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 Thanks for the post, most amusing. I think I would accept faster, wobble on the "more usable", and argue that the "more accessible" comes from the "more usable" for normal users. It is at least an arguable question whether accessibility itself has improved except, of course, when it comes to installation. Thanks for the interesting look at things.
Edited 1d ago