[Ipg-smz] XP Resurrection

[Rob Reilly]

Tom,

I have one like yours. Wiped the disk years ago and have run Xubuntu on
it since. Wrote a few articles, to offset my cost. The kids used it with
Linux as early-teens. Worked pretty well. A little slow, still a solid
machine.

Keeping it first edition XP makes sense to me. You might just grab a
small SSD, put Linux on it and run it as is. Save the XP disk for future
sale, nostalgia, faith, investment or whatever. Plug it back in as needed.

Nice to see some love for the "old" hardware. Now the early Pi and
Arduinos are old. Uggg.

drtorq

On 7/18/19 1:25 PM, Tom Henderson via Ipg-smz wrote:
> 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
>
>
-- 
--------------------------
Rob "drtorq" Reilly
doc at drtorq.com
407-718-3274
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