My god, what have I done? Can you guess from the title image for this post what I had to do?… Install Windows XP! This was a real throw back for me, being the OS (Operating System) that I used for almost as long as the now also defunct Windows 7, it was a real flash back situation.
Buy why, in the name of computer safety, would I knowingly and willingly install Windows XP onto a computer? Because my father needed it. Yep, my dear father has some ‘legacy’ programs that, according to him, only run in XP, or perhaps more specifically, in DOS (the operating system that came before Windows) and he needs to get some old data out of these programs.
Those out there that are a little more tech savey might say; “Why not run a VM?” or Virtial Machine (running an OS inside your existing OS, but it’s in a sort of box that’s separate), and to that I say; “Yes, that would be safer.” However, it does require a bit of a higher technical experience and would have actually taken longer to set up. Also, I didn’t think of it at the time 😛 My dad has an old computer with it’s own keyboard, mouse and monitor and MOST importantly, this PC is NOT being connected to the Internet
The vulrabilities mentioned in the previous post would potentialy wreck havoc on an unpatched, unprotected, unsupported version of Windows! But this is offline and I’m OK with that! When we were installing XP (which was really retro for me, having done it many times but not for a long while) it asked for a “Computer Name” and my dad said; “What should we call it?” my suggestion of “PLEASE-GOD-DON’T-CONNECT-ME-TO-THE-INTERENT” was a close second to “XP-PC”
I’ll be interested to see if the software he needs to access works fine or if we’ll need to do a bit more tinkering with drivers and the like. We can do this by downloading them onto his main PC and copying them across to this XP machine via USB Flash Drive and running them.
As per my previous post, if you’re not running Windows 10 already, beware, you need to get off Windows 7 by any means necessary. Either upgrading to Windows 10 or consider if a Linux distro can fulfill your needs.
Thanks for stopping by, more blog posts to come soon. Also, if there is a topic you would like to see me cover, please do let me know in the comments section below.
Warm Regards,
Paul
HobStar Computer Solutions 