Windows XP Fun                                             2023-04-13
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My eldest son is really into Minecraft, and MIT Scratch. About two
months ago he came across the re-creations of older versions of
Windows on Scratch. Some people with perhaps far too much time on
their hands have made some fun projects which look like Windows 95 /
98 / 2000 XP. They 'boot' and have a desktop you can explore, e.g.:

 https://scratch.mit.edu/users/_A-Guy_/

We got talking quite a bit about older versions of Windows, old
games, etc. and came up with the idea that at some point we'd build a
'retro' PC together, from parts, for fun. I got to mess around with
all kinds of (then practically worthless) old 386 and 486 PC bits as
a kid. I'm sure he'd enjoy that kind of thing too, but with late 90s
Pentium II / III stuff.

As it turns out, it's a lot more difficult / expensive to get retro
PC stuff here in the UK than when I looked into it about a year ago
in the US. Plenty of CPUs and RAM out there, not so many decent
motherboards and cases. I suppose with smaller houses in the UK we're
not keeping old computers lying around so much, so they've ended up
at the dump.

As it also turns out, the T430 laptop, which has just stopped being my
wife's daily driver, has almost a complete set of drivers available
for XP 32-bit. Only the USB3 ports aren't supported.

Two hours later, and I've just finished losing badly at Windows XP
solitaire. My son was excited about notepad (of all things?!), and
the fonts. Maybe we'll get around to SimCity 2000 / 3000 sometime
soon. I miss those.