Recently, Microsoft officially ended support for Windows XP to the general public, but along with certain government agencies, those running the Windows Embedded Industry variant of the OS will also continue to get updates until 2019. Formerly known as Windows Embedded POSReady, it’s based on Windows XP Service Pack 3, and since the updates are perfectly compliant with the end user version of Windows XP, you too can benefit from these security fixes.
Microsoft stopped offering significant feature enhancements to XP a long time ago, but security updates are often required as new holes and bugs continue to be discovered. The fact that Microsoft has already released an update to the Windows XP version of Internet Explorer even after support was “officially” ended shows that even after twelve years, the software is still susceptible to issues, and if you want to cover your back until 2019, here’s how you’ll need to go about it.
You can’t go in head-first and add these updates without shuffling a few things around first. After all, the Embedded POSReady edition of Windows XP is labeled as a different piece of software, and if you simply try to apply its updates to the regular edition of XP, you’ll hit a brick wall in the form of a version mismatch error.
Before you go ahead and get started, it’s worth noting that you will need to be running the 32-bit (x86) edition of Windows XP Service Pack 3 for the trick to work. Also, taking a backup of all your important data is worthwhile, just in case something should go wrong.
We’re not expecting anything to go majorly wrong, but as ever, proceed at your own risk. Redmond Pie is not responsible for any data lost or damage to your PC as a result of following this tutorial.
With the formalities out of the way, let’s get started.
Step 1: You will need to make a plain text document, and add this info:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
“Installed”=dword:00000001
Save the above as: xp.reg
Step 2: Double-click this newly-created file, and the contents will be added to the registry.
And that’s it. Once you have this new registry file added, you’ll be able to get these very secret updates on your Windows XP computer.
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