If you have a need to install older Windows now, there are some great resources for installing updates:

- https://legacyupdate.net/ - great for Windows 2000 and XP in particular

- https://windowsupdaterestored.com/ - targets more Windows OSes

I have a Pentium 3 system under my desk for running some software that needs access to specific hardware (so I can't just run it in a VM), and Legacy Update was fantastic for getting Windows 2000 working properly.

If you want the nostalgia of running the original updates for a couple hours or plugging in a new card for the first time that's definitely the best way to get it. If you just want to get the final version on a machine then installing from an already slipstreamed installer image like in the article is probably the way to go, significantly faster and doesn't require any bootstrapping of getting the install "good enough" to be able to run the updates in the first place.

The article slipstreams drivers rather than any updates - but yes, you could slipstream updates, and there are unofficial pre-updated ISOs available.

I've tried ones for 98, 2000 and XP and I've found that most of those unofficial updates go too far - they tend to try to do things like backport DLLs or APIs for better compatibility with newer software, but I've found they make the system less stable and less period correct - which affects software compatibility.

In my case, I'm trying to run a mix of old programming software and old games - both of these had problems on unofficial update packs.

Thank you for this - I have to get a win 2k system back running to program some old off brand PLCs I have. It would be sweet if it can be as up to date as possible. Do you trust your p3 system to be on the internet full time ?

It's behind my normal router/firewall so not directly internet accessible, but yes, I have it on my normal home network.

Most network traffic to it is via a samba server on Linux configured to be accessible to SMBv1 still for use as a file dump.

It doesn't really talk out to the internet much - you can't get modern browsers and even if you could it would be too slow to be practical.

Fun little article. Though I feel like using a VESA driver is cheating. Fine enough if all you need is a basic framebuffer for something like MS Office, but even something like video playback would probably bring it to a crawl

I'd imagine that CPU would brute force its way through any 720p media (to match the screen).

This and his efforts in getting Win3.11 AND Win1.0 on a modern-era laptop are incredibly interesting. The guy built his own sound card to get the latter working!

Will this hack work on CPUs newer than Haswell?

I wonder if SDI would help here