MSI Afterburner drops support for Windows XP - but let's be honest, 23 years was a good run

Windows XP is approaching 23 years old, but there are folks out there who still use the operating system - in very niche cases obviously - but those people should be aware that MSI Afterburner no longer supports the ancient Microsoft platform.

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Afterburner has supported Windows XP for a long time past its sell-by-date (Image Credit: MSI)

Perhaps the biggest surprise here, though, is that the overclocking utility from MSI did still support Windows XP until its latest release.

MSI Afterburner version 4.6.6, which is in beta, made the change due to switching over to the VC++ 2022 compiler.

The release notes for v4.6.6 state: "Ported to VC++ 2022 compiler. Please take a note that due to this change MSI Afterburner will no longer be able to start under Windows XP. Please stay on the previous versions of the product if you need this OS support."

There are a couple of other notable changes here, including that Afterburner has introduced voltage control support for the popular AMD RX 7800 XT graphics card. Also, we're told some future NVIDIA GPU device IDs have been added to the hardware database, but there are no further clues as to which (and if these might be RTX 5000 models).

Back to the topic of Windows XP, as mentioned there are still users of this operating system, which is way, way out of its support timeframe now (by a decade).

A fair number of applications continued to support XP for a long time. Indeed, Steam support was only withdrawn in 2019 - though, thinking about it, that's actually half a decade ago (good grief - all this is making us feel really old).