At the beginning of this year, iImade a video about
React OS. I would say go watch it but judging by the view count you probably already have. I've decided to take another stab at installing React OS, but this time I'm taking a slightly different
approach. In my first video, my goal was just to see if React OS could run on my existing Windows XP computer. My plan this time around, is to select a computer that i think has the highest chance of a successful React OS install, just to see if it's usable under any circumstances. I ultimately decided to use this Dell Inspiron e1705 laptop for this test. Based on the results of my previous
experiment, as well as a bit of research, I think that this machine has the best chance of success out of any of the spare computers i have to hand. This particular model was from 2006. It features an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600, running at 2.3 gigahertz, and that's paired with an Intel i945 GM/PM
motherboard chipset. In theory, this combo should play much nicer with SATA drivers and mouse
input than the AMD based system I used last time. There is one quirk of this particular machine
that i am a bit concerned about. But it shouldn't present a problem until after the OS is installed,
so I'll cross that bridge if we make it that far. I'm also going to be using a nightly build of
React OS this time around, as was suggested by a commenter on my previous video. Just like last time,
the first order of business is to back up drivers from the existing Windows installation, so we have them on hand to install later. After that, I'll go ahead and swap out the hard drive with a spare,
and then we can get the installation started. The initial React OS installation actually went really well. As predicted, there were no issues with any of the drives being read which is SO nice, especially since everything on this computer is SATA. I do need to address something while I'm
here though. In my first React OS video, i said that BTRFS was a drive format that
was supposed to be equivalent to NTFS. Turns out i was wrong on that, as several of you
were quick to point out. BTRFS is actually its own, completely different format, that was originally
designed for use in Linux server environments. It seems to be most similar to EXT filesystems,
but I'm not even sure if that's totally correct. Now that that's cleared up, I'm going to go ahead and format this drive as FAT because that's what i had the most luck with last time around. After a reboot, the first time setup went about as well as it could. Right out of the gate the mouse works, which if you saw my last video you'll know is a huge win all by
itself. Also, I didn't mention it last time, but i really like the option to choose between
these different desktop themes during setup. Even this fairly basic selection is more varied
than what Windows XP gives you without additional customization. There's also an option to choose
between a server and workstation configuration. I don't think that was there last time, so that's
neat. After the desktop finally loads, we get hit with a series of prompts to install device drivers, and this is where the frustration begins. I plugged in my USB stick with all the drivers that i backed
up earlier, and the system immediately slowed to a crawl. Even after unplugging it, everything was
lagging so much that it became unusable and i had to hard reset the computer. This time, I made sure to plug in the USB drive before booting React OS and everything seems to work fine. Time to start the driver installations. ...and here's where we run into the first major
problem. In Windows, when installing a driver from a specific directory you can choose to scan
for subdirectories to find an appropriate driver, and that system usually works pretty well. That feature doesn't exist in React OS. If the directory you've chosen doesn't contain an appropriate .inf
file, the installer won't be able to find anything. All the drivers i backed up earlier are in their own subfolders, and i can't just pull all the files into a single directory because file names would conflict. That means the only real option i have here, is to figure out which of these dozens of
folders contain the exact driver i need for the device I'm installing, which is kinda hard to do
when most of them have names like system device Now, the stock React OS drivers do seem to
be working relatively well here, so, this is where i would stop and see if i could get this
machine to do anything with just those before I risk breaking something. But, due to a quirk of this
computer, that's not going to be much of an option. this is the problem i alluded to earlier, and it's something you may be familiar with, if you've ever tried to install Linux on a Dell laptop from around the same time as this one. I'm of course talking about the fan controller issue. For some stupid reason, Dell designed the fans on a bunch of their laptops from the mid-to-late
2000s to only be controllable through software. On most computers, the CPU fan will kick on
as soon as it has power, even if the computer can't boot. Here though, you could boot an entire OS and start playing Crysis, and the system fan wouldn't even budge if the chipset driver wasn't installed correctly. Even if you're running a factory fresh Windows installation, the fan on this computer will not spin up until the chipset driver initializes
part way through the Windows boot process. This means that i have to get at least the
chipset driver installed and running in React OS, or else risk overheating the whole computer when
i try to run more CPU intensive applications. Crap like this is why i tell people not to buy computers from Dell. So, I went into device manager and installed what I'm pretty sure is the chipset driver, and it seemed to install successfully. After a restart, everything still looks good. Except, now the mouse isn't working. UUUuuhhhhggg... ...not this crap again. Also, the fan still isn'tspinning, and i don't really want to deal with this mouse issue so, time for a reinstall. This time though, the install didn't go quite as smoothly. I got a blue screen on my first attempt to boot the installer, and this error on each subsequent attempt. That was, until i pulled out my flash drive. Then everything worked fine. It seems React OS does not like to play nice with this thing. While waiting for the reinstall, it dawned on me that i could try sticking all the driver files in a single folder, and changing the file names when conflicts arise. I'm not sure how dependent
Windows is on specific file names for drivers, so this may or may not work, but i figured it's worth a shot. My hope is if one driver breaks something, something else will be able
to fix it, but I'm not counting on that. After i spent about 20 minutes moving everything
into a single directory, I popped the drive back into the laptop, booted the system and pointed the driver installation at the directory I'd made. ...and, it kind of worked. Most of the drivers were able to install just fine. There were a handful of devices that couldn't find a driver, and i got
this scary looking error at one point, but overall, this worked shockingly well. After i got through the installer dialogs I checked in device manager and, yeah, it looks like most everything's here. I went out of my way to make sure the chipset driver was installed while i was in here, and then rebooted. Fingers crossed nothing breaks this time. Hey hey hey! Not only did it not crash, but everything
still seems to work, including the mouse. Woohoo! It even looks like we have an internet connection. This weird version of internet explorer that React OS comes with can't actually render web pages, but we do appear to be online. This is some actual, tangible progress. Time to get some programs installed and see what this thing can do. Except not quite... That stupid CPU fan still isn't
spinning, and i really don't want to push my luck trying to fix it after getting this far. I do want to get some applications running, but I'd also rather not kill this computer in the process, and i don't want to just stop here because that wouldn't make for a very good video. The whole point of this experiment was to push the limits of this insanely unstable operating system, and we've finally got to a point where we can maybe do that. After much deliberation, I eventually just said "Screw it", stuck the laptop on a heat spreader, and cranked the fans to max. Here's hoping that's enough to keep it from overheating. Okay, first things first. Let's see if we can set a screen resolution higher than 600 x 800. Alright it looks like we can. Don't seem
to have any options for widescreen though, and oh my god, that screen tearing. The graphics driver definitely isn't performing optimally here. Next order of business is to install
a web browser that doesn't suck. I just copied the latest version of Firefox onto
my flash drive, so let's see if it works. Ah crap that's right, plugging in the flash drive crashes
the system. Welp, time for another hard reset. Hmm... Looks like the new resolution settings got
lost in the crash. No problem, I'll just go ahead and switch it back real quick and... Oh my god, you've got to be kidding me. The mouse stopped working again. All right, hard reset.... again, but this
time i pulled out the flash drive before booting, and what do you know, the mouse works again. I switched the resolution back over, shut down, plug the flash drive in, turned it back on, and the mouse stopped working again. Cool. So, it looks like my flash drive is
completely breaking mouse input for some reason. I wonder if this is why the mouse
stopped working with the previous install. After some extensive troubleshooting, I eventually figured out that it is possible for my USB drive and the mouse to co-exist peacefully. ...but only if the heat spreader isn't plugged in. Couldn't tell you why, but i guess I'll run with it. Luckily, this particular heat spreader has a barrel jack for power in addition to USB, so I can just plug it in the wall, and we're back in business. Time to install Firefox. Well, the installer doesn't seem to want to load from the flash drive, so I
guess I'll copy it to the desktop first. ...and everything locked up again. How many resets are we at now? I should really start a counter. Okay, second attempt, and this time I just copied
the installer to the desktop straight away, and that went a lot better. I also want to take a second to point out this copy dialog. I really like this assortment of
different icons in the copy animation, As opposed to the single sheet of paper you get with the Windows one. Anyway, let's install Firefox. After waiting forever for the installer to load, it turns out that this version of Firefox is too new to run on React OS. I guess i need to go track down the latest version that still supports Windows XP and try again. Oh, and by the way, it turns out unplugging the flash drive while the system is booted it causes an instant blue screen. So, that's cool Alright, so now I've got the new, old
version of Firefox ready to go and... Oh... It blue screened on boot. Alright, let's just unplug the flash drive and try again here... ...and it's still blue screens. Okay, let's try debug mode. Blue screen. ROS debug? Blue screen. It's just blue screens all the way down. Now, I never did test this spare hard drive I'm using, so I decided to run HDSDOS on it, just in case it's going bad
and that's part of the problem. Nope, looks good. I guess unplugging that flash drive did something to break the install. Either that, or it just fell apart on its own. Normally this is where I'd give up, but because I'm doing this for a video, I will reinstall one last time. Because i really do want to test out some applications, and I'm sure you guys all want to see that too. So I reinstalled React OS all over again, and booted it up for the first time only
to find that, yet again, the mouse wasn't working. *frustrated shigh* Shut down. Pull the flash drive. Boot back up again. Okay, this is a weird one. This time it's stuck on a lock screen that we haven't seen yet. The mouse works but everything else is completely locked
up. Alright, well, third time's the charm i guess... hopefully. And we're back to this same screen
again, and the mouse isn't working. I did try running both debug modes only to have
it lock up after displaying system info. So yeah, it seems like this install is completely
shot right out of the gate for some reason So, because this attempt failed so spectacularly,
I will go ahead and reinstall one last time So I ran through the whole setup process. Again. And, thankfully, it doesn't seem to have broken itself this time. The mouse still won't work if my flash drive is plugged in though, and now i have no idea how i got it working earlier,
because the heat spreader is still unplugged. So, what i'm going to do is boot
into a Linux rescue environment, copy the drivers and Firefox installer from the USB stick to the C: drive, and then hopefully we can get everything working from there. So that took a while, but now we're booted back into React OS, and we can go through and get all the drivers installed, same as before. I'm also going to go ahead and get Firefox
installed while we're here, and then we'll reboot. All right, so we're booted back up here.
i've set the resolution as high as it'll go, and a quick check in command prompt confirms that
we are online. Let's finally get this party started. Firefox seems to work reasonably well. It's a bit slow, but it can load and display web pages just fine so we're off to a good start. But, then i tried to load YouTube, and I got their error page for out-of-date web browsers. Does this version of Firefox predate HTML5? I'm actually not entirely sure, let me know down in the comments. Reddit kinda works, but it's extremely slow, and a good chunk of the images won't load. Old Reddit works a bit better, but it's still extremely slow, and we don't seem to be able to play embedded videos. I'm gonna say that streaming video is probably out of the question for this setup. You will be glad to hear that spacejam.com works perfectly tho. So ,the web is kind of hit-and-miss, but that seems
to be at least partly down to the obsolete browser we're stuck with. I went ahead and installed a bunch of other applications to try out, and it was during this process that i discovered React
OS does not handle multitasking very well. I was running a download for a program, and an installer
at the same time, when everything got laggy, and then locked up, except for the mouse. I hit ctrl-alt-delete, which almost worked but not quite, and after sitting here in limbo for a minute, the hard drive stopped seeking and the display cut out. No blue screen or anything, just an unresponsive black void. I hope this thing didn't just overheat. Another reset, and no overheat warnings
so i think everything's gonna be okay. I finished up installing the programs I want to
test, so now let's go through them one by one. We'll start with something that should be fairly simple.
Let's see if we can rip a CD with Exact Audio Copy. The program itself seems to work fine, and
I got part way through the setup wizard. ...but then it couldn't find my CD drive for some
reason. No matter what I tried it just couldn't find it, so I guess that's that. My hope was to be able to rip a CD and then play those files with good ol' Winamp, but i don't think that's going to be happening, even if EAC did work, because Winamp can't find an audio output device. It told me to check the settings menu, which took me an embarrassingly long time to find. I used to use Winamp all the time about 15 years ago, but my god this interface has aged horribly. I don't remember it being this difficult to navigate. Anyway, when i finally did get to the settings menu, i couldn't find an option to change the output device. so i guess this one's a failure too. Interestingly though, Winamp was able to read the CD i had in the drive and apparently play it, albeit with no audio. It crashed when i tried to rip the CD though, and then i had to reboot again. At least control alt delete worked this time. Next up, is the FTP client Filezilla. I had high hopes for this one since networking seems to work pretty well, and this is
an otherwise fairly simple application. But it won't even start. It just throws up a
cryptic error message when you try to launch it. Oh well. Let's move on to VLC, which actually does launch. I was going to start by playing the CD that's already in the drive, but VLC has the same issue as Exact Audio Copy, where it just can't see the disc. That's disappointing, though
I guess not entirely unexpected with how things have gone up to this point. Earlier, I copied over a video file to test with VLC, so let's try that out. Well how about that, it plays. Pretty decently too. There's a bit of stuttering and a fair bit of screen tearing, not to mention no audio, so I wouldn't exactly call this watchable, but it does perform a bit better than i expected. There were a few other applications i was hoping to try, but all of them absolutely refused to install on React OS. I didn't really want to take the time to track down compatible versions at this point, assuming they even exist, so let's move on to the finale. Time to try some games. I've decided to kick things off with a title that i already know runs extremely well on this computer under Windows. That being Unreal Tournament. The installer starts right up, but the install itself is painfully slow. Seriously, it took about half an hour to install this 600 megabyte game, and after all
that it doesn't even run. I can click play and a process for the game gets created but then nothing actually happens. No error, no crashes, nothing. If i hadn't opened task manager here
i wouldn't even be able to tell it was running, Let's try again, but this time with something
a bit less technically demanding. The Sims seems like a good pick. Oh dear. This glitched-out autorun menu does not inspire confidence. The installer works though, so let's keep going. Like Unreal Tournament, The Sims took about 30 minutes to install, which was not helped by having to swap disks part way through. After the install is finally over i get prompted to install AOL 7.0. Hell yeah! Now here's an offer i can't refuse. Let's take a little AOL-themed detour before we have a look at the Sims. The AOL install actually went reasonably quick, and the application itself
seems to run incredibly well, all things considered. I think this might actually be the most responsive
application out of everything I've tried so far, but unfortunately, the AOL service has been offline
for years, so i can't actually use it. Anyway, let's have a look at The Sims. And unfortunately,
it's the same story as Unreal Tournament. The game process starts, but nothing ever actually happens. Best guess is this behavior has something to do with DirectX, but I'm not entirely sure. I was also going to try out both Sim City 2000 and Half-Life, but unfortunately, neither of those game's installers want to run on React OS. And i think that about does it for this strange little experiment. I could keep going, trying out any number of old PC applications and games until
this install collapses under its own weight, but i don't really expect any of them to work to any
meaningful degree, and at this point i don't think it's worth the effort. This video already took way
longer to make than i had planned, and there was a ton of troubleshooting and just waiting for things to happen on this extremely slow setup that i left out of this video. From what i can tell, there is
literally nothing React OS can do that can't be done faster and infinitely more reliably on Linux, and that includes running windows applications. I don't think I'm ever going to revisit
React OS again, at least not without a drastic overhaul that substantially improves both application and hardware compatibility. Hey! Thanks for watching this video. Be sure to
leave it a like and hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed it. Also, if you saw my last video on Code R, I just wanted to let you guys know that i will be looking at more obscure racing games soon and i got some really good suggestions in the comments of that video, so stay tuned for that. I think that's all I've got. Bye.
