ByQuadCore

Before ESU was a thing Microsofts Extended Updates program then called Microsoft Custom Support Agreement was a six year option instead of only three (or four for Azure). Before 2019 some enterprises made already contracts for the CSA and Microsoft needs to deliver that. So Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 will have monthy updates until Jan 2026.

It seems as many people refer to my graph I created about a year ago. I had updated it in Nov 2022. This is the updated one:

NT 5.x is the best series of the Windows NT line ever. It was so simple but also super stable and just does the work for me. I used XP until mid 2017 as main, and it was for the most part a very pleasant eXPerience. The old taskbar and explorer interface with deskbands and quicklaunch is just a dream for productive work. To this day my workflow works best with the explorer from XP/2003. It also runs usable on hardware starting from Pentium III to the well beloved and very fast Sandy/Ivy Bridge µarch. Even on Haswell with some tweaking. The only real downside is the aging and very bad security architecture/concept and the limited modern hardware support. If 3rd party software and hardware vendors still support NT 5 I would likely use it to this day as main.

Everyone that needs Fiddler for NT4 this version works: https://web.archive.org/web/20040616233904/http://www.fiddlertool.com/dl/FiddlerSetup.exe This version will not run on any 9x system. .NET 1.1 runtime needs to be installed on NT4.

It will work with Windows 7 just fine. The 3rd generation Ivy Bridge also supported XP and Vista. Windows 7 support will go up to Skylake (6th gen) officially. Also Kabylake and even Coffelake will mostly work but unofficially driver wise.

But only for Windows 2000 SP3+ and Windows XP SP1+ or Windows 2000 SP2 and XP RTM with the SUS Client Update. Windows 2000 RTM, SP1 and Windows Me are not working yet.

Sadly not much. We are currently working on v4. But it still does not work correctly. getmanifest.asp makes v4 very hard. v31 works but only updates until October 2000 because at this time Microsoft has changed the inventory system.

That happens because the VME instructions in AMD Zen and Intel 11th Gen+ are broken. Possibly because 32Bit operating system support was dropped starting with these architectures. A Simple fix for this can be found here, works just fine: https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x/releases/

Like Windows NT 4 SP7 was originally planned, the same was for Win2000. In 2004 Microsoft canceled the project and replaced it with update rollup 1 for Win2000 SP4. This was the case because "costumers were already happy with SP4 and there is no need for another SP".

There can be many reasons why the updates won't show up. I think the language is the problem here. Each language has its own files and configuration, The Updates in the critical package are not that special. Most space is for DirectX and the IME.

Okay seems to be a problem with the gng file. When I use other gng files it wont show me as many updates. But my gng file is 0x00000407.gng so a German one. Its 63KB in size. Maybe this helps.

You will need to find the missing cif files and rename them. Copy the ones with the same number and rename them to the requested name, eg. 2456_XXXX.cif to 2456_therequestedname.cif. Without them, Windows Update will only display the updates which have the cif files in place.

I used the 0x00000407 because of German language. The .gng is the language pack and the .as simply the link between the .inv and .bm. For English the 0x00000409 is fine. You need valid .inv and .bm files. Also in the CRCCif in Root the called files must be valid for your os config. If something is wrong with the files or the file is for the wrong os IE may crash. Simply test other .inv or .cif files and rename them if needed.

I think I renamed it. The original name should be 9CF8F16EC35A1C51E503075187D04DA6E6369D92.inv and 966E85EC2985933BE567EDC0EE888D8DAA29FD8E.bm.

It's E523F435D07F55621D376488CD866161407FC187.inv from August 2000. Interestingly .inv and .bm files disappeared after October 9th 2000. They were replaced with .bkf files and bitmask.cdm and inventory.cdm. But Update v3 won't load them in, and only a few were archived. Only some. I have archived some and made my own cabpool server. It works fine. Also Internet Explorer 4, 5, 5.5 and 6 can use the webinstaller again.

Yes, it needs the Windows NT network stack. Windows Update in 95 works now with localization. I've written a small javascript to detect if the Windows version is Windows 95. Other versions like 98, Me, NT and 2000 are redirected to R1150 and Windows 95 to static_w95. It gets the language values from getLanguage.asp. Edit: I just found out that we can edit .as files in Microsoft Excel!

https://web.archive.org/web/20040617074150if_/http://www.fiddlertool.com:80/dl/FiddlerSetup.exe This one works on NT4 with .Net Framework 1.1 installed.

Not yet. Win95 gives me critical errors. I must debug them later using a proxy, which is tricky on Win9x. An older version of Fiddler works fine under NT4, but not in 9x.

Windows Update works now with auto detection of language/region. But not in Windows 95. Windows NT4, 2000 and 98 SE are using the language of the OS and also downloading the updates in the right language.

Notepad++. But it's not properly decoded. Saving the file will probably destroy it.

Editing the inv files is doable. When you open the inv with 7-zip there is the inventory.as file. It seems that it's checking the registry for installed updates.

We need a way to edit the catalog files and fill in the new updates. But I don't know how the files are encoded, not a lot of information is available for inv and bm files, sadly.

The German one. Windows Update v3 is fully localized and uses the one from the DE folder, it's the original file. I also found out that in the v31 Content folder are interesting files in the folders with the numbers eg. 90715. Each OS and IE config uses its own folder. the files 0x000004XX.as and 0x000004XX.gng are the "Language Packs" and each language has its own inv and bm files wich is the actual catalog. If you replace the files you get different updates. I have replaced some and interestingly NT4 showed me some Windows 98 updates.

No, it's the original file.

I just found out why Windows Update v31 is only shown in English. In default.htm there is only a static value. If you put in your language ID and language code, Windows Update will be shown in the right locale. Edit i got the German Version working: