Day 3 of running Windows XP in 2025 is up.
I opened Enafore to check my Mastodon replies. It worked—for a few seconds. Then the notifications started. And they didn’t stop. Ping. Ping. Ping. I couldn’t reply. I could barely move the cursor. I watched the system buckle in real time.
So I tore XP apart.
I disabled over thirty services, deleted Windows File Protection, nuked the prefetch cache, rewrote shutdown behavior, and killed every background process that wasn’t strictly mine. If it touched the network, tried to log something, or ran without permission, it’s dead.
And you know what? Enafore runs fine now. JAWS doesn’t read new posts live, but I don’t care. I can read. I can reply. XP obeys.
Discord, though? Wouldn’t even load in the browser. Just a blank page. So tomorrow, I’m pulling in what channels I can through IRC. It’s not over.
Read the full post:
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/dead-os-walking-30-days-on-windows-xp-in-2025-day-3-i-dont-patch-i-burn/
#WindowsXP #Retrocomputing #BlindComputing #Accessibility #IRC #Mastodon #DeadOSWalking

@fireborn Really enjoying both this series and your other posts. Re: Discord, I recently became aware of a project called Discord Messenger which is a win32 Discord client specifically designed to be runnable on older Windows versions. I tried it briefly, meant to contact the developers to report a few things because they have it set up so that the arrow keys love putting you back in the box to type a message and the list of messages is a custom control not reachable from the keyboard, but the CTRL+K quick switcher is there and NVDA screen review was able to read the messages so the JAWS cursor should in theory work too. This is in case you need access to more than you'd get from your IRC bridge.