2000 points to slytherclaw!

Wow. I've been following this and you, sir, are insane in the best way. Hahaha!

was there to see most of it live. I thought that machine was toast.

As a fellow tech nerd this was an interesting read, but why? I mean, why are you going to so much effort to run such an old OS?

@CallumStoneman Because a system should work for you — not the other way around.
Forced upgrades. Artificial obsolescence. Feature regressions sold as progress. It’s all getting worse. I wanted to see what happens if you just say “no.”
Turns out… you can take back control.
You can drag something deemed “dead” back to life — and it’ll still do the job, if you’re willing to fight for it.
I also wanted to push back on the folks who responded to my other posts saying I “don’t know how easy I have it now,” that older systems were “less accessible” or “harder to use.”
So I put that claim to the test.

Haha nice! So how functional is XP in 2025? Internet Explorer was never really worth using in the first place (beautiful accessibility but not much else), and I’m guessing you can only get very old versions of Chrome or Firefox? I’d bloody love to go back to the days of XP, for Outlook Express if nothing else

@CallumStoneman It's mostly usable. Supermium is a modern chromium fork that works well. Surpant is a fork of the basalisque browser that also works and feels very much like firefox. there are community maintained versions of msn, windows live, etc. there is a port of outlook express to get it working, but I haven't dug into that yet.

@CallumStoneman The thing really holding me back is the hardware I'm using it on. Netbooks weren't good when they came out, and they don't hold up very well today.

Ah yeah, one of my first laptops was a Netbook. I remember thinking it was amazing at the time, but looking back that's definitely only because I had very little else to compare it to