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Developer Raymond Chen says Windows XP shipped with an encrypted version of Microsoft Bob to pad out 30MB of free space. Before Windows introduced its modern GUI system, Microsoft was well-known for its iconic command-line operating system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. But did you know that the Redmond giant developed a user interface called "Microsoft Bob" (codenamed Utopia) to make Windows more user-friendly to those comfortable with DOS? Microsoft Bob shipped with a cute interface that was easy to navigate, presumably part of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates' broader plan to get a PC in every household. Microsoft Bob was an exaggerated graphical user interface for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT, designed to make computers more intuitive and easier to navigate for new users. Microsoft Bob seemingly moved away from tiles of windows to a cartoonish home interface, packed with files, folders, apps, and even the beloved Rover the Dog, who also wiggled its way into Windows XP as a virtual assistant alongside Clippy. However, Microsoft Bob failed to spark interest among users, prompting the company to pull the plug on the friendly interface before its prime time. According to PCWorld, Microsoft only sold 30,000 copies of Bob. The software's low reception and adoption can be attributed to its stringent hardware requirements, including a demand for 8MB of RAM, which was a big ask at the time. Microsoft Bob was forced to bite the dust in Microsoft's Graveyard around the same time Windows 95 shipped. Microsoft reincarnated Bob in Windows XP with 30MB to spare Windows XP advertised before its launch. (Image credit: Getty Images | Steve Liss) While things on the Microsoft Bob front remained quiet for a while, the user interface made a surprise comeback when Windows XP shipped. At the time, Windows XP was packaged in installation CDs, but Microsoft realized that the disks still included 30MB of blank space after adding the software for padding. The tech giant seized this opportunity and included an encrypted version of Microsoft Bob. While speaking to TechNet Magazine in 2008, Microsoft's veteran Windows developer explained: "The result was a rather feeble attempt to slow down the people who like to make illegal copies of Windows. Somebody decided to fill that extra capacity on the CD with dummy data and to have the Windows Setup program verify that the dummy data was still there." "This, the logic went, would force people downloading a copy of the CD image to download an additional thirty or so megabytes of data. Remember, this was back in the day when ‘broadband’ hadn’t yet become a household word and mainstream users were using dial-up connections." Chen points out that the person in charge of padding out the installation discs dug through and stumbled into the nostalgic Microsoft Bob. "He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file," stated Chen. "The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it." More interestingly, the developer "smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That’s what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD." The company needed dummy data to fill up the 30MB of free space as an attempt to fill up the install discs, thus making it difficult for pirates to illegally download and distribute the CD image. "Bob was actually more useful dead than alive," Chen concluded. Microsoft veteran engineer Dave Plummer, better known by his "Dave's Garage" handle, also admitted that he played a hand in bringing Microsoft Bob to Windows XP. "I did what Microsoft couldn't." Being a huge fan of Microsoft Bob, Plummer indicated that Windows XP's development team was looking for a way to differentiate the operating system install CDs. He claimed that the limited bandwidth allowed them to easily identify digital ballast that could be encrypted and signed specifically to the CD-ROM version. As such, the engineer narrowed down his options to Microsoft Bob since the company had the license and trusted that the product could be precompressed for encryption. According to Plummer: "I grabbed the compressed floppy images for Microsoft Bob and concatenated them into a single large Bob blob. I then encrypted the blob of Bob with several passes of different encryption tools and techniques, including a huge private/public keypair generated by a long sequence of random mouse movements, and so on." "I did a few other procedures that I felt were important to the process, and out came a giant multi-megabyte blob of Bob that I could effectively treat as a root of trust on the CD. If you had the OEM blob, you could use an OEM license key. If you had a retail blob, you had to use a retail key." Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

There's been a ton of speculation lately on whether or not Microsoft will release a major update to Windows 11 this year or if the company will take a bigger leap and launch "Windows 12." However, 23 years ago today, Microsoft didn't keep us waiting or speculating about the next version of the OS. On February 5, 2001, the company officially announced it would launch Windows XP in the second half of the year. Microsoft's press release about Windows XP did admit that the OS was previously under development with the code name "Whistler." As you can read in our earlier look at the history of Windows XP, Microsoft originally had its consumer and its business Windows teams as separate units. However, in 2000 Microsoft decided to merge those two units into one to work on Whistler, It would finally bring the Windows NT kernel to the consumer version and ditch the old MS-DOS architecture. So, where did the final "Windows XP" name come from? Well, Microsoft was trying to ditch its date-based naming system for Windows that started with Windows 95 and continued with Windows 98. However, Microsoft used the Windows 2000 name for its business version of the OS, which forced the company to name the next consumer version Windows Millenium, shorted to Windows Me. So for the next OS version, Microsoft went with Windows XP, which the company said was short for "eXPerience." Both the consumer and business versions of the OS would use the "XP" name. The company would eventually release a number of different XP versions. That included Windows XP Starter, which was made for lower-end PCs that could only run a few programs at a time. There was also Windows XP Media Center Edition, which, as the name implies, was made specifically for media hardware devices like TV set-top boxes. The XP branding wasn't just for Windows. Microsoft also decided to add that name to the next version of its Office productivity suite. Yes, we got Office XP in 2001 as well, in place of the previous "Office 10" code name. Just as an aside, Microsoft seemed to have the letter "X on the brain in 2001. The company launched the first Xbox game console in the same year that Windows XP and Office XP launched. We are a little surprised that we didn't get "XP Games" as the name. But we digress. The announcement of both Windows XP and Office XP 23 years ago today was a fairly major turning point in Microsoft's history. XP ended up being a huge success for the company, as big if not bigger than Microsoft 95. Windows XP was also helped by the fact Microsoft took much, much longer to release the next version of the OS, Windows Vista. There was a gap of over five years between the release of XP and Vista (which entered general availability in January 2007). Then, Vista ended up not being well received by PC owners, and Windows XP got its support extended while Microsoft tried to release Windows 7, which it did in late 2009. Microsoft finally ended its official support for Windows XP in April 2014, over 12 years after it launched in the fall of 2001. Ironically, Windows 7 ended up having a fairly long support life span as well, thanks to the failure of Microsoft's Windows 8/8.1 operating system. According to the most recent numbers from Statcounter, there are still 0.57 percent of Windows-based PCs that are running Windows XP, close to 10 years after it ended its official support time period. That means there are likely still lots of PCs running that OS that was officially announced over two decades ago. Heck we even have trains in that are running on the much older Windows 3.11, for goodness sakes. Source

According to the latest data from Statcounter, Windows XP is still installed on roughly 0.57% of PCs, which is a lot of outdated hardware and software with regular access to the internet. Most developers dropped Windows XP shortly after Microsoft ended its extended support in 2014, forcing users to switch to Windows 7 or 10. However, there are still some apps that continue working and receiving updates on Windows XP. MSI Afterburner, though, is no longer among them. MSI Afterburner has been updated to version 4.6.6 with a few notable changes, such as voltage control for the Radeon RX 7800XT, support for future Nvidia graphics cards, Unicode UTF-8, and various bug fixes. More importantly, it now uses VC++ 2022 compiler, which renders the app unable to run on Windows XP. With that said, it is not the end of the world for Windows XP users. They can still use previous MSI Afterburner versions to overclock and monitor their GeForce FX 5900, ATI Radeon 9000, and other true-to-era graphics cards. As for Riva Tuner Statistics Server, its latest update packs "more than 90 compatibility enhancements, changes and new features, including programmable conditional layers support, PresentMon, and Nvidia Relex." Here is the complete changelog for Version 4.6.6: You can download MSI Afterburner from Guru3D and the official MSI website. Source

The first week of 2024 has been an interesting one for you if you enjoy a bit of retro Microsoft and Windows news. We covered a cool software utility program dubbed "MSBob" that tries to take inspiration from the failed Microsoft Bob project. The app is still WIP and could become a more polished and useful version later. Aside from that, we also took a small stroll down memory lane all the back to the 1980s as the earliest known version of 86-DOS - the OS that's the forefather to MS-DOS - was unearthed with a photo of the original disk as well. Most PC users today though are far more familiar with the graphical user interface (GUI) of Windows, as compared to DOS, and despite all the modernization efforts that have been made to the UI, many, including members of the Neowin forum, seem to have a soft spot for the older Windows versions, like Windows 95, XP, and such. YouTuber AR 4789, who creates and shares interesting Windows concepts, published their latest video that may quench the thirst of those who have always wanted a more modern version of Windows XP with the feel and touch of Windows 11. The UI looks polished and modern similar to 11 with the colours and style as well as the famous Bliss wallpaper reminds of its roots in XP. The Start menu is on the left instead of the center. which most would likely prefer on XP, and as a nice touch, there is also Rover the cute assistant dog in there as well. A Winver screenshot was also made that shows the version of Windows XP 2024 as 24H2, which is in line with the yearly feature updates on 11. Up next, we have the File Explorer which also shows a similar treatment with a combination of the best qualities of Windows 11 blended in with Windows XP. Finally, we also have the Settings menu and again, the YouTuber has done a great job with the design as the thing looks pretty compelling. You can watch the concept video in full below: It's perhaps not too far-fetched to assume that had Microsoft never retired XP and its UX /UI choices, the concept shown here may well have been very close to a real thing. Source

In case you have not been following, Microsoft is looking to block off really old processors from running the next feature update for Windows 11, 24H2. A couple of instructions, SSE4.2 and PopCnt, are being made mandatory for a CPU to be able to run the next version of Windows 11. Since this is an instruction-level block. However, these chips were never really supported in the first place so it will only affect those who are used to bypassing the Windows 11 requirements on their ancient systems. Folks like those, who love to run Windows on old incompatible hardware are in for a treat. A smart German modder, after a lot of hard work, has managed to modify Windows XP such that it will work on Intel i486 as well. i486, also called 486 or 80486 is the first x86 processor to pack over a million transistors, 1.2 million to be a bit more precise, though it released in 1989, which was over a decade old by the point XP was out. The ISO for the modded XP version was uploaded on the Archive.org website (spotted by Bob Pony on X), though, it is only in German at the moment, and there are a few reporting bugs too. An example screenshot of the Windows XP SP3 running inside 86Box (an IBM PC emulator) on an Intel i486SX, which is a low-cost variant of the i486 that had its floating point unit (FPU) turned off, was provided; which is why there is a separate 487SX math co-processor, reported as FPU in 86Box spec details, alongside it. There is also a screenshot of an AMD 486 clone running it. In case you are comfortable with German and have a spare 486 system, you can try it out. Perhaps you could even try out the recently open-sourced MS-DOS 4.0.0 too. However, do not forget the dangers of using such unsupported OS as a recent experiment showed just how vulnerable an old PC like one running Windows XP can be. Source: MSFN forum Source

Microsoft Design site has a ton of attractive wallpapers, retro and otherwise. A high-res rendered hill inspired by Windows XP's familiar "Bliss" wallpaper (visit Microsoft's site to get it at full resolution.) Microsoft Did you read the news about the Windows XP activation algorithm getting cracked and suddenly get nostalgic for the blue skies and bluer taskbar of that old Windows release? Or maybe you just like attractive, high-resolution desktop wallpapers and you want to make a change? It turns out that Microsoft's design team has rendered an updated 4K version of the default Windows XP wallpaper—you might know it by its name, "Bliss." It's one of several retro-themed wallpapers on this Microsoft Design site, including photorealistic renderings of Solitaire, Paint, and (of course) Clippy. The site has been around for a while and hasn't been updated since December 2022, but Windows engineer Jennifer Gentleman tweeted about it yesterday—it's new to me and maybe to you, too. The most recent wallpapers appear to be products of Microsoft's Design Week event. Among others, the Microsoft Design site also hosts the default wallpapers that have come with several Surface PCs, quite a few Pride Month-themed wallpaper designs, and several images focused on the company's recent emoji redesigns and the icons for the Microsoft 365 apps. Most of the wallpapers are pretty cool-looking, even the ones that aren't re-creations of 16-bit apps. Microsoft While the updated Bliss image does appear to be a 3D rendering, it merely imitates the look and feel of the old Bliss photo without re-creating its every detail. As the sun was slowly setting on Windows XP's empire in the late 2000s, the artists Goldin+Senneby took a 1:1 re-creation of the then-grapevine-covered hill for an art installation piece called "After Microsoft." Widely circulated photos of the Bliss hill on fire in 2017 were ultimately revealed as a hoax. Microsoft is fully aware of the nostalgia for its products among a certain segment of its userbase, people who miss the aesthetics of software from the early- to mid-'90s (and who also miss the time when advancements in computing were mostly exciting instead of mostly worrying). Nineties-themed ugly sweaters are an annual tradition for the company at this point, and in 2015 it launched "MS-DOS Mobile" as a fun joke to distract Windows Phone users as they waited for exciting new hardware and software that would never come. Today I stumbled upon Microsoft’s 4K rendering of the Windows XP wallpaper

If you want your computer to work as well as it can and avoid privacy or security risks, sticking to an original Windows installation is your only option. However, some Windows modifications are worthy of your attention and some time to play around (maybe in a virtual machine or a spare computer). For example, Tiny11, a mod that allows you to run Windows 11 on less powerful hardware, or this absolutely wild Windows Experience Freestyle Update that turns Windows 10 into a virtually indistinguishable Windows XP replica. Windows Experience Freestyle Update is a modified Windows 10 installation (version 1809) with a very thick coat of 22-year-old paint. It carefully replicates the look and feel of Windows XP, which many consider the golden era of Microsoft's operating system. There is the old File Explorer, Task Manager, Control Panel, Start menu (still better than the one in Windows 11), and Internet Explorer (just a reskinned Firefox). Even 3D Pinball and the OG Paint are available! Of course, those who have experienced using Windows XP will be able to spot the differences. Also, some notable limitations and issues will prevent you from using the mod as a primary operating system. For example, any DPI above 100% will break everything, not all buttons and links in File Explorer work, and some parts of the OS look like butchered Windows 10. Still, it is safe to say the modification is the closest modern Windows XP replica that none of the third-party apps can achieve. If you want to experience a "modern Windows XP," check it on the Internet Archive. Before downloading, mind the privacy risks and legal implications of using modified Windows ISOs (the mod is not activated, and it requires a genuine Windows 10 key). For most, admiring the project from a safe distance will be a better choice. Speaking of other Windows XP-related news, a recently published video shows how much more data Windows 11 sends to questionable servers out of the box compared to its 23-year-old sibling. This mod turns Windows 10 into an indistinguishable Windows XP replica

Windows XP continues to hold a special place in the hearts of PC enthusiasts. Despite Microsoft discontinuing support and turning off the activation servers for Windows XP, enthusiasts seeking to relive the nostalgia or utilize old hardware/software often face challenges. A recent blog post by TinyApps highlights an offline activation tool that provides a solution for activating Windows XP. The tool was discovered by Reddit user retroreviewyt. The newly introduced offline activation tool, xp_activate32.exe, offers a compact executable package designed as a "phone activation utility" for Windows XP. This tool allows users to activate the operating system entirely offline, eliminating the need to connect to potentially risky online environments. With a file size of only 18 KB, "Windows XP Activation: GAME OVER" provides a convenient means for tinkerers to activate their Windows XP systems without internet connectivity. As Microsoft discontinued support and deactivated the Windows XP activation servers, attempting to activate the operating system online poses significant risks. The offline activation tool ensures safer activation and protects XP systems from potential flaws and vulnerabilities in the outdated operating system. Windows XP can expose systems to potential threats. As a result, many users prefer to keep their Windows XP installations offline, limiting their usage to software and hardware that resides in their archives. Online essentials such as secure browsers and antivirus software may be difficult to obtain for Windows XP, further emphasizing the importance of offline usage. Numerous tools were available in the past for generating keys that Windows XP would accept, predating the creation of this self-contained offline program. These tools often took the form of software hacks or brute-force decryption utilities. On the other hand, some users may be interested in exploring even older Windows operating systems beyond Windows XP. These systems often require specific serial keys for activation, but their simpler algorithms can make finding valid keys relatively easier. Windows XP activation algorithm cracked after 21 years, what now?