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

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!

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

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.

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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?