

Unofficial methods were made available to apply the updates to other editions of Windows XP, but Microsoft discouraged this practice, citing incompatibility issues. As of August 2021, 0.6% of Windows PCs run Windows XP (on all continents the share is below 1%), and 0.18% of all devices across all platforms run Windows XP. Windows XP is still very prevalent in many countries, such as Armenia where over 60% of computers use it. In the late 1990s, initial development of what would become Windows XP was focused on two individual products: " Odyssey", which was reportedly intended to succeed the future Windows 2000 and " Neptune", which was reportedly a consumer-oriented operating system using the Windows NT architecture, succeeding the MS-DOS-based Windows 98. However, the projects proved to be too ambitious. In January 2000, shortly prior to the official release of Windows 2000, technology writer Paul Thurrott reported that Microsoft had shelved both Neptune and Odyssey in favor of a new product codenamed "Whistler", named after Whistler, British Columbia, as many Microsoft employees skied at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort.

The goal of Whistler was to unify both the consumer and business-oriented Windows lines under a single, Windows NT platform: Thurrott stated that Neptune had become "a black hole when all the features that were cut from Windows Me were simply re-tagged as Neptune features. And since Neptune and Odyssey would be based on the same code-base anyway, it made sense to combine them into a single project". Īt PDC on July 13, 2000, Microsoft announced that Whistler would be released during the second half of 2001, and also unveiled the first preview build, 2250, which featured an early implementation of Windows XP's visual styles system and interface changes to Windows Explorer and the Control Panel.

Microsoft released the first public beta build of Whistler, build 2296, on October 31, 2000. Subsequent builds gradually introduced features that users of the release version of Windows XP would recognize, such as Internet Explorer 6.0, the Microsoft Product Activation system and the Bliss desktop background. Whistler was officially unveiled during a media event on February 5, 2001, under the name Windows XP, where XP stands for "eXPerience". #WINDOWS 8 WINDOWS XP SOUNDS PROFESSIONAL#.
