You Can Do This Today.

XP is not even close to being either gone or 'dead' !!

For anyone who is determined to keep it on hand & running literally forever there are several solutions.

1. The somewhat easy & straightforward way: - Get any easy distribution of Linux to start with (A fine example is Ubuntu); - After the very short learning curve, install VirtualBox; - Make a new VM & install XP into that; - Activate if necessary; - Use it as desired.

2. A more personalized & comprehensive way: - Use your already personalized and/or tweaked & activated existing XP installation via the P2V process. This works especially well and even for multi-partition, single-OS setups via disk imaging utilities. Many are able to directly make or convert to complete VM images which are easily used via different platforms. This has been done successfully and used via VirtualBox, VMware Workstation or VMware Workstation Player.

The biggest advantages of using XP as a guest OS via a very stable host OS are these: - In a modern PC with enough RAM, etc., XP runs even faster & smoother than it ever did natively; - If/when any serious problem occurs - all one need do is to close the VM & re-start it as it was before; - Modifications are possible to make & keep when used via VirtualBox, or VMware Workstation. 3. There are live, USB based versions of XP floating around as well as winPE 2 versions such as BartPE that can still be customized & rebuilt to one's own preferences, BUT; Those may fail to boot on very modern H/W due to HDD controller problems. One very good way to use this sort of XP is via installation on a separate partition & using a boot manager to multi-boot the system. Much is still possible even with newer H/W by removing UEFI?GPT & setting the HDD controller to a compatibility mode, when the system's BIOS allows all that. (Sadly, many proprietary sorts of PCs restrict such settings.)