Let's Install Windows XP Delta Edition on a Toshiba Netbook
As Netbook November progressed, I found myself talking a lot about my Acer Aspire, and primarily using my HP Mini; so I figured I should show some love to the third wheel of my collection. I received this Toshiba NB505 a little over a year ago, but I didn’t really have anything to do with it. Occasionally I would pull it out, do a couple little things, then set it aside. But today, I wanted to try something a bit more unique. I wanted to install Windows XP Delta Edition on it.
What is Windows XP Delta Edition?
For the uninitiated, Windows XP Delta Edition is a fan mod for Windows XP. The goal of the project is to “restore beta features and visual aesthetics, along with fixing inconsistencies.” According to the the project’s website it “aims to recreate the Windows XP Beta 2 aesthetic and bring back lost features, functions, and programs from previous versions of Windows, along with prerelease versions of Windows XP.” It’s really is quite cool and I’ve been wanting to try it on real hardware for a while now.
Long time subscribers to The Retro Millennial may also remember an article that came out back in March 2023 titled Let’s Explore Windows Vista Delta Edition as part of the Vista Challenge. That’s right, Vista Delta and XP Delta are sister projects. In fact, the person behind these two projects even has a Windows 7 Delta Edition, and a Windows 8.1 Delta Edition available; but let’s stay focused!
XP Delta Edition (henceforth, XP Delta in this article) has a number of things I liked about the Windows XP beta releases. First, and foremost, it includes the pre-Luna Watercolor theme which I think is a pretty slick looking middle ground between the traditional Windows 2000/Me theme and the more “futuristic” Luna theme.
In addition to the theme, XP Delta also includes some other cool features. Not only do you get Windows Media Player 6.4, you also get Media Center 95, and even the Program Manager from Windows 3.x! There are others, to be sure, but I didn’t find a comprehensive list before writing this.
The Machine
As a refresher, this device is a Toshiba NB505. It is a netbook that released in either 2010 or 2011. XP was still officially supported at that time, but it was quite long in the tooth. By then, we had gotten both Windows Vista and Windows 7, and Windows 8 was just on the horizon.
This device shipped with Windows 7 Starter — a stripped down version of 7 for netbooks with loads of artificial limitations in place. It comes equipped with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.66 GHz Intel N455 Atom CPU. A powerhouse, it is not… but perhaps XP could be a quality system for this aging little laptop?
The Installation
Booting the computer, I wanted to see what was on it since it had been so long since I’d used it. It turns out the last OS I tested on it was Bodhi Linux 7 which I had installed around the time it came out in late August or early September 2023.
It actually wasn’t too bad once the system was fully booted. Startup and login took a good little while, but once I was in and the OS stopped loading things, the system was quite snappy. Chromium even worked well enough for more basic web browsing. YouTube still slowed this netbook to a crawl though…
So I started by first inserting the CD I made into an external USB optical drive. I then made the necessary changes in the BIOS before booting into the Windows XP Installer. XP Delta apparently also adds a bunch of other drivers and such causing the installer to take about 7 minutes to load in.
After deleting the Linux partition, I created a new partition taking up all available disk space and began the formatting process for the NTFS partition. This was by far the longest part taking nearly 49 minutes. I could have chosen the quick format option, but I’ve had enough weird hiccups doing that in the past so I opted for the full formatting.
Once the format was finished, I proceeded to install XP Delta to the new partition. This stage took a little under 12 minutes which was honestly faster than I expected. However, not everything went according to plan. Several items failed to copy over causing errors to pop up. Clicking OK did let me through to the rest of the setup though. Once my user account was created, more errors came indicating that Watercolor and Whistler failed to copy over. These are themes, and frankly were two of the things I was really wanting here. It didn’t really matter as I could just add them later on manually.
Once the setup was finalized, the system needed a reboot and we were greeted with the XP Delta splash screen, which I quite like.
Unfortunately something went wrong and the system would immediately crash at the splash screen before going into a boot loop. After a few failed boot attempts, I tried going into Safe Mode both with and without networking enabled but that failed as well.
The XP Delta website did say they recommended installing on hardware that is known to work with Windows XP and while the NB505 can run it, it wasn’t intended for it. So I decided to break out my copy of Windows XP Professional and give that a go. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it, but this image could not even identify the drivers for the hard drive in this netbook and I didn’t feel up for searching around for it on my own.
Unfortunately this means this little project was a failure, but that’s alright. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes. Could I have tinkered around and gotten it to work? Sure, but it had already eaten up nearly an hour and a half of my afternoon and I had other obligations. Perhaps someday in the future we can return to this and see it through, but until then it will just go back on the shelf until next November.
Ways to Join the Community
I had never heard of the Delta versions of Win XP/7, so thanks for making this post. I'll have to give them a try at some point.
Typeo: "So I [stated] by first inserting the CD"