Playing with Windows XP

A few weeks ago I decided to set up an old, broken netbook on the desk and just start playing with it as a normal, everyday use sort of PC. Nothing exciting or all that special–and really nothing worth telling anyone about, I guess. But, sharing some of my useless tinkering and nonsensical ramblings is what this whole journal/blog/whatever is all about, so, yeah.

Sitting on the desk–or table, rather–up against the wall is the motherboard out of an old Acer Aspire One A150–check it’s info and Geekbench scores here. I’ve only the board sitting there with the power supply plugged into it, as I’d removed it from the shell a few years back to retrieve the hard-drive, and I never put it back together–the LCD and keyboard on the poor thing were destroyed by children a very long time ago. For a display, I’m using a Vizio E24-C1 television. The TV had been a sort of “smart tv” back in the day, but advances in technology have rendered it just another television–the only “smart” features that still work are YouTube, and Yahoo News & Weather; all other apps and services have died over the years.

Since I’m tied down to the desk, I’m using ethernet rather than wifi, and have plugged an old Creative Labs ED2400 in just for the fun of playing with optical media. The keyboard is an Adesso ACK-540UW–not my favorite, but it works.

Side note–I just went searching for a link of some sort to offer for the drive, and could only turn up results for people selling them second-hand (of course). Anyway, I picked up mine while “thrifting” at the Lexington Peddlers Mall for five bucks; I found two on ebay–as of now, there’s one for $140 and one for $200!

And, as the post title suggests, I’m running Windows XP–updated with every patch it could get, of course.

Yes, you read right, I’ve got an old XP machine connected to the Internet. I’m here to catch and spread as much digital disease as possible. (Doubtful, of course, as I did grab as many updates as I could force upon it–including the POSReady ones, plus I’m running firewall on the machine, and am sitting behind two other firewalls. I mean, it’s possible, but I doubt it. Besides, with what vulnerabilities the system still may have, what are the chances I’ll actually trigger a malicious web script, or download an infected file?)

Anyway, I’m tinkering with a laptop on life-support, and I’m loving it.

One of the odd things that I’m most proud of is finally figuring out how to mess around with cygwin. A lifetime ago when I learned that having a Linux-like layer of compatibility on Windows I was excited and wanted that functionality; unfortunately, when I tried, I kept running into numerous issues that I just couldn’t figure out–that, and the issues of Internet accessibility I faced at the time didn’t help. Now, having a slightly better understanding of Linux and a better grasp on what I want to accomplish with using a computer–plus “high-speed Internet”–I’ve finally gotten a working installation of cygwin on an XP machine. It only took me about twenty years to get here. (If you want or need instructions for getting cygwin on XP, check out https://superuser.com/questions/1132000/is-it-still-possible-to-get-cygwin-for-xp)

I guess one of the silliest things that I’ve done with the machine so far–other than bringing it to life–is probably my getting it to run irssi. I would’ve preferred to have weechat running on it, but I still haven’t found a way of making it compile and don’t believe I ever will. Irssi works just fine, though. Since I haven’t completely weened myself off of using multiple windows and haven’t fully trained myself on IRC commands, I had to make irssi more weechat-like, and found a decent tutorial for that. The next thing was getting an easy way to load URLs–I’m really only using IRC as a live newswire sort of thing and not chatting it up with people (I’d need friends for that to happen). I found the “openurl” script, changed the call from w3m to links–I know, w3m was the better choice, but I’m still learning console stuff–and, boom. I can now open the full text link of that weather alert from the iembot on mastodon; now I just need to view the images in links.

I tried to see if I could compile sxiv or fim like I had on my Linux machines–as I wanted to have animated gif compatibility. Unfortunately, I kept running into different incompatibilities and requirements that I just couldn’t seem to satisfy; then I remembered–I’m running this on a Windows machine, why not just have it call an actual Windows program? After a little searching, I finally found the program I was looking for–JPEGview. I downloaded the last version that dkleiner released, put the 32bit exectuable right in the Windows directory, launched it, let it create an empty ini file in the Documents and Settings folder, told it to save the opened defaults to that ini, and then I went back to the ini to tell it not to go fullscreen, and–boom. Now I can launch JPEGview to see images in an instance of links launched from irssi in a cygwin terminal–after associating image extensions with JPEGview in links, of course.

Yeah, I know. That was a whole bunch of useless nothing to write about, but I’m having fun, and I think that’s what’s important, isn’t it?