The cockroach of Windows, XP, lives on in London's Victoria Coach Station

Windows XP is coming up to a 20th birthday yet it is heartening to see that the OS can still be guaranteed to take its place as one of the three horsemen of the borkpocalypse. While not actually on a screen of blue, the ugly face of Windows XP has shown itself nestled between a CMOS error and another screen that has simply …

[Piro]

It's not ugly, it's nostalgic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic

Microsoft could not get rid of Linux and they still cannot rid of XP. Another example of If ain't broken don't fix it. In this case it's the battery. You wouldn't believe how many hi profile applications still run under XP. You only notice them when they fall over.

[heyrick]

Re: Ironic

I still use XP. Rarely use a desktop machine these days, and there are a few applications that are quite nice and run will on XP on a box from when the Pentium4 was a thing, so I never saw any need to spend money to replace what works.

[captain veg]

Re: Ironic

If they're actually running on a Pentium 4 then you would probably save money by moving to a cheap Atom (or similar) powered box just on electricity costs.

Unless it's part of your home heating, of course.

-A.

[DJV]

Re: Ironic

Some years ago a friend of a friend asked my advice on the secondhand laptop he wanted to buy. I took one look, saw it was Pentium 4 and said, Don't touch it with a barge pole - it will overheat and burn itself out. So, of course, as he was an idiot, he ignored my advice and bought it. Within a year it had overheated and the CPU died. I took pleasure in saying, Told you so.

[Piro]

Re: Ironic

P4 in a laptop was just a terrible idea. It's good Intel came to their senses and developed the good ol' Pentium M instead, which is basically the parent of all the modern Intel Core processors...

[heyrick]

Re: Ironic

"Within a year it had overheated and the CPU died."

Thankfully it's a desktop box with a heatsink the size of a planet and a fan at both ends (of the heatsink, there's another for the PSU).

The fans run normally most of the time, but go batshit when playing EDuke.

[steviebuk]

I loved Windows 98se. Never wanted to move to XP. Tried it, wasn't keen but also turned out my PC wasn't that great. This was back in 2004. I think I may have lasted another year before I was finally confident enough about XP that I moved, then loved it :)

Stayed on it until Windows 7. Loved Windows 7. Still using it and only use Windows 10 on work machines. But I might have to bite the bullet soon as there are some quite useful "quality of life" things on Windows 10 that work well that are missing on Windows 7. Native ISO mounting for example.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Personally it was Windows 2000 that I clung to, until I was forced to replace both the motherboard & HDD, when the spinning rust died & the world had moved away away from IDE.

Icon - Moving to XP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm isn't just an empty box?

[Trigun]

Yeah 98SE was one of my favs - mostly because it was stable compared to 98 1st Ed which just kept BSODing whenever you tried Nero Burning ROM or playing a DVD (with help from an MEG2 card, of course).

[Trigun]

Liked XP a lot, but I do remember it running like an absolute dog after a few months and really the best thing to sort it was a reinstall. Oh and I miss the Press F6' to install 3rd party drivers for AHCI mode :).

[Anonymous Coward]

UNESCO

Obviously there need to be World Heritage Borks.

Since UNESCO is busy bothering Liverpool, ElReg should step up.

[Version 1.0]

How about a Bork upgrade?

If this becomes a popular thing with the error messages displayed on social media when this is seen, maybe Windows 11 will display an advert with every error message? I've just deleted the "Joke" icon because I think this is actually a possibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

XP almost forever

I've been using an XP PC as sort of NAS. I had originally bought it planning to put some sort of Linux on it. Turned out it was a mutant Dell that couldn't run any of the Linux way back then. So I stuck with XP and used the mirror drives to give a little extra data security.

I had been doing system wide backups using the DVD drive on it. But alas, the DVD drive started having increasing numbers of errors so now it's just the mirror drives as a security blanket. The backups are now done on the two main and new PCs using their newer DVD's. I don't have that much data at home and I have a fair number of DVD's.

It's only on for data backups and it never is used for mail or web surfing. So it's mostly safe.

[martinusher]

You can't keep updating embedded kit every five minutes

This message hasn't permeated yet for some reason. Its a fact of life that you can't keep updating devices all the time, especially if they've been certified for some industrial or health related operation. The particular build of the OS and the firmware with it are SKUs for the entire device.

This hasn't permeated to the IoT crew yet. Its why I don't mind connecting my yard lights to an IoT switch but you'd never, ever, catch me putting anything large, expensive, heavy or critical on one of their devices.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Coaches are arriving and departing? You know we have thingies powered by internal combustion engines and electricity now, right?

[Roland6]

Well its probably more secure than anything W10...

Given the level of security vulnerabilities found in versions of W10 (and I suspect also in W11 release candidates) ...

Interestingly, I see there hasn't a post yet about how running unsupported versions of Windows is poor security practice; probably because as we've seen in recent months, running a current version of Windows isn't necessarily good security practice....