Legacy Update updated – so your old Windows can be, too

Need – or prefer – an EOL version of Windows? Don't panic!

Legacy Update is a third-party Windows Update client which can update old, unsupported versions of Windows, from Windows 10 and 11 all the way back to Windows 2000.

And now, Legacy Update version 1.12 is here, with a significant rewrite of one component to make it smaller and faster. It can fetch and install all the available updates for every 21st century version of Windows. It's also very handy for Windows XP and Windows 7. And soon, we think it may win a new fanbase of Windows 10 users after Microsoft throws the kill switch.

The Windows Update web app first appeared for Windows 98 and continued all the way through to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. You visited a special Microsoft website using Internet Explorer, and an ActiveX control made an inventory of your OS, compiled a list of available updates, asked for your approval and then installed them all. Its slide into oblivion began when Windows Vista and Server 2008 appeared: Microsoft moved the functionality into a dedicated Control Panel applet. In 2011, Microsoft turned off the website's functionality for NT 4 and everything older, and then in 2020 for everything up to Vista.

The thing is that the updates are still online, in the Microsoft Update Catalog. What Legacy Update provides is a third-party replacement client which does the same job as the old webapp. It is able to update SSL certificates for very old versions of Windows, and supports newer protocols than the discontinued SHA-1.

It is not a piracy tool. It won't activate Windows. It can find and install some device drivers, but that's not its primary purpose either. (The only driver installer worth your time is the FOSS Snappy Driver Installer Origin.) Legacy Update just updates Windows and other Microsoft apps, just like the discontinued Microsoft service. It's open source freeware – the source is on Github.

It seems that Microsoft's backward-compatibility for building Windows XP binaries with Visual Studio 2022 recently went wrong, so for this new version, the ActiveX plugin has been rewritten using MingGW. The plugin is now smaller and faster. The website and back-end have also had some bugfixes, too, reducing the number of reboots it needs and avoiding recommending some unnecessary updates.

We have mentioned Legacy Update a couple of times in recent years, when talking about running Windows XP in 2023, and later, on keeping Windows 7 running in 2025.

The perspicacious may have registered the mention of Windows 7, because that never needed the web app: its update functionality was built in, and thus browser-independent. Which was all well and good – until it was turned off in January 2020. You could pay for Extended Support until 2023, but even the last edition standing, Windows Embedded POSReady 7, had its life support unplugged last year.

Enter stage left, Legacy Update, which will still happily patch a new (or ancient but un-updated) copy of Windows 7, or 8.0 or 8.1. Or even older. Yes, Windows XP is still surprisingly usable, as we found out a couple of years ago.

The relevance of this today, of course, is that Windows 10 now has fewer than three weeks until Microsoft hits the big red kill switch. Back in June we reported that Redmond would let you into the VIP area for free if you bought enough space to back up to its cloud, or using Microsoft Reward Points. Now, as The Register reported last week, even that has been waived for users in the European Economic Area.

We strongly suspect that other loopholes will be found. With one Registry key, Windows XP got updates into 2019. The same will be possible for Windows 10. Don't panic, and don't buy a new PC – or even rent more cloud space – just because the billionaires in Redmond tell you.

Or you could reinstall Windows 10 IoT LTSC and get updates until 2032. ®

Bootnote

We have read that it's also possible to do an in-place "upgrade" from Windows 10 to the LTSC edition, but we haven't tried it yet. We don't run Windows much around these parts and haven't got many well-used copies with a few scratches, dents and dog-ears to make it a meaningful test.

We also learned of a third-party setup program called UpDownTool which can do an in-place reinstall of Windows 10 LTSC on top of an existing copy of Windows 11.

We hope to give these a try and report back. Watch this space.