Thanks for the post, most amusing. I think I would accept faster, wobble on the "more usable", and argue that the "more accessible" comes from the "more usable" for normal users. It is at least an arguable question whether accessibility itself has improved except, of course, when it comes to installation. Thanks for the interesting look at things.

just set a custom DNS for adblocking, and you'll want to track down a 20 year Norton installer.

Get ready to have your info stolen and your computer burned internally because there're viruses out there that can fry motherboards.

ahahaha this sounds like a security nightmare, but I'm glad you're giving it a spin, even if 20 years late and well passed its prime. I suppose that may color your experience a bit, sure XP was worse in some aspects like set-up speech (but even that's debatable on some Linux distros) but overall in terms of the standard win32 experience a lot of apps were more polished than once UWP and all that junk came on the scene, IMHO.

Wow. Haven't thought about Grizly Gulch in decades. Last time I saw that game was either in the late '90s or early 2000s where a student I was teaching purchased it. Shades of Doom was a lot of fun. I broke down and bought cheat codes for it, which made things a bit easier.

You should try Windows 7, too.

@Bruce @DavidGoldfield What else would you call it? It's hardly a joy to use in 2025

Re the original drivers for that netbook, I think the NC10 recovery images are available on archive.org. You should have given those a shot.

@Bruce For me, running XP was a pretty smooth experience, even on an old machine that was only meant to run Windows 98. However, I remember hearing that the early builds of XP were not so easy to work with and I can only guess that this is the build you may have installed?

I'll definitely be keeping track of this. Especially seeing as you fresh installed xp onto a system. That I have not done yet, and don't think I will in future. And hey, plus a million for grizley Gulch from Bavisoft. strait up, that was 1 of the very first audiogames that I ever played on xp. That and ten pin alley from PCS. I spent my entire 13th year on this earth glued to my system due to those games. Now as for accessabillity/useabillity between xp and 11? Apples to oranges, and the apple, that being xp, is way better, snappyer and faster. Seriously whenever I want a tech vacation, I just boot up my old dell laditude d820 and go to town, sans going online of course, I'm not that brave with my good ole systems haha. But truly, best of luck to you. You got this, you can do this :)

tihs reminds us very strongly of all the Solaris 10 work we're doing, tbh. that netbook might run OpenSolaris actually

It wasn't until I first used Windows 95, which for me was in 1997, that I really began to like Windows. As far as Window-Eyes, I felt that their manual, as well as the one for Vocal-eyes, was fantastic. Vocal-Eyes, though not my favorite DOS screen reader, was the first one that I used and their manual made the learning process a real joy. In my opinion, those guys really knew how to write good documentation, finding a balance between accuracy and friendliness to help the user ease into learning the product. I had a lot of respect for Window-Eyes and it had some very nice features. Their cursor keys feature allowed you to be able to use standard navigation keys while assigning one or two functions to them without any scripting knowledge required. I'm frustrated that JAWS still doesn't allow for this. I also thought that their free Window-Eyes for Office was a bold move and at the time it was revolutionary. I thought it was terrible to see Vispero killing that product and the screen reader landscape was diminished as a result.

@Bruce @mcourcel @DavidGoldfield Same here, didn't want to bother. I tried 95, didn't like it, tried 98, didn't like it, tried 2000, liked it and was done. Upgraded to XP, and didn't bother with DOS again. Between 95 and 2000 was a good six or seven years, if not longer, and I only completely quit DOS in 2002. Three years ago, I fixed a machine for a guy who was still using DOS on a very old laptop. The main problem was finding hardware which worked for that machine. It got done, but took a while. There are still machines being sold, or were at that time, running DOS without issue, but they were for old software and the vendor was charging an incredible amount.

@Bruce @DavidGoldfield So you were dos before? May I insert right here and now. Dinosaur. Lol!

@mcourcel @DavidGoldfield Guilty. LOL I didn't have the money, I didn't have the inclination, and I spent many years trying to decide whether I wanted to spend my money on JAWS or Window-Eyes.

@Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel That's interesting as I honestly wasn't aware of any of these things, particularly sending your computer to them? That's certainly very odd. I wasn't actually a customer; I used Window-Eyes at a couple of nonprofits I used to work for who had a Window-Eyes license. I called them for support but only occasionally.

@Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel I personally felt that the move from scripts to apps was a brilliant marketing move on their part. Scripts sounds scary to a lot of people; apps are fun things and having their own app store was very nice. JAWS has this incredibly powerful scripting language but FS offers no central location to get and download them. Even NVDA now has their own add-on store and I really like that approach.

@DavidGoldfield @Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel yeah, JAWS really needs something like the add-on store.

@Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel I hadn't read RDC's manuals but I'm not surprised to hear you say that. They were a very customer-centric company. RDC/Braille Planet being gone was another loss to our industry, as was David Holliday's passing.

@Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel The idea that I submitted to FS during their first Next Big Thing contest was for a script writing wizard. It wouldn't be able to assist in writing something along the lines of Leasey but it would be a wizard to at least allow a new user to write some decent scripts to help make things a bit more accessible. If I had the skills to do it I'd surely try developing such a thing.

@DavidGoldfield @Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel First computer usage for me was BBC Basic and Master machines. Followed that up with DOS 5X, 6X, windows 9X and so on. Used most major versions of Microsoft stuff. First Mac use was 2014 with Mavericks.

Wasn't there a remote access tool built into Window-Eyes, similar to JAWS Tandem, or am I totally making that up? Probably not. That would have allowed their support staff to look at someone's configuration remotely.

@Bruce @techsinger @mcourcel Yes, I know what you mean about MegaDots. Having that as a true Windows version could have possibly given Duxbury some serious competition. I had a chance to use both HotDots and MegaDots when I worked for Blazie Engineering and I just loved MegaDots. In the DOS environment, I don't think Duxbury could load documents and allow you to forward or back-translate them at will, at least I don't think our version did that. MegaDots did this and I found its user interface easy to figure out.

The more I search my brain for it I'm convinced Window-Eyes likely didn't have a remote access client. Nowadays, something like RIM would make remote support super easy.

@austinnix It was very stable once what we had was configured but it is well behind 2025 standards.

@techsinger @sparksexist @Bruce @DavidGoldfield @mcourcel I would use this gladly.

@Bruce @DavidGoldfield @techsinger @mcourcel So, I'm a bit late to the convo, but I was on the same TT server as @fireborn when he decided to do this project, so I also grabbed a dell latitude capable of running xp, and I must say, once you update the TLS root certs, install the windows xp imbedded updates, and all the patches, well, no, it's not what I'd consider secure, but it's fast, doesn't beg me to use microsoft 365 copilot TM, doesn't shoe onedrive sync in my face, doesn;t have 50 separate telemetry services, doesn't nag me about updates... it's a great OS even now if only it were to be updated for security. I can watch 2025 youtube, write mastodon posts with enafore, play all the old audio games with true 3d hardware accelerated sound without fucking with dlls, and it's generally been a trying but amazing time. coming from someone who used xp as the bais of my computer knowledge as a child, this is an amazing exercise in nostalja for me, and honestly about the only thing I can't do is dropbox, steam games and hearthstone, (though if I installed one core patcher I'm sure they'd at least be doable if not stable) one core patcher is not part of this exercise because both of us want the real xp experience, (if it doesn't run, it doesn't run...) and I'm honestly fine with it.

@sparksexist @Bruce @DavidGoldfield @mcourcel This is, of course, further evidence that software, and Microsoft is not the only offender here, it's just the one we're talking about, has not improved for the user over the past ten years. Let's pretend that there was a security update to secure XP to the extent that Windows 11 is secure. Note that I make no claim about the security of 11, I'm happy to call it the most secure thing on earth and am also happy to say it has the security of a colander. I leave all that aside and am willing to accept what anyone says. Anyhow, let's put in a magic update which would make the systems equal in security. Let's also have the magic update support all hardware supported by 11. Now, let's say you had to use that updated XP for the next five years. Would you be disappointed? I don't think I would be, honestly. I would be reasonably satisfied, I wouldn't be missing much. XP was released in 2001 and the last SP was in 2008. Do I mean that software hasn't improved much since 2008? I think that's what I'm saying, as crazy as it sounds. That's where I'm being pulled to by the evidence. I honestly don't even know if security has improved much since 2008. Frankly, I'm to the point where it's either defense in depth or we're just toast anyhow, even if we just installed the latest stuff from patch Tuesday. That's not a great place to be, but it's where the realities have put me.