The pain and joy of using an old OS on hardware newer than it is
And what can you do with it?
Even with some relatively current antivirus installed and your firewall on, we'd recommend going into Windows Setup and unticking every optional item that you can, and the same goes for all forms of sharing, remote desktop, remote assistance, and remote anything else. Avoid any proffered online tools from Microsoft itself, such as Outlook Express or Windows Media Player: if it runs on XP, it's hopelessly obsolete. The latest versions of VLC and 7Zip both work fine. Notepad++ version 7.9.
We also grabbed a copy of MS Office 97, the version we tend to favor. It has the same file formats used up until the 2007 release, so it's easy to convert its files in modern apps, and it has an order of magnitude more features than we'll ever need. At the time that Office 97 was released, it was widely held to be bloated and sluggish, and the shipped version had somebugs. However, Service Releases 1 and 2B fixed most of these, and they're on the Internet Archive too.
By modern standards, Office 97 is tiny and very fast indeed. We installed the core suite – Word, Excel and Powerpoint – omitting the ancient version of Outlook as that by nature needs to go online to be used. We also turned off some other unloved"features" such as the Office Assistant, the file-indexing tool, Office Binder and so on, but enabled all the file import and export filters. After updating it with both service releases, it took a whoppingof disk space.
Julio Merino is absolutely right. Even the relatively bloated-for-the-time Office 97 on the equally-bloated-in-its-day XP, when run on this 15-year-old laptop, are fast, snappy and responsive. XP64 boots in half a minute, and large apps snap open in under a second.
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