Learn more about what we’re doing at the Legacy Update project.
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!
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!
We’re now posting updates on Bluesky. Follow us at @legacyupdate.net!
I’m sure many of you are aware of Windows Update Restored, a very similar project to Legacy Update, which aims to preserve what was lost from past versions of Windows Update. Legacy Update is incredibly fortunate to still have enough of Windows Update online for it to continue working on Windows 2000 and later. WUR is not as lucky, but they’re fighting the good fight, and have done some incredible work to bring back Windows Update versions 2 to 5, while Legacy Update focuses only on version 6.
I’ve been extremely fond of what they’ve been doing, and WULover/CaptainTER06 and the rest of the crew have been wonderful people, so we decided we should officially work together.
You’ll soon see some changes to the Discord server to accommodate the WUR project, and we’ll be working together towards our shared mission of reviving Windows Update and other web services long forgotten by Microsoft. Super excited for what’s to come, and I hope you are too!
By the way, you may already be aware, but WUR are asking the community to look around on any old hard drives you might have, in case they might have Windows Update v3 inventory files and update downloads. More info here:
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