Hey all, so I have a bit of an infatuation with this old XP beta from January 2001. It works pretty well, all things considered. For a fun project, I wanted to spec out a theoretical "best" machine which would run this build.

I've been researching and experimenting, and have concluded that anything newer than maybe Socket 478 isn't going to work. The HAL in this build is very wonky and only seems to like Pentium III or very early Pentium 4 machines. Anything newer seems to make the stage 1 installer hang. It's ACPI-related.

Some have reported that setting the HAL (F5) to Standard PC fixes this for some machines, but I've yet to actually get that working, personally.

One notable exception I'll mention here is - long ago I ran 2428 (or maybe it was 2446) on a Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop which had a Pentium M on it. No issues installing there.

Anyways, I'm currently trying to figure out what the best possible graphics card is which would run on this build. I'm guessing the GT 430 / 520 / 610 PCI cards wouldn't work. Probably too new, right? I combed through the Device Manager and saw a list of OOTB-supported graphics cards. Riva TNT2 / Ultra / Quadro2 Pro, etc. Also a bevvy of Cirrus and Matrox cards.

I plan to do 3D gaming and modeling work (with Blender 2.43, the very last version to work on this build) on this specific machine, so I definitely need something higher-end than the ones the OS supports out of the box. The best I can get, really.

AMD graphics cards are apparently a no-no, from what I've read online. They just don't work, so I'm stuck with NVIDIA cards it seems.

I bought a SDHC to IDE adapter, along with a 256GB SD card. This particular build isn't 48-bit LBA aware so it can't utilize over 137 GB. Because I am really dedicated to this project, I went for the 256GB card, even if a bunch isn't usable. I could've saved money and went with a 128GB card, but then I'd be missing a few GBs 😀

Does anyone have experience with this beta and running it on real H/W?