Just a friendly reminder that, particularly when coming from search result summaries, AI only knows as much as it can glean from sources it deems to be authoritative. Often, those are news outlets that use clickbait, and put writers under pressure to push out articles without much critical thought.

After 10 years, Windows 10 has reached end of support. Don’t panic. Your Windows 10 computers will not explode. You will not catch every piece of malware in existence. You should enrol in ESU, or switch to Windows 11 or Linux, but this is not the end of the world. Our guide on what to do now:

Wait, Windows 10 is legacy now? 😳 Windows 10 reaches end of support in a few days’ time, and there’s been an increasing number of questions about what will happen to Windows 10 and Windows Update. We put together a new guide to answer your questions:

So long, Windows Update website 🫡 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 updated – so your old Windows can be, too

🌎⬆️ Legacy Update 1.12.1 fixes some issues from 1.12. (Surprisingly few issues for a big rewrite!) github.com/LegacyUpdate... More on 1.12 in the quoted post below 👇

Steam powered? No no, *Windows* powered

🌎⬆️ 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!

root: boring, not scary at all, can just access it with sudo NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM: loud, asserts dominance, requires service hacks to access, shows The System is in charge

Last week, apparently because a broken update was pushed, every running Windows Server on the planet with WSUS installed went and re-synced their entire database, causing a DDoS of Microsoft’s WSUS servers. Not a good past few weeks for Windows Update!

Getting an error that the Windows Update service isn’t running, or is Microsoft Update not being enabled for you on Windows 7, 8, or 8.1? Microsoft just let a config file expire… *again*. It took 2 days for them to fix it in 2017 🤷‍♀️ We’re monitoring and will take action if they don’t fix it soon.

What is going on with Windows Update and drivers? 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:

Well, of course we’re not at the end of the Windows Update drivers saga. Like I’ve said before, I strongly believe this is to do with WSUS struggling with a huge database. Security is just a convenient additional benefit. Still a legitimate one though - old vulnerable drivers can be used by malware.

This might seem huge, but I’ll point out that Microsoft already opened Windows Update to 3rd party apps 12 years ago. It’s called the Microsoft Store, and it uses Windows Update on the backend. This really rather shows Microsoft is terrible at convincing developers and users what’s good for them.

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:

The Microsoft Vulnerable Driver Blocklist, known for such hits as breaking your crappy RGB drivers, includes an Asus driver named AsHitIo_Drv.sys, or as Microsoft calls it, ASHITIO

Ever thought about how Windows Aero assumed desktop PCs would become thin clients, and servers would be empty glass rectangles?

The Microsoft support forums, in their mission to be the most useless website on the internet, has found a new trick: You don’t need humans to write low quality non-answers. AI pretending to be an employee can do it just as well! (Context: WSUS’s deprecation was announced in September)

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! 🌎⬆️

Windows 7 lives! How to keep your favorite fossil running

Depending how Microsoft does this, it may mean driver updates no longer appear on pre-Windows 10. But this is pretty much necessary. There’s a LOT of drivers, mainly for Windows 10/11. Just the metadata is over 100GB, and enabling driver syncing on a WSUS server makes it choke and become unusable.

Well it’s about time someone thought of the cats 😻

Wait what?

Therapist: Generic Microsoft Windows isn’t real, it can’t hurt you Generic Microsoft Windows:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! 🎉 Please update all of your computers to ensure that it's year 2025 compliant ASAP!!!

“You’ll be visited by three spirits” The three spirits:

Just added a bunch more people to our starter pack! Lots of retro tech creators have joined Bluesky in the past few weeks. I recommend following all of them 😊 bsky.app/starter-pack...

If only I knew how far it would come 🙃

👋 Welcome! We’re an open source project that continues support for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, and 8 where Microsoft left off. 💬 Join the Legacy Update community on Discord! We talk about everything - not necessarily just tech! discord.com/invite/Y9rbX...