neowin[.]net/news/windows-xp-activation-algorithm-cracked-after-21-years-what-now/
OK, this one may seem a little off the wall, but it is actually potentially useful. Neowin links to a blog post that links to a Reddit where you can find the link to a shared file on Google [it was still there at the time of this post]. And that file will let you activate XP.
XP is not a bad OS. Up until a hardware upgrade made running XP impossible [there were workarounds, but at the time I didn't feel it was worth the hassle], I ran XP alongside Win7. Win7 was 64-bit & used 8GB RAM, while XP was 32-bit, using just shy of 4GB RAM, and performance between the 2 was pretty much equal [XP had a very slight edge].
Anyway, if you've got, or come across old but still functioning hardware that cannot run Win10, there's a good chance XP will work -- I remember getting XP running on an ancient laptop that shipped with Win98, the 1st version, not SE. Linux, the OS you might think of 1st in that situation, would not work with it. And then there's old software -- lots of companies went under or were bought out, and there's no current replacements for the software they released, which in many [most?] cases won't run on newer versions of Windows. The problem is that if you didn't install & activate XP years ago, today you cannot activate it following official procedures. The activation servers are no longer there.
FWIW, my XP VMs use the old Win7 Virtual PC version of XP, that IMHO works a bit better than installing the original version, though I've no idea what tweaks Microsoft used. I've even got an old VM of Win98 [it only takes up 366MB], & AFAIK it still works, though it's been a while since I fired it up out of curiosity.