What's A Pentium For?
- Monday, April 21 2014 @ 02:26 PM EDT
- Contributed by: masodo
- Views: 1,484

Now that Windows XP is no longer a supported operating system you will find more and more of these older computers being pulled from service simply because it is thought that they are not safe and will bring harm to any network they might be connected to.
Disconnecting your old XP Computers from the network (particularly the internet) is probably good advice. Setting your XP driven computers on the curb is just plain wasteful. These old systems may well have much life left in them - particularly those older tank-built Pentium 4 machines manufactured for business use.
Before parting with your old XP computer think about whether it can be used in a single purpose capacity, also known as a computer kiosk. Is there a single program that the computer could run that might take a burden from your shiny new Windows 7 (or ok 8) computer? Imagine rather than booting-up, logging-in and starting the program; you need only turn on the machine to start the program you need.
Kiosk Mode
Regardless of your reason for running your machine in kiosk mode the key steps are going to be: 1.) disabling the log-in screen and 2.) Changing the default "SHELL" from Microsoft Windows Explorer to the program of your choice.
It is a good idea to first create a restricted user named "Kiosk" and don't even bother giving them a password.
I have already detailed the steps for disabling XP logins in a previous article [See BlogDogIt: Disable XP Login]
Here are the steps to having your computer go straight to the program of your choice when it first starts up:
Perhaps one of the most used Windows XP applications in the world of business has been the program known as "Solitaire." This is a specialized business app that would be well suited for use on a dedicated machine in an office environment. This example will show how to set up Solitaire to run on start-up. You can apply these steps to your program of choice (PINBALL.EXE perhaps?)