What's more, Legacy Update identified the correct driver, fetched it, installed it, and after a reboot, suddenly XP had working audio. It was the single driver we'd not been able to locate by hand. 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.įor 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. 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. 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. Once installed, you can use the project's own website. Legacy Update consists of a program that you must download and install. 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. 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. (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.Įven 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. 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. 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. Sony long ago removed its driver downloads page for this nearly 15-year-old machine. 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.īut 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today is finding drivers, and this goes double if you're trying to run it on hardware that came out years after XP was superseded. It should be: it launched with Windows Vista in early 2009 – about nine months before Windows 7 finished gestating. 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. TinyXP is a lot quicker than Thin PC, which is barely cut down at all from standard Windows 7. The result was both impressive and disappointing. 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. TinyXP is a third-party distribution of Windows, which omits a lot of bloat from what was already not Microsoft's leanest version. As an experiment, we nuked the sluggish Windows 7-based OS, and replaced it with TinyXP. 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. One of them is a Sony Vaio P, a sub-netbook with a unique form factor, which is why we keep it around. Regular readers might recognize some of the machines in the FOSS Desk Testing Fleet by now. 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. 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. The results were… not what we expected.ĭid 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. 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.Ī 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.
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