Prying eyes of hackers and tweakers have managed to find a registry hack that allows users to receive Windows XP updates even if they don’t have a paid support option.
The trick is to make your Windows XP system believe that it is a Windows Embedded POSReady. This can be done through manipulating the registry by navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady and changing the “installed” flag to “dword:00000001”. To ensure that you don’t mess up any other bits of the registry, there is a simpler way. Copy the below contents into a text file, save it as a .reg file and then execute it.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
"Installed"=dword:00000001
Once done, head onto Windows Update and you will find that there are a lot of pending updates including quite a few security updates. Your Windows XP system will start fetching updates designed for POSReady 2009, which is based on Windows XP Service Pack 3. As Microsoft extended the end of life of POSReady 2009 till 2019, chances are you will get the updates for foreseeable future.
However, there is no guarantee that the hack will continue to work, considering that Microsoft will find a way to disable this.
We would like to remind our readers that this is not the best way to secure your operating system, but is rather a ‘buying time’ trick and you should upgrade to a newer Windows operating system or a secure Linux distribution that lets you carry out your basic tasks such as browsing, word processing, number crunching, emails, among other things.
Cool. Five more years of good ol’ XP.