Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3M87bfnyuI
Updating Windows The Old Fashioned Way - In 2024
Introduction
In July 2006, Microsoft discontinued support for Windows 98, 98SE, and ME. In 2011, they switched off the Windows Update service for those operating systems completely.
So what if I told you that all this - and a lot more - is back thanks to a community effort?
Windows Update Restored (and similar service LegacyUpdate for XP) fully integrates into these old versions of Windows just like the good old days. So lets update Windows like it’s 1999!
Well, 2006, I guess…
Script
This is a video that I’ve been wanting to make for quite a while now, because it’s quite a useful tool for owners of these old, obsolete, unsupported Windows PCs. I certainly have quite a few of them lying around the studio myself, and I like to think that my viewers are also the kind of people who have old, obsolete, unsupported Windows PCs lying around so hopefully this will be useful to you too.
And I was just in the middle of something, and an opportunity came up to actually demo this. So I thought, “You know what? It’s about time I made that video” - and I’m going to be demoing this on my Time ICEDESK PC - so this was made in 2002, it’s a PC built into a desk, and I’ve already covered this a couple of times on my channel:
In the first video, I showed how I picked it up from an old crumbling community centre that was about to be demolished, and then I installed Doom on it, as you do, and in the second video I did some essential maintenance to it, like replacing the old leaky capacitors and the original noisy fans…
…and this is quite the machine, I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s got a 1.1GHz AMD Duron CPU, it’s got 512MB of RAM, it’s got integrated graphics, and it’s got integrated audio too - and the operating system, for such a noble beast?
Of course, it’s Windows Millennium Edition!
Because that always gets lots of YouTube comments and that’s what it’s all about. But I use this as a bridge PC here in the studio, so I use it to copy files to and from various different machines: newer machines, older machines, writing floppies, all of that kind of stuff.
Allow me to explain. So, I have an FTP server running on this machine - it’s this one, “Quick ‘n’ Easy FTP server 3.2 Lite” - and the cool thing about this is that I can track down drivers and installation media and stuff like that using my modern computer - my MacBook Air - and then I can, of course, FTP into this and copy the files across and then copy that kind of stuff to disk or indeed, I have SMB set up on here so I have the drives shared on the network - so my other PCs, which are networked, I can just connect to this and copy that stuff across. It makes life so, so much easier - and I did actually use this off the back of my recent Tiny PC video.
Once I’d finished recording that, I decided I wanted to do a clean install of Windows 95 for something else that I want to cover, so I put the hard drive in here initially as a second drive, just formatted it and copied the Windows 95 install files over, got the network card set up in there and used SMB to copy everything else across.
Really, really useful workflow and it’s generally the workflow that I use for everything that I do here in the studio.
Now, of course, this PC itself just gets used as a bit of a workhorse and it’s completely and utterly neglected - and you may have spotted that it’s nagging me to install Windows Updates because - well - this hasn’t been updated since I installed Windows Millennium Edition on it all those months ago - and it’s finally time to rectify that situation.
That’s basically because I ran into a specific problem here - so if we go into our FTP folder, you may notice that I have the Office 2000 Professional installation media in here, these two ISO files - and that’s because I want to install Office 2000 on the Desk PC, potentially for something that I’m going to be doing - and to do that, I thought, well, rather than burn the disks, I would install Daemon Tools, which allows you to mount these ISO files as an actual drive as far as Windows is concerned.
But I can’t actually install it: “This installation package cannot be installed by the Windows Installer Service. You must install a Windows Service Pack that contains a newer version of the Windows Installer Service.”
Now, I could go online and I could find the old updates and things for Windows Millennium Edition, and I could go through and install them manually, but there is a better way of doing this now - so allow me to demonstrate!
So if we just fire up Internet Explorer as we normally would - this machine is connected to the internet I should say, it’s behind various firewalls and things so it is relatively safe - but the address that we want to go to is:
www.windowsupdaterestored.com
…and here it is, Windows Update Restored. So, I will allow the creators of the site to explain in their own words:
“Welcome to Windows Update Restored. This is a project dedicated to restoring the update functionality for Windows 95 up to Windows XP, with automatic updates as well. We actively work on the project and make improvements over time, which can be found in the news section at the bottom of this page.”
“In August of 2011, Microsoft shut down the Windows Update service for Windows 95 / NT4 / 98 / ME / 2000. This prevented legacy systems from getting updates and other software from Microsoft. Windows Update Restored has brought back those old websites to give you the update experience of how it was back then.”
And this is absolutely fantastic - so, of course, over the various eras of Windows, Microsoft had different versions of this service - and they have actually restored the various different versions. Now, I’m not going to go over all of them in this video - you’ll probably see glimpses of them in future videos on my channel - but the version that we are interested in today is v4, which was the last version to support Windows Millennium Edition. So let’s check it out!
…and the first thing that we get is this help message - they are looking for old Windows Update packages, so if you have an old ME machine, or indeed any of the versions of Windows that they support here, go digging through those folders and see if they have any files that they don’t have so you can forward them on to them and they can actually add them to the service - so very much a community effort, but we’ll just continue through to Windows Update Restored - and this should look very familiar to anyone who was running these older versions of Windows back in the day.
“Important, end of support for Windows 98 and Windows ME. Effective July 11, 2006, support for Windows 98, 98 Second Edition and Windows ME and their related components will end.”
Now I should say that you shouldn’t be using a PC like this as your daily driver - if you even can somehow, I’m not quite sure how - but there’s all sorts of strange people out there, and you probably shouldn’t be leaving them permanently connected to the internet either, but this is certainly a very useful way to get them up to date. So this will actually work as per good old Windows Update worked back in the day:
“Scanning the PC for required updates.”
As you can see, there are quite a few required for this machine - so we’ve got an update to System Restore, we’ve got security updates, we’ve got critical updates, we’ve got… Yeah, pretty much everything covered - so we’ll install those first.
“List of total selected updates currently contains Windows ME System Restore update.”
Oh, it’s an exclusive item, which must be installed separately - okay. So…
“To continue installing, press OK.”
So we’ll install that separately.
“You must restart your computer.”
I’ll just allow that to run…
…just security certificate things.
Ah, and by the way, there is actually a way to get rid of all of those pesky certificate errors that keep popping up - they are just a mild annoyance, it will work perfectly fine without doing this - but if we just go back to the windowsupdaterestored.com homepage, and then we can browse to the Download Center and go to “Other Types of Downloads”, and then we’ve got the “Windows Update Restored Tools”, I believe it is.
Yeah, “Windows Update Restored Certificates”, and we can actually download these registry files, so this is the one for Windows 9x, and run that.
“Are you sure you want to add that to the registry?”
“Yes”
That has successfully been added - and now, of course, we need to restart so it picks up those new certificates.
…and then we can scan for updates again.
“19 critical updates for your computer.”
“Install now.”
…and look at that, 17.8MB - much, much quicker of course than this was back in the dialup days. I know a lot of people would have moved to DSL and stuff by the time Millennium Edition came out, but we certainly didn’t - I think we were still on dialup at home well into the Windows XP era.
But we’ll just allow that to finish.
Say what you will about ME, but I do love that startup sound!
…and there we go, that was incredibly quick and painless, but that’s all of our critical updates and service packs installed, which is fantastic. But of course, if you remember using Windows Update back in those days, you will no doubt remember the other stuff that you could also get from this service - so if we just click through to here, this is all optional, but highly recommended.
We’ve got Windows Media Player 9 series, so we can install that. We’ve got DirectX 9c, we can add that. That must be installed separately from all other updates - okay, we’ll do that separately.
This is quite useful, this is Windows Automatic Updating - and this is actually a modified version of this tool, so it’s the tool that runs in the system tray and pops up whenever there are new updates - and this is actually connected to this service rather than the long-defunct Microsoft version so if they uncover any more Millennium Edition updates and add them to the service then it will notify you and actually allow you to install those, so that’s quite useful.
It’s just telling me that that Windows Media Player 9 update needs to be installed separately, so we’ll remove that.
But yeah, some quite useful things here - we’ve got Windows IDE hard drive caching, we’ve got an update for Outlook Express 6, we’ve got a Universal Plug and Play update, and then we’ve got some multi-language stuff here as well, so I’m going to go through and get all of this stuff installed, and then hopefully, finally, we’ll be able to install Microsoft Office.
[a few minutes later…]
…and of course it seems that some of our updates have updates, so we’ve got Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 - I’m going to leave that for now, I’m going to go and see if I can install Daemon Tools, which was the original plan.
Yeah, there we go, now we have the installer! So I can just go through this…
“You must restart your system” - again.
So I bet this little red icon will be familiar to a lot of viewers of this channel - Let’s just go through and mount our image, finally!
Go to FTP… Office 2000 Professional Disk 1…
Okay!
I’m going to go through and I’m going to install this and then I will show you Windows Update Restored’s final trick.
[A little longer than a few minutes later…]
So that should be Microsoft Office installed - let’s just have a very quick look, let’s fire up Excel.
Oh yes!
It’s nice to see you again after all these years, but go away.
So this is what I wanted to try out - this is one of the files that I found on that Tiny PC, you may recognise this from that video. Just enable macros and here it is - wow, the resolution is a lot higher on this PC, obviously…
Who wants to be a millionaire? The spreadsheet - and I did say I would release this, so I should probably get on and do that.
“Which continent is Spain on?”
“Europe?”
Yeah, and that’s working great in Office 2000, so that’s good to see - but anyway, that’s not what this video is about. It’s good to see that that’s working properly - no, I don’t want to save anything, go away!
…and finally - oh, and by the way, there is actually a shortcut on the start menu, I don’t know why I keep going into Internet Explorer and typing in the address, but there you go, I’ve only just discovered that - we’ll just continue through to windowsupdaterestored.com.
Yeah, this security warning keeps coming up - I did install those certificates earlier but apparently that doesn’t work properly on Millennium Edition, it’s probably something that I need to report back to them. But anyway if we go back into “Scan for Updates”.
Now, if this was a later version of Windows Update - unfortunately v4 is the latest version that works with Millennium Edition - but if this was a later version of Windows Update and indeed a slightly later version of Office, then you would also get your Microsoft Office updates through here as well - something to look out for if you’re running XP or later.
But anyway, one of the final things that I can just show to you is if we go into the “Installation History” you’ve got the history of all of the updates that have been installed, so I can go through and see that most of those were successful - I have had a few that have failed today so I’ll go through and try to reinstall those although I’m sure they’ll pop up-
Oh, speak of the devil!
There it is - so that’s actually automatically downloading updates in the background. Oh, that’s perfect timing!
Okay, so we’ll close this.
“Windows is ready to install recommended updates for your computer.”
So as you can see - and that wasn’t reliant on me going to Windows Update again, that’s just purely coincidence, the timing of that - but we can actually go through and look at that.
Yeah, so I think that’s actually some of those updates that have failed in that list, so that’s great to see so we can just click through and install those.
So that’s windowsupdaterestored.com, a very useful tool for users of Windows 95 all the way up to and including XP - and I should point out that if you are running XP there’s also a very similar effort called legacyupdate.net which works in very much the same way so you can take your choice - I’ll put the links to both of those services down in the description so you can check them out - and I should also point out that you shouldn’t be connecting these old unsupported versions of Windows to the internet for any length of time, please do take precautions. Antivirus, firewalls, the rest of it - please don’t use them for general browsing, but I probably don’t need to tell you that.
Anyway, thank you ever so much to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi and indeed my YouTube Channel Members for all of your support for the channel, and thank you to you for watching, so hopefully I’ll see you next time.
Original Video Links
Support the channel!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ctrlaltrees
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Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ctrlaltrees
Relevant Links:
Quick ’n Easy FTP Server Lite: https://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/html/quick__n_easy_ftp_server_lite.html
Daemon Tools 3.47: https://archive.org/details/daemon-tools-347
http://www.windowsupdaterestored.com
http://legacyupdate.net
Time ICEDESK PC Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLJ-Nv_tKpJl9m8gSR4cri6quoXgKPvtg
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