Metropol

Today, I had to sort out someone's computer which involved reinstalling Windows. Their particular box was a Pentium Pro P200 with 64MB RAM. The Pentium Pro chip was optimised to run wholey 32 bit operating systems, and since the machine was far too old to run Windows 2000/XP well, this meant staying with the venerable Windows NT 4.0.

NT4 was released way back in 1996 and so a virgin installation needs to have a raft of updates applied in order to bring it up to spec (or rather, up to 2003 spec at which point Microsoft stopped supporting it). At present, the ancient Windows Update version 3 is still running for the benefit of Windows NT and Windows 95 users, but on using it today it occured to me that it won't be around forever.

Similar things can be said about Windows Update version 4, at present it's still supported and new updates are still added to it for users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000, but there will come a time when they'll ditch it.

Yet as far as I can tell, beyond service packs, there is no obvious way to get hold of these updates except through Windows Update.

Does anyone know of a way of making Windows Update download the installation files for the updates it requires, in a form which you are able to burn to a CD, with the aim that I can produce a CD which contains all of the updates necessary so that I can still patch up a virgin installation after Windows Update stops working for older versions of Windows?

there was a CD out called the security rollup CD. Not sure if it supported NT4 though. I'll ahve a look for it.

it was here
http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -gb;833242
but it doesn't seem to be available anymore. maybe a look around that site would help

cwathen wrote:NT4 was released way back in 1996 and so a virgin installation needs to have a raft of updates applied in order to bring it up to spec (or rather, up to 2003 spec at which point Microsoft stopped supporting it). At present, the ancient Windows Update version 3 is still running for the benefit of Windows NT and Windows 95 users, but on using it today it occured to me that it won't be around forever.

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/Produ ... tiring.asp

"January 1, 2007 Online support [For NT 4.0] is no longer available."

Presumably meaning "No more grabbing updates from us, ever"

In general, patches and stuff are around for the best part of about 10/11 years, based on http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/ ... &x=20&y=11 exception being Windows 98 and ME.

Similar things can be said about Windows Update version 4, at present it's still supported and new updates are still added to it for users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000, but there will come a time when they'll ditch it.

Does anyone know of a way of making Windows Update download the installation files for the updates it requires, in a form which you are able to burn to a CD, with the aim that I can produce a CD which contains all of the updates necessary so that I can still patch up a virgin installation after Windows Update stops working for older versions of Windows?

One can download all the updates manually from the Microsoft Update Centre at this time, for Windows 3.1 onwards. http://download.microsoft.com

The CD mentioned by Hyma doesn't support NT 4.0. The only NT systems it supports is 2000 and XP.

Neil Jones wrote:The CD mentioned by Hyma doesn't support NT 4.0. The only NT systems it supports is 2000 and XP.

ah well, wasn't sure about it.

Is slipstreaming possible with NT4 or is that only with service packs and NT5?

Is slipstreaming possible with NT4 or is that only with service packs and NT5?

Since all versions of Windows NT (including 2000 and XP) have used the same installer (which, incidentally, is based on the Windows 3.0 installation program from 1990!) I presume you can slipstream.

Indeed, I've seen it done - my NT4 CD applies SP1 by default. As far as I'm aware however, you can only do it with service packs.

Whilst we're at it, does anyone know how to enable the desktop update when installing IE6 (i.e. so the UI looks like Windows 98 instead of Windows 95)? I know it still ships with it and there is a way of doing it, but I couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to go through that awful cludge of installing IE4 (I had a job finding a CD with that on too) and then upgrading to IE6 afterwords.

One can download all the updates manually from the Microsoft Update Centre at this time, for Windows 3.1 onwards. http://download.microsoft.com

So presumably the only way to do what I want is to note down everything Windows Update has installed and then download them all manually? Cheers anyway, at least I know it can be done (albeit with more effort than I would have liked!).