About a month ago I decided to give a low-power (but new) Solaris system that I had lying around a new lease of life. The two alternatives for it were Ubuntu or XP, Vista would have been a push but might have worked, but I saw no reason to torture myself. I opted for XP because of my software requirements.

The machine in question is a little beige box that I slapped together from parts. It has a P4 3.0GHz processor, 120GB HDD and 1GB of RAM. It runs off an inexpensive Asus Micro-ATX motherboard, with onboard video, sound and 100MBPS LAN. It is not setting any records, but it sips electricity compared to my gaming desktop and it is fairly quiet.

The goal for this machine was to make it perform all of the functions that were keeping my gaming system connected around the clock and to allow my main desktop to be used for what it was intended, gaming and a little bit of work. I soon found a whole lot of other things that I wanted to do with the machine and that was where this project really began. There is a lot of versatility hidden away in Windows XP that a lot of people never really scratch the surface of. Most of the functionality is really easy to implement and a lot of the stuff is just a short Internet search away. However, if people don’t know that it is there to begin with, how do they know where to start looking?

I firmly believe that XP has and will continue to have a place in the home. A cheap low-powered system these days is more than enough to get some lightning fast performance out of the aging OS and that is what I am going to set about showing with this series of articles.

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