Microsoft’s most popular operating system is now 11 years old

Oct 25, 2012 12:39 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft will unveil the new Windows 8 in a few hours, but it’s another operating system that gets a birthday cake today.

Windows XP officially turned 11, as Microsoft rolled out this highly popular operating system on October 25, 2001.

Surprisingly, Windows XP is still one of the most popular operating systems on the market and some consumers are even claiming they’ll continue to use it after Windows 8’s debut.

Figures revealed by Net Application confirm that Windows XP is still installed on 41 percent of the computers and is currently the second most popular OS after Windows 7.

Microsoft struggles, on the other hand, to convince people to dump Windows XP, claiming that this isn’t a safe working environment anymore and encouraging them to deploy Windows 7 or Windows 8.

“Microsoft plans to end support for Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 in 2014, and that will affect your education institution if you are using this software. On April 8, 2014, Microsoft will no longer provide hot fixes, product updates, and most critical, security patches for Windows XP and Office 2003,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft will stop providing support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014, but as far as consumers are concerned, it remains one of the best versions of Windows ever released.

Many of our users have already expressed their intention to stick to Windows XP, even after Microsoft stops providing patches and fixes for this OS version.

“I noticed I hit a lot of walls trying to accomplish things in Windows 7 opposed to XP which makes it fast and simple and non-frustrating. So yeah I would rather repay for my XP license to continue support, otherwise I'll just keep using an unsupported XP and run my 100% clean backup every time get infected,” one of the users said in a comment.