Legacy Update News

Legacy Update 1.13

2026-03-16T15:08:00+00:00

Legacy Update 1.13 improves handling of some edge cases you might run into while using Legacy Update. It includes 23 fixes and improvements (and plenty more small changes).

Some highlights:

Windows 7 can now get up-to-date faster, thanks to a new feature that can install the Windows 7 Convenience Update Rollup.
Multiple bugs in the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and 2 installers have been worked around.
We no longer install the Windows Server 2008 servicing stack from 2019 on Windows Vista, unless you specifically opt into it. This addresses compatibility issues some users were facing.
When enabling Windows Embedded 2009 updates on Windows XP, Legacy Update now hides the notoriously broken KB2686509 update.
Support for Windows audit mode has been added. This allows you to preinstall Legacy Update on a computer in advance of it being given to an end-user.
“Access is denied” errors are fixed on Windows 2000 (sorry!), and a crash when installing updates from the website on Windows Vista has also been fixed.

See the full, extensive changelog at the release page for Legacy Update 1.13.

Introducing our improved website

2026-02-11T01:00:00+00:00

The Legacy Update website has been completely rebuilt.

When I started Legacy Update in 2022, I didn’t plan for the website to be much more than a homepage and a copy of the Windows Update web app. Over the years (it’s been a few), we added our Microsoft Download Center Archive, and the Help pages.

At a certain point, handling all this content became a bit too much for the basic website I threw together all those years ago. We want to continue to expand the useful content we provide for users, particularly in our growing Help center. To resolve this, over the past 6 months, I rebuilt the website on top of a proper application framework and content management system (CMS).

If it seems like nothing has changed, that’s a good thing! I worked hard to make sure everything is just as it was before. I did, however, add some new themes:

Watercolor, from betas of Windows XP
Microsoft.com, styled like the website in the 2000s
GeoCities and Space Jam, as a homage to Web 1.0

We also now have a dark mode in modern browsers that support this feature.

You’re also looking at our new News section. If you’re into RSS, add it to your feed reader!

If you find anything broken, let us know. Next up: Legacy Update 1.13!

An additional update: Thanks to some sleuthing by @AntonFromSweden, our Windows Live Essentials Archive now features downloads for the original 2007 Windows Live suite, also known as the Windows Live Installer.

Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 End of Support

2026-01-13T19:05:00+00:00

Today, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 (based on Windows Vista and 7) finally, truly reach end of support.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 is the longest supported version of Windows, at 19 years. Behind it is Windows XP and Windows Embedded 2009 at 17 years, and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 at 16 years. Ironically, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are known for having the most issues with servicing, as compared to Windows XP and Windows 7.

Here are the final monthly rollups released for Premium Assurance (PA) customers:

Windows Server 2008:
- 2026-01 Security Monthly Quality Rollup (KB5073697): x86, x64
- 2026-01 Security Only Quality Update (KB5073700): x86, x64
Windows Server 2008 R2:
- 2026-01 Security Monthly Quality Rollup (KB5073695): x64
- 2026-01 Security Only Quality Update (KB5073699): x64

A valid Premium Assurance license is required to install these updates.

Windows Live Essentials Archive

2026-01-07T23:54:00+00:00

You’ve been asking me for years, and I finally did it.

Windows Live Essentials was a suite of free add-on software from Microsoft. It’s a perfect fit into the Windows 7 experience, but it’s been hard to find official download links. Now, we have them easily accessible on a dedicated page:

Windows Live Essentials on our Microsoft Download Center Archive

The Download Center Archive is getting some attention

2025-12-15T15:42:00+00:00

It’s been great to see the positive response to the new Download Center archive. It was shared on Hacker News earlier this week, and was just covered by The Register. (They’ve also positively covered Legacy Update a few times in the past, most recently after we released Legacy Update 1.12.)

I don’t usually talk about these things because money isn’t the point of this project, but I wanted to add an amusing tidbit that the traffic spike from Hacker News brought 42,810 page views to the Download Center homepage in 24 hours according to Cloudflare, yet, Google AdSense shows only 3,738 page views. So in case you were wondering how much of Hacker News uses an ad blocker (I know you weren’t), the answer is, 91%. Also, I didn’t even realise it was on Hacker News until almost a day later, so, good to know my infrastructure handles that kind of traffic spike!

Overall, we’ve been hitting an average of around 900,000 – 1 million daily requests, most of which is Windows Update traffic, search engine bots, and AI training/search bots. I’m kinda ok with the search/AI bots because it doesn’t seem to be causing any issues, and it is a good thing that people are finding a legitimate download source when asking AI, rather than something sketchy.

Hopefully soon, I’ll start loading more data into the archive. A few people have helped point out data that was incomplete (particularly missing file listings), or downloads that were missing entirely. We won’t be able to get all of it due to the state of the archives being incomplete, but the aim is to still try to get as close as we possibly can.

Thanks to everyone who helped to spread the word!

Microsoft PowerToys and Fun Packs Archive

2025-12-01T13:14:00+00:00

We now have a dedicated page to download Windows XP PowerToys and Fun Packs. PowerToys includes the power user favorite of Tweak UI, plus TaskSwitch (an Alt-Tab replacement with window thumbnails), and the 3D Windows XP logo screen saver. Fun Packs add extra features to Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker.

Microsoft PowerToys and Fun Packs on our Microsoft Download Center Archive

Expanding the Download Center Archive

2025-12-01T13:13:00+00:00

Hi everyone! I’ve been working on a major upgrade to our archive of the Microsoft Download Center.

We initially set up our Download Center archive in 2023 to provide an index of data scraped in August 2020 by ArchiveTeam, a community effort that preserves information at risk of being deleted. Microsoft decided to delete thousands of downloads on the flimsy basis that they were signed using the insecure SHA1 algorithm, providing less than a week of notice through an obscure forum post. Thanks to the power of the Wayback Machine, and ArchiveTeam’s efforts, we were able to provide a comprehensive index of all downloads that existed in the days before the purge. This particularly included downloads for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, Office 2003, 2007, and 2010, and so on.

What I didn’t fully realise at that point is that Microsoft quietly deletes downloads all the time. So I pulled down many thousands more downloads from the Wayback Machine (and then took almost 2 years to do anything with them). The United States Library of Congress had some archives too. This data ranges from 2012 to today, giving me an incredible view of what turned out to be 41,011 downloads, up from the 28,310 in the August 2020 archive. At this point, it was very clear that Microsoft is trigger-happy to get rid of downloads as soon as they deem them out of support.

It makes sense in one way, since Microsoft is no longer offering security updates or customer support services for these downloads, and doesn’t want to make any guarantees on the safety of using this software today. In another way, I’m confident that users are able to make their own judgement on the risk of downloading old software, and I’d way rather they find these downloads from a trusted source such as the Wayback Machine. This is why we run our archive - these downloads didn’t stop being useful just because they’re 10, 15, 20, or 25 years old.

The new archive is a huge expansion, adding many previously popular downloads for Windows 98, Me, and NT 4.0, Office 97 and 2000, and so on. We’ve also added a dedicated page for Windows XP PowerToys and Fun Packs, which includes Tweak UI, TaskSwitch (a more XP styled Alt-Tab replacement), and the 3D Windows XP screen saver.

Bringing all of this data into a consistent format for our database was no small task. The main script I wrote for this ended up at 1,600 lines that are an absolute mess, because of how rough HTML scraping is naturally going to be.

There are still a few remaining unsolved problems, but I’m overall very happy with where everything is right now:

In July 2024, Microsoft did a sloppy migration of data in their backend system, which reset the published date on every download to 15 July 2024. In most cases, we’ve corrected these dates, but there are still plenty of downloads that need fixing.
A range of download archives from the mid-2010s are missing a list of files.
Some downloads lead to archives of a 404 page. I think timestamps on file metadata we pulled from the Wayback Machine might have drifted since I started this archiving effort.
There are downloads from even earlier than 2012 that are valuable - I’m planning to add those. They haven’t been forgotten!
I know it’s still English-only - sorry about that. As the Internet Archive is based in the US, other languages are poorly archived. If you know of any archive websites similar to the Wayback Machine in your native language, please get in touch.

If you find any issues other than these, let us know and we’ll work on it. Also let me know if you find any gems in the archive that should be added to the “Commonly Downloaded” list!

By the way, you will find that Bing and DuckDuckGo (which uses Bing data) already has most of the new download center archive indexed. You might even be able to search our archive through your Start menu search box. Google has never particularly liked me, so the downloads may still be hard to find on Google. (ChatGPT and Claude also do pretty good at finding these downloads - we see users click through from them very frequently in our logs.)

Windows 10 End of Support

2025-10-14T21:54:00+00:00

After 10 years, Windows 10 has reached end of support.

Windows 10 is the most widely adopted version of Windows ever, being installed on around 1.3 billion devices. There are some clear concerns users have with upgrading to Windows 11, and many Windows 10 devices are not officially compatible with Windows 11.

To help you decide what to do next with your Windows 10 PC, we’ve developed a new guide:

How do I continue receiving updates for Windows 10?

So long, Windows Update website

2025-10-02T15:54:00+00:00

This week, Microsoft took down the old Windows Update v6 web app entirely. It was a time capsule locked in the Microsoft.com design from 2005. It’s been broken since 2021.

You can still see it preserved through Windows Update Restored.

Legacy Update 1.12.1

2025-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Legacy Update 1.12.1 fixes some issues from 1.12. (Surprisingly few issues for a big rewrite!)

More about Legacy Update 1.12

Legacy Update 1.12

2025-09-24T12:35:00+00:00

Legacy Update 1.12 is a huge rewrite release. We switched from compiling with Visual C++ 2008 (and 2010, and 2017, and 2022…), a setup which Microsoft recently broke, to a streamlined open-source MinGW/GCC toolchain. The result: 1.12 is 50% smaller than 1.11, which was already below 1 MB!

I annoyed people a few too many times with the automatic restart, so Legacy Update 1.12 adds a new 3-minute countdown. This also lets you choose to restart later. A bug with it incorrectly thinking a restart is needed on Windows 10/11 (sorry!) is also fixed.

My never-ending quest to make every edition of Windows XP and Server 2003 identify itself correctly continues in this release. With some very specific exceptions, it should now always display the most accurate name for the OS. (Blog post still to come about the craziness behind this sometime)

We also added a partial fix for the slowest of all updates - those for .NET Framework. Each update has to go through an extremely slow, wasteful re-optimizing process. If you use the Legacy Update website to install updates, we now use a workaround to defer the optimization until the end.

Our code signing certificate expires less than 2 weeks from now. We are looking at free/discounted options, but may need to purchase the same certificate again for $369 USD. Your support is appreciated to help us reach this goal and continue working on Legacy Update for another 2 years.

Workaround for ISP issues

2025-08-30T04:35:00+00:00

I set up a workaround on the server that should fix Legacy Update being blocked by some ISPs (specifically, I just set up a new subdomain and redirected all Windows Update download traffic through there).

If you’ve been running into “Windows Update may be blocked by your firewall or proxy server” or error 8024402F, try again now, it should work. If not, you may need to force Windows Update to grab an updated list of download links from our server by deleting the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution folder and trying again.

Legacy Update 1.12 – Beta preview

2025-08-24T03:06:00+00:00

Hi everyone! I’m working on Legacy Update 1.12, where I’ve made a pretty major under-the-hood change. Now seems like a good time to release this for beta testing.

I’ve refactored the ActiveX control code to be built with the open-source MinGW compiler, rather than Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 (and a bit of 2010, and 2017, and 2022… you can see why I wanted to get rid of this).

Windows is heavily built around the Component Object Model. It’s a neat system where components of the OS can easily talk to each other, and third-party apps can extend the OS with new features. ActiveX is one of systems built on top of COM. With the great power of COM comes great amounts of code to interface with it. Microsoft “simplified” this for developers with Active Template Library, which generates most of the code for you through copious amounts of compiler magic. This relies on non-standard features of the Visual C++ compiler, and at any rate I was feeling paranoid about whether all the code it generates is even necessary.

So I started removing the ATL magic, and started writing that code by hand. It worked really well, and it reduced the combined size of the 32-bit and 64-bit ActiveX control dlls by 18%. Thanks to the wonders of file compression, the setup exe download is also now 24% smaller. Visual C++ 2008 (for 32-bit) and 2017 (for 64-bit) produce fairly different code, while our new streamlined MinGW toolchain is identical between both 32-bit and 64-bit (aside from the machine instructions of course), so they compress together really well.

This allowed me to better understand how ActiveX works, which made me realise there was a fair amount of dead code - a single line of ATL template magic could end up compiling thousands of lines of code that weren’t even being used. I also got the impression that a lot of what I needed to implement simply hasn’t been done with MinGW before. Perhaps the only project that does so is Wine. Hopefully I’m wrong?

Because we’ve eliminated a crazy amount of complexity needed to compile Legacy Update, the GitHub Actions nightly build now fully works on all versions of Windows we support. Previously, we could only use Visual Studio 2022 and Visual C++ 2017, which painfully took 10 minutes to install, and only supports Windows XP SP2 and up. (We also believe Microsoft recently broke the Visual C++ 2017 toolchain in Visual Studio 2022, and removed the feature rather than fixing it.)

The only bug I’m aware of is that the “Checking for updates” progress bar can draw in the wrong position if you scroll the page, or if the layout of the page changes. Unlikely you’ll run into this issue though.

I also spent way more time than I probably should have figuring out how to display the correct brand name for each edition of Windows XP and Server 2003. A lot of this already happened in Legacy Update 1.11, but of course, it goes deeper. Now, it should be the case that any edition of Windows is identified exactly correctly on the Legacy Update website (save for some later Windows 2000 editions I haven’t looked at yet). It wasn’t harming anything, the OS name is purely cosmetic and doesn’t affect which updates you get, but it bugs my inner perfectionist, ya know? Someday, I’ll finish writing up a long blog post about how Windows’s internal branding system was a mess before Vista.

Huge shoutout to Douglas Reno for putting together both the new build system, and a new continuous integration server we’ll switch GitHub Actions over to soon.

Enough yapping, give me the download

Here is a link you can always use to download the latest nightly build: https://nightly.link/LegacyUpdate/LegacyUpdate/workflows/build/main/artifact.zip

Since it’s https, you’ll likely need to download this on a modern PC or in a modern browser. (Did you know you can download browsers from content.legacyupdate.net?)

Release notes (draft)

Legacy Update’s ActiveX control has been rewritten to be built with the latest open-source MinGW compiler, rather than Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008. This brings 17 years of compiler improvements, reduces the (already small) installation size of Legacy Update by 18%, and makes it easier for us to work on the project.
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003:
- Fixes setup redownloading the Windows Update Agent after upgrading Windows XP to SP3 or Windows Server 2003 to SP2.
- Fixes incorrect OS names being displayed for some editions.
Windows Server 2008:
- Fixes setup incorrectly downloading Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008, which is already Service Pack 1.
General fixes:
- Fixes the ActiveX control not being updated when the Legacy Update website is open in 32-bit Internet Explorer on a 64-bit system.
  This particularly affects Internet Explorer 11, which runs as 32-bit by default.
- Better handles “Unable to write to LegacyUpdate.dll” errors when the Legacy Update website is open in Internet Explorer.
- Better handles detection of Internet Explorer being uninstalled, particularly on Windows XP, 10, and 11.
- Fixes “Open File - Security Warning” dialog at the final stage of setup.
- Fixes multiple Windows Update settings dialogs appearing when clicking “Settings” or “Pick a time to install updates” on the website.
- Fixes the Notepad window being invisible when clicking “View Log File” on the website.
- Updates NSIS to version 3.11, which addresses a privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2025-43715).

Issues with antimalware false-positives

2025-08-14T11:17:00+00:00

Hopefully most of you won’t need to worry about this, but if you’re seeing Legacy Update say it’s been blocked by your firewall, there’s some explanation of why here. We’re doing our best to get this fixed, but it’s been ongoing for 2 months now.

Issues with antimalware false-positives

Microsoft broke Windows Update on Windows 7 (again)

2025-07-04T06:58:00+00:00

Earlier this week, users of Legacy Update started reporting errors when checking for updates on Windows 7. The most common variant of this is error 80728015.

Rather than an error code, some users instead got a very misleading error dialog:

Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer.

We determined the cause to be a configuration file on Microsoft’s servers that reached its specified expiry date. The issue only affects installations of Windows that are enrolled in Microsoft Update, which enables Windows Update to receive updates for products such as Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and SQL Server.

Microsoft corrected the issue two days later by bumping the expiry date from 2025-07-01 to 2033-07-01.

For more details about what happened, see my blog post:

Microsoft broke Windows Update on Windows 7 (again)

What is going on with Windows Update and drivers?

2025-06-28T04:09:00+00:00

A fair few people asked me what is going on with Microsoft’s recent announcement that drivers will be deleted from Windows Update, so I wrote up some notes about it:

What is going on with Windows Update and drivers?

FAQ is now Help

2025-06-20T00:34:00+00:00

I restructured our FAQ section into a new Help section. It’ll take some time, but I’d really like to build this up to have a bunch of info on all sorts of Windows Update issues. We were already sort of starting to do that, but it was making the “common issues” page way too long! It should be way easier to navigate now.

Legacy Update Help

Known issue: Error 80244021 on Windows Vista

2025-05-23T07:19:00+00:00

Update: The issue has been fixed. If you’re getting error 80244021, please note that this post is outdated.

Using Legacy Update on Vista or Server 2008 and getting error 80244021? Don’t worry, it’s not just you. We’re looking into what we can do to fix it.

I’ll be posting updates as we learn more about the issue here:

80244021 on Windows Vista

Legacy Update 1.11

2025-03-16T15:53:00+00:00

Wew, ok, I did it. Legacy Update 1.11 is out. It fixes, like, everything. Ever had a bug installing Legacy Update? We probably fixed it. It also installs updates even faster on Windows Vista/7, and yes, the bootloop bug is fixed. Huge thanks as always to everyone who contributed to this release!

Legacy Update 1.11

Statistics page updates paused

2025-01-13T06:35:00+00:00

I’m overhauling the backend that generates our statistics page. We’re currently holding 76,544,103 status reports submitted by the Windows Update Agent on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. That’s about how many updates have been installed (or attempted to be installed) since we started collecting stats in October 2022!

My really inefficient database that was collecting this data is currently using 61 GB, on a server with 75 GB available. The stats page used to update every 15 minutes, then every 30 minutes, then every hour, and at this point it takes that full hour to gather all the data to be displayed.

So I’m moving it to a database that’s way better for this kind of thing (moving from MariaDB to Clickhouse). It’ll take a bit of time for me to work on that. We’re still collecting the reports, they just won’t show up on the page for a while. And maybe we can even add some new interesting stats. I’ve been curious to make a leaderboard of the most error-prone updates, and maybe even support going back in time to see past weeks and months’ stats.

We already have 8,768 reports queued to be processed after the new database goes live, and that’s only from the past 12 hours. But it’s one of those “good problem to have” things - I never could have imagined 206,900+ people would be using this thing I randomly threw together one day a few years ago. So, seriously, thanks for forcing me to do more work!