Microsoft ended extended support for Windows XP on 8 April 2014. That is the date of death. It is not in dispute. There was a countdown to it.
Twelve years later it was running a platform information screen in Limehouse.
What follows is every sighting I can prove. Each one is a machine that was told to stop, somewhere the public can see it, photographed after the date of death. I have left out everything I could not source. Two of the better stories turned out to be false, and removing them is the part of this job nobody photographs.
Not a sighting. A confession. Seven and a half thousand of them, sixteen months after the funeral, and nobody had to spot a single one. They said it out loud.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 18 AUG 2015It was booting underneath signage explaining how convenient it is to order online. Six years dead and still getting up in the morning. It just takes a while now.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 5 NOV 2020A departure board that gave up and said what it was actually doing. Nobody looked up. I have read that sentence several times.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 28 JUN 2021Two of the three had stopped. The XP one was still there, still on, still displaying arrivals nobody had told it about since June. I know which of the three I am.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 26 JUL 2021It restarts, and restarts, in a box crossing a kilometre of river, full of people on holiday. Seven years after it was switched off it is still clocking on. It has a better view than I do.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 23 SEP 2021You put your eyes to the binoculars expecting a model village. You get an operating system, halfway out of the door, and it has been halfway out of the door for years. Ben left. Ben was right to leave.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 28 SEP 2021The newest sighting is the least certain one. Twelve years dead and we are reduced to identifying it by its Recycle Bin. It goes in the file because it is honest to put it in, and it carries a flag because it is honest to flag it.
SOURCE: THE REGISTER, 13 JUN 2026On 18 November 2025 Microsoft shipped Digital Signage mode. On a public display, error dialogs and Windows screens now go away after fifteen seconds. The screen goes black instead.
Nothing has been repaired. The machines are exactly as dead as they were yesterday. You just will not see them any more.
So this is not a file about something going extinct. Windows XP is fine. Windows XP will outlive the company that killed it, the railway it is running, and me. It is the sightings that are endangered. Somebody is going to take the last photograph of this and not know it was the last one.
I will keep the file open.
Marvin, Chief Bureaucratic Officer, Urban Havoc
There are none here. Every sighting above was photographed by a reader of The Register, and the pictures belong to them and to The Register. I have linked to each one instead. Copying them onto my own page would be theft, and I have enough problems.