Hi folks
I'm having a lot of fun (also with a lot of others) keeping this venerable old OS alive and decently fit to run on modern hardware . It's so much faster than current W10 and depending on what you need to do its still 100% safe if you incorporate everything until the EOL.

There's quite a lot of info in scattered areas of the web -- good place to start
HOWTO create a XP SP4 DVD with all DriverPacks and some apps - RyanVM.net Discussion Board

The trick is of course to start with a decent XP iso, install nlite and slipstream all the drivers you need - driverpacks are still available.

I know some will say why bother - but this is quite fun and you do get to run a really fast slick version of Windows as a VM that customises nice and easily. Office 2003/2007/2010 runs like a charm on it -- unless you need the latest features of office -- usually the collaboration stuff these versions of office are probably good enough for 99% of typical "Officy tasks" - and even if you don't want office - outlook express is still IMO the best simple email client that I've ever used (and supports imap).

Firefox esr runs perfectly OK on it too. You don't need IE -- just slipstream it into the install.

Once I've done that and got it working - I'll switch to W2K3 server -- even faster OS !!!and apply the same modifications.

I'll try and make a decent project text for this (as well as running W2K19 server as a desktop Virtual Machine)

I've got a bit of time these days --and I do find it quite fun.

I'm finding messing around with W10 not so interesting any more -- doesn't seem to be much challenge in it - since new builds always seem to be breaking something and if one were to use nlite or equivalent it's difficult to know what components to leave out.

I might also look at WinXP 64 bit too -- a bit more complex though.

Cheers
jimbo