Interesting XP Registry Hack

Published on May 26, 2014 By DrJBHL In Personal Computing

Everyone knows that since mid April, XP is no longer being supported by MS (unless you’re the IRS) and you’d become “officially vulnerable”.

Not so fast.

This just in from reporter Hankers: There’s a registry hack for XP which will allow you to receive security updates as if you were ‘Windows embedded POS ready 2009’. Per Neowin, the hack was first reported in betanews and ZDNet confirmed it. This will allow security updates until 2019.

Good news.

Sources:

1. http://betanews.com/2014/05/26/how-to-continue-getting-free-security-updates-for-windows-xp-until-2019/

2. http://www.zdnet.com/registry-hack-enables-continued-updates-for-windows-xp-7000029851/

3. http://www.neowin.net/news/reports-claim-windows-xp-can-be-updated-via-registry-hack

Comments

benmanns

on May 26, 2014

This is probably good news for many xp users but the question is for how long will they be able to benefit from the tweak.
My guess is that there won´t be any xp specific updates available very soon that will pop up in update list.
Another thought and i dont want to attack anyone with it im just curious, to my understanding POS is over and downloading updates after that ( is a bit robin hood) not that it would ruin the company but... isnt that part Data mining and snitching ?

And as far as i understand there will be updates that are not xp specific so there is a high chance that unexperienced users will trash their systems or do unrelated updates just dont show up?
IF so the list might be empty sooner than many expect.

Wizard1956

on May 26, 2014

Keep in mind these updates are written for point of sale systems running XP based software, not for desktop users. While for the most part, they may be very similar, there may be enough dissimilar that a POS update could hose your OS. I strongly advise making a restore point and a full backup before doing any reg hack or installing any updates.

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