[Ipg-smz] XP Resurrection

[Tom Henderson]

Fellow Guilders,

This is a tome about resurrecting an EEE Asus system that hadn't been 
turned on since 2012.

The short background is that this system was owned by a fellow who died 
in 2012. His widow contacted me to donate his stuff to our ham radio 
club. In the mix was an EEE, which had been updated in 2012 but 
otherwise it had been unused, and I mean zero data. It has a 900mhz CPU 
and an amazing 2GB of DRAM. It's roughly tablet-sized, and has Windows 
XP on it, and not Windows XP SP2-- the point where Microsoft implemented 
the concept of "user space". XP SP2 broke a lot of software and drivers. 
It also terminated the ability for quite a bit of legacy amateur 
software (and so much more) to work. This was a rare beast.

I found a charger for it (Universal, $11), and plugged it in. It took a 
while to think about it, then XP finally arrived with an Admin logon, no 
password. I had envisioned turning this into a Xubuntu machine, but 
there is a LOT of ancient ham radio software that runs on XP and does 
not run on XP SP1+ at all, no matter how you hold your mouth, or dance 
on one foot whilst whistling Stephen Foster tunes.

The question is, do I connect it to the big bad Internet, update it, or 
sell it at a hamfest as a place to use old and relic software? It's 
behind NAT and a stateful firewall.

On one hand, I'd like to see it nominally secure (if updating is even 
still available from Microsoft), and on the other hand, you can play 
Duke Nukem I all day long, or learn Morse Code on a freeware 1996 DOS 16 
bit program, etc, etc. Should I connect it or is its value undisturbed 
better?

Votes?

Tom


-- 
Tom Henderson
ExtremeLabs, Inc.
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