- This is a brand new Windows XP netbook.
And today I'm going to be answering two questions.
First of all, can my childhood dreams
of using a netbook actually come true?
Which, hopefully the answer will be,
I will be happy and not disappointed at all
with this incredibly underpowered software and hardware.
And number two, what is it like to use Windows XP in 2023?
Let's not forget that Windows XP came out 22 years ago.
Oh, I don't like that.
I don't like that at all.
Well, I did the video.
I built a super high-powered gaming PC
with Windows XP as a meme.
But since then I had not used XP.
And obviously, for that,
I really just kind of did it for the meme.
So, this would be my first time
properly using Windows XP in 15 years.
(upbeat music)
- [Ken] Is there a reason why
you're running Windows XP on your MacBook Pro?
- Yeah, as we all know, Macs supports Windows.
If you haven't seen, I got this device from VIP Outlet,
which strangely had basically a brand new, in-box netbook
that is at this point, well over a decade old.
Look, I'm gonna be honest,
Windows XP is a very old operating system.
And every bit of malware from the year 2001 on
is designed to destroy it.
So, I'm a little afraid to actually put this online.
This looks like it's a fairly up-to-date version of XP.
So, let's see here.
Performance & Maintenance.
Oh, my goodness.
Dude, I have not seen these in so long.
That's weird how I have not used XP in so long,
and I remember some of this stuff.
Oh, we're Service Pack 3
Wow!
So, we've got ourselves an Intel Atom N450 CPU
at 1.66 gigahertz and 0.99 gigabytes of RAM.
You couldn't give me one gigabyte?
Come on.
So, I just like how on the splash screen,
it now says "Turn off Austin's Happy Place."
And I will not be doing anything of the sort,
because Austin's Happy Place stays on all the time.
So, I know I have 160 gig hard drive.
How much space is actually left?
One of the things I'm tempted to do,
I know I literally just got this thing started,
but I'm kind of tempted to maybe upgrade it a little bit.
- [Ken] Windows Vista Basic?
- No, that's a downgrade.
I'm tempted to maybe throw in an SSD,
because I think that actually will help a little bit,
even though the CPU is egregiously slow.
And I'm also tempted to potentially upgrade the RAM.
So, this comes with one gig,
which is actually not bad for XP.
I think most of these netbooks could handle two gigs.
- [Ken] Upgradeable RAM, really?
- Yeah, this thing is actually designed
back when your computers were upgradeable,
like, on the back you can get the RAM,
obviously, the battery pops right out,
and you get access to the the hard drive.
I'm not gonna put this online yet.
I know it's not actually what's gonna happen.
But I'm mildly terrified that I'm gonna put it online,
and immediately catch it on fire.
Oh, should I go on a tour of Windows XP?
Oh, look at that little graphic for the volume.
- [Narrator] World of digital media.
- Optimized for games and DVDs.
Can I play Halo on this?
I have Microsoft Works.
I think that's, wait...
- [Ken] No, Works was, the level below Microsoft Office.
- Yeah, it was, like, the lite version or whatever, right?
- Yeah. - Okay.
Programs, I've got Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word.
Let's open up Word.
Microsoft Word 2007.
So, this totally works.
Let's do a little keyboard test.
This is a test of...
Oh, boy.
So, something I never really noticed about a netbook,
this keyboard is pretty small.
We actually have a lot of stuff.
Wow, we have a ton.
We have Windows Live or the whole suite there.
Webcam and video web camera.
Oh, my God, wait.
Oh, it does have webcam.
Oh, I'm gonna open up the webcam.
Let's see if the...
It works!
Okay, we are now recording
on this high quality eMachines webcam.
I can't wait to hear what this sounds like.
But boy, oh, boy,
have I been transported back to 2010?
I'm not gonna say shocked.
I mean, it's not good.
But it's actually not as bad as I thought.
It reminds me of the webcam on the 12 inch MacBook.
That was 480p and looked kind of bad.
And this is significantly older.
Intel Matrix storage console.
Games!
(upbeat music)
Power.
(upbeat music)
When I die, play this at my funeral.
Dude, I used to spend so much time playing this.
I really expect this to be bad, and it's not bad.
It's really not that bad.
Netbooks had such a bad reputation.
No, no, no, no.
I'm just gonna stop stalling.
I'm gonna put this online.
Here goes nothing.
So, this does actually have Wi-Fi,
but I'm sure it's gonna be 801.11g, if anything,
or even B potentially.
It's not gonna be good Wi-Fi.
So, I'm just gonna bypass that for right now.
I will get on Wi-Fi later.
But for this initial setup,
I'm gonna plug it in via ethernet
just to give it it's absolute best possible opportunity.
It's funny, it's such a small laptop,
even by today's standards.
The fact that we've got
ethernet, VGA, two USBs, audio in and out,
as well as an SD card slot,
actually, not bad.
We are plugged in, unplugged, plugged in...
Oh, interesting.
It's flickering on and off rapidly.
All right, we'll deal with that in a minute.
Why don't we try Wi-Fi?
It does see networks.
It keeps giving me a notification
that it's seeing wireless networks.
Let's try that instead.
We're online!
Okay, the floodgates have opened.
The first thing to do, Windows update.
(Austin laughing)
All right, Windows update.
Please give me good updates.
Windows Update was in Internet Explorer.
Oh, my God, I forgot about that.
Dude, look how slow this is too.
(Austin laughing)
"When you send information to the Internet,
it might be possible for others to see that information.
Do you want to continue?"
No, keep me off the online space forever, thanks.
Here's a problem.
We're not able to get stuff up and running,
because our clock is probably way off.
What?
What time does it think this?
Adjust Date and Time.
January of 2009.
Boy, I wish.
This computer currently thinks it is 14 years ago.
Let's update it, and get it on 2023 time.
Certificate error, still not working.
What is wrong with my certificate here?
Oh, wait, that's Google.
I got Google running.
I need to spend some time getting my head around,
not only just what it's like to use the netbook,
but more importantly,
I need to get Windows XP sorted as best as possible,
because I think it's gonna be a real problem,
if I'm trying to use Internet Explorer 8 in 2023,
because this is very vaguely functional.
But say I go to, I don't know,
what happens, if I go to youtube.com/austinevans?
No, nothing is gonna work.
So, I need to spend some time getting my head around
what it's gonna take to...
Oh, wait, is it loading?
Oh, wait, YouTube's probably HTML5, isn't it?
I don't think Internet Explorer 8 even has HTML5.
This is before that was even invented.
To give this a proper try,
I'm going to upgrade what little bit I can,
which is going to be adding some more RAM.
So, we've got a bunch of our older SO-DIMMS,
as well as throwing in an SSD.
I think that's gonna make a difference.
We're still gonna be limited by Windows XP, which is fine.
Because again, it's one of those things
where Windows XP does kind of work okay.
My concern is almost entirely,
I just don't want it to get Linus-ed.
But on top of that, having the additional RAM
as well as the additional, faster SSD,
I think, actually will make a pretty big difference.
All right, let's take a look at what we've got here.
So, first up, I can remove my battery,
which is very helpful.
And we've got a...
Okay, so we have our Wi-Fi card.
And we do have the hard drive,
which is definitely a SATA drive.
That will be fine.
What I'm more concerned about is the RAM.
So, let's actually see what's in here.
All right, inside here we have a single DIMM.
Okay, cool.
I can work with that.
So, we have a single, Samsung,
one gigabyte DIMM, DDR2 6400.
Okay, I actually think I might have...
Okay, that's some DDR2.
So, I'm gonna just try to load up those two gigs,
and see if it works.
All right, we've got ourselves our Atom CPU,
our BIOS, which is very old.
Two gigs of RAM, look at that.
Am I just smart or am I smart?
There we go!
So, we'll go ahead and boot into Windows.
And then, assuming that it all works fine,
I'm going to clone this hard drive over to our SSD.
There we go.
It loaded into Windows XP, no sweat.
(upbeat music)
I did that,
and I saw the editors adding the CapCut thing as I did it.
Okay, give me that two gigs of RAM.
So much RAM!
Now let me go ahead, and pull out our hard drive.
Which one is it?
Is it tool-less?
Oh, my God.
It's, like, a tool-less hard drive.
Are you kidding me?
Well, technically not tool-less,
because I'm gonna have to take it out.
Look at that.
Here is our WD Scorpio Blue, 160 gigabyte hard drive.
Now, I'd just like to point out
the advancement in technology.
So, this is a WD Blue SSD.
It not only has significantly more capacity,
but this probably costs, I don't know,
$60, $70 when it's new.
This costs about $20, and it is about 10 times faster.
So, thanks technology.
So, now my friends,
let's see how usable this netbook really is.
So, the first thing I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna open up our web browser,
which in this case is K-Meleon.
Let's give this thing a try.
Wow, it actually loads,
which I know shouldn't be all that much of a surprise.
But you saw earlier, when I was trying to use this thing,
it would take, like, 45 seconds to do anything.
Let's go to Google first,
and see how fast that is.
Yo, this is an actual usable system.
This is an actual usable system.
Did you see how fast that was?
Let's go to YouTube.
Okay, so let's go into the mobile site,
which actually is probably not a bad idea.
Look at this.
This is a real...
Wait, we've gotta actually watch a video though.
Let's actually watch a video
to make sure that this is working.
We got an ad!
The problem is though...
Oh, we're lagging now.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on.
Wait, we might not be able to watch a video.
Hang on a second.
If I can watch it at, like, 240p,
I'll consider that to be a success.
What resolution are we at right now?
480p, please.
We need 240p.
All right, so we're gonna full screen this now.
Can this play actually correctly?
Okay, let's give it a second.
It's a little laggy.
But this is a YouTube video playing on a netbook from 2010.
YouTube existed in 2010,
so maybe that's not the most exciting thing in the world.
We'll say that YouTube is somewhat usable.
I shouldn't do this.
I'm gonna try Internet Explorer now.
Oh, it does work.
Okay, all right.
We'll take that.
Let's go to YouTube.
Let's see if actually YouTube works better.
Oh, no, it doesn't work.
Can I just go anyway?
No, and YouTube doesn't even...
It just, no.
I mean, let me try Firefox.
Oh, look at that old school XP logo.
All right, let's see here.
I know this is older.
It actually doesn't look that bad though.
Wait, hang on.
I'm on Firefox 46.
If you wanna download Firefox today,
you are on version number 112.
I have now updated to version 47.
Oh, my God, we're...
Okay, we're now updating again.
We'll be right back
after we download 73 more Firefox updates.
So, we are right now on Firefox version 52.9,
and I can no longer perform updates on this system.
So, if you open that up,
basically it just says that Firefox,
if it wants to load,
has ended support for Windows XP and Vista.
So, it looks like
Firefox stopped supporting this around 2018,
which is an old enough version of Firefox,
which would basically make me not trust it at all
for anything important.
But this is at least a reasonable version of a browser,
certainly better than Internet Explorer.
I mean, think about it.
This computer came out in 2010.
Windows XP came out in 2001.
And yet, I'm running a version of Firefox from 2018.
17 years of support.
One area where I will say it's a little bit less than ideal
is with the keyboard.
So, for reference, on a decent laptop keyboard,
I can hit around 100 words per minute.
This one, I am probably gonna struggle to hit 50.
88 words per minute!
What?
Wait, I don't understand that.
Every time I've used this keyboard, I struggle with it.
I've like...
Really?
I can't believe I just did that good.
I mean, that's better than I've done
on some brand new laptops.
Now, my friends,
it is time to do the thing
that I basically have made this video as an excuse for.
We're gonna play some games on this netbook,
specifically the only game that matters.
We're playing StarCraft.
What, did it just load that fast?
Sorry, I'm exiting that.
Excuse me?
Can we just show that one more time?
All right, I'mma load StarCraft, ready?
And...is there a cartridge slot?
Is this an NES?
How did that load so fast?
Oh, my God!
All right, let's go.
I'm ready to go.
Oh, my God, I have no shortcuts.
Okay, to be fair,
I definitely spent way more time playing StarCraft 2
than StarCraft one.
But where are my shortcuts?
Oh, man, I've gotta remember
how to make my keyboard shortcuts.
I can't...
I've got depot here.
All right, we're building a depot.
Look at that.
Okay, we do have keyboard shortcuts.
Can I just go in crushing dudes now?
There we go.
Suck it, Zerg!
So, this runs amazingly,
like, legitimately excellent.
We're sending our dudes back to base.
Should I just send all my SCVs in too?
Sorry, I'm getting really into StarCraft right now.
This thing's great.
I'm just so happy.
This has no right to work as well as it does.
There's two takeaways I have here,
one of which is,
Windows XP is definitely not holding up well.
Nothing supports it anymore.
No one should be using XP on a regular basis
for anything more than playing some old games or whatever.
You really, honestly shouldn't
have a Windows XP connected to the Internet.
But if we put XP off to the side for a second,
and talk about the netbook,
yes, it's underpowered.
But with some very cheap,
very simple upgrades that you can do today
between the SSD and the RAM,
you can do this entire upgrade for like $30 less,
if you find some used components.
And it completely transformed this laptop,
because when it first came out,
people made fun of them that,
while they were cheap,
they were slow, they were laggy,
they could hardly do anything.
But if you treat this less
as an actual real computer you're gonna use,
and much more so as a novelty to run Windows XP
to type up your old documents,
to use MS Paint like the good old days,
this is so cool.
I'm so happy with this.
I'm gonna go crush some Zerg,
and live a happy life.
Go, go, go!