Core 2 Quad Windows XP Build

    So, my family is quarantined due to possibly having COVID-19. My place is a mess. I have many dismantled systems. What if I could finish up a system?

    I wanted to build a good XP system for a while, but never really got myself to do it. I wanted to use parts I already had, and I wanted to keep it rather simple. I had this old HP Pavilion a1473w desktop with a bad motherboard which has been around EVERYWHERE. I took it to school for a project, I swapped out motherboards on and off with AM2, 1156, later 775, you name it. I originally used it to hold me over in 2015 when my laptop "died". It originally had a Pentium 4 HT 620, 2GB of RAM, a 200GB hard drive, Radeon Xpress 200 integrated graphics, and 32-bit Vista. I thought it was good at first until I realized the shortcomings of Prescott/Prescott-2M/Cedar Mill.

    You may wonder what happened here, and it's a little complex but not too hard to understand. CPUs have pipeline stages. The later Pentium 4s along with all Pentium Ds and Celeron Ds had 31. Most CPUs at the time had 10-15 stages. 31 was far too many. A longer pipeline allows for higher clock speeds, but ends up hindering instructions per clock. A Pentium III (coppermine had 10) from around the same era as a Willamette Pentium 4 (which had 20) would run faster not because of the clock speeds, but because of the shorter pipeline. The longer pipeline also caused branch mispredictions, which had to be reset in the event that an instruction was not being passed through as it should. There's more to this, like the lack of a barrel shifter and other crap, but that's for another day. tl;dr The Athlon XP/64 was a better choice and gave you impressive performance and later, 64-bit support compared to the Pentium 4.

    Alright, enough yapping about why NetBurst was a mistake in our world. Here are the parts I had:

-MSI G31TM-P21 motherboard (Low end chipset works fine, but it won't have all the fancy stuff like the better ones have.)

-Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Common chip, but works perfectly fine.)

-4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 (What, you wanted me to install 8GB? 4 is plenty for XP.)

-Radeon HD 4870 512MB (It's better than an 8800 Ultra, and it even works unlike said card.)

-500GB HGST 7200rpm HDD (I needed to use it in SOME way.)

-Optical drive and a 1.44MB floppy drive (in case i will EVER need it)

-Windows XP Professional SP3 x86

-Onboard audio and LAN (Keep it simple, stupid.)

    You may be wondering "Why didn't you go with anything older?" In case I need extra power, I have it. Windows XP SP2 literally rewrote the entire OS, and SP3 was released in the era of dual/quad core systems. XP SP1/RTM and in some cases SP2, actually runs better on older hardware compared to SP3. It may not seem like much at first, but once you install more programs, it becomes more noticeable. SP3 would have ran fine on my 3.2GHz Northwood system, but maybe not later on. I also went with more recent hardware because it's actually somewhat more reliable. The components used were made shortly after the disaster called the CAPACITOR PLAGUE, where Chemical X was accidentally added into the mix of sugar, spice, and everything nice. Also, I own a CTK-720 now and I'd like to have good hardware for FL Studio 10, as the CTK-720 has pretty flaky driver support in later versions of Windows. Also, I wanted to use hardware that I already own and this was a good choice of components.

    It runs great! I used nLite to slipstream some stuff like the latest updates for XP SP3, integrating drivers, and cutting out some unnecessary stuff like the OOBE. Note that I would not recommend maining XP, especially purely for "nostalgia" since it has many security flaws which are usually patched rather quickly in supported operating systems. If you are STUCK with an older system, I would install a lightweight GNU+Linux distribution like Void, Arch, Devuan/Debian, Xubuntu, etc. if possible.