Time Capsule Laptop!

Volphin

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Jun 5, 2011
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1,405
This nice older lady gave my mom a laptop because she doesn't use it anymore. So she asked me to come and take a look at it. What I saw astounded me!
Sitting on her table was a circa 2004(?) Sony Vaio PCG-K23. It has a 100Gb drive and 1Gb of RAM, running XP. Opened up Microsoft office, and it ran like a 383 with a blower strapped to it.

The odd thing is, it is mint. Not a scratch, dent, smudge, dust particle, worn key or any wear whatsoever! It looks like it just transported itself from 2005! Kinda erie actually. Who knows, maybe this lady bought it, tried it, and was too intimidated by it to use it?

Here's the kicker though… I hate to see perfectly good stuff go to waste, if someone can use it. What do I do with this thing? Obviously XP is no good for surfing nowadays...
 

GA_Boater

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Sounds like a perfect candidate to load up one of the flavors of Linux. While it might run like a supercharged 383 with XP, up any MS upgrade will turn it into a Yugo with flat tires.
 

dingbat

Supreme Mariner
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Nov 20, 2001
Messages
15,413
I still have my company "Winbook FX laptop running Windows 95 from back in my Project Management days.You wouldn't believe how many miles I lugged that brick around the world.

Hasn't been out of the bottom desk door in probably 7-8 years, but its still there...lol
 

Scott Danforth

Grumpy Vintage Moderator still playing with boats
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XP is still so much faster than Windows 10
 

garbageguy

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May 8, 2012
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...Obviously XP is no good for surfing nowadays...

Why not? I do it from my "home PC" running XP. Sure, it's not great, but we use it occasionally for that, and Word - until it dies. Then I have a new anchor,,,
 

boatman37

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May 14, 2015
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Security issues. MS no longer supports it so any new found vulnerabilities will not be patched. you can still use it for Word or anything else that can be done offline but i would not be getting on the internet with it or even connecting it to your network
 

mla2ofus

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Dec 30, 2008
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571
Wife is still using our 2002 Gateway desktop with XP for scrap booking, etc. No online use.
Mike
 

82rude

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I cant see where surfing the net would be an issue.If your worried don't put personal info or banking info on it .Theres still many security programs for it also.I have a couple of friends that still use it for everything and no issues so far.jmho.
 

boatman37

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if it gets infected with malware it can spread to other devices on your network. if you use an account with admin privileges as your regular account (as many do) and an attacker gets in he now has access to your SAM file, which is the database that stores all of the hashed passwords on that computer. look up rainbow tables and you will see why this is bad, if you are like most people then those passwords are likely the same passwords you use for everything, including banking, etc.

with XP most users just used an admin account (myself included) for daily usage because it was a pain to install software or make system changes. it required you to log out and to log back in with an admin account. windows vista (which was horrible) started using User Account Control. with UAC you can use a standard account as your normal account and just enter the admin credentials into the UAC box when it popped up if you were installing something. the threat here is if you are using an admin account and that gets hit then the malware now has admin access to your machine (including your SAM account). with a standard account the malware only has access to non-admin files and functions

didn't mean for this to be a long post but it takes a bit to tie everything together
 

GA_Boater

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I cant see where surfing the net would be an issue.If your worried don't put personal info or banking info on it .Theres still many security programs for it also.I have a couple of friends that still use it for everything and no issues so far.jmho.

Look what happened last Friday. A good chunk of the Web was brought by modern, fairly up to date devices being infected with a virus - Webcams. XP is just as vulnerable, even more so.
 

mjf55

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Jun 17, 2014
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462
I am not even sure Linux would run too well on it. It would have to be a base version, minimum graphic, no KDE or Gnome, but Xfce or LXDE desktops would work.
 

Keith Ogden

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Jul 22, 2016
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37
No Title

I got that beat . Here is my 1991 ThinkPad 700C with original dock . Still works . How about a 33Mhz with 4mb ram and a 120MB hard drive ? still has Windows 95 on it .. God I am a GEEK just for keeping this thing . Weighs in at about 12# ... and cost a whopping $4000 !
 

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boatman37

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May 14, 2015
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didn't mean to be the bearer of bad news but there are some bad people out there that are very good at what they do. on top of that there are tools out there now that allows rookies to hack a system with limited knowledge.and that goes for any operating system, not just XP. just that XP is more susceptible to it since there are no more patches or updates for any new found vulnerabilities.

i work in this industry so i read about it all the time and i'm always thinking from a security perspective
 

dolluper

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Jul 19, 2004
Messages
3,900
Keep the xp loaded and run off a line live cd like knop pix and hack win s 10 hehe
 

gm280

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Jun 26, 2011
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Actually we still have a desktop that runs XP. But that is because we use it to drive our large bed professional Universal LAZER engraver. And since both are older machines, it works pretty well. The problem is we want to upgrade to at least Win10 on a new desktop. But the drivers for our Universal LAZER machine may not be there to support the older Universal LAZER system. It is always a search and find game when you own computers. JMHO
 

thumpar

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Jun 21, 2007
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I have been working on computers for a while now. We were Compaq authorized. Some of the ones I worked on were black and white screens still under warranty models. I still have one of the beige Compaq laptops with Win95 on it.
 
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