dmso

Thank you, this was exactly what I was looking for! I'll test what you described in the thread you linked as soon as I have enough extra time for experimentation. Fair enough, making a fully updated installation medium by slipstreaming all the necessary updates would be the ideal way to do things, but I have no experience on that sort of project, and I'm not sure if there's enough time anymore for all the testing and trial&error that's likely to go in creating the slipstreamed disc and verifying that the installations made with it work flawlessly. Nor do I know if I can trust the various unofficial update packs that are floating around the 'net, at least if there's no reliable way to verify that they only contain executable code from official sources. Moreover, since activation for Windows XP (even the phone activation) is not likely to be working forever, there's no guarantee that new installations can be made far into the future, thus the usefulness of a fully updated installation medium may be more limited than what might first seem. That's why I'm actually planning to create an image of a system partition with fully updated WinXP on it, along with all the XP-specific programs I want to preserve for future. So if my hard drive breaks for example, I don't need to re-install anything as I can recover an already activated & fully updated system from backup. I've also purchased a couple of identical motherboards to serve as replacement parts for the same purpose (i.e. to avoid the need to re-install + activate), and I'm planning to get a few identical XP-compatible graphics cards as well. Anyway, thanks to everyone for your contributions. I'll report the results when I've tried the solutions suggested in this thread.

Actually I wasn't asking anything piracy-related or even anything that would be somewhere on the "grey zone" of copyrights, I just want advice. Right now my primary concern is to get Windows Update working for a fresh install of WinXP SP3. Getting network activation functioning is perhaps less critical, as there's always the option to activate through phone. Moreover, getting TLS 1.2 to work (which is a prerequisite for network activation) may prove problematic because it requires installing hotfixes designed for POSReady (as explained here by alstring), and I'm afraid those might cause problems if applied to an un-updated XP SP3. So does anyone know what hotfixes/updates I need to apply on top of fresh SP3 + IE8 to get Windows Update working?

First of all - I apologize if this post seems somehow "lazy", as all the information required for accomplishing the task mentioned in the title is surely covered in various threads on this subforum - but I feel there's a need for gathering all the info that's needed to activate and update WinXp (while it's still possible) in one place, in an up-to-date form. As I understand it, the update servers for Windows XP are to be decommissioned in 19th of July this year, after which it's no longer possible to connect to Windows Update and download any updates. Therefore the last moments are at hand if one wants to preserve a fully updated Windows XP installation for future use. However, as it turns out, downloading updates from Windows Update is not so simple anymore, although not yet impossible (as far as I understand). Firstly, connecting to Windows Update and downloading updates manually seems to require that the Windows installation used is activated (or so it did at least the last time I checked). But connecting to the activation servers appears to require support for the TLS 1.2 protocol, which is not supported by a fresh installation of WinXP SP3 (or even a fully updated installation with all the official updates up to April 2014). Furthermore, updating the root certificates seems to be needed, as reported in this thread by CyberAxe - is this still the current situation, i.e. does the workaround (disabling certificate revocation checking) no longer work? Secondly, Windows Update in its current form is not (and hasn't been for a long time) compatible with the original version of IE8, thus the manual installation of certain updates is needed before one is even able to connect to Windows Update. So, if I have a fresh install of Windows XP SP3 with only the original version of IE8 manually installed on it, which procedures I have to go through in order to be able to activate the OS and download all the updates that are available through Windows Update? Which hotfixes I have to manually install before being able to do so? If someone could write an up-to-date list of all the steps needed, I would be deeply grateful. Many thanks in advance!