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As a result of the continuous march of technology, every few years I find that still useful peripherals or pieces of previously expensive software are no longer compatible with the latest operating system. The majority of the time a work around can be found though running items in compatibility mode or via a virtual environment. Normally after some effort you can usually arrive at the point from where you started, which just seems like a considerable amount of effort for no real benefit.
This seems to be the case for many of my workshop items that came with software in order to program or other pieces of development software that cost a considerable amount of money when originally purchased.
This got me thinking, why can’t I just build a PC from now cheap hardware collect enough spares to keep me going indefinitely, bang on an operating system and never worry about compatibility issues ever again.
Now I know what you’re thinking, what about patching, trogons and virus!
Well my answer is this, the main source of these is via internet downloads, though USB transfer and via email attachments. Now this is the radical bit, if we don’t use the internet on these machines and ensure that they never receive an email (milieus or otherwise) then this eliminates the majority of the sources right away.
Then if we accept that we may occasionally pick up something though USB transfer as there is no internet connectivity the trogon, virus or otherwise cannot pass on my personal data. The very worst that can happen is that the files on the infected machine are destroyed and I have to perform a full rebuild or reconstitute the device from a clone backup.
To mitigate this problem as long as I have a way of checking my USB transfer files for issues and a regular file backup procedure for my personal files, then I should be reasonably safe.
The lack of internet connectivity immediately throws some obstacles in our path, for example Windows 10 required internet verification after installation which means that it would always be nagging to be verified and eventually may stop working altogether.
This is true for many of the operating systems that would allow me to run my software and hardware easily. This would have limited the operating system to Windows 95/98 which is a little too old for what I am trying to achieve. Luckily a release of Windows XP intended for virtual machines that does not require the final internet verification sequence has been released (a link to this is included below)
This allows me to run all of my software and is a reasonable starting point for the build.
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