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Gildo Santiago
Released in October 2001, it is almost 15 years old today. I was only 11 years old when this OS was released so you can imagine I pretty much spent much of my teen years using XP machines other than Red Hat Linux of course.
Despite its age, XP continues to live on in embedded systems like ATMs, factory and medical machines where replacement costs and re-certification (timelines) makes them infeasible to be replaced in the near future. An extreme example is how the 23-year-old Windows 3.1 which crashed is still used in a French airport as of late last year.
But where is the fun in that? I saw this as an opportunity to determine if it is really possible to install WinXP on a much newer system. It was also a good way to relive a bit of my childhood that way.
It is impossible to obtain WinXP via normal retail channels as Microsoft has stopped selling it as of 30 June 2008. The deadline for OEM partners also ceased not long after. There is however a way, if your business has an Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscription, you win! As Algoaccess is a startup of less than 5 years, we enrolled into Bizspark which gives us 3 years of free access to Microsoft software.
MSDN provides legitimate software licenses and disk images of almost every Microsoft product. This even includes old ones like MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. Talk about going further down memory lane if you want to!
Anyway, the disk image I chose is Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3. There exists a 64 bit version of XP Pro but I rather not go that way as drivers for that are hard to find even in its era.
XP was created in an era where there was no Serial-ATA (SATA) drives, no SSD drives, no UEFI, no GPT, USB was starting to get more popular and floppy disk drives were still commonplace. Your BIOS settings must take care of these limitations.
Another optional setting is SATA mode. If you have a choice for IDE or AHCI mode, you should always pick AHCI if you have the drivers or IDE for maximum compatibility. AHCI is required for the extra features like extra bandwidth, Native Command Queuing and hotplugging. AHCI will require extra drivers which have to be slipstreamed into the WinXP installation media which is in the next step.
Basically since WinXP was created in an era where there were no SATA drives, the installation CD can only recognise IDE/Parallel-ATA drives. Windows XP also happens to be the last OS I believe to have its installation interface seem like a DOS-lookalike text-based installers of its predecessors.
When you boot an original installation CD, this message will flash for about 3 seconds at the start. You can press F6 to immediately proceed with loading your own SATA drivers. This is where the issue got its name from. If you ignore this, you will still get another chance later.
Seen in the context of that era, the floppy disk thing is quite understandable. If your hard disk controller is not recognised, your CD drive is holding the Windows CD and USB flash drives are not yet commonplace then what is left?
The proper way if one does not have an internal floppy drive is to get a USB floppy drive, load the AHCI drivers into the floppy disk and proceed as per normal. Believe me, I have tried this solution years before and it works provided if you have the right USB floppy chipset. More details on supported floppy chipsets in the same F6 explanation link.
The more elegant solution however, is to inject the AHCI drivers directly into the installation media so WinXP can recognise your hard disk controller from the get go. If one is using an older machine, getting the AHCI drivers is no biggie, just a download away from the Intel website. However, we are now using a more modern 8-Series chipset.
Modern disks now come pre-formatted with the GUID Partition Table (GPT) instead of the legacy Master Boot Record (MBR). If you wish to know why GPT has superceded MBR, just consult the Wikipedia articles. The problem is that WinXP cannot be installed on hard disks that use GPT. We have to convert them to MBR. Note that MBR only supports hard disks up to 4 terabytes (TB).
You may be tempted to just restart and allow the XP installer create the partitions during the (next) install step. I do NOT recommend you let XP handle partitioning especially if you are using an SSD or modern magnetic drives. Modern Advanced Format drives from 2009 now use a 4KiB sector size instead of 512bytes which was the era where XP was designed. If your created partition is not aligned to 4KiB, which a legacy OS like XP will get wrong, you will have performance issues. More details can be found here and here.
This screen greets you at the start. Future Windows setups will no longer have this blue background with white text theme. This is a legacy from the Windows 3.0 installer which was released in 1990. You can see the similarity in this Windows 3.0 setup video.
The internal wifi card is an Intel Wireless-N 7260 which does not have Windows XP drivers. This laptop does not have a RJ45 ethernet adapter. To initially tide my way through, I tentatively used a USB-Ethernet adapter. I happened to purchase this USB 3.0 hub/Ethernet combo sometime back so I used it. It is based on the ASIX AX88179 which thankfully has a Windows XP driver.
Without graphics drivers, the video performance of the OS will be very sluggish. The screen will occasionally flicker and frame rate is low when you do stuff like dragging the application window or scrolling in your web browser.
I happily used the VBE 3 version and am happy to report that things are much improved. Not as good as one by the manufacturer itself as there is no hardware acceleration but still much better performance than no driver at all. The brightness is also locked at maximum so be wary about straining your eyes if you are using a laptop. The HDMI output of the laptop is also unusable.
Although WinXP no longer has new updates, it does not mean we do not install the existing ones. Microsoft fortunately did not pull the product activation and update servers. Hundreds of updates await. The .NET frameworks that come with Windows Updates will also be useful.
A separate update that you might want to install is the exFat update which will allow you to handle external drives formatted with the exFAT file system. The update was originally available here but Microsoft pulled the update file. Thankfully another blogger has downloaded a copy and is hosting it.
If you like, you can install some Powertoys for Windows XP. They are a collection of tools I used to enjoy using years back when XP was still my primary OS. I especially like Tweak UI, Open Command Window Here, Image Resizer and Alt-Tab Replacement. You can download the entire collection from Majorgeeks.
So I have come to the end of my post. I assume most of you readers will not actually try to install XP in this day and age, at the most you will only do so in virtual machines. Nevertheless, I have learned lots especially the universal AHCI and video drivers part which will continue to be applicable in future.
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