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Recycling hardware

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dr_andus:
Well, I have an old HP PDA and a Palm III. I'm keeping them to donate to a museum in a few years. Or something else similarly silly. ;D
-Renegade (February 25, 2013, 06:51 AM)
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Well, you can never know... Palm might rise again...  ;) In fact WebOS is coming to a TV near you...

The South Korean company will acquire the system, known as webOS, and some of the employees who work on it from H-P for an undisclosed amount. LG plans to use webOS in televisions, said Skott Ahn, LG president and chief technology officer. (...) Unlike smartphones and tablets, where Apple's or Google Inc.'s operating systems have a vast number of apps written for them, smart TVs don't have a dominant operating system yet. Developers could just as easily choose to write programs for webOS...
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app103:
Windows 7's virtual XP mode might be a way round that.
-oblivion (February 25, 2013, 11:30 AM)
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Does it allow software to pass an OS version check by lying when you install something, reporting that you are attempting to install it on XP and not Win7?

mwb1100:
Does it allow software to pass an OS version check by lying when you install something, reporting that you are attempting to install it on XP and not Win7?
-app103 (February 25, 2013, 05:56 PM)
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If you're running the installer in Win XP mode, then as far as the installer is concerned it is a Win XP machine.

What I'm not sure about is if Win8 has anything similar.
-oblivion (February 25, 2013, 11:30 AM)
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MS removed Win XP mode from Win 8.  Maybe if you upgrade your Win 7 machine with Win XP mode installed, it'll still run in Win 8 in some fashion, but I'm not sure about that.

Note that VirtualBox is supposed to be able to run the Win XP mode VM (which can be downloaded even without having Win7), but I think there's some hacking involved to get the VM's BIOS signature recognized so the Win XP VM doesn't need reactivation. VMware supports running a Win XP mode VM, but my understanding is that it'll only do it on Windows 7 machines to avoid breaking the Win XP mode license.

Tinman57:
  If you decide you can't use it or don't want it, you can always donate it to Goodwill, even if it doesn't work.  They will either find a new home for it or recycle it and put the money into the Goodwill services.  I just gave them an older Sony single disc CD player and a broken microwave oven.

oblivion:
Windows 7's virtual XP mode might be a way round that.
-oblivion (February 25, 2013, 11:30 AM)
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Does it allow software to pass an OS version check by lying when you install something, reporting that you are attempting to install it on XP and not Win7?
-app103 (February 25, 2013, 05:56 PM)
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Yes. XP doesn't know it's running virtually. Version checks only report XP, from inside the VM.

I'm currently experimenting (at work) with a piece of software that requires the presence of a 16-bit NetBIOS stack to run. XP has it, 7 doesn't (and can't be given it.) The software works in XP mode and, once the application's been "published" to the Win7 host, appears to be running directly on the Win7 desktop. It's VERY cool. (I never EVER thought I'd say that about a Microsoft product!) The only downside is that it takes a long time to start up, the first time it's used after rebooting -- effectively because you're not just loading a program, you're booting a machine and THEN starting a program.

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