You’ll be surprised at how much your computer appears to speed up when you install Windows fresh. There are also cheaper ways to get Windows 10. However, if you don’t mind waiting for delivery, you can buy Windows 10 Home from Amazon for £68. Windows 10 Home costs €149.99 from Microsoft. It isn’t a limitation of Windows 10 but of XP: even if you wanted to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP you’d have to wipe your hard disk and start again. You’ll have to do a clean installation as there’s no way to upgrade and keep your files, settings and programs. All you have to do is choose Settings and create a half-dozen virtual drives, then mount each one to an ISO on the host machine.However, if you can’t afford that, you might be able to install Windows 10. The files are ISOs, so download Virtual CloneDrive in the VM (you might have to right-click the exe, open properties, and press "unblock") and mount each file to install it. Save "Service Pack 1a", "Service Pack 2 (English)" and "Service Pack 3 (x86)" to the shared folder on your host machine. Otherwise, there's a couple places you can get the SPs from (at least). If you selected the "with Service Pack 3" option like I mentioned, then skip this section. XP is ancient but we might as well update it where we can. Now you can download Chrome (it'll install v49, the last supported version for XP), Firefox 52.9.0esr (Mozilla's last supported version, but you'll likely have to install SP2 first), or Opera 36 (you get the picture) on the host machine, drop them in the shared folder, and install them from the VM. XP had really minimal requirements, so a couple gigs of memory should be more than enough. It's a pita to resize the partition afterwards, so give it 30 or 40 GB at least. Give it plenty of hard disk space if you plan on installing other apps. If you're doing this from MSDN, select the "with Service Pack 3" option to make life easier. You can't install service packs on 64-bit systems, so you may want to choose the 32-bit option. Sure, that's annoying, but you're not seriously using this for anything serious are you? Note 2: I won't share any keys or recommend where to find them, but you were allowed to use XP for 60 days without activating, so you could probably use any key you find and you'll be good for a couple months. It doesn't work on Windows 10 easily, but there's usually a workaround.
Note 1: If you just need to run something in XP with a minimum of fuss, check out the free Windows XP Mode app that runs XP inside of Windows 7. With that in mind, let's check out the best of Windows yesteryear. it's retro time! Isn't it funny how something brand new comes out and we get excited, then we get annoyed with it's deficiencies, then it's forgotten when something better comes out, and finally after enough time we get all nostalgic and pull it out of mothballs?
I just got access to an MSDN account with keys for various versions of Windows and Visual Studio, so.
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