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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

This definitely gets a nerd award, I like doing that myself when working on win32 code (i.e. if possible and not to cumbersome, try to use functions that have been around in old windows versions). But it begs the obvious question if there's a legitimate use case for this, other than having a modern browser when spinning up your retro machine for that nostalgia once a year. And even then, unless you're visiting vogons, any modern website probably chokes your machine to death if it's a period-correct XP/7.

Old POS terminals for example? But I think they would just display an ancient website in an ancient browser anyways, and again if the hardware is as old as the rest of the system, this will probably just add slowness with no actual benefit.

Oh and yeah, nice job with the name, I misread it the first time. :-D

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A period correct Windows 7 era machine is something like a Core 2 Quad with 4-8 gigs of RAM, I'd hope that even the worst modern web abomination runs on that.

The vast majority of systems back then had Core 2 Duos, modern web apps (or overcomplicated sites) can easily choke those.

I was using a Core2 Duo with 4GB as my main home computer until about a year ago, and while some sites made it run slowly (mostly recipe sites and others with a lot of video ads) it was certainly still usable. The trick was to keep the browser down below 10 or so tabs and close it when I needed to use some other heavy piece of software.

Interesting, maybe it actually is Firefox being slower than chromium, but incidentally a few days ago I was trying to make an old core 2 duo laptop a browser-only machine for a friend's kid, and with debian 12 and Firefox, the start page of YouTube with no video playing had both cores hover at around 70%. The page worked but was notably slow. Videos played smoothly. So I guess if you don't mind the fans spinning constantly it's usable, but eh...

You probably didn’t have Hardware Video Decoding enabled in the browser, that’s still not the default on Linux.

But as said, that was on the landing page with no video playing. What is it even doing there that can load up the CPU like that? I was rather surprised then that playback was actually smooth at least at 480p. Otoh I doubt core2duo had any sort of hardware acceleration for video decoding, but don't quote me on that...

> I doubt core2duo had any sort of hardware acceleration for video decoding

That would be the job of the GPU anyway, but H.264 decoding was pretty much standard back then. That's why plugins like h264ify[0] exist for old hardware.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdc...

> That's why plugins like h264ify[0] exist for old hardware.

Which the intel GMA GPU's did not support in core2duo era. Those features were added by their gen5 (ironlake) GPU, the first intel HD gpu.

X4500HD introduced H.264 decoding on the last Core 2 generation

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620155937/http://intellinux...

edit: turns out this was never merged and attempts to get the old code running on a modern stack were not successful

https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/issues/544

Hah nice digging, that issue was an interesting read. I will definitely check the IGD version of that laptop.

Make sure to use an ad blocker and turn off that weird Ambient mode graphical effect that just kills framerate. Videos should play fine after that on a Core 2 Duo if you have hardware accelerated decoding enabled.

Google regularly tries to break Firefox, Chromium probably works a lot better, if you can convince it to use GPU acceleration on Linux.

> if you can convince it to use GPU acceleration on Linux.

which isnt all that difficult, btw :)

good to point out that it's not enabled by default.

Yes, it's not difficult, but if you compare default settings it'll skew the results.

I just donated a couple of ~20 year old Vista machines.

One was an Athlon; the other was a Core Duo. They both had 1GB RAM.

Donated to who??? Isnt that like donating your old socks?

You make that sound like it’s a bad thing

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/12/28/...

https://www.computercorps.org/

but I don't think they take old socks.

Our first computer was an MS-Dos machine that our local high school were getting rid of back in 1994. I learned a lot from playing around on the machine, trying to understand the command line.

This is a different time though, computing resources are ubiquitous and cheap. I'm not sure what anyone can do with a 20 year old machine

I have machines like that and it runs OK if you have a SSD, and more than 8GB of ram definitely helps.

Hopefully you can read hackernews without an SSD and many GBs

To be fair, you can also read Hacker News in links, so if that's your only goal, Chromium is overkill.

You can. Old reddit as well. I do that regularly on a 1st gen Atom netbook with 1GB of RAM and no SSD.

Windows XP64 (amd64) supports multiple cores and up to 128GB physical memory (maybe 8 years till that is standard on laptops?) Is the problem the website or the browser? Do modern web sites need all that spyware crap added e.g modern media sites, YouTube? Or is it the frame works that slow it down.

I guess to use winXP 64 you need to be a driver coder as well to create drivers for latest internal gfx hardware built into intel cpus.

Good on them for getting it to compile and work. I miss WinXP and Win7 with classic UI theme.

I have a use case. I keep a Windows 7 laptop solely for dealing with old microcontroller boards (flashing, reconfiguring, sometimes coding whole chunks). A browser like this is going to come in really handy.

Do yourself a favor and wrap that thing in a VM

Why? I have a Windows XP laptop online only for that exact same use case and I don't do any banking on it, nor am I signed in any accounts whatsoever, so what's the risk?

If some malware were to compromise it somehow, there's absolutely no credentials or valuable info on there to steal or encrypt for ransom, and the machine is on it's own VLAN, so if it were to hypothetically get infected with something, the malware has nowhere else to pivot in my network just in case someone made some ultra-specific malware that can target both Windows XP machines and Amazon Alexa devices together as if I'm running Iranian nuclear centrifuges or something and have state actors targeting me.

Plus, is there any Windows XP malware still circulating in the wild online mainstream? Feels like worrying about catching smallpox today.

So that once it breaks you can just restore the disk image from when it worked.

I wouldn't compare it to actual diseases. As an European, the anti-vaxxer movement provokes profound disillusionment in me, and that last sentence... Apologies, I had to say this.

(You are correct in that using a XP machine is likely less risky today if you're only doing so in a LAN and with minimal access to the Internet)

>Apologies, I had to say this.

Why? It was just a silly example, not a anti-vax promotion.

You likely don’t do a lot of hardware development. VMs cannot talk TTL and even low-level USB properly without a significant amount of hassle. Typically unplugging peripherals (or rebooting an MCU) will disconnect the device from the host, and then you usually have to reconnect them to the VM and lose logging output.

I have been proudly using the same instance of Windows 7 as my "daily driver" for 11 years.

I guess as long as daily driving (regarding online activities) isn't much more than browsing reddit and Facebook that might work, but wouldn't using Online-Banking/PayPal/Amazon on a system that hasn't been patched in years make you nervous? I mean the browser is a good sandbox but still...

Reddit, Facebook, Paypal, Amazon are all the only sites this computer connects to.

The attack vector of malicious ads on these sites are the largest attack vector - which is nearly abysmally small since Chrome is a better sandbox than windows is.

Aside from 0-days, which are basically/practically out of scope, the only thing to worry of is automated scans and 3 letter agencies.

I am behind a NAT, and the 3 letter agencies are inescapable - but a defense of "my computer is old and insecure" may retro-actively be the only plausible deniability that the "layman" such as myself can muster.

Hypothetically. Similar to having an open wifi network for the sole purpose of muddying the waters and adding noise to a signal.

The browser sandbox is reliant on functional OS features to work. I would not recommend using something that old.

The opposite I would say. Facebook and Reddit are the worst hogs you can find. Advanced productivity software and most websites have no problems running on old machines.

Ah that was worded poorly I guess; I was saying that in regards to security, but that sentence got awful long now that I re-read it. As in, you're probably not doing anything too critical on there.

The recent Reddit frontend update is insanely bad for both UX and performance. I had no idea further enshitification was even possible but holy crap they knocked it out of the park this time.

I wonder at what point having a company with a terrible product like that on your resume ruins your chances of being hired somewhere that actually cares about quality products?

I hope you realise that that OS has not been receiving any security patches since 2020 or so.

The ROI on targeting older machines in Western countries is so asymmetrical, that I only fear targeted attacks - given my personal risk assessment, I'd rather allow a targeted attack and be alerted when my honeypot accounts get compromised, then join the ranks of Win11 botnets and a juxtapositionally genuine false sense of security.

I think you're miscalculating here. Most of the 'hacks' taking place are scripts scanning the entire internet looking for non-patched machines running knows vulnerabilities.

The risk of being targeted by one of these is near 100% on a long enough timeline.

I'd _seriously_ advice you to never put a WinXP machine on the internet, even with a firewall in between.

At least get the extended support thingy.

Me too!

>But it begs the obvious question if there's a legitimate use case for this, other than having a modern browser when spinning up your retro machine for that nostalgia once a year.

There are lots of Windows 2008 / 2012 servers out there. Not internet facing hopefully. But that still may need something better than Internet Explorer to display webpages.

Also lab machines that are still on XP or 7.

If old OS's have been air gapped since they've gone EOL, then shouldn't the last browser version they already had be able to support everything they can access?

Yea but it just sucks to use

Maybe offline web development on old, perhaps proprietary, hardware platforms? Security and the risks of running untrusted code wouldn't matter so much.

Some people don't like modern UI design and continue to use windows 7 and before

If that's a concern for you, there are themes for GTK3 and GTK4 that replicate classic 3D widgets and remove much of the excess padding in modern apps. https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 (You should install both; Chicago95 is more actively developed, but B00merang gives you a GTK+4 theme that's currently missing from Chicago95.) Works reasonably well as a daily-driver, giving you a similar look to the modern SerenityOS GUI on a standard Linux system. Even the modern GTK+4 "responsive" apps work as designed, though with some non-critical graphical quirks.

I use windows 11 personally. I'm not a w7 user

they also must love millions of vulnerabilities and outdated software too!

Some people don't like computers and continue to watch television.

Some people like computers but don't like half-assed Control Panel replacements, a task bar/start menu filled with msn.com tabloid contents, Copilot search bars, Microsoft 365 nagware and advertising

Windows XP is the last version of Windows that's generally thought to be free of backdoors and US spyware. This is possibly why Putin seems to still use it (a photo of Putin was all over the internet a few months ago https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=putin+...).

There are private companies that claim backport security updates, although I don't know how effective they are. Their customers are primarily government and defense.

>Windows XP is the last version of Windows that's generally thought to be free of backdoors and US spyware

On what basis? Depending on your crankiness level you could argue that "backdoors" far predate that[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Or Dual_EC_DRBG.

>Windows XP is the last version of Windows that's generally thought to be free of backdoors and US spyware. This is possibly why Putin seems to still use it

Despite every major news outlet reporting this back in 2019, this is actually fake news. People saw that the taskbar appeared blue in a low-res photo, and concluded that it must be Windows XP. Very sloppy journalism.

If you look at the full-resolution version of that 2019 photo, it's clear that it's Windows 7 (or maybe 8 with a Start menu mod): http://static.kremlin.ru/media/events/photos/big2x/W2kaDAtDz...

Doesn't the xp tcp/ip driver still contain an unpatched zero day?

That would be where private companies, and presumably foreign governments, providing patches come in. I've never worked with any of these companies, so I don't know the details. They say a lot of Win7/8 patches work on XP, possibly with some patching of the patches.

> Windows XP is the last version of Windows that's generally thought to be free of backdoors and US spyware. This is possibly why Putin seems to still use it

Although it is very possible that more recent proprietary OSes contain spyware, Putin showing himself using XP is almost certainly propaganda to fuel distrust towards Microsoft and western governments/corporations in general. They have top notch FOSS developers in Russia, and I'm sure he can obtain a 100% spyware free Linux/BSD/whatever PC, unless he doesn't trust the hardware itself which can be bugged just like OSes and software (firmware, binary blobs etc.) so that he uses very old iron that most certainly don't contain malware but can run only ancient OSes. If that's the case, then it could make sense.

Intel IME, AMD PSP, have both long been thought of as hardware backdoors.

AMD's licensed zen1 chips that China makes, whose name excapes me at the moment, have the AES instructions and PSP removed. They're also banned from being imported by the state dept, so, that's either because they're also backdoored by china somehow, or, they aren't backdoor-able, maybe both.

Suffice to say however, modern computers (and smartphones) are chock full of potentially spooky SoC's and someone like ol'vlad might just be paranoid enough to not trust them.

The China version has all the American backdoors removed and Chinese backdoors added instead.

So if I live in the west I can protect myself from being spied on by my own gov by using Chinese CPUs? Sounds like a selling point to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Intel Management Engine was introduced 2008 (2013 for AMD). XP was introduced in 2001 and was succeeded by Vista in 2007. The dates for the ME and Vista introduction seem close enough that if there was some sort of secret plan, that concurrent development would have been happening.

That said, I have read many times that Putin does not use any computer or the Internet.

(For those unfamiliar with it, the ME is an inaccessible second CPU running Minix and is network-aware.)

> That said, I have read many times that Putin does not use any computer or the Internet.

I wouldn't be surprised no. He's got flunkies to do everything for him. And he does seem pretty out of touch with reality, which might be because they tell him only what he wants to hear. For example consider the war on Ukraine, it seems he really expected to overrun them in a day or two.

Legend has it that he was giving money to his intelligence service to bribe the Ukrainian army generals to surrender at first sight of the invasion. They noticed "You're giving me money that you don't need a receipt in return, in preparation for something that's never going to happen? Let me call you back, I need to call the Bentley dealership.". And when asked they just reported "Yeah, the Ukrainian army will surrender, no problem!"...

> Putin showing himself using XP is almost certainly propaganda to fuel distrust towards Microsoft and western governments/corporations in general.

Hardly. He probably has more important matters to think about. That would be a world record in propaganda with the least impact.

There's no reason for him or anybody else to use inferior FOSS software when an old OS does just fine.

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