A "new" hope for newer Hardware? :XP Compatibility

Holy Cow! What impressive 'puters!

 

Yep, it was a really awesome addon for xp that really made xp bulletproof. That ME DAW system sounds awesome! It reminds me of our cyrix p166 system that I need to restore--it has 17 fans in it.

 

These are absolutely awesome! I could only imagine how fast these are--probably blindingly fast! 4.7ghz on xp with 2200Mhz ram?!?! YES PLEASE!

I would love to see what your speed-battle.com numbers on with firefox--refresh it a few times and let me know the max number. I just want to be impressed even more.

 

Well, as far as you stay within your router its all right. Theoretically.
I run WIPFW firewall on my Win2003.. its heavy tuned (NetBIOS completly disabled
and additionaly blocked by FW by default). So its relativly ok.. Just relativly..
Unfortunately XP/2003 kernel still have bugs and even can weirdly bluescreen
on web browsing... So alertness is advised.

00020 deny udp from any to any 135-139
00020 deny tcp from any to any 135-139
00021 deny tcp from any to any 445
00021 deny udp from any to any 445

 

Are these the specific rules you have set up? If so, why these rules and these ports? Thank you in advance for your reply!

 

135-139 and 445 are SMB/NetBIOS ports. We all know that Microsoft SMB
have a lot of holes. like a swiss cheese
So blocking them on FW is pretty much first basic
defense from network perspective.

I dont use SMB from loong time, its much safer
to move files between windows hosts by HTTP..

 

Thank you for the details. Generally most firewalls won't route SMB over TCP/IP because of NAT, so there's safety there already.

And I would be very scared to run http for file transfers since http and https are the most targeted protocols. If you want to be truly safe, just run IPX/SPX--no one runs that any more and it's not routeable so can't even go over the Internet.

 

Scared? Absolutly no reason to be scared.. HTTP itself is pretty safe protocol.
The problem are all the exensions that sit on top of it.. JavaScript, ActiveX etc..

IPX/SPX is super old and unreliable. If you have packetloss in your network, you can get your data moving corrupted.

Best choice IMO is HTTP.. Its very simple, its easy to proxy it down to the host in LAN either by TCP 80 port redirection (or anything you prefer) or via nginx reverse proxy.
Also easy for other side to download. Anyone have browser these days.
You just give him URL with your IP address and path and vioala he can download.

The only issue is to find right and lean HTTP server for Windows.
Luicky, I wrote one for my own usage. Its called bhttp and its exe is only 27KB.
It will work from Win2000 up to Win10 (32bit app). Its command line HTTP server.

% bhttp --help
Usage: bhttp [-t] [-I <ip>] [-X <ip>] [-l <port>] [<dir>]

Usage is super simple, you start it (by default listens on 8080) and wait
for connections.Once you done, you press CTRL+C to kill it and you
close cmd.exe. It does NOT operate in background, so you dont
run it all the time.. just for a moment of file sharing.

If anyone is interested, PM.. I will give you URL to download.
I dont want to post link to download, all the bots will pick it up

 

For some reason the forum didn't notify me about replies. I've been meaning to add it to the thread. Well I actually haven't powered on that XP computer in about half a year, it was in the hallway. I brought it out and powered it on and found out I actually didn't currently have the GTX 780 card in that computer.. it's over in another computer so I've been working on removing it and migrating it around.. and I want to disassemble the XP computer and re-build it into a bigger case so I can fit it with a bigger 480mm radiator for the GTX 780 (Old Kepler cards produce a ton of heat once overclocked) So it will take some time. It turns out I currently have a GTX 750 Ti in the XP computer that I have air cooled and clocked up to 1400 Mhz. And as a lot of you know, Nvidia limits us to 2 screens max per video card in Windows XP, and I like to connect up my XP system to my 3 x 1080p monitor setup occasionally to game on it so I added a GT-710 to the system for the 3rd monitor. Anyway if you're curious about it's performance here's an AIDA64 report from the machine as is: http://www.outfoxed.net/p67-xp/3570K-XP.html And here's a 3dmark 2006 result from a few days ago or last week, I forget at this point: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm06/18206515 You can see the OS as XP in the bottom under "General". I'm in the process of rebuilding the XP computer right now and putting the 780 back into it again. Would others be interested in me running a re-build log in the forums here with photos? I might could do that.

Also: this is kind of a shadow of the past XP rig I had. I own a sexy Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 motherboard (search for it on google to read about it, it's stupid nuts, 32-phase power Z77 motherboard) and I had the same 3570K in that system clocked @ 5.3 Ghz with this same ram I'm running now @ 2500 Mhz in it. But sadly that motherboard crapped out on me and it won't run any more and I'm reduced to this P67 board because I can't find any other "stupidly exotic and high end Z77 chipset motherboards" online for sale for a decent price so this P67 Extreme4 will have to do for XP rig for now. It's a shadow of it's former glory but it's still decent.

 

IPX/SPX was the backbone of lan communications before tcp/ip became popular on the desktop, and it's still quite reliable if used in the same era setup. If there's packet loss on the lan, there's bigger problems to worry about!

That http server sounds neat. I would like to try it out. Every so often I want to file transfer between systems that aren't running smb and it would be nice to try out your neat little server versus ftping back and forth to a local server.

 

Gotcha. I would love to see a re-build log and also see the speed-battle results since that's basically the only metric I check between systems. What was really interesting to me on the AIDA was how well the dual x5550 supermicro server board did because it's basically the same thing as my z600, r410, and r710 systems. It explains why they feel so fast sometimes.

Have you talked to gigabyte about repairing the board? Finding boards in good condition is getting harder and harder, and it would probably be easier to just get your original one fixed.

 

I doubt it. I had the VRM water cooled with a VRM water block and I had a problem 2 years ago of an old radiator I was using (9-12 years old at that point) finally sprung a small leak and the water level ran low while I was away from home and left it on and idle and the VRM overheated and killed the first 3570K. That Z77X board never has worked right since then. It wouldn't even try to turn on. Flip switch.. nothing other than LED's light up. Power switch dead, board won't try to turn on, just does nothing. I left it removed from a system in a box in the closet for 3 months and brought it out and it powered on and ran again for about 8-10 months with another replacement 3570K in it and then one day I went to turn it on last spring 2020 and it just did the old "I'm dead and won't even try to run" BS so it's permanently in a box now. I might put it on ebay for like $20 starting bid on auction, have them pay shipping and let it go to someone else (and fully describe everything wrong with it). This P67 works for now but the power system in it isn't as clean as it was in the Z77X (smaller VRM) so it won't run at the same high clocks the Z77X would (slower CPU OC & slower Ram OC). I'll keep my eyes out on ebay for some other crazy ivy bridge era board. Or later I have thought of trying to use an exotic X79 era motherboard with quad channel ram. Almost all X79 motherboards have native XP-32 drivers on their respective websites for download (I'm not sure if everyone knows that.. now you do) so that should be the last "XP Compatible" computers we could build. I don't need a lot of CPU cores for XP though as with it being DirectX-9 only all games are single core based so a quad core is fine for it. Sorry for rambling.. it's just thoughts that have gone through my mind. I might see about starting a thread on the rebuild then and embed some photos since at least 1 person seems interested.

 

I think you might have mentioned the water cooling before killing it as it rang a bell. Great to know the full story behind it. Yep, and it's good to know what era motherboards support xp with readily available drivers. And xp support isn't limited to consumer chipsets--the Intel C602 and 5520 chipsets also have full xp driver support (at least on my HP z420 and z600), so even though these support 24 cores and up to 256GB of ram (z420), you can still also boot xp on them. I've even gotten xp to run well on Dell servers--the 2950, R410, and R710. And xp is pretty bulletproof on these platforms with their ecc reg memory and enterprise class sas storage. I think the 2950 had a power on time of over 6 months before I had to shut it off for the summer (generates a lot of heat under load) and I think the R410 was only shut down to test a ram upgrade, but was otherwise up for over a year now. The best part is that you can get these servers for free if you look in the right places.

 

I'm not even sure if I'm on topic for this thread any more so I hope whatever admins here don't slap me but on the topic of "Which hardware is compatible with XP": Well.. personally I was going after the absolute highest performance possible for gaming for Windows XP myself. In that pursuit I discovered there really was only two options: AMD's AM3+ platform (Almost all AMD AM3 & AM3+ motherboards all should have native XP-32 drivers on their respective websites) and Intel's Ivy Bridge platforms. After I discovered that I started comparing performance data to figure out which is faster. A preface: My comments below are not "Fanboyism" or "Biased". I do not deal in that sort of thing. In my comments here are I am only talking about actual facts and raw data, not conjecture. Disclaimer aside I looked into some old results from overclocking websites like hwbot, and various internet forums for reports of CineBench R11.5, R15, and R20, using their single core benchmarks and also I compared SuperPi results. SuperPi is a CPU benchmark program that only uses 1 thread so I could look at single-threaded performance (Completing the test in less time = faster by the way). Here's some of that data I found that's most telling.

Someone took an AMD FX processor for AM3+, overclocked it to 7130 Mhz with liquid nitrogen and ran SuperPi on it. The result is here:

Then compare that to someone with an Intel I5-3570K running the same benchmark here:

Note that the I5-350K above is even running -300 Mhz below it's factory default / stock speeds too.

Once I found this information I abandoned all thoughts about trying anything to do with AMD and I focused enitrely on Intel's Ivy Bridge line and worked on motherboards that allowed extreme levels of overclocking to try and OC it to the moon for even more performance. I've even gone in to the crazy realm of removing the metal IHS from the 3570K, and I have a specialized water block from Germany (Heatkiller IV Pro Intel, Nickel Plated) that is designed with the exact mounting pressure to mount Intel processors in their sockets without the normal latch or it's IHS cover, bare chip direct to the water block like AthlonXP and some Pentium-III processors worked. So that's what I ended up using. Also another comment: My water cooled computers are not like those "Expensive beauty builds with $1000 in water parts with hand bent tubes" and such you see on reddit. I'm more of a "will never ever possibly leak for any reason" sort and I use tubing with old barb-style clamps and worm-drive clamps from autozone. It may not be pretty but I have used this sort of setup in multiple computer builds since the 2000's and I haven't had a leak from fittings or tubing or clamps yet. I stay with what works and is proven reliable.

 

And I made a typo in the above post but can't edit it.. ugh.

 

You said you would like to see it so re-build log is started over here: https://www.xpforums.com/threads/exotic-windows-xp-build.934546/