I doubt it will be useless... other browsers would reference that applet via their network connection settings... Wouldn't other applets and apps have references to Internet Options?
Thanks MisterB for your informative post. One thing that puzzles me, is why MS still allows XP to be activated and that's one of the areas I was thinking they could hamstring it, unless you have retail or other non oem copies. Recently I've been through 2 Pro oem activations (phone) and aside from the caution that it is no longer supported they activated anyway. One of these was on different hardware, which I told them about and the other is the same. Leaves me thankful this time I get a pass, but who knows from here on in. With all the hold-ups I've had through last year, I haven't been able to get ahead enough to learn anywhere near enough. I think getting some sort of start in Linux would be a wise idea. VirtualBox has been something I've wanted to get into. When I went to install it the other day I backed out because I didn't know enough about the right components to install. What is a hypervisor?
Because of the way Microsoft sells licenses, they are legally obligated to activate any properly licensed Windows installation and I can't see them getting around this as much as they might want to for older versions. I've never even had to call them for an activation. A hypervisor is a host operating system that is running VMs. Any OS with VM host software would be considered a hypervisor but, obviously, if you intend to do all the real work in VMs, you want the host OS to be as lean and minimal as possible. Just drivers and networking and a firewall and basic security components. I've got a Qubes installation on my W520 which implements that concept fully out of the box. Qubes is interesting but a little too much and too rigid for a lot of what I do. The only Windows version it supports for a VM is 7. Security comes at a price. I want to run multiple Windows Vms with multiple versions of Windows including virtualized versions of my old Xp installations and I'm playing around with different OSes running the same Virtualbox VMs. The winner so far is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which works really well on this laptop. At logon, memory use is only 600mb of 16gb which leaves the rest for the VMs. Linux has better memory management than Windows and Windows 7 uses twice as much memory just to run the OS but actually works pretty well. This is a pretty fresh install and I could trim it down a bit. Xp x64 uses around 800mb but I've found that it doesn't seem to handle multi threading as well as 7 or Ubuntu and one or two cores will be running really high while the rest are idle so VM speed is not that good. My experience with this laptop pretty much confirms what experience has long taught me. The best version of Windows for a given computer is the one it came with. Both Xp x64 and Windows 10 have driver and compatibility issues and are generally slower on this machine while Windows 7 works with everything I throw at it, hardware and software. That includes running Windows 10 in a VM. The only other OS that works as well on it is Ubuntu 14.04.
If you have any specific examples please share. I have removed the Internet Options applet and the browser and apps I use work fine.
