What happens if you connect Windows XP to the Internet in 2024?

What people said

ROllerozxa · 2026-06 · Criticism

The kind of passive infection that is shown in popular videos like this one ( [VIDEO] ) tend to only happen if you hook up an XP machine to be directly accessible to the Internet. Like, if you connect your XP machine to your router sitting in the middle of your Internet connection and don't forward every port, you should be fine in that regard at least. There is also Supermium which is a relatively recent version of Chromium backported to run on Windows XP with all the security patches that brings, but with that being said I still would not do anything security critical on it.

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Sohcahtoa82 · 2026-02 · Reference

> There was a time when if you'd put a fresh XP install on the Internet you'd get 5-10 minutes until it would get restarted. This is still true, though 5-10 minutes is slightly pessimistic. Source: [VIDEO] TL;DW - Guy installs XP and makes it internet accessible, only takes 15 minutes before the first malware appears on it.

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badsectoracula · 2024-06 · Criticism

AFAICT there was a single YouTube video that started this[0] and they mentioned explicitly several times that this mainly works because they put it in "the open internet" as a server. Disabling the firewall was the icing on the cake and yet that is all sites that reported this[1], no mention about how the computer was not behind, well, anything that a desktop in the last couple of decades would be (and most likely beyond that, i remember around 2002 when i had a modem, i had to visit a web page at my ISP to allow me open various ports as many things were disabled by default). [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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