Legacy Update: Get back online, activate, and install updates on your legacy Windows PC

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.

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.

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

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!