Windows Lifecycle Policy

Windows Lifecycle Policy

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Microsoft has stopped releasing updates and hotfixes for many old Windows operating systems, including all versions of Windows 9x,[30] and earlier versions of Windows NT. Windows versions prior to XP are no longer supported, with the exception of Windows 2000, which is currently in the Extended Support Period, that will end on July 13, 2010. Windows XP versions prior to SP2 are no longer supported either. Also, support for Windows XP 64-bit Edition ended after the release of the more recent Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.[citation needed] No new updates are created for unsupported versions of Windows.

Emulation software

Emulation allows the use of some Windows applications without using Microsoft Windows. These include:

Wine — a free and open source software implementation of the Windows API, allowing one to run many Windows applications on x86-based platforms, including Linux. Wine is technically not an emulator but a "compatibility layer";[31] while an emulator effectively ‘pretends’ to be a different CPU, Wine instead makes use of Windows-style APIs to ‘simulate’ the Windows environment directly.

CrossOver — A Wine package with licensed fonts. Its developers are regular contributors to Wine, and focus on Wine running officially supported applications.

Cedega — TransGaming Technologies' proprietary fork of Wine, designed specifically for running games written for Microsoft Windows under Linux. A version of Cedega known as Cider is used by some video game publishers to allow Windows games to run on Mac OS X.

Darwine — This project intends to port and develop Wine as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Microsoft Windows applications, and to provide Win32 API compatibility at application source code level.

ReactOS — An open-source OS that is intended to run the same software as Windows, originally designed to imitate Windows NT 4.0, now aiming at Windows XP compatibility. It has been in the development stage since 1996.