Quite a few people here sound like ideal candidates to try ReactOS. It is an open source implementation of the NT architecture and should generally slot in for most software including drivers. It works quite well and plenty of people have managed to get old hardware working on ReactOS that was not otherwise ssfe to connect to a network. It works just like Windows NT and looks very similar but also supports more modern security standards and software.
I tried it twice and not a single time it clicked with my hardware. The idea is great though and might solve few problems for me (old software on modern PC).
Damn, that sucks. What sort of stuff were you trying to keep running? I haven’t got a lot of old hardware anymore after moving a bunch of times, everything I have is modern old, around to 5 to 8 year mark, so no hardware support issues but also nothing powerful enough to do anything fun with.
E.g. I spent a lot of time trying to convince specific old and outdated branch of AutoCAD-like program (never heard the name before or after) to work on anything past WinXP for my dad. He used that specific one at work and can’t get past anything else due to UI and workflow differences. I ended up running it in VM XP, because it was the only sane way…
Very cool. I helped my uncle get a tiny component of an old architecture program he paid a few thousand for working in a VM because literally nobody had made the same type of file converter since them and for some reason nobody minds having one machine running Windows XP on a machine in the corner. His XP machine died so I grabbed the disk and reimaged XP into a VM, brought over the files, and boom, that program runs and will continue to do so on a machine without network access but with a single folder mount point for dropping files back and forth.
Quite a few people here sound like ideal candidates to try ReactOS. It is an open source implementation of the NT architecture and should generally slot in for most software including drivers. It works quite well and plenty of people have managed to get old hardware working on ReactOS that was not otherwise ssfe to connect to a network. It works just like Windows NT and looks very similar but also supports more modern security standards and software.
I tried it twice and not a single time it clicked with my hardware. The idea is great though and might solve few problems for me (old software on modern PC).
Damn, that sucks. What sort of stuff were you trying to keep running? I haven’t got a lot of old hardware anymore after moving a bunch of times, everything I have is modern old, around to 5 to 8 year mark, so no hardware support issues but also nothing powerful enough to do anything fun with.
E.g. I spent a lot of time trying to convince specific old and outdated branch of AutoCAD-like program (never heard the name before or after) to work on anything past WinXP for my dad. He used that specific one at work and can’t get past anything else due to UI and workflow differences. I ended up running it in VM XP, because it was the only sane way…
Very cool. I helped my uncle get a tiny component of an old architecture program he paid a few thousand for working in a VM because literally nobody had made the same type of file converter since them and for some reason nobody minds having one machine running Windows XP on a machine in the corner. His XP machine died so I grabbed the disk and reimaged XP into a VM, brought over the files, and boom, that program runs and will continue to do so on a machine without network access but with a single folder mount point for dropping files back and forth.
ReactOS rocks!