[zeugma]

I didn’t remember, but when I recently loaded an old, early XP disc onto a desktop, I saw how crude and primitive it was, going from the original to Service Pack 3 and years of updates was a total transformation.

It wasn't really usable until SP2. I remember vividly the screams about it. SP3 helped as well, but also introduced the 'validation' crap.

[ansel12]

I recently put an old hard drive into an old computer and loaded XP off of an old disc (all from different finds), and somehow I got past the verification process, by paying close attention.