Unofficial Windows XP SP4 | Hacker News Reader

Unofficial Windows XP SP4

ryanvm.net

169 pointsbcaa7f3a8bbc107 comments

Oh man, this brings me back. I used to love making those streamlined XP installs where I stripped out as much as posisble. Was insane how fast you could get XP.

Don't even get me started on when Longhorn leaked. OS ended up sucking but the Longhorn leak was amazing.

I always enjoyed slipstreaming the drivers onto an XP disk, and then going through the install process at 1280x1024 with full graphics/sound/network support.

I never heard about a Longhorn leak, what was amazing about it?

If I recall, those first Longhorn builds found a great middle ground between the foundations of XP and the few good parts of what would became Vista, including some nice ui concepts.

Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end.

Longhorn concept was awesome. I remember how crazy and advanced this Longhorn promo was https://youtu.be/b9ifQvQCO7Y

>Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end.

Maybe with the first versions, but after a few service packs it was really usable. Hell, Windows 7 was referred to as "Windows Vista SP3" :)

But I do agree that Vista wasn't as Longhorn. I think they realized it was too demanding and too advanced so they decided to milk the concept ideas for later versions.

In the video, is the last application that opens when Longhorn starts up a package manager ? I've never really understood why both Microsoft and, especially, Apple have never tried to adopt a model similar to the one used by Linux distributions, positioning themselves as the intermediary between the end users and application developers. I suppose this is because they were focused on enterprise customers, and there was already a model in place for shipping software to such customers. However, for home users, installing applications have always been a tedious process that is full of risk.

> Apple [has] never tried to adopt a model [...] positioning themselves as the intermediary between the end users and application developers.

I know it's in a way tangental to what your point was, but if you read this sentence again you'll realise that it is exactly what they have tried (rather successfully) to adopt.

> Apple have never tried to adopt a model similar to the one used by Linux distributions, positioning themselves as the intermediary between the end users and application developers.

Wait, isn't the prime example of an OS or device manufacturer doing that not “Linux distros”, but instead the app store model that Apple embraced we exclusive consumer mechanism for add-on software with iOS, and have since extended in less-rigid form (because of legacy expectations) to MacOS?

> I think they realized it was too demanding and too advanced so they decided to milk the concept ideas for later versions.

there were major resource leaks in the file system and the shell that they just weren't able to fix. meanwhile the company kept piling in new features without having a roadmap for actually shipping the project.

Originally it was XP base indeed but after the development hell they stuck in, they've pick Server 2003 and baked out what later become Vista.

Oh boy, that brings back memories! With nLite you could slipstream Windows XP to run under 100MB. That was fun!

It might just be nostalgia but I really liked the GUI for Windows XP. The Start Menu was a clean and intuitive interface to find things you've installed. Windows 10 seems to be a huge step backwards in terms of usability. I tend to use xfce or lxqt on all my Linux systems. These days, all the action is happening in the web browser and I want my operating system is just work.

I liked WinXP -- possibly the last Windows I liked -- but if I remember correctly, the first thing power users did was de-XP-ify the GUI and switch it back to the classic, cleaner look :)

I used to do this up into Win7 days, avoiding the "Aero" theme. A shame they took that option out of 8 and later.

Classicshell.net is quite good for that

It doesn't make the window borders feel like the 90s, or get rid of dwm.exe.

Part of it was just resources. XP ran a lot faster and better without the theming. Another part of it was due to buggy graphic drivers. But once you started getting XP on much faster computers you tend to leave it on or turn it off out of habit.

True about the resources. But back in the day we also turned it off because of the "theme park" feel it had. It felt like the classic desktop with clown makeup.

Missed your reply.

I always liked the 'fisher-price' look.

Vista/7/10 do look much more professional, still miss the xp look.

I don’t mind Windows 10. Like every other new OS Microsoft has put out, they try to cover up all the basic tools with fancy GUI additions and apps.... that I promptly disable and go back to using plain old file explorer and notepad like I have been for decades now.

> using plain old file explorer

If you really like the plain (really) old stuff, winfile.exe is open-source and can be built for modern day Windows[1].

It has received quite a few patches and improvements, but it's still basically the same old tool.

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

My first install has been Classic Shell (now Open Shell) on every system since Windows 8 rolled out, thanks to their hard work Win 8/10 upgrades changed nothing about how I work. Only change I’ve made was when Win 10 multiple desktops came out I swapped from sysinternals desktops, using AutoHotKey to map them. I setup XFCE the same way so it feels pretty consistent.

Yes, one shouldn't use Windows XP. But it's still handy to keep a working XP virtual machine with some basic tools to run ancient programs that one encounters from time to time get the job done...

windows xp running on modern hardware is lightning fast.

I'd love to have Windows XP with security patches and modern drivers.

The inevitable cost is zero security. Most desktop OS are not designed with security in mind and are vulnerable in different ways, but it's safe to say that Windows XP's security is effectively zero at this point.

Personally, I only use Linux and BSDs on my machines, haven't use Windows for years. But I keep a Windows XP VM, I only need to use it for not more than once or twice a month, sometimes it's ancient hardware supporting program, sometimes it's ancient government program. There's no confidential information in the VM.

> The inevitable cost is zero security When using VMs you could have a separate VM for each application. This will not improve security per se, but at least will isolate the effects of a vulnerability. This of course assumes that sufficient RAM/disk space is available

With overlayed storage images and KSM, one can run a lot of VMs using a modest amount of memory. Basically you pay the memory cost of the guest OS once, and there's some (much lower) additional overhead per each VM.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Overlay_storage_im...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Enabling_KSM

Thanks, this sounds very interesting. On the other hand, are there any security implications? (especially if one assumes that hypervisor is _not_ bug-free) edit: I did some initial research and yes, it may have some security implications. However I believe it is not a major concern since the original idea was to use VMs to isolate instances of Windows XP which right now should be considered unsafe anyways

KSM is also not totally free, a good amount of CPU time has to be spent to search for merging opportunities (this amount scales logarithmically with the amount of pages to scan).

There is also a simple security implication, since you now have the possibility to over-allocate your physical memory, and suffer great consequences if many pages are unshared at the same time. Merged pages can be swapped out, but since they need to be scanned again when they are swapped in, BEFORE being merged, there is a great potential for memory pressure spikes in some configurations.

Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware.

[] if we don't count accesses to the disk, of course

I didn't realize how broken Windows 10 is, until I tried it on someone else's computer... At this point, it's unsuitable for any computer without a SSD: M$ has made a huge amount of background system update & housekeeping activities as integral parts of the system and they will continuously SEEK your disk to death, it doesn't need to be 20 MB/s, just 2 MB/s random seeking will render it useless for doing any actual work at any time. It's laughable that high-end commercial laptops are still being sold with those 5,400 RPM, 1 TB HDDs, totally unusable.

You'll never see this kind of bullshit disk access on *nix (as long as you turned off your desktop search index service), or, for this matter, Windows XP...

When I didn't have an SSD, I spent a lot of time configuring the system so it wouldn't do as much IO in the background. Lots of services, as you say, do that by default, and it's unbearable. You'd be using the computer normally and all of a sudden it would start crawling for no apparent reason.

I try to do the same on a work desktop but it doesn't matter because xagt.exe

Who knows what it is reading and writing that can't wait while I do npm install

Well, it doesn't match my experience. I have 8 gb of ram and spinning rust disks and performance is bearable. For gaming even.

Gaming is generally not affected that much by SSD vs HDD performance, except for loading times.

General work tasks on the other hand is affected much more, especially when multi-tasking / often launching and switching between applications.

maybe it was defragging?

I guess it's the same with Mac OS. Some years back, migrating Mail data would always fail on my Mac Mini, but would succeed quite happily on my MacBook Air. I always suspected the HDDs. Moved to SSDs and everything was better.

Yeah, since the APFS transition in particular, macOS is unbearable on an HDD. And Apple still sells the base iMac with a 5400rpm drive. Ought to be criminal.

Well, HP at least used to sell their laptops with a powersupply that could not power the laptop enough to run at the speed it said in the specs. For getting full speed you had to buy a bigger powersupply from them. Saw this on a computer that someone donated to the sportsclub because they bought a new computer to replace the old slow thing. Turns out all that was needed was a bigger powersupply.

A lot of modern software is unfortunately following this trend. As companies outfit developers with higher end systems including NVME SSDs, performance issues from inefficient I/O patterns are hidden during development.

In the same vein, web developers testing their stuff on ultrafast 4G.

This! In my hobby projects I start the development usually with Raspberry Pi as backend, even for db, as it forces to use resources efficiently and reveals problems fast. Only building/compiling is good to be done on fast machine.

I like this idea, it makes sense to integrate a particularly low spec machine into the development process and I wish more developers would do it.

You can use the cpu cgroup controller to starve your program of CPU time. Use the cpu.cfs_quota_us and cpu.cfs_period_us knobs.

Now if only there was a way to use the blkio controller to emulate the performance characteristics of spinning rust (reasonable sequential IO performance but with a big penalty for random access...)

Remember that you aren't their focus group. Their focus group are people with little to no knowledge of computers, and these services actually help.

That being said, how often is system update happening for you that its really a problem? It's a point that I see being repeated over and over, but I don't think I've had any interruption at all from system updates, beyond windows doing the occasional update before power down.

And also about the housekeeping activities -- Why would it continuously seek? Beyond fragmenting, indexing or defender scanning your files that shouldn't be happening, and I don't think I've ever had that be a problem...

"People with little or no knowledge of computers" would actually benefit the most from a LTS-like version of the OS, with security updates _only_, and flexible feature upgrades every two years or so. That you can't get with Windows 10 (as an individual user), but can totally get with e.g. Debian Stable, and without paying a dime. Isn't that a bit ironic?

In my experience people annoyed by updates are mac users who are starting Windows VM once in a few months which will obviously download tons of updates and will ask to restart almost immediately. And, yes, as Windows did not have enough time to do its housekeeping, it'll do it, slowing down the whole experience.

I'm using only Windows in the last few years and it was never a problem for me. Windows asked me to reboot exactly once. Other times I just had "power off and install updates" menu item instead of "power off". That said, I'm powering off my PC every day, may be it matters.

I haven't been using Windows a lot in the last years (as you said, updates annoy me a few times a year, but I still take the time to do them), however, a lot of Windows users have told me and others in our hackerspace that the first thing they do is to disable Windows Update when they install Microsoft Windows, so I suppose that they are really annoyed by updates.

I think most of them cling to the idea of a computer that doesn't need any kind of maintenance (except on the hardware side), which is something I can totally understand, but is not currently doable, at least if you want to keep connected to the rest of the world.

(Of course, we do tell them that if they want their computer to be connected to the outside world in any way, updates should not be disabled, and that maintenance is necessary).

Which is exactly what I was trying to convey in my original comment. I feel like the base that has a problem with the updates are a small vocal minority, which seem to be present any time Windows is mentioned on any HN thread. I have met plenty of people who develop/work on windows every day and don't have that problem.

There is another, silent, group : the ones that don't have any problem with the updates, because they disabled them, or because the local computer expert who installed their computer disabled them. They are also not vocal at all, since they "don't have any problem". (And this is also not only a problem on Windows).

It's especially fun when you are just about to run out the door, trying to pack down your work laptop and all the options you get is "Update and shutdown". Perfect if the computer will be spending the next four hours in a closed backpack and the car/bus/train/boat/plane is leaving NOW. If the laptop is older than two years you can't trust the battery to keep long enough for the update to finish and besides, how hot will it get in the backpack?

A clean install of Windows 10 is close to literally unusable on my 11-inch Dell AMD A9-9420e laptop, with 16GB (lol) RAM and SATA SSD.

Basically, the "Windows Antimalware Executable" and various other Windows processes keep one of the two CPU cores more or less constantly pegged. Everything takes ages. The only way to really use this damn thing is to disable Windows' realtime virus protection, which, well.... ouch. And it's still barely tolerable just for playing music files and the most basic of web browsing.

Granted, that's a cheap and hugely underpowered laptop.

But this was disappointing to me because I had a 1.3GHZ Core Solo based machine with 4GB and a primitive SSD running Windows 7 circa 2009/2010 and it was plenty usable.

That's not normal behavior, per my experience.

Are you sure Dell didn't ship it with something that, f.ex. is constantly making privileged calls and thereby causing AV to be invoked?

Wouldn't be the first time.

Pretty sure. I physically removed the HDD that shipped with the laptop, put an SSD in, and did a fresh Windows 10 install. 16GB RAM, too.

(Yes, part of my reason for buying this refurb'd Dell is because I thought it would be hilarious to put 16GB of RAM and a huge SSD into a crap netbook hahaha)

I haven't dug too deeply into it, but in dozens of hours of use and casual observation... it seems to me that if Windows Defender's realtime protection is enabled, then any disk access causes Windows Defender AV to be invoked which in turn leads to high CPU usage.

Dropbox was an absolute killer while it did its initial several GB of file syncing over the LAN. Dropbox pegged one CPU core, while Windows' antimalware pegged another. Same with iTunes while I was downloading my music collection from iTunes in the Cloud.

Now, both of those examples involved network traffic as well as disk I/O. So, I'm not exactly sure what Windows' antimalware was fretting about.

(Also keep in mind that the CPU we're talking about here, is a very low power dual-core AMD A9 chip. I don't see this problem on my desktop machine. On that, the antimalware CPU usage is low enough that I just don't care)

Yeah, a lot of stuff should be more rigorously tested on single and dual-core environments.

Especially when it relates to OS-handling (specifically: Windows), I feel like we've papered over a huge number of poorly sequenced, blocking calls with "more cores!"

I guess that explains why Win10 runs like a dog on my partner's computer which, whilst not brilliantly-specced, isn't absolutely awful either, but is disc-based.

> Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware.

That very much depends on when in XP's time line you're commenting from.

When XP was first released it had literally double the hardware requirements as Windows 2000 and XP didn't really add much functionality despite that bump in requirements (to me, it felt mostly due to themes). Granted XP was quicker booting if you had a large font folder but it wasn't until SP2 when XP really became an obvious upgrade to 2000. By which point XP was 3 yeas old and even budget hardware was now higher than recommended specifications of XP.

Windows 10 is now 4 years old, so comparing XP on 2004 hardware to Windows 10 on current hardware does feel fair.

IIRC correctly, XP brought the 1-way firewall, native USB support and media codecs. Hence the doubling of requirements. The firewall may have come in SP2. Prior to SP2, XP was pretty buggy/useless.

Geeze, how time flies...

Multimedia codecs and USB were in Windows 2000. USB 2 support was in XP SP1 and the Firewall was in XP SP2.

To be specific, XP has had ingress firewall and SP2 adds the egress counterpart.

If it even runs instead of BSODing?

Linux with a lightweight WM (LXDE or Xfce) is even snappier, in my experience. It does need quite a bit more RAM (0.5 GB for a bare XP-like experience) but that's about it.

FLWM has even lower mem usage (the usability suffers though)

Ironically, XP had issues with running legacy software back in the day, as it was the first NT-based OS targeted on desktop computers.

> [NT] was the first NT-based OS targeted on desktop computers

In the mainstream home computing sense, yes. But it wasn't the first NT-based OS to target desktop computers. Windows 2000 had a few desktop releases and was even available pre-installed in some high street computer stores. Also NT4 did have a "Workstation" release specifically for desktop computers albeit that was aimed at businesses.

Prior to NT4 I don't think there were separate desktop/server releases of NT but it did have enough software to run as a desktop if one wished. Though I think those people might have preferred OS/2 or Windows 3.1 instead (or a non-IBM PC; because there were plenty of options back then)

Every version of Windows NT (and later derivations) has had separate server and desktop-targeted releases going back to "Windows NT 3.1" and "Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server".

Ahh. I wasn't sure about NT 3.1 as it's the only version of NT I've not had to manage. In fact quite possibly the only version of Windows I've never used even once.

One could change an NT4 workstation install into a server install with one or two registry changes and a reboot.

There may have been a few binaries on the AS install media that were harder to come by, but in general the editions were licensing segments and not really different products.

it was the first NT based OS targeted at home users. At least on the places where I've worked, NT, since 4.0, was basically the default Windows OS for enterprises.

A lot of small businesses used DOS/9x though, and boy did that generate work.

For me that was NT service pack 3 which brought DirectX to NT. That way I was able to play Diablo on my workstation!

I totally rely on my WinXP vm to run Office legacy stuff, an old scanner for which I only have XP drivers, and to keep alive accounts used by my daughter when she was little. Perhaps I should update it to SP4...

Edit: It was a p2v vm of a desktop I started running in 2005. By 2009/10 it had started to crawl: 5m+ for boot and shutdown compared to seconds as a vm on Linux!

I've recently started using VueScan for old scanners - it started when we got donated an old 35mm film scanner but it seems to cope with most hardware thrown at it.

Not free, seems very good though. Cross-platform support too: https://www.hamrick.com/

Thanks, I'll certainly try it out.

Edit: Yup, it covers my Visioneer 7300. Thank you indeed.

SANE claimed in 2005 to support the Visioneer 7300, for whatever that's worth. Though VueScan seems very cool, especially supporting IR dist removal, which is not present in SANE (which tends against any processing whatsoever).

I do have sane on my system. However, I found the interface very rudimentary.

Yeah, and the first-party SANE command line frontend (scanimage) is the only one that works reliably for me. I was just thinking of looking in to why none of the third-party frontends are reliable, I think I'll at least post an issue about that on the GitLab. XSane may work better than the GNOME and KDE SANE frontends.

It's great stuff and supports a seemingly endless number of scanners old and new.

What an interesting niche business. Amazing that they have reverse engineered so many different devices (6,000+), though I would bet there are only a few dozen basic categories that you can fit them all in. The founder of Hamrick would make for a very cool AMA type post here.

True, I also occasionally run XP inside a VM.

The only issue is that the version of IE bundled with Windows XP cannot be upgraded to a newer engine, so for software such as Office that defer to the IE browser engine shipped with the OS to access the web, it is unable to access HTTPS-only websites like GitHub that use modern ciphers.

GitHub also doesn’t downgrade the SSL connection to use old ciphers that are still supported by a few large websites.

Firefox shows a startup warning it no longer supports XP and Chrome wasn’t usable IIRC. I wonder if there’s a way to upgrade embedded IE on Windows XP?

I have a full XP machine because some games simply will not work under a VM with newer hardware. Example, the original Metal Gear Solid on the PC uses 8-bit acceleration. Pretty much every GPU dropped that support in the mid-00s.

I have very good memories from Windows XP. I moved from Windows ME (which was absolutely terrible) directly to XP and it was so much better. I even liked the overall appearance. But then I guess nostalgia and being less critical myself back then plays a role...

Ehh not really XP was a great Windows OS for the time it came out.

For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4.

For the home users it was a move away from the old 9x kernel line and into the NT kernel line, which was infinitely better.

XP's problem was that with Longhorn's delays and then Vista sucking so much, it took until mid-2009 for a suitable replacement to appear, and by then XP was really outdated. But at the time it came out ? It was great.

For a long time I ran Windows XP x64, which was basically Windows Server 2003 x64 without the server components, that worked great (and server grade patches, becoz they just send the server updates). It was free as well, as they we're testing the ground for x64 OS'es.

Quite a lot of people did also run 2000 at home as well. It was actually a damn good OS given it's era: Linux wasn't ready to be used as a primary OS for most people, 9x/Me was total garbage and OS9 was somehow worse. Apple hadn't yet released OSX (that came a year later IIRC) and there were some inevitable compatibility and onboarding issues when that was released. The only real contender was BeOS (which did support x86 by that point) but sadly that didn't have the momentum to challenge Microsoft.

> For the entreprise users it was mostly the same as Windows 2000, a great OS released just a few months before that was much better than NT 4.

Windows 2000 definitely wasn't "mostly the same" as NT 4. They were as different as Vista was to XP. 2000 and XP (pre-SP2) were very similar though.

I miss NT 3.51 - it was rock solid (it didn't have a compromised driver model) and smooth even on 486 hardware.

Windows 2000’s stability was something else coming from 98SE and Mac OS 9. My family’s shared/house PC back then was a Dell Dimension 4100, which was actually pretty great in terms of hardware but was chained down by 98SE. The increase in usability that thing had as a result of being upgraded to 2000 was staggering. It went from “ok” performing and bluescreening every so often to a rock solid powerhouse in a single step.

If only all OS upgrades went that way…

I think XP SP2 was the high point of Microsoft OSes. But don't forget that the initial releases of XP were chock-full of massive security holes

Ah, POSReady! The special version of Windows XP for point-of-sale systems and ATMs. They have a service life target of something like 15 years, since the companies using them don't want to go through huge replacement cycles if they can possibly help it.

Windows POS Ready 2009 is the Windows-7 based product that we still use here. Supported until 2023 by contractual obligations. No wonder they are offering ESUs to businesses and maybe even consumers - gotta write the updates anyways, might as well push em out to a few other skus?

I wonder if ReactOS is by now more lean and mean then XP_SP4, would be nice to run Office2010 in Parallels as I don't really grok the MacOS Office365

You could also run it in Wine.

There's offline Office 2011 for Mac. It seems to be available on Ebay. And apparently the 2016 version also has an offline edition.

IIRC volume licensees have access to fully offline 2016 and 2019 Office versions.

Is this reputable / trustworthy?

Only if it's open-source, which I doubt.

No clue, but if it can be reconstructed from officials URL, I assume it's the best you can expect.

Or just compute checksum of its contents and try to find the sources of binaries ?

I stayed on Windows XP-64 for a very long time. It shared code with the Server 2003 if I remember right. Drivers were solid... if you had them. God help you if you did not. (most of the quality parts did, however) I miss the days of nlite tuning an ISO.

As an OS, it did what I'd hope an OS would do - just stay out of the way and let me run my apps.

Is this pack refreshing SSL/TLS Root certs ?

How can I make a VirtualBox VM out of this?

Date should be updated to (2019), the latest fixes are from POSReady updates from May this year.

How hard is it to write your own OS ? Based on experience of Gates and Torvals, I think someone will eventually write an owesome Operating System that will be beautiful abd flashy yet yseful and wont steal user data to make extra money.

You'll need to have strong backward compatibility with a popular system for it to have chance to become popular.

MS-DOS was compatible with CP/M when it came out and MS kept working on backward compatibility since then.

Linux was unix-like and filled a hole for a FOSS unix-like OS at the right time. The GNU utilities were among the first things that were made to work on it and it was kinda source-compatible with other unixes.

If your new system requires that everything under the sun gets ported to it before people can use their favorite tools, it will fail.

BTW, Gates didn't write his own OS, he bought it and got people in his company to work on it.

It’s so ironic how Gates, who looked and acted as a stereotypical übergeek, found ultimate success by... being a shrewd businessman and doing as little own work as possible. And still, most non-IT people think he was some sort of hacker genius.

Writing an OS isn't that hard. After all, Lion's Commentary on Unix is only 250 pages.

But if you actually want the OS to be useful and have modern features, then you're looking at hundreds or thousands of person years rather than a couple months. Plus all the time you'd need after convincing the world to port their software to your new OS.

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