[Ipg-smz] XP Resurrection

[Perlow, Jason]

I guess my ultimate question is... why

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 1:26 PM Tom Henderson via Ipg-smz <
ipg-smz at netpress.org> 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
>
>
> --
> Tom Henderson
> ExtremeLabs, Inc.
> +1 317 250 4646
> Twitter: @extremelabs
> Skype: extremelabsinc
>
>
> --
> Ipg-smz mailing list
> Ipg-smz at netpress.org
> http://netpress.org/mailman/listinfo/ipg-smz_netpress.org
>


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