There is still a lot of countries where XP is used, especially in poor countries where people don't have a clue with computer and just use it as it is, as long as it works. Microsoft must for sure think about their update that takes hours blocking your computer sometimes which is not really an evolution in 2018. On Linux for example the system is upgrading whlie you can work without any slow down.
Did you try Linux? there is everything for you, old stuff (ms dos, windows emulators etc), while the system itself is rock solid, even on P3
WinXP isn't viable as a platform for using the Internet at this point, at least from a security perspective. I liked WinXP a lot, but Win7 x64 is really the minimum bar for browsing safely at this point (32-bit address spaces make life too easy for malware authors - that holds for Linux, too).
We've made compiler upgrades over the last few months in order to pick up Microsoft's compiler-based mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown. There's a decent chance that this is what has precipitated the change. We wouldn't roll those changes back, and those mitigations are only available in the newer versions of the compiler. It's hard to know if it's the compiler mitigations, or perhaps other on-by-default optimizations in the version of the compiler that we're using that might be causing the headache on the Pentium 3.
While we get that a lot of old hardware stays in use in the field, there's a limit to what we can reasonably support, and we're talking about CPUs that are well into their late teens. Intel Core CPUs were introduced around 2008, and we absolutely support those, so we're maintaining at least a decade of hardware compatibility. We generally take the stance with trailing-edge technology that we're not going to break it explicitly, but if it stops working at some point, we're not going to invest in keeping it alive. In fact, I'm not even allowed to have a WinXP machine in the building at this point, much less attached to the network.
It raises an interesting point, in that we had explicit requirements for CPU hardware back when we supported mobile, but we don't appear to publish equivalent minimum system requirements for Desktop. I don't believe that we would make a significant engineering investment to support an 17-year old CPU.
Also, it looks like global WinXP adoption is in the 2% range, down from 5% about a year ago. It's vanishing rapidly, and the TLS/SSL technology underpinning the HTTPS protocol is down to one remaining configuration that is both considered kind of secure and actually works on WinXP. We're definitely in the end-days of WinXP being remotely usable in the context of the larger ecosystem.
FWIW, I've got an Atari 800XL hanging around. We used to keep it in the office running Zork. It got a lot of love. It's the legacy hardware in the context of the larger ecosystem where this stuff breaks down. There's something to be said for how good the Ethernet standards have held up that you can still easily put 18-year-old machines on the network.
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