philscomputerlab wrote:

Good idea obobskivich!

I had a look and couldn't find anything obvious but then found a parental control setting that allows you restriction to the Internet based on time. That should work.

Parental controls can work, also if you have a "block services" or "block ports" feature that lets you put in ALL TCP/UDP ports per IP or per jack that would work too. Usually they aren't as overt as "click here to disable Internet for Machine #2" though... 😢

philscomputerlab wrote:

On my XP gaming machine(s) I just go online to activate games in Steam. Then play them in offline mode 😀 Or get them on GOG which doesn't need Internet.

One thing I haven't quite figured out, which is likely quite easy, is how to have them connect to the LAN to access shares but not have Internet access. Would leaving the default gateway field in the IP settings do the trick?

Steam games iam only going to use them on my specially maded 32-bits which have windows 7 32-bit as the OS.. So that would also save to use steam on..
On an XP system, i would only use XP on systems from the period 2000-2004/5 and would keep them just offline if i can (so i would only run games on disk that can be played offline)
Its just to hassle with security and still going to need only to activating your most wanted played games..

On my system i use a motherboard with hardware firewall (dont know if it helps much, but its better then none)

Yes up to 2005 / 2006 is far as I would go. Any newer and Games either came with DX 10 support out of the gate or received a Patch. I remember Bioshock being one of the first games that you wanted to play with Vista for better graphics.

You guys are very generous for your "XP games" - I cut them off at around 2003 (NetBurst and NV30), and everything newer better get with the program and run on Windows 7 64-bit. 🤣

Well, found my Windows 7 cd. But yeah, I definitely wouldn't use xp on a modern system (unless i lost my Windows 7 cd). Maybe up to 2010 for the cut off line. Hell, I used xp up to this year on another computer.

I use multi-boot config, Win 7, Win XP, Linux Mint, AROS and FreeDOS. In my nr. 1 and 2 computers, not very new.
Nr. 1: Athlon 2 X3, 3.3 GHz, 8 Gb DDR3, Radeon 6790, 500 Gb+1 Tb HDD's, SoundBlaster XFi.
Nr. 2: Core 2 Duo 8200, 2.66 GHz, 4 Gb DDR2, Radeon 4670, 500 Gb, SoundBlaster Audigy2 Platinum eX

XP works well in both of them.

"what's the best comp Windows XP will run on?"

best being subjective, either the top of line from XPs time period or modern core2quad or intel i series system with an ssd and 4gb of ram, also probably AMD phenom 2 series.

If it's any help, 7 Pro has XP Mode available if you wanna look into that, or you could always virtualize XP (or 9x/ME) in Vista, 7, or 8.1, QEMU Manager being a good, easy way to do that.

RetroGamingNovice wrote:

If it's any help, 7 Pro has XP Mode available if you wanna look into that, or you could always virtualize XP (or 9x/ME) in Vista, 7, or 8.1, QEMU Manager being a good, easy way to do that.

XP Mode generally isn't a benefit for gaming - it's a pre-packaged VM to offer a cheaper/simpler alternative to MED-V for businesses that need to support applications that don't run nicely in newer versions of Windows (like hand-built intranet stuff that requires IE6.0 to work properly). It doesn't provide hardware 3D, and the emulated hardware environment is fairly minimal compared to the system requirements of many games from the "XP era" (if I remember right it emulates something like a 440BX-based system with a P2 or P3 - it's aiming at maximum compatibility over maximum performance).

This provides a decent overview of XP Mode:
http://forums.techarena.in/operating-systems/1171748.htm