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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.

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Recently I had an issue activating XP on Eee PC after a RAM/SSD upgrade (setting it up as a retro-gaming console, better performance than RetroPie). I had to resort to registry hacks and msoobe to suppress activation forever, despite having product key at the back of the netbook - XP CD wasn't accepting it at all. One more situation where legal owners have to waste more time than pirates... If ReactOS makes it far enough to run on Eee PC, I'll get rid of XP.

I use a lot of virtual machines across all versions of Windows. What I've found is that almost every time online activation fails, if I do the telephone activation, it goes though. Just wanted to pass that along in case you or someone else runs into this again.

I tried phone activation as well, it was rejected. I typed all installation numbers correctly.

Dang, I was hoping to help :(

If the automated telephone doesn't work, you used to be able to stay on the line (or just don't enter anything) and talk to a person. They can usually help.

It sounds like you were trying to activate the OEM key on your netbook using retail media.

Yes, that's the case. Unfortunately, ASUS didn't provide installation media, just recovery media, which only works for their 4GB/12GB SSD combo and was failing operation when I tried it on a new SSD. So I tried regular XP Home ISO, but was out of luck.

I'm not a Windows licensing expert, but this is basically how it works:

1. You can't use the OEM license with retail installation media.

2. You don't get OEM installation media because the license is tied to the hardware.

3. The OEM recovery media can't be restored to different hardware.

4. The OEM license key can't be used to install a retail Windows install on a different computer.

Simply wonderful! ReactOS is really needed...

I feel you. It really sucks that ASUS's recovery media doesn't let you replace or upgrade your memory or storage. Those are user-serviceable parts, IMO.

I am not sure if ASUS won't allow it by principle, but Eee PC 901 was using odd SSDs based on Mini PCIe with the same form-factor as mSATA SSD, but different electric circuitry, so regular mSATA drives couldn't work and you had to get an adapter converting mini PCIe into mSATA first. And once you plugged it in, primary master disappeared, so I guess that's what confused recovery media. They likely couldn't predict the future of SSD interfaces and were using some early prototypes before standardization.

It's a strange situation when a Windows licensing expert is actually a thing.

Commercial software licensing has always been a PITA, especially at the enterprise level. I just thank sweet baby Jesus every day I don't have to deal with IBM or Oracle.

There must be a chart somewhere that shows customer lifetime value vs. churn vs. licensing complexity.

At some low number of customers, the more complex you make your licensing, the fewer people buy and the fewer people renew, and since piracy is roughly zero anyway, you make your licensing simple.

Then something magical happens somewhere in the middle, where either piracy becomes scarier or your customers are more locked into your ecosystem. Then the more complex you make your licensing, for some reason the more profit you can get out of your customers. It must be this way, otherwise we'd have no way to account for MS/Oracle/IBM.

I wonder where the crossover points on the chart are.

* How much piracy do you take before you make your licensing a nightmare?

* How "enterprise" do you have to go before you stop worrying that making your software a massive pain to install and upgrade won't bleed your customers away?

If you think that's bad, you can get Microsoft Certified Professional certified on licensing. On at least 3 separate exams. I am certified on licensing.

It is possible to create an OEM install disc.

I've done it once in the past and it wasn't super complicated. It looks like it might be harder to find the oembios files now, but I bet you can still accomplish this if you're determined.

https://superuser.com/questions/539714/windows-all-oem-activ... has some details that could get your pointed in the right direction

>Eee PC

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

I was doing "spring cleaning" and found a box with Eee 901, so I was thinking whether to post it on eBay and sell for scraps, or upgrade it and make it a retro-gaming monster ;-)

Funny.... I also just dug an Eee 901 out of a box (it used to run Windows Home Server).

Honestly, just grab a Raspberry Pi for your retro gaming console. It almost certainly does the job better, and the power usage difference will pay for itself soon enough.

RPi is way slower than Eee 901... You'd get many more demanding games working smoothly on Eee than on any RPi. I have RPi as well and was considering making a RetroPie console, but performance was not there. You can even buy faster handheld consoles from China for $25 these days...

I'd suggest a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (can you even buy an original Pi?), with more than 3x the single-threaded performance of an original Pi. I'd wager comparable single-threaded raw performance to the N270, a 10 year old chip at this point.

GPU performance, I'd put my money on the Pi 3B+ over the Eee. Heck, I may even get mine running again to run some benchmarks... or Google for the inevitable raft of folks who already have.

I would need to see data supporting the assertion that it is "way slower than Eee 901". Off the top of my head, I'd expect it to trade blows with the N270. I'd also be surprised if the support for the Eee 901 was anywhere near as strong as the Pi from the retro gaming community, but, honestly, I haven't put together a retro-gaming rig since, maybe, 2001. Maybe it's time to put together two...

I was using an EEE 1001px as my main computer until a few months ago when I finally got myself a new laptop. I did replace the battery two years ago, but besides that it all parts were the original from 2010. I really like this little computer.

I'm currently using an Asus VivoBook E200H ( https://www.asus.com/uk/Laptops/ASUS-Vivobook-E200HA/ ) as my main computer, which is somewhere between a netbook and a notebook. If it didn't have such limited internal storage (32GB SSD, not upgradable without desoldering) I'd be happy to recommend it. There are plenty of pluses (super portable, long battery life, decent keyboard, etc...).

Microsoft held back the netbook market by setting strict requirements on the tech specs required for Windows licencing, without that restriction I'd suggest we'd still have a healthy market for netbooks today.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2526983/microsoft-wind...

> ""Our license tells you what a netbook is," said Ballmer at the Microsoft-hosted day with Wall Street analysts. "Our license says it's got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.""

> "Last May, the Malaysian Web site TechARP.com, which regularly leaks information provided to computer makers by Microsoft, reported that the company would restrict Starter to specific netbook configurations. According to TechARP, Microsoft will only sell Starter to OEMs for use on netbooks that have a 10.2-in. or smaller screen, no more than 1GB of memory, a hard disk drive of 250GB or less (or a solid-state drive no larger than 64GB) and a single-core processor no faster than 2GHz."

I've been fiddling around with my Eee PC 701 in the past couple of weeks. Is there still a community for this sort of thing? RetroPie supports Eee PC?

I bricked mine ages ago, unfortunately - I really liked it, despite the keyboard being just a bit too small.

I have the next gen 901; you can use any of the 32-bit emulation platforms on Windows and the 1.6GHz Atom (that could be overclocked to 1.8) is significantly faster than any Raspberry Pi, so you have a larger pool of games you can play at a proper speed. I upgraded it to 2GB RAM/60GB SSD, and it really flies. It's only slightly larger than a handheld console, so I thought converting it to a retro machine would be perfect use for it ;-) I tried Linux Mint on it initially but it was much slower than XP, so I am sticking with XP.

The last time I was using my eeePC 901, I managed to put Windows 8 on it, and I remember it being faster than either the XP or Ubuntu/Mint varieties I tried on it.

Slitaz would blew both 8 and Mint. Try it.

Those were fun little machines. I wish mine would still boot... my black 700 has been bricked for years, but it was awesome for college. Especially for those awful, tiny, half-desks that college classrooms seem to always have.

I think by the time the OS is usable the available hardware won't have any drivers. I think it will be a VM only OS.

I also have an EeePC, I created an OEM CD looking for OEMBIOS.bin and SLP activation.

I don't remember if it works/worked with XP, but OEM Win 7 can usually be activated via phone, even if the key was refused during installation.

Yeah, DOSBox is nice for retro gaming or even the oddball application, but it pales in comparison to the potential of this project.

The place where DOSBox isn't sufficient is for games in that Win 95/98/2000 era. Most of those don't run very well, if at all on modern Windows, unless somebody still has the source and bothers to rerelease a modern "HD edition" or somesuch. I still have to keep a Win 98 VM so I can play Sierra's Civil War Generals 2 from time to time.

I heard that DOSBox can run Windows 3.1 to run 16 but Windows games. I also heard someone hacked Win95 and Win98 to run under DOSbox. You could just use QEMU emulate a Pentium box and install 95 or 98 under that as an alternative.

Dosbox runs windows 3.1 perfectly, with resolutions up to at least 1280x1024 (what I use for tetris) _or_ true color mode (unfortunately not both). You can supposedly install 95/98 in it, but I've had trouble actually using them in it.

Cracks will always be around... and XP is one of the "simpler" ones compared to the newer Windows.

"security" isn't a big deal either, just keep all your ports closed and don't run untrusted code or unnecessary services. AFAIK all the exploits have been on services and such, which shouldn't be exposed to the Internet anyway.

Newer Windows is still only two shell commands away from activation.

Do tell

KMS servers. there are a bunch on the internet you can use, and you can even run one locally on your LAN. only catch is you can't run the server locally (although you can patch out system files to bypass this), and you need to connect to the server every 180 days to refresh your ticket.

Even better buy a $10 key on ebay.

Life gets a lot better when you start running Win10 security.

IE: Win10 can run the password manager service on a separate VM now automatically. Hell, you can start new version of Microsoft Edge in a clean and isolated VM, requiring the attacker to use a hypervisor zero-day to pwn your box. And since the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor is often running through UEFI secure boot with assistance of the TPM modules on the motherboard, and because the Hypervisor has very few services running (really: any service is in its own VM), its a much, much harder attack surface to go through.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/09/27/application-g...

Security features that add convenience (ie: group policy allows admins to automatically open websites in "Application Guard" mode) helps a lot. When the user literally only has to wait ~5 to ~10 seconds to boot up a clean version of IE isolated inside of a VM (separated in a RDP session), its much easier to have widespread security throughout a network.

I mean really: think about the security model needed to pwn AppGuard + IE. You either need to pwn the RDP session (unlikely, but hey its possible). Or, you figure out how to escape an isolated VM, when said VM has virtually all applications locked out. I saw a security demo of AppGuard recently. You can't run cmd.exe, you can't run powershell, you have zero permissions inside of your VM. If you somehow escape the sandbox, you STILL have to break through a hypervisor to get to the user.

Its way, way WAY easier to do "proper security" with Win10 + all of the virtualization tricks (AppGuard, Credential Guard, Device Guard). The modern Win10 security model is beginning to be immune to even kernel-mode exploits.

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With that being said: WinXP has security problems with modern Win Vista+ because that's the edition where Microsoft decided that direct-hardware access is a BAD IDEA for standard usermode applications.

WinXP allows any user-mode application to directly talk with the hardware. Win Vista+ does NOT allow it. And that broke a ton of programs (old controller hardware, printer drivers, etc. etc.)

Fixing security issues causes compatibility problems.

Ive considered this in a few things.

What if we could go back and access that infrastructure, what lessons could we learn?

I really dont know, but I personally see this as useful from an entertainment POV, let alone function.

Good thought, never saw it from an archiving point of view!

Don't all new Windows releases ship with backwards compatibility modes?

I wouldn’t count on Microsoft supporting XP era software 10 or 20 years from now, and I wouldn’t ask them to.

I recall seeing videos on YouTube of Windows 1.0 applications running on Windows 10, so I suppose it really depends on what type of software exactly; more system-level things like disk defragmenters are unlikely to work, but basic productivity software likely will continue working. I personally have a few from Win95 era which I still use regularly, and of course I'd expect the basic Hello World messagebox binary to remain usable 10 years from now.

Basic applications such as that, sure. But the top parent comment referred to games, which are the opposite in terms of complexity and operating system features, and generally harder to support adequately in emulation.

I doubt it will be too long before 32-bit versions of Windows are no longer produced or supported. The 64-bit versions do not run 16-bit software. When that time inevitably comes, the Windows 1.0 software will also stop working in native Windows (rather than a 32-bit or even 16-bit Windows version running through emulation).

They do until Microsoft decides they don't. Unfortunately I don't know of any guarantees that MS has made about forever supporting XP comparability.

It's already quite well known that some Windows XP era games cannot run properly on Windows10. It does not affect every game out there, but it's easy to find enough to say this is a problem.

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