Longhorn-Tan
This character doesn't have many pictures and not much is known about her as she is based on Microsoft Operating System Windows Longhorn, which is still in development. One picture shows her as a girl with dark blue hair and two horns extending from the back of her head to the front; her clothing is all white except across the shoulders where it's black and there are the letters L and H on her chest. A design becoming more common is a young girl with long brown hair in pigtails wearing one or two clips featuring an orange and black logo resembling a stylized bull's head.
XP-Tan
XP is a sexy, dark-haired girl wearing the XP logo as a hair ribbon. As XP is sometimes criticized for bloating a system and being very pretty without being equally as useful, XP-tan wears very little and has large breasts. Also, as XP uses up large amount of memory, XP-tan eats a lot, usually holding a large empty bowl with the word "memory" on it, but still requests more. A rare variant that represents XP Home features a more reserved look, akin to 2K Pro-tan. She has XP shaped hairclips instead of a ribbon, and tends to wear her hair up in a short ponytail. An even rarer variant, for XP Media Center Edition, has short hair and small earrings in the style of XP Professional's hairclip.
In some cases, XP-Tan will sport the Windows Security Center logo on either a piece of jewelry or clothing, indicating that she has Service Pack 2.
2000-Tan
A few variants exist, but the most common is Win2K Professional. She is typically drawn as an intelligent, professional, reserved looking woman with short blue hair, glasses, and hairclips that resemble cat ears flanking a small white bonnet or ruffle, similar to maid's hairclip, that shows the windows logo. Her outfit resembles a swimsuit suggesting the Windows logo colors, and she wears a long coat. This is thought to reflect the opinion that Windows 2000 is the most stable, dependable, and balanced system. She is characterized as the "dependable woman" among the OS-tans and one of the domain controllers. Because of the greater stability of Win2K compared with WinME, which was released near 2K, 2K-tan is often described as a guardian of ME-tan. The blue in the picture is close to the default Windows 2000 desktop colour.
NT-Tan
This character is not very common. She usually has the purple hair and the pink dress seen here, but her age can range from child to adult. Sometimes she is also portrayed as the mother of 2K-tan.
Another version, Windows NT Workstation, also exists and has recently been more common than the original NT-tan, at least on the Futaba image boards. "NT" has the romaji representation of "enu ti"—this sounds a lot like "inu ti", and "inu" is the Japanese word for dog. Inu-T has blue hair, dog ears, a dog's tail and a necklace. She usually wears gloves and boots shaped like paws, and colored blue to match her ears and tail.
Yet another NT-tan, Windows NT SP6, was designed by the doujin group Deja vu, but it was considered a bootleg design by Futaba society and not an "official" OS-Tan. (See "Dispute between Futaba society and Deja vu" below for detail)
2003 Server (Saba)-Tan
2003 Server is often portrayed as being half-girl, half-fish, with an ethernet hub as a bonnet on her head. Other versions show her as a girl with a short white skirt and a vest-style top with a long tail in the back (usually with a bow) and Windows four-square logo pins in the bow at her neck and on the tail. In some forms, she has a belt made from ethernet cable wrapped around her waist. Saba is a pun: in Japanese, the word for "server" is pronounced "saaba", while "saba" is the word for mackerel.
ME-Tan
The more cutesy personification of the much maligned and infamously unreliable Windows ME OS, ME-tan's appearance rarely varies and was the first OS-tan created, by the one now called 'ME-aki'. She is instantly recognizable; she has green hair in long pigtails and wears a maid outfit with a ! badge on the front in the spirit of the Windows yellow error icon. ME-tan is a hard worker and always wants to help her master (Toshiaki), but predictably fails at everything she tries to do, and often literally crashing and irritating her sisters. When she is not frozen or out of control, she tends to do things showing a lack of common sense or knowledge, such as putting soda into a microwave oven or attempting to kill people by swinging a scallion (see below). In spite of, or perhaps due to, her pitiful plight, the clumsy ME-tan is one of the most beloved OS girls.
98 and 98SE-Tan
Many variants exist; however, the most common are a pair of young girls. The First Edition of 98 has a white and blue uniform, navy blue hair with a clip shaped like "98" and has a windows logo as part of a necktie. The 98 Second Edition mascot normally has grey-blue hair and a green sailor school uniform with the letters SE on the front.
Two early versions that continue to be used alongside the girls are a pair of stick-limbed snack-boxes with a face and version number drawn in crayon, based on the 'Vulcan 300' toy that appeared in the anime series "Konjiki no Gash Bell!!". In the very early days before the designs of the primary OS-tans had settled, generic stick-limbed boxes were often used as placeholders; there had been instances of small DOS and Windows 3.11 boxes before other designs gained popularity. Both girls now make regular use of these as 'mechanical suits'. The 'mech-box' used by 98 is blue in colour, and likewise the 98SE mech-box has a green theme. The mechs are sometimes shown as guardians or friends to the 98-tans, otherwise the two girls can be seated inside them as pilots. The box sizes can vary, ranging from doll-like when carried by the girls to taller than an adult when they ride inside them. While both are fairly shy girls, 98SE is seen hiding in her mech-box a lot more often.
95-Tan
95, being an older version of "modern" Windows, is usually represented as a traditional lady from the early modern era of Japan. She is a gentle-looking brown haired woman in a kimono, with a hair ribbon showing the four Windows colors. The pattern of her kimono is based off the file "hana256.bmp," which was used as a desktop wallpaper pattern in the Japanese version of Windows. Moreover, the color of the big ribbon on her head imitates the logo of four colors of Windows. Her costume is a traditional kimono and a hakama of Japan, and she wears thick sandals (geta or zori?) on her feet. These are women's college student's typical clothes as seen in the earliest period during the course of the modernization in Japan (from the Meiji period to the Taisho period), and the cultural background for the comparison of the modernization of Windows to modernization of Japan is seen there.
Her most common activities are drinking tea, serving meals or doing other housework. One recurring theme is her unfamiliarity with newer, post Win-95 technologies, such as USB devices and broadband internet connections. She is also occasionally depicted wielding a katana in an aggressive manner, symbolizing that it was her generation of operating systems that Microsoft finally achieved full dominance of the personal computer market. One comic strip shows her talking to other OS-tans about beating up the Mac girls; and 95 is commonly portrayed with an overwhelming hatred of the Macintosh OS Tans.
Because Mozilla Firefox is incompatible with Windows 95, several OS-tan four-panel comics have been made portraying other OS-tans encouraging 95-tan to "think in Russian!" and 95-tan's inability to internalize the Russian language enough to accomplish this.
Windows 95 OSR 2.5-Tan
The last patched version of 95, Windows 95 OSR 2.5, resembles the first but has shorter hair, and outfits are black and dark coloured versions of 95's. She also has a more extroverted personality. She also seems to regard 98-tan as a rival, and is sometimes seen wearing a black skirt, black gloves, and a white sleeveless shirt like 98, but with a red tie and black 95 style bow.
CE-Tan
Being an OS designed for small devices, the personification of Windows CE (CE for short) is portrayed as diminutive and fairy-like; complete with gossamer wings and wielding a USB cable wand. Because a modified version of Windows CE was the operating system of the Sega Dreamcast console, there are several illustrations of CE standing upon or around the Dreamcast's "swirl" logo.
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