Day 1 – Dust, Drivers, and Despair: Getting Windows XP Running in 2025
People have told me I don’t know how good I have it.
That my complaints about Linux are too much. That I’m spoiled. That back in the day, things were harder. That Windows XP was worse in every way. That modern systems are faster, more usable, more accessible — and I’m just being dramatic.
So I decided to call that bluff.
For the next month, I’m using Windows XP as my main operating system. Not in a VM. Not themed to look like XP. Real XP, running on real hardware. I picked up a Samsung NC10 netbook from 2009, maxed it out at 2GB of RAM, put in a small SSD, and installed Windows XP SP3.
This is not nostalgia. I didn’t use XP growing up. I started with Linux. I missed out on the Windows accessibility tools, the XP-era games, the speech APIs people now call “legacy.” This is me exploring it for the first time — in 2025.
Getting it installed (the hard way)
XP’s installer is completely inaccessible. No speech, no Braille, nothing.
I didn’t have sighted help — I used OCR to get through it. It was slow, janky, and I had to double-check everything, but it worked. And honestly, that set the tone for everything that came next. Nothing has been smooth. But a surprising amount of it is... functional.
Display drivers are a war crime
After install, I landed in 800×600 with no hardware acceleration. I tried driver after driver — Intel, generic fallback, sketchy forum packs — and every single one ended with “This device has a problem.”
Eventually, something worked. I don’t know which version finally did it — and I don’t want to poke it too hard to find out. I’ve had to reinstall it four times already just to get a working screen. It’s fragile. One wrong move and the whole system collapses.
This isn’t like Linux, where I can poke logs and swap out modules. This is XP. If it breaks, it breaks silently, and your screen reader goes down with it.
Screen readers: older than some of my readers
Somehow, I got multiple screen readers running. Here's the breakdown.
- JAWS 15 wouldn’t install at first — said it was missing component utilities. The fix? One registry key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer]
"DisableMSI"=dword:00000000
After that, it worked. And it works really well. It runs better than NVDA — faster, smoother, and feels like it actually belongs on this system.
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NVDA 2017.3 still runs, and runs fine. No missed elements, no weirdness. It’s solid. Familiar. But on this ancient hardware, JAWS just has better performance.
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JAWS 14: I haven’t tried it again yet, but now that the MSI issue is sorted, I’m guessing it’ll work.
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JAWS 7: Installed, but I could only read one character at a time. Needed to reinstall the display driver just to get that far. Not worth it.
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Window-Eyes 5.5: It technically launches. That’s about all I can say. It stutters, loses focus, and generally struggles to function.
JAWS 15 is the clear winner so far. It’s old, sure, but this OS was its home turf.
The browser keeping me online
Forget Firefox 52 ESR — it’s dead. TLS errors everywhere. Most sites just don’t load.
But then I found Serpent. It’s a fork of Basilisk, kept alive by people who still care about legacy systems. And somehow, it works.
GitHub loads. Google works. My blog renders. Even YouTube sort of functions.
It’s not fast. It’s not pretty. But it’s usable. And that’s more than I expected.
Serpent is the only reason I’m not completely air-gapped right now. Without it, I wouldn’t even be able to publish this post.
Office still works
I installed Office 2003. No tricks. No problems. It just worked. Word and Excel launched and behaved exactly like I expected — fast, no ribbon, no cloud sync trying to second-guess me.
I haven’t tried Outlook yet, and I probably won’t unless I really feel like punishing myself. But the core apps are solid so far.
Okay, some things actually slapped
Amidst all the pain, I’ve actually had some fun. I’ve been playing old-school audio games — the kind I completely missed out on growing up.
Since I started with Linux, I never got to try any of these back when they were current. Now, I get why people loved them. They’re responsive, charming, and surprisingly fun. And they just work. No fighting with sound servers. No missing DLLs. Just run the installer and go.
Here’s what I’ve played so far:
- Grizzly Gulch Western Extravaganza
- Super Liam
- Shades of Doom
- Topspeed
- Pipe2
- Packman Talks
- Sarah and the Castle of Witchcraft and Wizardry
- Alien Outback
- Judgment Day
- ESP Pinball Extreme
- Monkey Business
- GMA Tank Commander
- Trek 2000
- BG Uno
- Pong!
- AudioQuake
This is probably the most fun I’ve had using XP so far — just installing and playing games that were built for this environment and still run without complaint.
Updates, sort of
I got updates working with Legacy Update — a community-maintained replacement for Windows Update.
On top of that, I enabled the POSReady 2009 trick. It’s a little registry hack that makes XP think it’s an embedded system, which lets you get updates through 2019 instead of stopping in 2014.
No, it’s not secure. But it’s better than nothing.
What about OneCore?
I know about the OneCore API patcher — the thing that lets XP run some newer Windows 10-era apps. But I’m not using it.
At least, not yet.
This month is about seeing what XP can do on its own. No tricks, no backports, no modern scaffolding. Just plain old SP3, patched up to 2019, and running on 16-year-old hardware.
That’s the challenge. And for now, I’m sticking to it.
Some of this is... easier?
Here’s the part that surprised me: XP, in some ways, is easier.
There’s no UAC. No Microsoft account requirement. No forced updates. No containerized nonsense. You install a thing and it just runs. You change a setting and it stays changed.
It’s not better. But it’s less complicated.
And that whole "you don’t know how good you have it" argument? I’m not sure it holds up anymore. Because right now, XP feels less like a hassle than Windows 11 does on a bad day.
Day 1: closing thoughts
XP is fragile. It’s ancient. It’s out of support. But it’s not useless.
Some of it still works. Some of it even works well. And some of it is surprisingly less frustrating than what we deal with today.
That said, I’m still on the hunt for a couple of essentials. I haven’t found a decent ad blocker that plays nicely with Serpent, and I haven’t picked out an antivirus yet. I’m not eager to turn this into a malware museum — but I’m also not about to install something bloated, shady, or modern enough to break half the system.
And I wrote and published this entire post directly from XP. That alone feels like a win.
I’ve got 29 more days to go.
I don’t actually believe I’ll make it through all of them. Maybe I’ll cave. Maybe it’ll just stop working. But I’m going to try anyway. Tomorrow I’ll write a document, check some email, maybe even set up a development environment. Or break something. Probably both.