Rhuwyn wrote:

I never heard of the Windows Fundementals for Legacy PC's after some googling it looks really interesting is there any documentation on things that don't work?

There just aren't enough people using it to build up a meaningful knowledge base. It seems to me that if you go that route, sooner or later you're going to encounter a mysterious compatibility problem no one knows anything about and that can't be fixed without a great deal of anguish.

Software being optimised for multi core CPU's killed off my P4 as a daily driver, eg, not being able to use the system while a AV update was being applied in the background.
Flash/Scripts is what killed off WinXP as my daily driving OS, even on later hardware.

I know there are work arounds, but as a daily driver I just want something that works.
To the OP, I would leave the XP computer on the network with a share and just use your main computer to download to that share.

You can write floppy images to a floppy disk using linux. I don't remember how, but I remember doing it

Deksor wrote:

You can write floppy images to a floppy disk using linux. I don't remember how, but I remember doing it

Yeah in order to do that you have to get the images in a raw format. A lot of the downloads from the internet are executables that write to the disk. I could probably find a way around it. Maybe I'm just being lazy. For now using opera has been functional enough to get through what I needed to do.

Rhuwyn wrote:

A lot of the downloads from the internet are executables that write to the disk. I could probably find a way around it. Maybe I'm just being lazy.

In some cases you can re-open the executable with the program used to create it, such as https://archive.org/details/tucows_222418_Floppy_Image .

A more general solution is to use Virtual Floppy Drive, but I'm not sure how well that is working on 64-bit systems or Windows 10.

I don't use my old, slower XP system yet, but if I do, it'll be because I swapped that crappy Radeon 9550 out for an actual gaming one (9700 Pro maybe?) and put period-correct games on it like Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3), Oblivion (Elder Scrolls 4), Bloodlines (Vampire the Masquerade), Half-Life 2, Neverwinter Nights, things like that. It's just a shame that I have a NEWER XP machine in a laptop with all-around better specs (2.1GHz Pentium M, 2GB DDR2-566, 256MB GeForce 7800GTX, etc.).

Deksor wrote:

You can write floppy images to a floppy disk using linux. I don't remember how, but I remember doing it

It's easy with raw images. As root or with appropriate write permissions:

1dd if=disk144.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k

Compressed or encoded images are a bit more tricky.