Hello there.

My name is Aaron Cunnington. I am planning on doing something that is possibly very slightly illegal, and I'd like to tell you about it (once having broken the law). So, this is merely a placeholder for my criminal activies. Of course, I'm not going to tell you about how I've done this thing, or exactly what it is that I am planning. All I can tell you is that it is software related, and that it involves BitTorrent, Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, and high frame rates.

Thanks

This better not be really illegal? Don't want us getting in trouble.

I think it's more of a known and accepted licensing 'workaround' of some sort. Microsoft don't seem to have done anything about it yet...
Anyway, this also involves reusing my Windows XP Professional OEM license that I stuck to the back of my computer and bypassing the Windows Genuine Advantage... I will explain soon.

Hmm, sounds interesting... Have fun with that.

I started this off last night. Sorry if the server runs slowly while I am downloading/uploading this piece of software... I'm not quite sure how much of the download it has done, but I'll find out later on tonight.

8O

Or at least I hope it does

I can only hazard a guess that:

You are downloading a 'stripped-down' copy of XP with little extra bloat and un-needed features. I'm also guessing that this copy coincidentally is 'missing' that windows genuine advantage tool.

I couldn't possibly tell.

Oh well, I guess we'll all know later.

Shall I move this to the 'Users Only' section, to prevent 'unwanted eyes' viewing it?

If he wanted it in the Users only, he would have posted it there.

Anyway, this should be interesting to see what you're doing. Also, haven't noticed any slowness.

The download has finished, and I'm going to test it out now!

Cool, tell us how you get on?

Can you tell us what it all is about now?

Yeah, please do!

Unfortunately, I am unable to reuse my Windows XP Professional product key... so I'll need to figure out some other way to do it, or just purchase a license and spoof some sort of licensing predicament...

I will try again, though.. I'd had half a bottle of wine while I was entering the product key, so I'm testing it out on my laptop right now.

Did it work?

Nope. I've asked my workmates how I can get around this without violating any copyright laws.
Edit: Tried it on another laptop and it worked... it's just installing a few extra bits now and I'll show you the screenshots after

Result!

My optimised Fedora Core 6 box uses more than twice as much memory as this...



Oh, and it's genuine.



Please, ask your questions.

Ok. What's actually happened? What has been changed to do this?

Tell a story.

How the hell did you do this? Please tell!

It's a big sexy secret

It's a different operating system, I can tell you that. This sort of thing isn't possible on Windows XP. I was running this on a Pentium 3 850MHz with 192MB RAM, and iexplore opened up in about .5 seconds, as did winword, as did wmplayer. It didn't phase it at all.

Hmm, are you going to tell us or not?

Probably not.

At the moment, I'm testing it to make sure it runs all applications OK.

I managed to install it on my machine at home successfully, but it didn't seem to install DirectX properly. It installed my Nvidia graphics drivers without any issues. It also installed the Ethernet driver without any issues. I will try installing a few games on there to see what happens and let you guys know. If it all works, I guess I should tell you all what I have done.

Just to keep you interested, here is me running a few applications on the low spec laptop...



Just so you guys now, it's not any sort of modified Linux or something like that.

Edit: Here is a screenshot of Task Manager in a standard Windows session on my work computer.

This stands a chance of running on my Windows 98 PC!!!