I was following some tutorial that was recorded a while ago, and it said for us to downgrade our npm version to 5.5.1 to avoid any differences (since that was the newest version at the time of the recording). So I did, using classic

```
npm install -g npm@5.5.1 

```

However, now I'm stuck, I can't update to the actual present day latest version. I tried `npm install -g npm@latest`, I tried manually typing the latest version, I even tried uninstalling both Node and NPM, and installing the latest ones, fresh from the site, but for whatever reason my npm just gets stuck on 5.5.1 again. How do I fix this?

I'm using Windows btw. Also, I'm just learning about Node and NPM, so I guess there is a chance I'm missing some obvious solution?

Edit: whenever I try to install something, I get the following

> 
> 
> ```
> npm WARN npm npm does not support Node.js v12.18.3
> npm WARN npm You should probably upgrade to a newer version of node as we
> npm WARN npm can't make any promises that npm will work with this version.
> npm WARN npm Supported releases of Node.js are the latest release of 4, 6,
> 
> npm WARN npm You can find the latest version at https://nodejs.org/
> WARNING: You are likely using a version of node-tar or npm that is incompa
> with this version of Node.js.
> Please use either the version of npm that is bundled with Node.js, or a ve
> of npm (> 5.5.1 or < 5.4.0) or node-tar (> 4.0.1) that is compatible with
> s 9 and above.
> 
> ```
> 
> 

and after that a long list of errors, including, but not limited to

> 
> 1: 000000013F8A5EBF napi\_wrap+114095
> 2: 000000013F850B46 v8::base::CPU::has\_sse+66998
> 3: 000000013F850EC1 v8::base::CPU::has\_sse+67889
> 4: 000000013F78F187 RSA\_meth\_get\_flags+85639
> 5: 000000014001AAE0 v8::internal::Builtins::builtin\_handle+323456
> 
> 
>