People keep telling me I don’t know how good I have it. That modern systems are easy, and that accessibility has come so far I should be grateful. So I decided to test that claim the hard way.
I’m running Windows XP for a month. Not in a VM. Not themed. Real XP. Real hardware. A 2009 Samsung NC10, with 2GB of RAM, an SSD, and the original drivers I had to dig up from the depths of the internet.
No speech at install. I used OCR to get through it.
Display drivers broke four times.
Serpent is the only browser I could get working.
I installed Office 2003.
Got JAWS 15 running after a registry hack.
NVDA still works fine.
I even played some old audio games I never got to try growing up.
I haven’t found a decent ad blocker or antivirus yet. I’m not expecting this to go smoothly. I don’t even really believe I’ll make it the full 30 days. But I’m doing it anyway.
Day 1 is up. Written and published from Windows XP.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/dead-os-walking-30-days-on-windows-xp-in-2025/
#WindowsXP #Accessibility #BlindComputing #RetroTech
#NVDA #JAWS #audiogames
#30DaysOfXP
@fireborn ahahaha this sounds like a security nightmare, but I'm glad you're giving it a spin, even if 20 years late and well passed its prime. I suppose that may color your experience a bit, sure XP was worse in some aspects like set-up speech (but even that's debatable on some Linux distros) but overall in terms of the standard win32 experience a lot of apps were more polished than once UWP and all that junk came on the scene, IMHO.