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Windows XP Dies Final Death As Embedded POSReady 2009 Reaches End of Life (techrepublic.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the you-had-a-good-run dept.

New submitter intensivevocoder shares a report from TechRepublic: Extended support for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 -- the last supported version of Windows based on Windows XP -- ended on April 9, 2019, marking the final end of the Windows NT 5.1 product line after 17 years, 7 months, and 16 days. Counting this edition, Windows XP is the longest-lived version of Windows ever -- a record which is unlikely to be beaten.

Despite the nominal end of support for Windows XP five years ago, the existence of POSReady 2009 allowed users to receive security updates on Windows XP Home and Professional SP3 through the use of a registry hack. Microsoft dissuaded users from doing this, stating that they "do not fully protect Windows XP customers," though no attempt was apparently made to prevent users from using this hack. With POSReady reaching the end of support, the flow of these security updates will likewise come to an end.

12 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Amusing summary by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm pretty sure that most people on Slashdot know POS really stands for "Point of Sale". But I found it amusing to read through the whole summary with "Windows" and "POS" lumped together multiple time leading the read to their own inner dialogue as to meaning...

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  2. Death? by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why would this amount to 'death'? If I had, for an example, a LabView system on my bench that ran on Windows XP, it wouldn't need to 'die' because it isn't networked to any other systems. There are lots of pieces of test equipment that embed various versions of Windows in them. At a previous job we had Unholtz-Dicke shaker tables. One had a Windows XP host, the other had a Windows 2000 host. They worked fine. They will continue to work fine.

    1. Re:Death? by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Technology never dies, as long as someone is using it.
      However a Dead technology means there is no more support or new products from its licensed company.

      We still have MS Dos 3.0 systems fully functioning and used for business.
      There are still people making games for legacy systems such as the Commodore 64

      But they are dead technology too, because there is no official point of support.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. Re:So... by viperidaenz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Meanwhile, the oldest Linux kernel still supported is 3.16, first released in 2014. It won't even get to 6 years before being abandoned.

  4. Windows 10 forever by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I thought Microsoft was just going to continue to enhance Windows 10 forever. That will certainly blow by the record set by XP.

    1. Re:Windows 10 forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The retail version of Windows 10 (FPP) is perpetually licensed and has an extended support lifecycle until 2025. That means anyone who paid for a boxed copy is covered until 2025 for security updates at a minimum. Windows 10 LTSB 2016 can't become subscription ware as it is licensed with a 10 year fixed lifecycle and Windows 10 LTSC 2019 also cannot be since that's covered until 2029.

      You're more likely to find Microsoft replacing Windows 10 with their latest Windows Core OS open-source project and charging for ancillary services like MDM, Active Directory, OpenID, e-mail and such with support from the Azure cloud. Even if people opt-out of the cloud, Microsoft can simply pass on savings to cloud customers without providing any requisite reduction in cost to users wanting on-premises under the Client Access License (CAL) or Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) pricing models. Heck, Microsoft's Azure services already wreck small IT support providers in terms of overall costs even given how cheap SPLA prices currently are! In the future, it may no longer be economically sane to pay 3rd parties for support when Microsoft can do it cheaper and often better.

      Remember that Microsoft already won the e-mail war, with small businesses being routinely migrated to the platform, despite the repeated outages 365 has suffered! Also, ask yourself this: How many other services offer 100GB inboxes with full indexing, repeated anti-malware scanning, per-tenant encryption (with optional per-message encryption) and unlimited fully-searchable archiving?

      Microsoft don't need to play dirty with Windows to win, in fact, open-sourcing appears to be their game plan to shutting down competition currently!

  5. You can upgrade Linux 0.01 by DrYak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Meanwhile, the oldest Linux kernel still supported is 3.16, first released in 2014.

    If your server is still running Linux kernel 0.01 you are completely allowed (thanks to the copyleft GPL it is licensed under) to upgrade all the way to the current 5.1-rc4.

    If your marchine is running Windows XP (and don't get me about Windows 2.0 or MS-DOS 2.0), you're hosed. You can't get updates for that version, and you need to buy a new "upgrade license" to get something newer. (though from time to time some of these upgrade are free).

    From the point of view of how Windows is handled, Linux is a single product which only differs by build numbers.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  6. Re:So... by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    MS gives a big FU to anyone who foolishly built a system on their OS. Let that be a lesson.

    Lesson learnt. 19 years of support for their software, clearly the absolute best in the OS industry. I can't find a Linux, BSD, Apple, or any other OS that still has that original version supported.

  7. Re:Functionally forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Time for a big compatibility rant:

    32-bit Windows 10 can still run most 16-bit Windows 3.0 binaries no problem out of the box. 64-bit Windows can run 32-bit binaries no problem with stuff dating as far back as Windows 95 working just fine. The community has adapted winevdm to work on Windows (otvdm) for running 16-bit binaries on 64-bit Windows 7 and above transparently, however, compatibility requires a bit of Wine-style work like nabbing old 16-bit DLLs for otvdm to work as it’s still early days. I can run the Windows 3.1 Control Panel and change the actual wallpaper in Windows 10 using it. That is how backwards compatible Windows is. For reference, Office 97 still works on 64-bit Windows 10 in 2019 without issues - yet StarOffice binaries for Linux fail on modern Linux distros.

    On Linux, the kernel team do a fantastic job of keeping userland compatibility but the distribution-maintained userland compatibility sucks donkeys. Simple commands like head and tail have compatibility broken by the GNU project for scripting, leading old video games like Unreal Tournament failing to install without environment variable changes and hacks. Likewise, commands keep changing for the heck of it, as do the interfaces for system configuration. A group policy written for Windows 2000 will still mostly work for Windows 10. A mandatory sabayon policy for RHEL 5 does not work in RHEL 7 a few years later and with some settings having no equivalents, meaning one can’t lock down the desktop GUI any more. Likewise, a Software Restriction Policy in Windows XP will still work on Windows 10, yet SELinux backwards compatibility gets repeatedly changed in incompatible ways (first, more modularity, then boolean name changes, then removal of some policy enforcement breaking custom modules....), this means system administrators often don’t bother locking down Linux systems as much as they should outside of what is spoon fed by the distribution default policy set.

    Audio: try RealPlayer for Windows.(even in Wine), then try RealPlayer for Linux. One stack retained full backwards compatibility for standard audio features, the other fubared a lot of proprietary apps.

    Graphics: Try running original Quake 3 Arena binaries on Linux so that you can have PunkBuster and such, then try on Windows. One OS works around the buffer overflow caused by OpenGL Extension count, the other leaves the user SOL.

    Networking: The RPC layer for networking allows one to use tools like Computer Management on Windows XP to maintain Windows 10 and vice-versa, ditto for the registry without needing to remote on and run commands directly on the host. 18 years of both forwards and backwards compatibility in Windows case.

    I could go on but it’s safe to say Linux does not have anywhere near decent backwards compatibility. Not because of the kernel but because of distributions and developers not putting in the extra work to maintain backwards compatibility.

  8. Re: Bricked? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So they're configured in a terrible state by default then. I've been using Linux since 1996. Your reply shows why Linux will never be a viable desktop OS.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  9. Microsoft is still offering XP on its servers... by Desert+Tripper · · Score: 3, Informative

    They say it's dead, but you can still download a free, fully functional 32-bit version of XP encased in a virtual machine (Windows Virtual PC) from Microsoft's web site! It's called "Windows XP Mode."

  10. Re:Exactly by Scoth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Commodore 64 had at least three different versions of its underlying ROM, and upgrades were a thing. It was a whole different ball of wax back then, but they existed.