That being said even if you are say on a modern operating system using a modern browser(Safari on newer versions of OS X), you still may not be able to use SCN and have to install Firefox/Chrome instead. I haven't tested Safari on OSX lately with SCN, because I gave up hope two years ago that it would ever be fixed. Then again running XP is something I would personally avoid. It's too bad they can't give you a windows 7 laptop with a XP virtual machine access for the rest of your work. Win 7 really does work fine on older hardware(2009 or newer).
Take care,
Stephen