Is WinDbg still compatible with Windows XP?

Question

I was looking for a debugger for Windows, other than GDB, which is freely accessible. I found WinDbg and it looks quite good so I wanted to give it a try. Now when I go to the MSDN page it offers to download the SDK for Windows 8. As this is a rather big package, I wonder if I can use this WinDbg version still for Windows XP?

Since my company still uses Windows XP for some time to come, I'm stuck with it for now. Is there another, free debugger which is user friendly?

I'm used to Visual Studio for debugging, which is quite nice. Currently I use Eclipse with GCC and GDB. GDB is good enough, but when I do some assembly I don't really like it, and all in all I don't find it very user friendly.

Answer 1

The latest WinDbg will work with Windows 2000 onwards and most commands work with Windows XP. There will be some that will only work with later versions, but these are documented in the included help file.

Just to ease your download pain, firstly there is the option to select what to download from MSDN, or you can just download the version you want here thanks to a kind person who is hosting the individual components.