Hi folks, thank you so much for your comments!<p>Yes, this was purely a "why not?!" project, it doesn't really make sense and using VMware or true low-level emulation like 86Box is a way better option than using completely unsupported software.<p>Currently going through your comments...
If I remember correctly, the blue text-mode part of the setup can be launched from DOS 7.1 (the DOS part of Windows 98, with FAT32 support) by copying the i386 directory from the CD to the FAT32-formatted hard drive and running WINNT.EXE from MS-DOS. I doubt this would work inside DOSBox-X, tough... I'd like to try but right now I don't have enough time for such experiments ;-)
> The OOBE started, but what an experience it was! This wasn’t an experience. This was pure madness!<p>Very enjoyable. I was overjoyed seeing shots of 3D pinball.
This article is not very clear. After the author realizes that they don't have low-level access privileges they just... do the thing that failed 20 times before and suddenly it works with no explanation as to why.
Were there any shims or workarounds (specific to an upgrade path from a DOS-based Windows) that were left in place in XP to keep things chugging along?<p>I’m wondering whether a clean install worked more efficiently versus an upgraded install.
There are people who create checksums of iso's and there's people like me.<p>And then there are people who do not read the ToS and then there's also nobody else.<p>I miss the simplicity of windows xp. sometimes.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but Windows XP was the last version of Windows where usability and UI consistency seemed to be central to the design.<p>The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps. I didn't have to contend with four different version of the file browser to open a file, or "Show more options" on right-click to get a non-idiot-proof context menu. Icons were high contrast, there were text descriptions and tools tips (instead of cryptic grey-on-grey icons), short-cut combinations were actually included in the menus, and almost every application had a help file!<p>Can we go back to that, please?