As another post indicates, I had restored a backup image of an old Windows XP installation, and was now in the process of cleaning up and refining it. Updates to the Windows operating system were an important part of that process. This post describes the options I found, and the steps I took to install those updates.
Within Windows XP, I found the Windows Update option by going into Control Panel > left pane > Windows Update. (Alternately, Control Panel > Security Center > left pane > Check for the latest updates from Windows Update.) Unfortunately, when I got there, I saw only a blank screen. The old familiar Windows Update screen was gone. I thought it was a problem with the system. In that case, a TechNet thread offered many solutions, as did other pages that came up in response to my search.
Eventually, I posted my own specific question. A response to that question said there was probably nothing wrong with my system; I was probably just seeing the result of the fact that Microsoft was not offering Windows XP updates anymore.
According to Wikipedia, Microsoft officially stopped supporting WinXP in 2014 – but Microsoft continued to issue security updates for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009, based on XP Pro. MakeUseOf (Stegner, 2016) described a hack that allowed WinXP users to install those updates in WinXP, though with some risk of instability. But eventually that petered out too. ExtremeTech seemed to say that development of those updates ended in 2019.
Yet while Microsoft had ceased developing updates of any sort for WinXP, as of this later date in 2023, apparently it was still possible to download the updates from those prior years. At this writing, a quick search for WinXP’s Service Pack 3 (KB936929) seemed to confirm that some if not all individual WinXP updates were still available in the Microsoft Update Catalog for manual (i.e., one-at-a-time) installation.
For a different and no doubt easier solution, the answer to my posted question pointed me toward an Internet Archive page offering a download called Windows XP Unofficial Service Pack 4. The page described that “SP4” compilation as “a cumulative update rollup for Windows XP (x86) English,” up through early 2016, with tweaks to address issues not fixed by the official updates, and with several explanatory videos included. That download was available in .7z, .iso, torrent, and putatively executable and non-executable .zip formats. This was a substantial collection. The .7z fileset, which was probably most highly compressed, was 5.3GB.
That Internet Archive page provided a link to what it called the “original source” webpage for SP4, and indicated that (as I confirmed) that page had been shut down. For those who wanted extensive detail, it appeared that the Archive had also captured the full history of the related discussion thread (comprised of 2,573 posts entered over a period of ten years, from 2012 to 2022) on the original RyanVM website.
Presumably, in that long and murky history, one would find elaborations on the reactions I found in my own brief research. On the positive side, I found a Hacker News thread in which one user opined,
For XP I really like the unofficial SP4 service pack which rolls up all post-SP3 updates into a single executable, with or without .NET. The later POS-only patches are also available. It makes it really simple to bring an old system “up to date”, even if the last update was a couple years ago.
There were, however, some countervailing views. Consider a Reddit thread in which one participant said, “I am not fan of ISO’s made by others that miss some updates and come with useless and outdated tools. [G]ive me a pure XP SP4 ISO.” That last remark may have been a reference to WSUS Offline, which seems to have provided a relatively polished solution for multiple versions of Windows, as described by one source in 2022:
WSUS still works for windows 7/ 8.1/ 10 but can no longer retrieve XP updates.
It generates all the global update packages and saves them as a file on your computer. It installs these updates according to the make & model of your PC without having to be connected to the internet.
A WSUS Offline thread elaborated on the end of WSUS usefulness for WinXP. As a possible exception, the Internet Archive contained a WSUS Offline compilation of “all the updates available for Windows XP via WSUS Online.” That download, in ISO format (also available via torrent), was 3.2GB. A SuperUser thread (c. 2010-2012) offered further discussion of WSUS Offline and other solutions of that era.
A more recent update cumulation effort, the Onepiece XP project, was apparently assembled by Nonno Fabio, starting in 2008. Discussion of that entry extended over 27 webpages, ending in 2015. The download seemed to have been last updated in 2017. In yet another effort, one user opined that MrJayCobPL had produced a superior cumulative update (2019), sufficient to let the user “completely update your Windows XP computer, even if it doesn’t have any Service Packs installed!” The most recent sites for MrJayCobPL’s work seemed to be at RetroSystemsRevival and MSFN.
What appeared to be the most current effort was that of Legacy Update, last updated (at GitHub) in 2023. Legacy Update described itself as “a community-run resource to help you fix access to the internet and the Windows Update service” on Windows XP and, to some extent, on other versions of Windows. Legacy Update offered a downloads page providing convenient access to commonly sought WinXP updates, such as certain Visual C++ redistributables and versions of Microsoft .NET Framework. But the main emphasis, at Legacy Update, seemed to be that the user could download, install, and run LegacyUpdate.exe (254KB), and this program would fix Windows Update so that WinXP could download and install updates directly from Microsoft. As the webpage said,
Legacy Update identifies the updates your system lacks, and installs them automatically, restoring the Windows Update service to full functionality. …
Legacy Update also restores connectivity to many websites in Internet Explorer, and other programs that use the Windows built-in networking functionality. This includes Windows Product Activation on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, allowing you to activate these versions of Windows online in seconds.
Unlike WSUS Offline, Legacy Update was not leery of leaving a Windows XP computer connected to the Internet for hours, to download all those updates; and unlike RyanVM’s SP4, Legacy Update was apparently limited to providing stock Microsoft material, free of tweaks that might improve and/or degrade a WinXP installation in various regards. My conclusion at the moment was that, for my purposes, it would probably be sufficient just to install the stock updates and avoid the complications and uncertainties that seemed to pervade those other efforts. Hence, I decided to use LegacyUpdate.
When I ran LegacyUpdate.exe, it listed four options. Three were selected by default: Windows Update Agent update, Update root certificates store, and Legacy Update. The fourth was Enable Windows Embedded 2009 updates. Mousing over these yielded further tooltip-like information below the checkboxes. For the Embedded option, that text noted that Microsoft officially recommended against that option, which would install security updates created for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 (see above). I left that one unchecked.
After running for a minute or two, Legacy Update opened Internet Explorer to a page that looked much like the official WinXP page for Windows Update. The most noticeable difference was the big banner across the top of this one that said, “Legacy Update.” It proceeded with “Checking for the latest updates for your computer,” just like old times. It paused to ask my approval of a certain update that my system would apparently need, in order to go ahead with all the rest. When it finished that, I had to click Home > Check for Updates. That gave me 188 updates. I went with it. For the most part, it was successful. There was just one error:
Windows Live
Couldn’t install programs
Please try installing Windows Live programs again.
Rebooting and re-running Legacy Update led to the discovery that, actually, two updates were not being installed. Possibly Windows Live Essentials were not installing because there was an underlying problem with Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 (KB2833941).
For the .NET Framework issue, a search led to 1 2 3 4 sources yielding the impression that there might be a solution, but that it wasn’t a sure thing, and implementing it could take a lot of time. I didn’t plan to use Live Essentials. Moreover, I was under the impression that the various .NET Frameworks were somewhat indendent of one another – that you didn’t need 1.1 in order to use 3.5, for instance, if you had software that needed 3.5.
So it seemed that this might not be a real issue for me. If that proved incorrect, my searching suggested that my troubleshooting should begin with Aaron Stebner’s advice. Another possibility would be to look more closely at SP4, to see whether its collection of fixes included something on this.
Aside from those seemingly unimportant exceptions, it now appeared that I had a stable and virtually complete physical Windows XP installation. I was inclined to let it rest until I had a specific need that could call for installing more software or implementing more tweaks.
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