When Windows XP went out of support, MS was clear: you could still activate Windows XP. And you could. For 5 years or so. But it’s gone now. I just changed some hardware, Windows XP noticed and told me I needed to re-activate, and — activation doesn’t work. Can’t connect to the activation server.
This isn’t a disaster, I’ve got other things I can do, but it’s sad: I’ve still got Win98, and I was counting on using WinXP for a while yet. And I’m afraid that it’s an indication of things to come: It started with FOS, where ‘out of support’ was made to mean “we have deliberately broken use with IE6”, moved on to Adobe Flash, ‘by out of support, we mean Denial of Service’, and MS has read the winds of change.
Please tell me that your machines with XP and 98 are for playing old games / enjoying historical oddities and they’re not connected in any way to the internet.
If they’re going to make it so that it inherently require activation? Yes. If they didn’t want to keep activation forever, then they shouldn’t have designed the software to need activation forever.
Or, alternatively, release a patch that allows it stay activated. No one is going to be using Windows XP instead of Windows 10 at this point, so there’s little reason not to do that at this point.
The fact that this might not happen was why people complained about activation. For preservation’s sake, software should never stop functioning due to lack of support from its creator.
That said, I do wonder the legality of just cracking it. As long as you have a license, you should be entitled to use the software.
I know I’ve used the bios for “Windows XP Mode” to let me run VMs with Windows XP. As far as I can tell, that’s entirely legal, as a license for Windows XP VMs came with Windows 7.
Naively, I kind of expected this. It’s not unknown for companies to free old products: MS has open-sourced DOS 2. Borland freed TP6. I thought that the day would come when they’d turn off their activation servers – and release an activation patch for XP. I think that was a reasonable expectation in 2005 and in 2015
But the world has developed in the opposite direction: a world where Google can gradually disable HTTP, Adobe can send out an update that disables the Flash player, React can decide that browsers will be locked out, and where Win98/WinXP should be turned off ‘for your own good’.
Exactly. And what makes it even worse is that when Microsoft first introduced the activation paradigm, they countered objections to it by explicitly promising that activation would never prevent any legitimate user from being able to activate a product. I consider anyone who has paid for a product license, or otherwise legitimately obtained a license, to be a legitimate user in perpetuity regardless of whether the product is still officially supported or not. There is a vast difference between ending support of maintenance and problem remediation services and rendering a product completely unusable.
No, it’s not obvious that Microsoft disagrees. They continued automatic Win XP activation for many years after support ended, and it appears from some reports that telephone activation still works. I think it’s more that they’re indifferent and don’t consider it worthwhile to maintain XP activation servers. I very much doubt that anyone is going to bring suit against Microsoft, and IANAL, but I would venture that if someone organized a class action suit, the outcome would be far from certain. Are you under the impression that Microsoft would win, or would necessarily even contest it? My money would be on the plaintiff.
Again, Microsoft is well within its rights to discontinue maintenance and remedial support, but not to disable existing products that still work well for many people. Remember that it’s not just new installations that require activation, but any significant hardware changes to existing installations will also trigger it. And remember, too, that most of that hardware will not be able to run currently available Windows systems (Win 10 or worse, Win 11), and many apps may not be compatible. So for many people the implications of Windows XP becoming non-functional can be considerable.
I suppose a mitigating circumstance is if phone activation still works, and also the fact that volume licensed corporate systems and most OEM versions don’t require activation. Plus, there are unofficial hacks to activate XP, though I’ve never tried them and have no idea if they work.
Rather than suing, people would likely just circumvent activation, same as people will circumvent copy protection on games they own.
There already exists an ISO for Windows XP on archive․org that does not require activation. The only reason I don’t directly recommend it is that it was not officially created by Microsoft nor officially condoned by them—though some suspect that the person who made the ISO was a programmer who worked on XP.
As a point of clarification, the license only comes with Windows 7 Professional.
I do have Windows 7 Pro on all my systems, but I’ve never bothered with Microsoft’s XP VM. I much prefer VMware Workstation Player, which is free for non-commercial use and a much nicer VM. I vaguely recall trying to install Microsoft’s “free” XP with it, but IIRC it was tied to Microsoft’s own VM. I ended up installing an old corporate volume-licensed version of XP under VMware. I’m not sure if Microsoft’s provided XP image was really unusable under VMware or just not worth the bother.
I myself prefer VirtualBox, and remember running into the same problem. There was a modified version of VirtualBox where it worked, however. When they didn’t update it to the newer versions, I remember finding out that the main modification was a BIOS file, and that there was as way to integrate it with the VM file so that said VM would work on any version of VirtualBox.
In your shoes, having corporate version available to me, I probably would have just used that, too. If I do create an XP VM on my current computer, I likely will just use the archive․org version I mentioned.
Since it has always been possible to activate Windows XP “by telephone”, i.e., off-line, it is obvious that online activation has never been indispensable. Besides the aforementioned hacks and batch scripts that automatically fix the problem for you, the algorithm the Microsoft servers use to verify your keys has been known from the beginning, namely a type of elliptic curve Schnorr signature. If you download eg this utility, I tested that if you run the program, select “WINDOWS XP CORP” from the menu, select “FIND KEY” as the mode, set the number of searches to some large double-digit value, and let it run, after a little while it does come up with a product key, which you could presumably use by selecting “Yes, I want to telephone a customer service representative”, then "Change product key, then update. I have not tested an actual activation, though.
