@Firtasik
Ah.. a wild guess, but did you uncheck the program's auto start option before uninstalling?

@Stojke
"keywords", "find", "Ctrl-F", "skimming", "speed-reading" ... are but a few useful stuff in the information era.

I like it better when some one who knows tells me directly.

And I like it better to do my homework before asking anything. Sure, much easier to let other people serve it cold. 😀

archsan wrote:

@Firtasik
Ah.. a wild guess, but did you uncheck the program's auto start option before uninstalling?

Hmmm, I don't remember.

archsan wrote:

And I like it better to do my homework before asking anything. Sure, much easier to let other people serve it cold. 😀

It was just one of those times where i didn't feel like bothering searching for it.

Stojke wrote:

So pretty much, i should stick with SP2 for Dual Tualatin 1.4GHz?

SP2 or 3 should be no difference as long as it's Pro (to support 2P). Remember that 1.4GHz Tualatin is going to be roughly equivalent to like ~2GHz Pentium 4, and you have SMP which helps multi-tasking (even if it's in the background) which can help things further. Also +1 to the system having enough RAM, but I'd assume such a machine would have at least 512MB if not 1GB+; throw a nice graphics card in there and you'd have a killer XP gaming box except any game that heavily benefits from SSE2/3 (which will be much newer than the machine, and all of which (afaik) work in Vista-later). 😊

Having said that, if the machine isn't on the Internet, and is just there for games, I wouldn't bother with the extra time to patch up to SP3 or whatever else; just get it compatible with the game(s) you want and leave it be. 😀

archsan wrote:

Anyway, if I had to do a fresh install of XP these days, I'd likely stop at SP2 and be done with it. Disable IE, ActiveX, and the likes. No internet, no fools with their usb drives to wreak havoc on my games-only machine. No flash, no Java, etc etc. And before anyone says anything about "paranoidism" again, guess what, I don't f***in care about how you treat your machines. Staying clean is always easier for me. 😀

I've checked the games that I'd rather run on XP (EAX Advanced HD titles) and they never required anything above XP SP2. Even the games that mention SP3 (post 2008, so less relevant for my purposes) can usually run on SP2 as well. Of course, if you share the pc or use it online, latest version AVs and firewalls will usually require SP3.

If anything, I'd suggest you install whatever SP you want right away from fresh, and if you want to install, say, SP3 later, after you 'populate' your xp installation, make sure you have backup, if there's anything important. Sometimes installing hundreds of updates at once can mess with already populated systems (happen on ~5-10% of systems, said an IT manager, not me).

I agree with this. This is pretty much how my XP gaming box is setup as well - and like I said earlier: there's a big difference between a machine that comes out once a week or less to run some old game(s), versus a machine that's gotta be online and all that.

+1 on imaging, backups, CCleaner, yadda yadda. 🤣

I'm okay with LAN though. Especially with laptops, I've also found adhoc wifi useful on a few occasions. But adding usb wifi adapter to regular desktop rigs shouldn't be much of a trouble either. 😀