You don not need to acquire some pro skills to deal, even with Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3. SATA drivers are also pre-loaded with pack. SO in short if you want to avoid any complexity which you might have experienced in advanced operating systems, while you felt that comfort level with XP usage, then its time to switch back to XP SP3.

Reading Time: 13 minutes (This is a long ~2900 words post, I recommend reading this from a tablet or computer) Windows XP is the second-longest supported operating system (OS) in Microsoft’s history. Support by Microsoft finally after a record-setting 12.5 years.

The number one rank is technically* held by Windows 1.0 at 16 years from 1985 to 2001. *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.

This was unlike WinXP which was updated up to its final moments and even had an after its support ended. This here also puts XP’s length of support in perspective with other Microsoft OSes. Released in October 2001, it is almost 15 years old today. 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. Despite 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. An extreme example is how the 23-year-old as of late last year. The problem I work in a startup called Algoaccess where we deal with medical devices specifically optician-related ones.

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. This means we actually need a Windows XP installation for testing purposes. No, virtual machines like VirtualBox or VMWare will not cut it, we need a native installation for realistic testing.

My company could easily procure a machine of an older era with full Windows XP drivers. There are guides like where people have used an older system to install WinXP in 2016.

But where is the fun in that? I saw this as an opportunity to determine if it is really possible to install WinXP on a much newer system. It was also a good way to relive a bit of my childhood that way. First thoughts? It shouldn’t be that hard right?

I know drivers could be an issue but it shouldn’t be a show-stopper? Turns out things are not so easy to put WinXP on modern hardware. The machine A photo to show that I have successfully installed WinXP on this machine abet with lots of missing drivers. A short video for “extra proof” The target machine is a Lenovo Ideapad U330p which was manufactured in 25 July 2014. Here are the key specifications: • Intel Core i5-4210U 1.7Ghz Haswell CPU • Intel HD Graphics 4400 GPU • Intel HM77 chipset • 8GB DDR3 RAM • Realtek HD Audio • Intel 7260N Wireless-N and Bluetooth 4.0 • 1366×768 screen • 500GB + 8 GB SSHD The Haswell CPU/GPU, which is about the time when Microsoft was stopping support for WinXP.