Nice looking system. I love that case. I'm planning on doing an xp build myself sometime in the next few months

Nice, I had a 790i rig before I upgraded it to my current X58 Lanparty XP rig.

Ended up putting the board in storage until I may need it again.

A very nice high-spec rig.

It seems perfect for those late-era XP games which benefit from powerful hardware but still support EAX.

I was thinking of putting a kinston SSD there that I have lying around, but I was worried about windows XP not having the trim function. I don't know if there is software for kingston SSDs that allow you to do trim manually.

Nice system!

Go for the SSD and for the price of them, who cares about trim bollox!

Most modern SSDs perform garbage collection through their firmware when the system is idle.

Some manufacturers recommend entering the BIOS and leaving the computer on for 6-8 hours like that. This allows the SSDs to perform garbage collection even if your OS doesn't support TRIM. I do this every month or so on my WinXP rig and never had any problems. Here's an interesting article from Crucial's website: https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/what-is-trim

Relevant part:

Trim and Active Garbage Collection are useful tools that can benefit the speed, function, and longevity of your SSD. But if your operating system doesn't support Trim, it's not a disaster. All Crucial SSDs are designed and tested assuming that they will be used without Trim.

EDIT - found another article which recommends leaving the computer on to idle in BIOS:

https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq- … has-slowed-down

On a PC, power on with the SSD installed and enter your system's BIOS or UEFI (please refer to your system manufacturer’s documentation on how to access the BIOS). Leave the system in this menu for 6-8 hours, which will power the SSD but not execute any operations, allowing Garbage Collection to run.

This is a nice build. Useful and not over the top.

Not sure it's fair calling StarForce malware. 😜 It's just a driver, albeit one that can render your system unbootable if an incompatible version is installed. Apparently some users were complaining that its presence may trigger repeated errors on IDE channels accessing the optical drive, which eventually leads Windows to downgrade it to the slow PIO mode. I don't know if that's true or not.

Baoran wrote on 2020-09-27, 10:32:

I was thinking of putting a kinston SSD there that I have lying around, but I was worried about windows XP not having the trim function. I don't know if there is software for kingston SSDs that allow you to do trim manually.

I use "AData SSD Toolbox 2.0.1" on XP. It doesn't care what brand SSD you have, all mine are Micron.

Other than that, you can also "overprovision" by starting with a fully TRIMmed drive and then partitioning it such that XP can't access the entire capacity. If you prevent something like 20-25% of the LBAs from ever being written, the drive will never flag more than 75-80% of it's Flash storage as holding relevant data, and so write amplification will never become significant. TRIM is then a negligible issue.

[edit:] If you do have a write amplification problem, then letting a garbage collection thrash-session run while you're not using the computer might improve the drive's performance when you do use it, but it's not really fixing the problem which is all the useless busywork the "garbage collection" is doing by trying to preserve garbage data that it doesn't know is garbage. TRIM is what identifies the garbage. If TRIM doesn't work then overprovisioning will contain the achievable size of unidentified garbage so it can't reach a point of overwhelming the drive.

I've had no problem using SSDs on XP, but my late XP gaming system ultimately went back to using a regular hard drive. I switched it to a hard drive when I wanted a simple, single drive XP install that could hold all my Steam games in Offline mode (not sure if it's even possible to install them anymore).

dr_st wrote on 2020-09-27, 11:14:

This is a nice build. Useful and not over the top.

Not sure it's fair calling StarForce malware. 😜 It's just a driver, albeit one that can render your system unbootable if an incompatible version is installed. Apparently some users were complaining that its presence may trigger repeated errors on IDE channels accessing the optical drive, which eventually leads Windows to downgrade it to the slow PIO mode. I don't know if that's true or not.

thanks
At least back in the day people thought that having starforce installed decreased computer performance. I don't remember if this was proven or not.

Think we need to just have a dedicated thread for trim with performance and longevitity statistics and everyone link it in their sig. Getting really old.
The safedisc and SecuROM issues are real, unknown about starforce. Use CD cracks and or make sure you make a backup image for easy restore.

Baoran wrote on 2020-09-27, 12:43:

dr_st wrote on 2020-09-27, 11:14:

This is a nice build. Useful and not over the top.

Not sure it's fair calling StarForce malware. 😜 It's just a driver, albeit one that can render your system unbootable if an incompatible version is installed. Apparently some users were complaining that its presence may trigger repeated errors on IDE channels accessing the optical drive, which eventually leads Windows to downgrade it to the slow PIO mode. I don't know if that's true or not.

thanks
At least back in the day people thought that having starforce installed decreased computer performance. I don't remember if this was proven or not.

Lol It didn't detect any disc inserted on a PC having multiple disc drives

DosFreak wrote on 2020-09-27, 12:58:

Think we need to just have a dedicated thread for trim with performance and longevitity statistics and everyone link it in their sig. Getting really old.
The safedisc and SecuROM issues are real, unknown about starforce. Use CD cracks and or make sure you make a backup image for easy restore.

The issues that copy protection systems cause bothered me more when I was installing the games to a main pc that I was using. Now that I am building PCs just to run old games it does not bother me that much as long as the games work. Seeing that starforce checking the silent hunter 3 disk kind of gave me nostalgic feelings.

DosFreak wrote on 2020-09-27, 12:58:

Think we need to just have a dedicated thread for trim with performance and longevitity statistics and everyone link it in their sig. Getting really old.
The safedisc and SecuROM issues are real, unknown about starforce. Use CD cracks and or make sure you make a backup image for easy restore.

Baoran was worried about TRIM and it's a very simple thing to solve. Just overprovision the drive and TRIM loses it's importance. If you insist on partitioning 100% of it then go ahead, but there's no reason to do that unless you just like to do things wrong.

The fact that an improperly configured drive will eventually choke itself to a crawl is a simple function of how they work. The perpetual confusion all over the internet that "garbage collection" somehow replaces TRIM is what I think has gotten old. You can't collect garbage if nothing ever told the drive that it's garbage. It's not going to decode the filesystem, no matter how many hours you wait.

I was never the heaviest gamer but I've never had a problem with disc based copy protection. I put the disc in and play the game. It's a lot less BS than Steam.

One thing I do, is sometimes make back-up images with the free version of Macrium Reflect.

It "trims" the drive when it does an image restore. I usually leave a gig free when I partition them anyway and like I said, the cost is so low, I don't really care.

Reason my XP PC is the most heavily used.

Can play a lot of my Win9x games with AA, AF, etc all set to highest detail.
Network "middle man" talks to both earlier and later OS's just fine. Win7/10 doesn't like my Win9x boxes some days
Native Large HDD support = dumping ground for earlier PC's with smaller drives.
FDD also makes it useful for creating boot disks from images.

Apart from a great gaming OS XP sits right in between

I watched a youtube video of what would be the best web browser for windows xp. They recommended a browser called Mypal and I downloaded it. Even if the web page claims the browser is still kept up to date it still seems have problems with many modern web pages. Does anyone have any experience of trying to use web in windows xp to download patches for games and such?

New Moon 28 by roytam1
https://o.rths.ml/palemoon/

or Extreme Explorer 360 if you like big brother

List of Web Browsers For All Operating Systems

Great spec but that's an absolutely hideous case that I want to nuke from orbit!

I find my XP PC makes my Windows 98 PC redundant most of the time. Most the games I have will run under XP just fine. I find myself making underpowered Windows 98 PCs these days to run those early 3D accelerated games on.

For browsers I use Opera on XP, accessed from their proper site. Its even an offline installer I think so its 50mb big or so. It works on the "modern web" just fine and I accept there is risk in pretty much any browser on XP.

Baoran wrote on 2020-09-28, 21:46:

I watched a youtube video of what would be the best web browser for windows xp. They recommended a browser called Mypal and I downloaded it. Even if the web page claims the browser is still kept up to date it still seems have problems with many modern web pages. Does anyone have any experience of trying to use web in windows xp to download patches for games and such?

I use the last version of firefox available for xp and haven't had any problems whatsoever. Just be sure you know what you're doing, be cautious, as you have to always be even in a modern browser anyway.
When in doubt, open the site in a modern machine first, or on your phone.