However, the two were never compatible with each other.
Windows XP, introduced in August 2001, can be considered one of the most successful versions of Windows ever, which brought with it a lot of new functionality. Looking at it through today's eyes, it's quite surprising that the system requirements included a computer with at least a 233MHz Pentium processor, 64MB of working memory, and 1.5GB of storage space.
A German designer named Dietmar set out to try to run Windows XP Professional SP 3 on an old computer with a good old 90MHz Intel 486 processor.
For comparison, the first 486 chips were released in 1989, while Windows XP was released more than a decade later, in 2001. Based on this, we can understand that the 486 systems were simply too low-performance to run XP.
However, the designer did not shy away from taking on the seemingly impossible challenge, and after some long and surprising experiments, he modified the operating codes in such a way that even old chips could understand them, thus running the Windows XP operating system.
Nearly 23 years after the release of Windows XP, a Windows tuner from Germany patched Windows XP to run on 486 processors.
Forum topic: https://t.co/1e2dsYZG9w
Patched ISO (German): https://t.co/Ftv9pvzVtY pic.twitter.com/1SwsZqynXK
— Bob Pony ✨ (@TheBobPony) May 17, 2024
Dietmar was kind enough to make it available for everyone to run iso file, so if you have a computer with an Intel 486 chip hiding at home, you can try it yourself. Of course, finding drivers for older devices and running code that's a couple of decades old requires some experience, so it's worth trying with that in mind.
