With just a few key presses and a couple seconds of your time, you can turn your Windows XP system into one that Microsoft will actually support for the next five years. While this is not recommended, it turns out that a simple registry hack can make it so that Windows Update does not notice that your system is running XP, allowing you to receive support for a longer period of time.
Support officially ended for XP earlier this year which has a resulted in large corporations and governments scrambling to either pay Microsoft for extended support or upgrade all of their computers. Instead of doing any of that, it turns out that playing around with the registry is all that is required.
The “hack” involves opening regedit, navigating to HKLM\Sytem\WPA and creating a key called PosReady. Once you have created the key, add a DWORD value to it and set that value to 1. Once all of those things are done, Windows Update will view your XP system as though it is a POSReady device and since those devices are slated to receive support until 2019, you will receive software updates if and when they are needed.
A more detailed set of instructions will be necessary for people running a 64-bit system, but 32-bit XP users should have no problem getting past Microsoft’s XP support restriction.
