Windows XP was on the first PC I owned, built by my brother in about 2001/2002. The computer had a 20GB hard disk, a 750Mhz processor, and served me well for many years.
To be honest, I always liked XP. I upgraded to Vista at some point, but that ran so badly, I switched to using Linux permanently in about 2008 or 2009.
Ever since I’ve had computers powerful enough to run VirtualBox, I’ve always had a Windows XP virtual machine.
Why?
- Lightweight and fast
- Good enough
- Runs most of the Windows software I might need
- Stable
I’m not a Free Software “fanatic”. There’s nothing as good as Adobe Acrobat XI that runs natively on Linux. Some people, myself included, consider Acrobat 11 far better than Acrobat DC. Recent Adobe software is more about them, and less about their users. Photoshop CS 5.1 also runs on XP and does pretty much anything you might need to do to a photo (if you can’t figure out how do it in GIMP).
Windows XP RAM Usage (Idling)
Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon (Idling)
MX Linux 19.4 (Idling)
Big difference between the three, aren’t there?!
Tips
My XP instance has no internet access (why would it?). I only use it for occasional Acrobat, a bit of WordPerfect and some IronPython stuff.
If you want to do some scripting, IronPython 2.7.8 is the last version that runs on XP (to my knowledge). I tried 2.7.9 to 2.7.11 (latest) but no dice, probably due to the .net framework 4.0 being the last to run on XP.
Make sure you’re running SP3, which was the last service pack released.