hi, i wanted to write a little bit about this funny machine..
this is a windows xp era machine that was rescued from an ewaste center. i have a bud who works out at a local ewaste place and he will usually pop up and let our group of folks know if theres something of interest to us, usually CRTs. i mentioned in our group that i've had a sort of very specific nostalgia craving of having an "of era" pc from the early to mid 00's, kinda of the XP era.
like a champion, our ewaste friend would send me some pictures of canidates to me. originally, i wanted something a little more compact around maybe a mini-atx/micro/itx build, but those were kinda rare at the time. eventually, this fuckin beast showed up and i was so taken back by how stupid and amazing it looked, i had to have it.
our ewaste friend managed to confirm it actually worked, and slapped an ssd in it (more on that later) and a new-ish HDD.
as far as specs, it's got 4gb of DDR3 (i think at around 500mhz?, a pentuim 4 core 2 duo, and it had an amd x300 gpu. i'm actually going to be upgrading this gpu to the loveable, venorable Nvidia 8800GT.
what really sort of sent me off on this journey was I picked up this very special NEC Multisync 1 monitor off someone in our CRT group and fell in love with it. it's multisync so it supports 240p up to around 800x600. It's not even native VGA! It uses DB9 normally, but I was given an DB9>VGA adapter for it, so it will work on most vga-compat devices. anyway, i was using my MiSTER on this for a while but I started thinking about getting an actual PC on this, and soon enough started going down that path haha.
running oblivion at highest settings around 800x600 and hitting 60fps on this was my benchmark and once I get all the stuff for my 8800GT this thing is gonna fly.
the XP install itself is a special build put together to allow the installer to be booted off a usb stick, with SATA drivers built in (can you believe XP didnt come with sata drivers?? i totally forgot IDE was still the main thing even in later releases of XP)
anyway, installation was pretty smooth! i messed up the install and had to restart it to fix it but it went pretty well.
SO...about the ssd.....windows XP does not support SSD's natively, as there's no support for TRIM. TRIM, to my understanding, helps clear out garbage off SSDs to continue to make them perform as you would expect. some later SSDs I think have this built into them, but a lot dont and rely on the OS to handle this. Obviously, XP does not have this. Also, if you accidently defrag your SSD it basically kills it from my understanding.
i went ahead and installed XP on this SSD anyway. I don't plan on really hitting it too hard and obviously wont be defragging it (and actually just disabled it all together to prevent this from happening)
ideally, the safer option would be to get some of those crazy 10k speed raptor drives and run them in RAID0, but this was a little simpler so I dont need to install RAID drivers.
once I got it installed I downloaded some drivers which (thankfully) a lot of these still exist on the device manu's websites still! this surprised me a lot. I guess 10mb driver files probably dont take up much space on their storage servers to care about deleting them. managed to get everything up to date!
as far as software is concerned, this required some help. I came across skipster1337's guide on "Using Windows XP in modern times" (this is where I also got the custom XP installer!) they have a link on their page with links to a bunch of "last known" xp compat software. https://skipster1337.github.io/posts/xp-info.html
theres even version of things like spotify that, sort of work still.
speaking of spotify, let's talk about GOING ONLINE WITH WINDOWS XP.
i don't really, recommend doing this. but im doing it anyway because I live dangerously, I guess. so, most web browsers aren't gonna work on XP. and IE of course, will not work on the modern web. so, there are some custom builds of chrome and firefox that....kind of work.
one of the chrome builds is called 360 Extreme Explorer. This is a chinese browser based on chrome that was designed to run on Windows XP.
Obviously, it's uh...a little sketchy. There's some repacks of this browser that remove a lot of the tracking stuff thats built into these but, you're still kinda taking a risk.
There's also MyPal, which I would recommend over 360 Extreme. It's an open source Firefox-based browsed that's based on another projected called Pale Moon. This has a little less compatibility with the greater web and a little slower than 360 extreme, but it still functions. I wasn't able to get Cohost to load on MyPal, but got it working on 360 Extreme.
anyway, I installed winamp and got a bunch of era skins and loaded up some linkin park and Oblivion and RCT2 and I'm quite happy! this was a lot of fun to setup, and highly recommend if you're wanting to dip your toes back into xp, it's a lot of fun if you can get a machine from the era.