My company could easily procure a machine of an older era with full Windows XP drivers. No, virtual machines like VirtualBox or VMWare will not cut it, we need a native installation for realistic testing. This means we actually need a Windows XP installation for testing purposes. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say we occasionally have to handle such older systems and test to make sure our product can work with them. I work in a startup called Algoaccess where we deal with medical devices specifically optician-related ones.

An extreme example is how the 23-year-old Windows 3.1 which crashed is still used in a French airport as of late last year. I was only 11 years old when this OS was released so you can imagine I pretty much spent much of my teen years using XP machines other than Red Hat Linux of course.ĭespite its age, XP continues to live on in embedded systems like ATMs, factory and medical machines where replacement costs and re-certification (timelines) makes them infeasible to be replaced in the near future. Released in October 2001, it is almost 15 years old today. This page here also puts XP’s length of support in perspective with other Microsoft OSes. This was unlike WinXP which was updated up to its final moments and even had an emergency patch after its support ended. *I say “technically” as that was when Microsoft finally declared Win 1.0 obsolete but I doubt Microsoft was updating Win 1.0 during its final years.

The number one rank is technically* held by Windows 1.0 at 16 years from 1985 to 2001. Support by Microsoft finally ended on 8 April 2014 after a record-setting 12.5 years. Windows XP is the second-longest supported operating system (OS) in Microsoft’s history. (This is a long ~2900 words post, I recommend reading this from a tablet or computer)

Advanced installer for windows xp