Home Premium (and you paid for it - it is included in the price, you could have the same PC without an OS cheaper).
The “join domain” button still works in this build. Click Join Domain and it just has you create a local administrator account since it can’t handle joining a domain in OOBE (there’s a restart, and a lot of times the initial GPOs could interfere with the rest of the setup process).
Only for installation. Afterwards you can create and use it with a local account:
> For those who want to use a local account, the best solution is to create a burner Microsoft account for use during setup and then to either create a new local user account or sign out of your Microsoft account once the OS is up and running.
This is the "if you don't like one particular thing your country does you should move to a different country" argument with a couple of the words changed.
Lots of people use applications for which there are only Windows versions. Switching operating systems is not the trivial thing you claim it is unless you only use a web browser.
Well, the obvious one was when the did the "XP Mode" for compatibility purposes.
I'd have expected to see a lot more along that theme by now. Windows's biggest opportunity and problem was always backwards compatibility, and the more hardware gets virtualization-ready, the easier it is to shift compatibility burdens to sealed-box VM images.
I could imagine a future Windows that finally achieves the vision of "only modern apps and APIs" by packaging everything else into sealed VMs running a predictable steady-state "classic Windows" install.
Modern Windows, Home or Pro already runs under a hypervisor, it's called Core Isolation.
> The entire idea of Core Isolation is that your OS will segregate critical core processes from the rest of the other normally running ones in order to defend against hostile or ill-natured software/driver or malware. You can think of it as a vault that only the allowed have access to, something that is not open to everyone. Windows achieves this feat by using its virtualization technology.
i think they will never force online accounts. A lot of small business prefer/need offline accounts, and there needs to be a solution for them, besides Windows Enterprise Edition.
For maximum nostalgia they should find a way to remove the volume-license key blocklist (added in SP1) so I can install Delta Edition with the "FuCK GateWay" key that is still seared into my memory 20 years later.
To me XP always looked ridiculous. Like an April’s fool joke, „Windows Toys“r“us Edition“. I still can’t believe that it was used to run nuclear power plants (it probably still does).
Agreed, 7 was the last Windows I felt had more to love than to complain about. When 10 entered a silly update failed - keep retrying failing updates just to fail again loop I just said nah not worth it and switched permanently to linux mint. It was the last straw so to speak. I was supposed to install an update manager and use it to install updates instead? Bleh.
Some audio tweaks here, some kernel tweaks there, we've been through a lot together already this OS and I :D
I think mobile OS designed also peaked with Windows Phone 7. Android and iOS haven't touched the intuitiveness and usability it had. Not to mention the Nokia Lumia hardware was light-years better in build quality then even most Android phones today.
They were too late too market and lost developer mindshare with the Windows Mobile to Phone transition.
Probably Mac OS 9.
I still hit command + n for a new folder, and get a new window. I loved that OS, but if I checked it out now I sure I’d be very disappointed.
Still using 7 when I'm not using Linux. Every new Windows after that just gave you more bloat you didn't ask for. Unsure whether the OS should run on a desktop or a tablet.
That's because nobody uses those graphics primitives anymore, and by removing the legacy cruft graphics device drivers can be simplified. Aero/modern UI, by contrast, is much closer to how the modern Windows graphics stack actually works, so it makes sense for Microsoft to move everybody to it and deprecate GDI except for legacy applications.
"Pimp my OS". The creativity from those days was definitely interesting to see. A lot of the people who did that weren't even really into computer science/software development; they just liked customising stuff.
I never got the whole “have to make everything skeuomorphic” trend from back in those days. You had a platform not bound by any analog interface…and what was the first thing designers did? Make crappy analog interfaces that you had to manipulate with a mouse.
Luna was one of my favorite Windows themes of all time. Microsoft was actually way ahead on “flat” design but it was usable, looked modern, and was attractive. They threw it away to mimic the Aqua aesthetic but didn’t really understand why Aqua worked, just kind of how it looked. The final XP themes were so ugly and inconsistent. It was like at least three different widget designs were mashed together (the window frame, the standard widgets, and the scroll bars all appear to be from different worlds).
Office XP and Visual Studio.NET had their own variations of flat widgets that also looked fantastic and seemed true to Luna. For a few seconds, Netscape 6 also had a really nice flat design that was replaced with bulbous, XP-esque chrome.
It would have been great if Microsoft would have stuck with that flat design language. It was original, very true to their brand, and looked “professional”. I would love to hear why it was scrapped in favor of what shipped.
Starting from a Windows frame of reference... 98SE, then XP, then 7, and then (with reservations) 10 was the gaming experience.
From a nostalgia perspective, I'm likely to view even Windows 3.11 clones in a positive light.
Really, though... harboring no specific ill will toward any OS developer, I just hope that L/indo/nix figures out how to properly interoperate, and we get a computing ecosystem that allows for new users to quickly and accurately figure out what kind of system they want to live in.
I was a Windows user until I moved to Linux and then Mac. I don't anticipate going back to Windows again, but the one that would tempt me would be an updated version of Windows XP. Like better security, drivers and maybe the search function in the start menu, but otherwise Windows XP.
I feel like this was the last OS where Microsoft gave a damn about you as the user.
I sometimes have to develop and test for Windows, and running latest 10-11 dev evaluation version from Microsoft in a virtual machine is nothing but pain (in terms of performance and usability, since I use FreeBSD/macOS/Linux for last ~15 years and anything after XP is a huge pain to me).
Will definitely try this one and see if it will work for my purposes!
I just intalled it into a virtual machine and it's already doing that thing where you go to network connections in the control panel and it hangs for like 60 seconds before it proceeds... Good times...
> Windows XP Delta Edition is an unofficial modification of a 21 year old operating system, and should not be used as a daily driver. Microsoft ended support for Windows XP in 2014, and all unofficial updates stopped in 2019. Windows XP Delta Edition is made by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts.
I still play around with my XP laptop and even browse with MyPal. It has native WPA2 and can connect to a modern access point. As long as you're behind NAT and aren't downloading random warez, there's not too much to worry about. Just don't do anything sensitive like banking, of course.
As a developer, I really don't understand the lovefest for XP, other than in the context of Windows 98, in particular the Windows 98 ME fiasco, and the evolution of Windows NT into Windows 2000.
Windows 7 pretty much fixed all the brokenness of XP, granted much of that brokenness was XP being a victim to the progress in hardware buses.
Yes, Windows Vista was a hot mess, which carried over into the first release of Windows 8, though by the second release of Windows 8, it was pretty solid, but still tainted by the stench of Vista.
But Windows 10 completed so much of what Windows 7 started. Everything in '10' was so much better. The network stack, particularly WiFi. Printer drivers. USB support. All of it really.
When I think how far forward 10 moved from XP, and having lived with Windows from '95' on forward, including writing NDIS network drivers for NT, I just don't have any nostalgia for XP at all.
And I know a lot of people hate Windows 11, but I have to say, USB support for Linux under WSL2 in Windows 11 is good, so it has that going for it.
I created a vm of the XP install that came preinstalled on my HP laptop a out 11 years ago. Through multiple laptops and migrations, it has still survived and is so convenient when a website expects to be accessed from Windows. Boots in less than 5 seconds to the login sounds that has been burned into our memories.
There is something about those screenshots that makes XP looks good. I remember when it came out we all thought it looked like a Fisher-Price toy. A very un-serious and unprofessional aesthetic.
With a proper BIOS PC or CSM enabled, you can partition a SSD for a few MBR-layout partitions, then format the first partition FAT32. Following partitions can be formatted NTFS.
Windows 98SE can then be installed to the volume if your BIOS can enable ATA mode (for HDD access to complete the boot process), otherwise you still can manually install the plain DOS (which underlies W98SE itself) to the FAT32 volume, but that way you only boot to the bare metal command line.
DOS is simple enough where the BIOS or CSM can transparently handle access to the ATA, SATA, or USB drives, keyboards and mice without drivers or anything. Sound is not so easy though.
DOS will usually work with the full amount of modern memory still physically installed, but W9x not, so excess memory might need to be disabled in BIOS or physically removed beforehand for full W9x use.
If you have a (empty) WINDOWS folder already on your FAT32 DOS volume before you try to install W9x (or WXP) on it, then you will be given the option of putting the new install into a differently named folder if you wish, I would choose for a WIND98 folder rather than WIN98 since the latter was almost like a keyword.
To a fresh FAT32 DOS volume without any of its few files in actual folders (directories) at that point, when you installed W98 it created your first 3 folders; Documents and Settings, Program Files, and your main Windows OS folder (which was either the default WINDOWS or your chosen alternative such as WIND98).
When you upgraded from DOS to W9x the bootsector no longer loaded simply IO.SYS, but WINBOOT.SYS then which brought in the whole Windows GUI on top of DOS.
As mentioned WXP can also be installed to a FAT32 volume, works great but it was never a mainstream approach. You can search much faster when its a FAT32 volume.
XP install CDs usually also need to use ATA mode rather than SATA (AHCI) mode in the BIOS unless the proper SATA drivers have been slipstreamed into the ISO.
Maybe this Delta edition handles that well.
If you install XP to your FAT32/DOS/W9x volume which still contains your (intentionally empty) folder named WINDOWS, you will again be given the option to choose an alternative OS foldername such as WINXP. The WINXP choice was the actual XP default at the very beginning (W2k used WINNT foldername just like NT3 & NT4) before reverting to WINDOWS foldername for most XP PCs and newer.
This would not be a recommended approach for users who were not comfortable renaming an existing Program Files folder used by Win9x to something else such as Prog98, otherwise installing XP over W9x would overwrite a number of the default Windows 98 programs in the Program Files folder with NT versions. Better to just hide the W9x Program folder and let XP write a whole new Program Files folder for itself when it installs. Either Windows version then boots using just its own uniquely named Windows folder. W9x doesn't care if the Program Files folder is from a newer version of Windows, it will still boot. When booted to W9x some of the common programs in the XP Program Files folder will only run under NT and you will get an error for that, but to workaround you could set a shortcut to your renamed Prog98 folder in that case.
This NT install also overwrites the DOS volume bootsector so upon bootup it searches for NTLDR rather than DOS bootfiles, but it also makes a backup of your DOS bootsector first saving it as c:\bootsect.dos so if you want to you could use your new NTLDR to still boot to DOS or W98 if present (since it's FAT32 anyway) by adding the line c:\="DOS from W98" to your boot.ini text file. In boot.ini "c:\=" syntax in this case is shorthand for "c:\bootsect.dos=". Quite convenient and un-necessarily deceptive at the same time.
IOW for advanced MBR operators who want to sometimes boot to Linux from a Windows-formatted volume using the NT bootloader, you need to back up the NT bootsector (disk editor is good for this), prepare a Linux bootsector using GRUB or Syslinux then save it as a file named something like c:\bootsect.lin. Then you can replace the NT bootsector to the volume from backup. Then in your boot.ini add a line such as c:\bootsect.lin="Linux on type 83 partition 4" for instance.
Anyway with DOS, W9x and Wxp in the FAT32 bare metal root, WIND98 folder, and WINXP folder respectively, sharing the same FAT32 volume you could ideally choose any one of them (even further choose Linux or Windows installs on different partitions/filesystems if you went there) from the regular Windows NT multiboot menu which will appear upon PC startup.
It has also been seen that on an NTFS volume already containing W10, if the Windows 10 Program Files folder was renamed to something like Prog10 beforehand, XP could still be installed afterward to a folder other than WINDOWS and share the same volume as long as the HDD was set up using MBR layout rather than GPT and you have a good BIOS or CSM, with SATA or plain ATA handled accordingly. Carefully, W10 can also be booted from the NTLDR bootmenu if you had saved a copy of the W10 NTFS bootsector as a file such as c:\bootsect.nt6 beforehand. Then address that in your boot.ini. Which you would need the W10 bootsector backup file anyway normally, to restore to the partition (after XP has "downgraded" it) so you can go back to using the original W10 NT6 BOOTMGR instead of the older NTLDR from XP. You then have to manually add an NTLDR bootentry to the modern NT6 BOOTMGR bootmenu to boot XP from there.
But that's kind of backwards, ideally things like Vista, W7, W8, W10 & W11 would each be installed on their own remaining NTFS partitions without sharing the volume with any other OS. As each of these OS's is installed to its partition on an MBR-layout HDD it writes its additional bootentry to the NT6 bootmenu within the standard BOOT folder on your "Active" MBR partition, typically the FAT32 volume on your first partition which is often small in drive space and considered reserved for boot files alone. Alternatively, as we have seen, regular DOS can easily format as much as a 32GB FAT32 volume so there can be plenty of room for things like DOS, W9x, or Wxp to be also installed and function right there beside the active boot files. And the boot files can access other partitions too.
With a BOOT folder this beefy, and NTLDR in the mix you may now have DOS, W9x, NT5, NT6 and even Linux on the bare metal at your fingertips.
Next adding a new similarly beefy EFI folder to the FAT32 volume will provide an additional, alternative way to boot the same OS's on the same partitions, but on non-BIOS PCs only the OS's modern enough to support UEFI booting will be available (for booting) when a proper CSM is not enabled.
UEFI alone is supposed to support booting from either MBR or GPT layout on the HDD, as long as a readable useful EFI folder is on a recognizable FAT32 volume.
When not using a BIOS or CSM, UEFI can't really boot into DOS, W9x or Wxp any more, but when they are on the bare metal anyway you can still use them in a VM inside a modern OS, from right where they are if you do it right.
only ran xp for a while - much preferred win2k - loved skinning windows - here's a screenshot from the brief skinned xp days: https://share.getcloudapp.com/p9uOpZeB#
What boggles my mind is how slow the Win 10 start menu can be. Unless you disable the web integration via regedit, it can take _seconds_ to open something as simple as the calculator. Plenty of times I'm tapping my fingers for something that would have been instant in XP.
I've been using the same xp vm about 8 years and I love it. 2 secs to boot and blazing fast. Only occasionally do I need win 7 or rarely 8. Not that I use windows much. I'll never use 10+, never ever.
The original Windows XP did not require a reboot at least once per day, like Windows 98, but it still required a reboot after 2 or 3 days of intense use.
The many Service Packs that have been applied later to Windows XP have improved a lot its stability, but I have not used Windows XP for enough years to reach a Service Pack version where Windows XP would never need periodic reboots. I have stopped using Windows XP in 2005, maybe later revisions have solved the remaining bugs.
I have used Windows 2000 on much less computers and for much less time than Windows XP, so the accumulated experience might be insufficient, but with Windows 2000 I have not encountered any situation when I was forced to reboot the computer, like it was needed from time to time with Windows XP. Even so, the improvement in stability between Windows 98 and Windows XP was huge.
Simultaneously with using Windows XP on many desktops/laptops, I was managing a large number of FreeBSD servers. Those were rebooted exactly once per year, in order to do a kernel upgrade, even if that could have been skipped without problems.
I had been using hibernation instead of shutdown on my desktop computer during (which was on service pack 2), and it wasn't uncommon to not reboot for months.
In a better world, companies would support & embrace this kind of creative exploration.
It's just a sad chilling legal regime that rules us. Control is prioritized over fun, for fear that the fun get out of hand or come to not reflect well on the corporate image.
What is Microsoft being defended from here, by these laws which prohibit this? This isn't a pirated work. This isn't distributing keys: they explicitly say you need to get your own key.
I'm honestly not sure your claims are at all valid, that the laws you are describing are the ones protecting against awesome works like this. If they are, then what a shame that those laws would be so overbroad, would threaten & wreck such innocent & virtuous remix-culture, would deny the world any of their agency & enforce top down corporate control.
Distributing software without the permission of the author is the definition of software piracy. This is literally software piracy.
The laws that prevent what you consider awesome work like this also prevent people from stealing your work. If we didn’t have these laws, we couldn’t have a software economy. It would be nearly impossible to make a living as a software engineer. The people who created these laws had the prudence to judge that the ability for programmers to securely make a living for their work is more important than the ability for programmers to take someone else’s work and do whatever they want with it.
> If we didn’t have these laws, we couldn’t have a software economy. It would be nearly impossible to make a living as a software engineer.
Considering that this was made more than a decade after Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP, I fail to see how playing around with such abandonware would destroy software companies. What a ridiculous hyperbole.
If anything, it's a good example of IP laws being disproportionally in favor of IP holders. Microsoft is already one of the richest companies on the planet, how much more penny pinching must we bear?
We are not talking about property here, we are talking about information. And it is not Microsoft's but belongs to everyone. Microsoft has only been granted a temporary monopoly over this information in order to incentivize them to create more.
'Piracy' is a moralizing metaphor created to liken copyright infringement to murderously violent plunder of physical goods.
You don't have to call anything piracy, if you don't buy into that propaganda project. You're welcome to instead use a label that encompasses all of the facts in this instance, like 'nominal copyright and trademark infringement', which acknowledges both the stances of the relevant laws and the fact that there's no material harm involved here.
That sounds reasonably accurate. It seems silly that software that protects itself from unauthorized use via a key would be entitled to such prohibitions. It seems silly software which is generally downloadable (such as windows10 here[1]) would be entitled to such restrictions. But yes, the corporations have rule.
You updated your post to add this after I said I agree:
> Distributing software without the permission of the author is the definition of software piracy. This is literally software piracy.
It's disagreeable that you'd make such a drastic change under my feet.
So to update my previous stance, I there may be some technical ground but I think users have a right too, to archival, to exploration. Leaving the software with all copy protection intact & in an unusable state for a user is pretty obviously difference than the hard fast clear case you make this out to be. This is pretty obviously different. Technically it's probably not up to snuff but the law is probably not competent in technics & needs to reel itself in to maintain legitemacy.
There is significant public interest in being able to look at & understand & see our past. Microsoft doesnt wish to be a part of that past but I dont believe it grants them the right to make the world forget & become ignorant.
This just feels like it's a very debatable relative perspective.
Even as a professional software engineer, the value of being able to obtain and hack on "the rest of the software universe" would be far greater than the value I can obtain by being able to deny others that right on my relatively minor scope of work.
Copyright tends to enable one software business model above others: selling canned bits with no extra work. If you're not in that business, you have little to fear, and only free publicity to gain.
If we eliminated copyright tomorrow, you could torrent a copy of $work_monolith with no repercussions. There would probably be little demand, as it's in-house tooling for a niche industry that requires non-trivial infrastructure to use. I would still have a job, because I'm still among the best-qualified people to manage updates, bugfixes, and compliance needs. Hell, now I have multiple potential buyers for consultancy and development services!
I think you can also say that there is something inherently sad about squandered value. Nobody ends up better off in the current scenario.
Microsoft has little to no interest in selling Windows XP, but there is a cadre of users who are interested in it. I've seen a fair number of people who want to build "the dream gaming PC of their childhood" now that they have the disposable income to do so, or people with technical "we can't replace the extremely specific software/hardware that controls the $5 million industrial machine with anything newer" lock-in. They lose out on being able to legitimately build something they want, and it's not like Microsoft was going to convince these people to buy Windows 11 for that use case instead. There may be some Rube Goldberg chain of downgrade rights you can invoke, but I doubt it's as simple as "buy a Win11 key and enter it in the XP installer's prompt", nor is it the sort of thing that's widely communicated.
I always figured the compromise solution was a (likely state-mediated) mandatory licensing board. You want Windows XP and the vendor won't sell it? Buy a concession license at a negotiated price from the licensing authority instead, and your "acquired somehow" copy is now legally sanctioned. That would ensure permanent availability of "back-stock" content, and the concession funds could be funneled back to the original authors, providing an effortless trickle-source of revenue on otherwise unsaleable products.
> I always figured the compromise solution was a (likely state-mediated) mandatory licensing board.
The majority of your argument seems to be based on the premise that you do not have rights over your own work. That the perceived public benefit has priority over your will over your own work. The day that the state ceases to enforce copyright based on that premise is the day that many types of software businesses will cease to exist. The incentives just won’t be there to create software that thrives under business models that require enforcement of copyright.
Microsoft, as the owner of Windows XP has the right to do with it as they see fit. It’s not anyone else’s concern whether they are not making the best use of Windows XP. Especially not a mandatory governmental board. It’s their property, it’s their choice.
IMO, the rights from copyright are not "natural" rights so much as a negotiated deal with the rest of society.
Ownership of physical assets derives from concepts like "scarcity" and "exclusivity". You can't have my widget because then I can't use it, and maybe, worst case, you damage it. This is more or less a universally understood risk and we have agreed as a society to build a legal system around it.
Intellectual property has no such underpinning. Once the software exists, you can't unring that bell. There's no technical reason that anyone who wants Windows XP can't have a copy; it won't wear out.
Instead of coping with a universal physical inevitability, we built copyright around a social tradeoff instead-- hacking around the natural economics of a finished product that has zero marginal cost or supply constraint. This lets rights-owners simulate scarcity and exclusivity and enables some business models-- usually the "front-loaded" model of "build the product first, the sell it later in an bulk undifferented manner". Society has accepted this tradeoff because it was considered a net positive. Hence language like the original Copyright Clause of the US Constitution-- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". It's not a natural right, it's a tradeoff where the rest of us expect to get something in return.
I believe this means this deal is always subject to review, alteration, or cancellation if it no longer justifies its costs. Creativity will find a way. Music will be written for as long as "I'm in the band" is a viable pick-up line, commissioned art will exist as long as someone has more fursonae than artistic talent to draw them, and software will emerge from the millions of businesses who need it to function.
Nobody's business model is sacred and guaranteed, and nobody is entitled to hold the rest of the world hostage to maintain it. Did we hold back the modern world because the steam locomotive and horse-whip manufacturers would go out of business? Why should the commercial-software industry have any more clout?
In the grand scheme of things if you set a precedent that copyright ownership is highly conditional and subject to the will of people who seek to dismiss your ownership for their own purposes, that will disincentivize investment in producing software works.
Perhaps people such as yourself who wish to see modders able to do what they wish with Windows XP think there is no commercial gain in Windows XP for Microsoft. In a different world there could have been. No one can predict the life expectancy of a copy protected work. This unpredictability and mere potential for long term value is part of what incentivizes corporations to innovate and produce. Remove their unconditional long-term right over their work and you will disincentivize the advancement of the arts and sciences. You may disagree but it’s simply true given that copyright protection has only increased over the history of the US, not decreased.
> the rights from copyright are not "natural" rights so much as a negotiated deal with the rest of society.
All “rights” are negotiated deals with the rest of society. Rights aren’t set in stone, they are essentially abstract constructs. They must be collectively believed in.
> No one can predict the life expectancy of a copy protected work.
I'd argue that software, and in particular operating-system software is perhaps one of the most predictable categories. It inherently ages due to gradual drift on hardware support and growing burdens of security risks and unmet compatibility needs. A 20-year-old operating system is probably only interesting for academic, historic/nostalgic, or special-case legacy support reasons.
For Windows XP in particular, it's interesting to remember that one of the motivations to cram Vista out the door was that they had to provide something new on a regular basis to justify the value of subscription-priced license agreements. Microsoft knew it had a finite shelf life from that perspective.
> You may disagree but it’s simply true given that copyright protection has only increased over the history of the US, not decreased.
I don't think you can draw conclusions from the behaviour of lawmakers, who are likely easily swayed by existing stakeholders who have a financial stake in expanded copyright.
I think expanding copyright got a free pass from society as a whole, until the late 20th century, because copying and modification was technologically gatekept until then. There wasn't really the possibility of "remix" work as we know it, and aftermarket reproduction was likely to be clunky, expensive, and inferior in quality. The villian for copyright was an unsympathetic commercial player trying to sell you a crudely mimeographed reproduction under the table.
It didn't matter in 1895 that we couldn't produce a remix of the top novel or song, because even if we wrote it out, most of us didn't have the facilities to make a commercial-quality printed product for mass sale.
Now, with digital content, the gates are open. An XP-Delta ISO is of similar quality and usability to a "real" XP ISO, and can be brought to consumers just as easily. The pain-point moves to the legal restrictions instead. We also have a new era of more sympathetic copiers: the archivists trying to fight the forever-loss of DRM content, the hobbyists trying to preserve or expand a product they loved, the remixers who are expressing themselves with bits and pieces of a shared zeitgeist that happens to be privately owned.
> I'd argue that software, and in particular operating-system software is perhaps one of the most predictable categories. It inherently ages due to gradual drift on hardware support and growing burdens of security risks and unmet compatibility needs. A 20-year-old operating system is probably only interesting for academic, historic/nostalgic, or special-case legacy support reasons.
Windows XP has only “aged” because Microsoft made a marketing decision to make it seem as though it has aged. Windows XP likely shares millions of lines of code with Windows 10. They only have the appearance of being a different product for marketing purposes. As a copy protected work, one is a direct derivative of the other. This type of life expectancy cannot be predicted.
Good policy is generically applied, fair, and sound. Saying “well operating systems should not have the same copy protections as other works for xyz reason” isn’t effective policy and would likely be found self-contradictory in court.
> I don't think you can draw conclusions from the behaviour of lawmakers, who are likely easily swayed by existing stakeholders who have a financial stake in expanded copyright.
Why not? What is the other side of the coin? The people arguing for decreased protection are doing it with no intention of starting businesses. They are ideologically motivated, not pragmatically. They simply want a world where they can do whatever they want with anyone’s IP because they think that’s how the world should work in the abstract, not because they intend to produce anything of sustainable value. Most of these detractors want to create one-off art pieces for the fun of it. That doesn’t bring food to the table or build a long term foundation upon which more advanced works be built.
The people arguing for more copyright protection do it with the intention of continuing to build more sustainable value. This results in more jobs and a larger economy.
> pieces of a shared zeitgeist that happens to be privately owned.
Chance has very little to do with it. We used Windows XP because Microsoft spent billions in marketing to distribute it and grow the PC market. It didn’t just happen by accident. Look at all the other fully functional hobby OSes that exist today. Look at ReactOS. Look at Linux. It’s not an accident that they don’t have the market share that Microsoft does. They don’t have an institution that is properly incentivized to market them to the masses. The most well known and used alternative OSes are Fedora and Ubuntu, can you guess why? It’s not random.
> The people arguing for decreased protection are doing it with no intention of starting businesses
Is the only possible social value of creative work the generation of a business? Maybe some things are simply better as a universal social infrastructure-- the benefit is that it exists for other things to be built around it, rather than as a direct business.
> Most of these detractors want to create one-off art pieces for the fun of it. That doesn’t bring food to the table or build a long term foundation upon which more advanced works be built.
To me, the big benefit is to move creativity from "the artist with his unsullied vision" versus "iterative multiplayer development." It's a principle I'd love to see not just in software, but all creative endeavours.
Yes, no individual hobbyist is likely to be able to spit up a project with the scale and scope of Windows XP, but a thousand hobbyists, each working their own fixation and interests, can potentially take an existing product and add real value to it-- or, eventually ship-of-Thesus the whole thing into something fresh.
Maybe you've got someone fixated on the device driver so he can keep using his one specific printer, or a student who wants to do his Ph. D. thesis on scheduler technology Another person just wants to replace every use of the world "whitelist" in the code.. Some of this stuff will be self-indulgent "art projects" but others are motivated by real productive aims.
You can't stop them, but now you also get the opportunity to cherrypick it. A new value centre emerges in curation-- like the role a Linux distributor plays. People will support a strongly opinionated project like Debian or Clear Linux because they trust the choices they make in curating and packaging other people's work, even if you could manually assemble the same elements from scratch yourself. The curators can then bring on professional developers to ensure that their interests are represented in future development.
The model you are suggesting works to some extent but it just isn’t as effective or efficient as the Microsoft model. Compare the usability and the prevalence of the Linux desktop (mostly advanced by red hat) to the Windows desktop.
In any case people are already free to build projects collaboratively and the GPL provides a workable legal platform for that model. Microsoft has opted out of that model and it’s their right to do so, it’s no one else’s right to force them into it. If people want to build a retro modded Windows XP compatible experience, the law fully allows them to reverse engineer and reimplement it. They are better off basing their work on something like ReactOS, which has already done lots of that work, instead of Microsoft’s IP.
What if I have a legally bought copy of WinXP and therefore have a"working" product key?
What if I installed a copy of WinXP from my CD with my bought key and it doesn't activate because WGA servers are long offline?
Same, but I use any WGA activation hacks?
Same, but instead of MS copy I used "Delta Edition" distrib?
And by the way, "working" in quotes because even if you have the key - the product key itself doesn't mean nothing except the way to allow installation process to succeed. It even doesn't guarantee what it would accuse you of pirating the said software (see WGA).
> This looks like a lot of effort for pirated software, unless I'm missing something.
This is false. Whatever law may protect Microsoft from people being awesome & investing enormous effort improving their products for them- and I'm sure there are plenty such laws- this claim of piracy seems false.
I do not see any product keys on the download page. These folks have no interest in helping piracy.
Eh it’s clearly a violation not to mention the trademark violations everywhere. it wouldn’t take much to go through the image to find unlicensed msft programs and likeness. Sometimes hn confuses how things ought to be reasoning from first principals with how they actually are.
It's awesome to me that no one can clearly state what this is a violation of, but we all tend to agree, yes, a rag-tag group of product-loving enthusiasts absolutely have no right to go poke around & make things awesome & cool & to improve the product. That's absolutely not ok. We agree. But we also don't even know why or how we got here & why that is.
There’s a difference between “what ought to be” and “what is.”
I get that you think this project is cool and the authors are doing admirable work. I don’t necessarily disagree there but the reality is this is not legally defensible. It is a violation of copyright to redistribute software without the copyright owner’s permission. That is the definition of software piracy. Whether or not Microsoft pursues legal action is a separate matter.
Someone left a review on archive.org with a product key. Can't hold the XPDelta people accountable for that. I could post it here too, and accuse YCombinator of encourage piracy.
Other than that, Microsoft has always been fairly relaxed about copying CDs/ISOs (not sure what the license says about it). It's the product key that matters.
You understand what user comments are, right? I mean, you're making one of your own right now.
So you'd understand how HN, for instance, has little responsibility with what you post in your comment. I can't claim that "Hackernews posted [your comment]".
That extends to Archive.org and the owners of this project.
I replied to a comment saying "Besides there's a product key on the download page."
That's not true: there is no product key listed on the download page. It sounds like there is a link somewhere on the page that goes to another site that hosts the product key.
Fun fact: The 'smartphone' version of MS Activation still works with XP keys. I put XP on an old ThinkPad a few months back to play some early-2000's games and was able to activate it this way.
I still feel that seeing a XP Desktop screenshot invites to much more experiences (possibly online) than a Win10/Win11 screenshot. It may be with the fact that I associate it to different internet eras as well. With XP I used to browse websits, fansites, blogs, forums, chats, MSN messenger/Yahoo Messenger/etc, whil now everything seems to be the boring social networks where almost everything is generated/shared.
Internet used to be much fun back then, and it may be the reason why most of the people have good memories about XP. I think the main reason (and I wanted to write an "essay" about this for a while) it's that we were offline by default in our lives, and we used to "go online" for a few hours durnig the day. Then you had your experience in the real world and went online to talk about them. Now it is the other way around - we live online by default, sharing photos and videos from a concert almost in real time, photos from a museum, etc. I think it took away its novelty.