Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, also known as Windows FLP by its friends, is a stripped down version of Windows XP, specially designed to suit the needs of older hardware PCs.

It is, in fact, a success.

I tried installing it on a really slow computer (which was running Windows XP before anyway) and it really helped performance. It has disabled the usually-annoying useless services by default, and you can really feel processing power, even in slow old processors.

The computer I tested was an AMD K6 300MHz @ 256MB Ram (64 MB shared with Video Memory). It actually feels kinda fast, I just installed it today and we all know Windows Installations degenerate with time, but this one feels smooth, at least for now.

It feels just a tad slower than my laptop (Pentium M 1.60GHz [Code-name Dothan; 64KB L1 Cache; 2MB L2 Cache], 512 MB in PC2700 Ram) running Windows XP Professional under heavy use for about 1 month.

That computer is only going to be used to read e-mail using Thunderbird, browse using Firefox, and write documents on Word and spreadsheets on Excel, so it is... quite enough.

This is, in my opinion, a very smart move from Microsoft. It's not a dumbed-down windows, it's full fledged, Windows XP Pro-based. That'll keep Legacy users from moving to Linux or other Open Source alternatives.

The also-smart move is that they removed support for certain things a power user would do (to avoid having people instal FLP on non-Legacy computers), for example, they removed WIA (Windows Image Acquisition), 802.11 (Wireless Networking) support, VPN, Dial-up, Telephony....

If it wasn't for that, I'd use it on my laptop, I'd love to see my laptop flying on Windows FLP, but oh well, I wouldn't use my laptop with no webcam abilities (WIA)... And though I could live without my webcam, what I couldn't live without is my Wireless Network.

The restrictions make sense, since it's meant for LEGACY PCs after all. Also, Microsoft won't sell it on retail, it is only for enterprises subscribed to a support program, also makes sense (and makes the restrictions even clearer, if you need it for your Enterprise Legacy platform, why VPN? the computers would be located in the corporate network anyway, no need for 802.11, after all it's a recent trend, why dialup or telephony if you're on the corporate network anyway?).

Regardless of those issues it still is a VERY smart move by Microsoft.


Download Link
http://rapidshare.com/files/87466451/WFLP2k6.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87467818/WFLP2k6.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87469256/WFLP2k6.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87470642/WFLP2k6.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87472072/WFLP2k6.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87473571/WFLP2k6.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87465020/WFLP2k6.part7.rar