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Windows 10 Enterprise can be downgraded to… Windows 95

While Microsoft is forcing consumers to upgrade their Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs to Windows 10 for free, the situation in the Enterprise market is different. For enterprise customers, backward compatibility matters the most and for them Microsoft provides a flexible downgrade offer. If a company finds Windows 10 not applicable for their production environment, they can downgrade Windows 10 to older versions, which are not accessible to regular users.

The operating systems to which they can downgrade their Windows 10 system include Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Professional and even Windows 95! Yes believe it or not because I was just as shocked when I read this. So from a licensing point of view, nothings stops the company from downgrading to Windows 95. However, Microsoft knows of course that technically it wouldn't install on the same hardware and even if you got it to install, it wouldn't run properly or give native performance unless you virtualized it.

See the following table:table
Image credits: @teroalhonen
The ability to downgrade to Windows 95 is not practical. Windows 95 is pretty old for any modern computing tasks.
95
Windows XP and later older releases are still perfectly usable and even have dozens of features which Windows 10 does not have.

Nevertheless, I found it funny that Microsoft lists Windows 95, 98, NT as the operating systems businesses can downgrade to. I think the option exists because a company might be using a specific software that requires Windows 95 and cannot be replaced with a modern alternative without significant development or support costs. Still, in the era of virtualization, it is unusual.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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