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Serious question, did I mess up by running Windows XP on my shop laptop for 8 months?
I kept an old Dell Latitude D630 on XP for running a serial port label printer at my fire station, and I swore by it since nothing new has a real COM port. Last week the printer started spitting out garbage characters mid-print, and a guy on a retro forum asked what my system clock said. The CMOS battery had died, the date reset to 2003, and XP was fine with it the whole time, which is what finally convinced me the problem was never the software. Now I keep a $6 coin cell in the drawer, but I still don't know if I should just move the label job to a Raspberry Pi. Has anyone kept XP alive for a real task and hit weird stuff like this?
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cameron_chen638d ago
Saw a post on Hackaday a while back about a guy running a CNC router off XP for like a decade, same deal, dead CMOS battery had his dates all wrong and nobody noticed till file timestamps went nuts. The Pi route is fine but you'll need a USB to serial adapter anyway, so the real COM port thing doesn't fully go away. For a label printer a Pi is honestly overkill, a $30 thin client with a real port would do the job.
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