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• Running Windows XP In 2016

  2 janvier 2016, par Multimedia Mike

  I have an interest in getting a 32-bit Windows XP machine up and running. I have a really good yet slightly dated and discarded computer that seemed like a good candidate for dedicating to this task. So the question is : Can Windows XP still be installed from scratch on a computer, activated, and used in 2016 ? I wasn’t quite sure since I have heard stories about how Microsoft has formally ended support for Windows XP as of the first half of 2014 and I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

  Spoiler : It’s still possible to install and activate Windows XP as of the writing of this post. It’s also possible to download and install all the updates published up until support ended.

  The Candidate Computer
  This computer was assembled either in late 2008 or early 2009. It was a beast at the time.

  
  
  Click for a larger image
  

  It was built around the newly-released NVIDIA GTX 280 video card. The case is a Thermaltake DH-101, which is a home theater PC thing. The motherboard is an Asus P5N32-SLI Premium with a Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz CPU on board. 2 GB of RAM and a 1.5 TB hard drive are also present.

  The original owner handed it off to me because their family didn’t have much use for it anymore (too many other machines in the house). Plus it was really, obnoxiously loud. The noisy culprit was the stock blue fan that came packaged with the Intel processor (seen in the photo) whining at around 65 dB. I replaced the fan and brought the noise level way down.

  As for connectivity, the motherboard has dual gigabit NICs (of 2 different chipsets for some reason) and onboard wireless 802.11g. I couldn’t make the latter work and this project was taking place a significant distance from my wired network. Instead, I connected a USB 802.11ac dongle and antenna which is advertised to work in both Windows XP and Linux. It works great under Windows XP. Meanwhile, making the adapter work under Linux provided a retro-computing adventure in which I had to modify C code to make the driver work.

  So, score 1 for Windows XP over Linux here.

  The Simple Joy of Retro-computing
  One thing you have to watch out for when you get into retro-computing is fighting the urge to rant about the good old days of computing. Most long-time computer users have a good understanding of the frustration that computers keep getting faster by orders of magnitude and yet using them somehow feels slower and slower over successive software generations.
  

  This really hits home when you get old software running, especially on high-end hardware (relative to what was standard contemporary hardware). After I got this new Windows XP machine running, as usual, I was left wondering why software was so much faster a few generations ago.

  Of course, as mentioned, it helps when you get to run old software on hardware that would have been unthinkably high end at the software’s release. Apparently, the minimum WinXP specs as set by MS are a 233 MHz Pentium CPU and 64 MB of RAM, with 1.5 GB of hard drive space. This machine has more than 10x the clock speed (and 2 CPUs), 32x the RAM, and 1000x the HD space. Further, I’m pretty sure 100 Mbit ethernet was the standard consumer gear in 2001 while 802.11b wireless was gaining traction. The 802.11ac adapter makes networking quite pleasant.

  Purpose
  Retro-computing really seems to be ramping up in popularity lately. For some reason, I feel compelled to declare at this juncture that I was into it before it was cool.

  Why am I doing this ? I have a huge collection of old DOS/Windows computer games. I also have this nerdy obsession with documenting old video games in the MobyGames database. I used to do a lot of this a few years ago, tracking the effort on my gaming blog. In the intervening years, I have still collected a lot of old, unused, unloved video games, usually either free or very cheap while documenting my collection efforts on that same blog.

  So I want to work my way through some of this backlog, particularly the games that are not yet represented in the MobyGames database, and even more pressing, ones that the internet (viewed through Google at least) does not seem to know about. To that end, I thought this was a good excuse to get Windows XP on this old machine. A 32-bit Windows XP machine is capable of running any software advertised as supporting Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95, and even 16-bit Windows 3.x (I have games for all these systems). That covers a significant chunk of PC history. It can probably be made to run DOS games as well, but those are (usually) better run under DosBox. In order to get the right display feel, I even invested in a (used) monitor sporting a 4:3 aspect ratio. If I know these old games, most will be engineered and optimized for that ratio rather than the widescreen resolutions seen nowadays.

  I would also like to get back to that Xbox optical disc experimentation I was working on a few years ago. Another nice feature of this motherboard is that it still provides a 40-pin IDE/PATA adapter which makes the machine useful for continuing that old investigation (and explains why I have that long IDE cable to no where pictured hanging off the board).

  The Messy Details
  I did the entire installation process twice. The first time was a bumbling journey of discovery and copious note-taking. I still have Windows XP installation media that includes service pack 2 (SP2), along with 2 separate licenses that haven’t been activated for a long time. My plan was to install it fresh, then install the relevant drivers. Then I would investigate the Windows update and activation issues and everything should be fine.

  So what’s the deal with Windows Update for XP, and with activations ? Second item first : it IS possible to still activate Windows XP. The servers are still alive and respond quickly. However, as always, you don’t activate until you’re sure everything is working at some baseline. It took awhile to get there.

  As for whether Windows Update still works for XP, that’s a tougher question. Short answer is yes ; longer answer is that it can be difficult to kick off the update process. At least on SP2, the “Windows Update” program launches IE6 and navigates to a special microsoft.com URL which initiates the update process (starting with an ActiveX control). This URL no longer exists.

  From what I can piece together from my notes, this seems to be the route I eventually took :

  1. Install Windows XP fresh
  2. Install drivers for the hardware ; fortunately, Asus still has all the latest drivers necessary for the motherboard and its components but it’s necessary to download these from another network-connected PC since the networking probably won’t be running “out of the box”
  3. Download the .NET 3.5 runtime, which is the last one supported by Windows XP, and install it
  4. Download the latest NVIDIA drivers ; this needs to be done after the previous step because the installer requires the .NET runtime ; run the driver installer and don’t try to understand why it insists on re-downloading .NET 3.5 runtime before installation
  5. While you’re downloading stuff on other computers to be transported to this new machine, be sure to download either Chrome or Firefox per your preference ; if you try to download via IE6, you may find that their download pages aren’t compatible with IE6
  6. Somewhere along the line (I’m guessing as a side effect of the .NET 3.5 installation), the proper, non-IE6-based Windows Update program magically springs to life ; once this happens, there will be 144 updates (in my case anyway) ; installing these will probably require multiple reboots, but SP3 and all known pre-deprecation security fixes will be installed
  7. Expect that, even after installing all of these, a few more updates will appear ; eventually, you’ll be at the end of the update road
  8. Once you’re satisfied everything is working satisfactorily, take the plunge and activate your installation

  Residual Quirks
  Steam runs great on Windows XP, as do numerous games I have purchased through the service. So that opens up a whole bunch more games that I could play on this machine. Steam’s installer highlights a curious legacy problem of Windows XP– it seems there are many languages that it does not support “out of the box” :

  
  
  

  It looks like the Chinese options and a few others that are standard now weren’t standard 15 years ago.

  Also, a little while after booting up, I’ll get a crashing error concerning a process called geoforms.scr. This appears to be NVIDIA-related. However, I don’t notice anything obviously operationally wrong with the system.

  Regarding DirectX support, DirectX 9 is the highest version officially supported by Windows XP. There are allegedly methods to get DirectX 10 running as well, but I don’t care that much. I did care, briefly, when I realized that a bunch of the demos for the NVIDIA GTX 280 required DX10 which left me wondering why it was possible to install them on Windows XP.

  Eventually, by installing enough of these old games, I fully expect to have numerous versions of .NET, DirectX, QT, and Video for Windows installed side by side.

  Out of curiosity, I tried playing a YouTube HD/1080p video. I wanted to see if the video was accelerated through my card. The video played at full speed but I noticed some tearing. Then I inspected the CPU usage and noticed that the CPU was quite loaded. So either the GTX 280 doesn’t have video acceleration, or Windows XP doesn’t provide the right APIs, or Chrome is not able to access the APIs in Windows XP, or perhaps some combination of the foregoing.

  Games are working well, though. I tried one of my favorite casual games and got sucked into that for, like, an entire night because that’s what casual games do. But then, I booted up a copy of WarCraft III that I procured sometime ago. I don’t have any experience with the WarCraft universe (RTS or MMO) but I developed a keen interest in StarCraft II over the past few years and wanted to try WarCraft III. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get WarCraft III to work correctly on several different Windows 7 installations (movies didn’t play, which left me slightly confused as to what I was supposed to do).

  Still works beautifully on the new old Windows XP machine.

• B2B Customer Journey Map : A Quickfire Guide for Growth

  20 mai 2024, par Erin

  What is a company’s biggest asset ?

  Its product ? Its employees ? Its unique selling proposition ?

  More and more people are recognising it’s something else entirely : your customers.

  Without your customers, your business can’t exist.

  Nearly 77% of B2B buyers found the buying process too complicated.

  With more competition than ever, it’s crucial you provide the best possible experience for them.

  That’s where your customer journey comes in.

  If you’re in the B2B space, you need to know how to map out the journey.

  By building a B2B customer journey map, you’ll be able to analyse the weak spots in the customer journey so you can improve the experience (and generate more revenue).

  In this article, we break down the B2B customer journey stages, how to build a customer journey map and how Matomo can help you track your customer journey automatically.

  What is a B2B customer journey ?

  Every customer goes through a specific path within your business.

  At some point in time, they found out about you and eventually bought your products.

  

  A B2B customer journey is the collection of touchpoints your customer has with your business from start to finish.

  From discovery to purchase (and more), your customers go through a specific set of touches you can track. By analysing this journey, you can get a snapshot of your user experience.

  One way to track the customer journey is with a B2B customer journey map.

  It helps you to quickly see the different steps your customers take in their path with your business.

  With it, you can quickly identify weak spots and successes to improve the customer journey.

  5 stages of the B2B customer journey

  Every one of your customers is unique. Their specific needs and their journey.

  It’s all different.

  But, there are crucial steps they take through their journey as your customer.

  It’s the same path your entire customer base takes.

  Here are the five stages of the B2B customer journey (and why you should track them) :

  

  1. Awareness

  Awareness is the first stage that every B2B buyer goes through when they start their journey in B2B companies as a customer.

  At this stage, your target buyer understands they have a problem they need solving. They’re out, actively trying to solve this problem. 

  This is where you can stand out from the competition and give them a good first impression.

  Some helpful content you could create to do this is :

  • Blog posts
  • Social media posts
  • Ebooks
  • Whitepapers

  2. Consideration

  Next up, your buyer persona has an awareness of your company. But, now they’ve started narrowing down their options for potential businesses they’re interested in.

  They’ve selected yours as a potential business to hand their hard-earned cash over to, but they’re still making up their mind.

  At this point, you need to do what you can to clear up any objections and doubts in their mind and make them trust you.

  Some helpful content you could create here include :

  • Product demos by your sales team
  • Webinars
  • Case studies

  3. Conversion

  Next up, your target buyer has compared all their options and decided on you as the chosen product/company.

  This is where the purchase decision is made — when the B2B buyer actually signs or clicks “buy.”

  Here, you’ll want to provide more :

  • Case studies
  • Live demos
  • Customer service
  • Customer reviews/testimonials

  4. Loyalty

  Your B2B buyer is now a customer. But, not all customers return. The majority will slip away after the first purchase. If you want them to return, you need to fuel the relationship and nurture them even more.

  You’ll want to shift your efforts to nurturing the relationship with a post-purchase strategy where you build on that trust, seek customer feedback to prove high customer satisfaction and reward their loyalty.

  Some content you may want to create here includes :

  • Thank you emails
  • Follow-up emails
  • Follow-up calls
  • Product how-tos
  • Reward program
  • Surveys

  5. Advocacy

  The final stage of the B2B customer journey map is advocacy.

  This is the stage beyond loyalty where your customers aren’t just coming back for more ; they’re actively telling others about you.

  This is the cream of the crop when it comes to the B2B buyer stages, and it happens when you exceed customer expectations repeatedly.

  Your goal should be to eventually get all of your customers to this stage. Because then, they’re doing free marketing for you.

  This is only possible when a customer receives enough positive B2B customer experiences with your company where the value they’ve received far exceeds what they perceived they have given.

  Here are a few pieces of content you can create to fuel advocacy :

  • Surveys
  • Testimonial requests
  • Referral program

  Difference between B2C and B2B customer journeys

  Every person on earth who buys something enters the customer journey.

  But, not all customer journeys are created equal.

  This is especially true when you compare the B2C and B2B customer journeys.

  While there are similarities, the business-to-consumer (B2C) journey has clear differences compared to the business-to-business (B2B) journey.

  

  The most obvious difference between the two journeys is that B2B customer journeys are far more complex. 

  Not only are these two companies selling to different audiences, but they also have to deploy a completely different set of strategies to lead their customers down the path as far as they can go.

  While the journey structures are similar (from awareness to advocacy), there are differing motivating behaviours.

  Here’s a table showing the difference between B2C and B2B in the customer journey :

  Different Factors	B2B	B2C
  Target audience	Smaller, industry more important	Larger, general consumer
  Buyer	Multiple decision-makers	One decision-maker
  Buying decision	Based on needs of the organisation with multiple stakeholders	Based on an individual’s pain points
  Buying process	Multiple steps	Single step
  Customer retention	Organisational needs and ROI-based	Individual emotional factors
  Repeat sales driver	Deep relationship	Repetition, attention-based

  Step-by-step guide to building a B2B customer journey map

  Now that you’ve got a basic understanding of the typical B2B customer journey, it’s time to build out your map so you can create a visual representation of the journey.

  

  Here are six steps you need to take to craft an effective B2B customer journey map in your business :

  1. Identify your target audience (and different segments)

  The first step in customer journey mapping is to look at your target audience.

  You need to understand who they are and what different segments make up your audience.

  You need to look at the different roles each person plays within the journey.

  Unlike B2C, you’re not usually dealing with a single person. You likely have a few decision-makers you need to interact with to close a deal.

  The average B2B deal involves 6 to 10 people.

  Analyse the different roles and responsibilities of your audience.

  Figure out what requirements they need to onboard you. Understand each person’s level of influence in the buying decision.

  2. Determine your customers’ goals

  Now that you have a clear understanding of each person involved in the buying process, it’s time to analyse their unique needs and goals.

  Unlike B2C, which will include a single person with a single set of needs and goals, you have to look at several people through the decision-making process.

  What is every decision-maker’s goal ?

  An entry-level admin will have much different goals than a CEO.

  Understand each of their needs as it will be key to selling them and taking you to the next person in the chain of command.

  3. Lean on data and analytics

  Now it’s time to analyse your data.

  You don’t want to guess what will work on your B2B buyers. Instead, leverage data that proves what’s working (and what’s not).

  Analytics software like Matomo are crucial tools in your B2B customer journey toolkit.

  Matomo can help you make data-driven decisions to fuel customer acquisition and loyalty to help get more customers all the way to the advocacy stage.

  Using Matomo (which analyses and interprets different data sources) can give you a holistic view of what’s going on at each stage of the journey so you can reach your goals.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  4. Draw out customer journey stages

  Now that you have your data-backed plan, it’s time for some customer journey mapping.

  You can do this on paper or use a diagram tool to create a visual B2B customer journey map.

  Here, you’ll draw out every single stage in your customer journey, including every single touchpoint from different decision-makers.

  5. Determine each customer touchpoint

  Once you’ve drawn up the customer journey stages, you’ll have a key list of B2B customer journey touchpoints to implement.

  Write down every single customer interaction possible on the journey through.

  This could be reading an email, a blog post or watching a video on your home page.

  It could be an advertisement, a phone call or a follow-up email.

  It could even be a live demo or video sales call (meeting).

  6. Identify your own goals

  Now that you’ve got your visual B2B customer journey mapping done, it’s time to go back to you and your company.

  What are your goals ?

  What are the end results you’re looking for here ?

  You’ve got your current map in place. Now, how would you like customers to go through this journey ?

  Where would you like them to end up ?

  Look back at your company’s primary objectives if you’re stuck here.

  If your company is looking to increase profit margins, then maybe you want to focus more on retention, so you’re spending less on acquisition (and leaning more on recurring revenue from existing customers).

  How to create a Matomo funnel to track your B2B customer journey

  If you want to start tracking and optimising your B2B customer journey, you need to have a good grasp on your funnel.

  The reality is that your customer journey is your funnel.

  They’re one and the same.

  Your customer journeys through your sales funnel.

  So, if you want to optimise it, then you need to see what’s going on at each stage of your funnel.

  

  With Matomo, you can map out your entire funnel and track key events like conversions.

  This allows you to identify where your site visitors are having problems, where they’re exiting and other obstacles they’re facing on their journey through.

  To start, you first define what events or touchpoints you want included. This could mean :

  • Landing on your website
  • Visiting a product page
  • Adding something to cart
  • Going to checkout
  • Clicking “buy”

  Then, at each stage, you’ll see conversion rates.

  For example, if only 3% of your visitors go from landing on your website to the product page, you likely have an issue between your homepage (and other pages) and your product pages.

  Or, if you can get people to add to cart, but you rarely get people going to checkout, there’s likely a problem to fix on your add-to-cart page.

  By leveraging Matomo’s funnels feature, you get to see your entire customer journey (and where people are falling off) so you understand what you need to optimise to grow your business.

  If you’re ready to start building and optimising your customer journey today, then try Matomo for free for 21 days.

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• Running Windows XP In 2016

  2 janvier 2016, par Multimedia Mike

  I have an interest in getting a 32-bit Windows XP machine up and running. I have a really good yet slightly dated and discarded computer that seemed like a good candidate for dedicating to this task. So the question is : Can Windows XP still be installed from scratch on a computer, activated, and used in 2016 ? I wasn’t quite sure since I have heard stories about how Microsoft has formally ended support for Windows XP as of the first half of 2014 and I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

  Spoiler : It’s still possible to install and activate Windows XP as of the writing of this post. It’s also possible to download and install all the updates published up until support ended.

  The Candidate Computer
  This computer was assembled either in late 2008 or early 2009. It was a beast at the time.

  
  
  Click for a larger image
  

  It was built around the newly-released NVIDIA GTX 280 video card. The case is a Thermaltake DH-101, which is a home theater PC thing. The motherboard is an Asus P5N32-SLI Premium with a Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz CPU on board. 2 GB of RAM and a 1.5 TB hard drive are also present.

  The original owner handed it off to me because their family didn’t have much use for it anymore (too many other machines in the house). Plus it was really, obnoxiously loud. The noisy culprit was the stock blue fan that came packaged with the Intel processor (seen in the photo) whining at around 65 dB. I replaced the fan and brought the noise level way down.

  As for connectivity, the motherboard has dual gigabit NICs (of 2 different chipsets for some reason) and onboard wireless 802.11g. I couldn’t make the latter work and this project was taking place a significant distance from my wired network. Instead, I connected a USB 802.11ac dongle and antenna which is advertised to work in both Windows XP and Linux. It works great under Windows XP. Meanwhile, making the adapter work under Linux provided a retro-computing adventure in which I had to modify C code to make the driver work.

  So, score 1 for Windows XP over Linux here.

  The Simple Joy of Retro-computing
  One thing you have to watch out for when you get into retro-computing is fighting the urge to rant about the good old days of computing. Most long-time computer users have a good understanding of the frustration that computers keep getting faster by orders of magnitude and yet using them somehow feels slower and slower over successive software generations.
  

  This really hits home when you get old software running, especially on high-end hardware (relative to what was standard contemporary hardware). After I got this new Windows XP machine running, as usual, I was left wondering why software was so much faster a few generations ago.

  Of course, as mentioned, it helps when you get to run old software on hardware that would have been unthinkably high end at the software’s release. Apparently, the minimum WinXP specs as set by MS are a 233 MHz Pentium CPU and 64 MB of RAM, with 1.5 GB of hard drive space. This machine has more than 10x the clock speed (and 2 CPUs), 32x the RAM, and 1000x the HD space. Further, I’m pretty sure 100 Mbit ethernet was the standard consumer gear in 2001 while 802.11b wireless was gaining traction. The 802.11ac adapter makes networking quite pleasant.

  Purpose
  Retro-computing really seems to be ramping up in popularity lately. For some reason, I feel compelled to declare at this juncture that I was into it before it was cool.

  Why am I doing this ? I have a huge collection of old DOS/Windows computer games. I also have this nerdy obsession with documenting old video games in the MobyGames database. I used to do a lot of this a few years ago, tracking the effort on my gaming blog. In the intervening years, I have still collected a lot of old, unused, unloved video games, usually either free or very cheap while documenting my collection efforts on that same blog.

  So I want to work my way through some of this backlog, particularly the games that are not yet represented in the MobyGames database, and even more pressing, ones that the internet (viewed through Google at least) does not seem to know about. To that end, I thought this was a good excuse to get Windows XP on this old machine. A 32-bit Windows XP machine is capable of running any software advertised as supporting Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95, and even 16-bit Windows 3.x (I have games for all these systems). That covers a significant chunk of PC history. It can probably be made to run DOS games as well, but those are (usually) better run under DosBox. In order to get the right display feel, I even invested in a (used) monitor sporting a 4:3 aspect ratio. If I know these old games, most will be engineered and optimized for that ratio rather than the widescreen resolutions seen nowadays.

  I would also like to get back to that Xbox optical disc experimentation I was working on a few years ago. Another nice feature of this motherboard is that it still provides a 40-pin IDE/PATA adapter which makes the machine useful for continuing that old investigation (and explains why I have that long IDE cable to no where pictured hanging off the board).

  The Messy Details
  I did the entire installation process twice. The first time was a bumbling journey of discovery and copious note-taking. I still have Windows XP installation media that includes service pack 2 (SP2), along with 2 separate licenses that haven’t been activated for a long time. My plan was to install it fresh, then install the relevant drivers. Then I would investigate the Windows update and activation issues and everything should be fine.

  So what’s the deal with Windows Update for XP, and with activations ? Second item first : it IS possible to still activate Windows XP. The servers are still alive and respond quickly. However, as always, you don’t activate until you’re sure everything is working at some baseline. It took awhile to get there.

  As for whether Windows Update still works for XP, that’s a tougher question. Short answer is yes ; longer answer is that it can be difficult to kick off the update process. At least on SP2, the “Windows Update” program launches IE6 and navigates to a special microsoft.com URL which initiates the update process (starting with an ActiveX control). This URL no longer exists.

  From what I can piece together from my notes, this seems to be the route I eventually took :

  1. Install Windows XP fresh
  2. Install drivers for the hardware ; fortunately, Asus still has all the latest drivers necessary for the motherboard and its components but it’s necessary to download these from another network-connected PC since the networking probably won’t be running “out of the box”
  3. Download the .NET 3.5 runtime, which is the last one supported by Windows XP, and install it
  4. Download the latest NVIDIA drivers ; this needs to be done after the previous step because the installer requires the .NET runtime ; run the driver installer and don’t try to understand why it insists on re-downloading .NET 3.5 runtime before installation
  5. While you’re downloading stuff on other computers to be transported to this new machine, be sure to download either Chrome or Firefox per your preference ; if you try to download via IE6, you may find that their download pages aren’t compatible with IE6
  6. Somewhere along the line (I’m guessing as a side effect of the .NET 3.5 installation), the proper, non-IE6-based Windows Update program magically springs to life ; once this happens, there will be 144 updates (in my case anyway) ; installing these will probably require multiple reboots, but SP3 and all known pre-deprecation security fixes will be installed
  7. Expect that, even after installing all of these, a few more updates will appear ; eventually, you’ll be at the end of the update road
  8. Once you’re satisfied everything is working satisfactorily, take the plunge and activate your installation

  Residual Quirks
  Steam runs great on Windows XP, as do numerous games I have purchased through the service. So that opens up a whole bunch more games that I could play on this machine. Steam’s installer highlights a curious legacy problem of Windows XP– it seems there are many languages that it does not support “out of the box” :

  
  
  

  It looks like the Chinese options and a few others that are standard now weren’t standard 15 years ago.

  Also, a little while after booting up, I’ll get a crashing error concerning a process called geoforms.scr. This appears to be NVIDIA-related. However, I don’t notice anything obviously operationally wrong with the system.

  Regarding DirectX support, DirectX 9 is the highest version officially supported by Windows XP. There are allegedly methods to get DirectX 10 running as well, but I don’t care that much. I did care, briefly, when I realized that a bunch of the demos for the NVIDIA GTX 280 required DX10 which left me wondering why it was possible to install them on Windows XP.

  Eventually, by installing enough of these old games, I fully expect to have numerous versions of .NET, DirectX, QT, and Video for Windows installed side by side.

  Out of curiosity, I tried playing a YouTube HD/1080p video. I wanted to see if the video was accelerated through my card. The video played at full speed but I noticed some tearing. Then I inspected the CPU usage and noticed that the CPU was quite loaded. So either the GTX 280 doesn’t have video acceleration, or Windows XP doesn’t provide the right APIs, or Chrome is not able to access the APIs in Windows XP, or perhaps some combination of the foregoing.

  Games are working well, though. I tried one of my favorite casual games and got sucked into that for, like, an entire night because that’s what casual games do. But then, I booted up a copy of WarCraft III that I procured sometime ago. I don’t have any experience with the WarCraft universe (RTS or MMO) but I developed a keen interest in StarCraft II over the past few years and wanted to try WarCraft III. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get WarCraft III to work correctly on several different Windows 7 installations (movies didn’t play, which left me slightly confused as to what I was supposed to do).

  Still works beautifully on the new old Windows XP machine.

  The post Running Windows XP In 2016 first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.