09/13/2026
I received this HP desktop box that still had the original Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system that it was shipped with installed. This was the last official XP edition released in 2002 before Windows 7 was released in 2009. The XP OS is over 25 years old now. It has the final service pack (SP3) installed as of 12/2007.
The manufacture dates of 10/2005 are all over the hardware, so the hardware is about to be 21 years old. It has a Pentium D CPU, 2GB of RAM, 350GB SATA HD, a 128MB video equipped TV and radio tuner card,10/100 network port, USB and with 3ch sound integrated. The DVD R/W drive is equipped with laser label printer. Basically, it has all the bells and whistles of the HP product line at the time and it would have been a prime candidate of updating to Windows 7. With a life expectancy of a few more years after a 2GB RAM upgrade. A decent PC for its time. The TV tuner card is actually still digitally supported. The unit was kept clean and I am really impressed that it still operates nominally.
So, with that is has been sitting around gathering more dust since it arrived on my doorstep until today.
As I was going through some old RAM that I have collected from salvage PC's and came across 2 Patriot DDR2 1GB DIMMs in the collection and it dawned on me to see if they would fit this PC. Same speed and size was my initial thought, opened up the HP box and checked and they indeed proved to be compatible.
So, after 21 years it has received a memory upgrade to 4GB of RAM taking it to the maximum available for the motherboard.
Now, the question is do I proceed to upgrade it to Windows 7?
Currently, I can remote desktop into it from a Windows 11 PC and it works great. Fast and responsive. I'm digging out some old games that I have on CD were fun to play like Warcraft II and Outpost.
With that said, that is about all it can do. However, XP uses a 8/16 bit network stack. Windows 7 took this to a 16/32 bit stack. I can do basic FTP transfers that has 128/256 bit encryption. Anything above TTS 1.0, there is no support for this under XP. Additionally , the XP OS uses FAT32 with no NTFS support.
So, it can reach the internet, it just cannot communicate with anything else properly. It currently cannot resolve any DNS server addresses due to the network stack. But, it will resolve pings and perform trace route with a modified hosts file for basic routing to a available 8/16/32/64 bit DNS server through a configured VPN.
This surprisingly worked, however it was very slow.
The fax/modem also works. There is only one modem service that is still operating and that is NetZero and it connected to it at 56kps today.
Anyways, I'll consider any other ideas for it. To get it usable on my network it will need to be upgraded to Windows 7 at least.
It can become a legacy box for games only Maybe some worth as an VM image.🤓
