Windows XP Patch Guide (Final)

One of the most frequent emails that I receive these days is in relation to the Windows updates lists in the support section. Specifically, given that there are lists for Windows 3.1 through Windows 2000, why isn't there one for Windows XP?

I've maintained for years that I don't have the time to maintain it in real time - with up to 20 updates being released a month and a long dependency and replacement chain going back to the release of SP3 to deal with, I'm surprised that anyone in Microsoft had the time either! I did however promise quite a lot of people that once XP end of life, I would create a 'final' version of the updates list.

I have finally done it and published it. The updates list for XP Pro can be found at
http://www.hpcfactor.com/qlink/?linkID=210

As with the other updates, to entice you to donate, if you cannot be bothered to do all the downloading yourself, if you make a sensible donation to the running costs of the site, I'll let you download them from here. The download size is well over 1GB, so please keep that in mind when I say "sensible".


... and a quick note to some of the lower members of the Internet community who in the past have donated £0.50, downloaded everything they wanted and then copied the patch guides from HPC:Factor's support section and then put the downloads up on your own website or elsewhere. Thanks for that. You've really killed donations to this site, especially in the last 18 months. I self fund this site, there are no adverts on it to annoy you, other visitors or our members. I've spent hours making these guides and update downloads, so thanks for being so selfish, arrogant and greedy. Thanks for stealing that work and claiming it was your own.

I've always downloaded the updates when the became available and then slipstreamed them into my XP installation CD, which actually got so large that it had to become an XP installation DVD...

I also did the same thing for my Microsoft Office 2007, that is I slipstreamed those updates into the DVD as well. So now when I install XP on a new machine, it automatically installs MS Office 2007 as well with the updates.

The only thing I have to do afterwards is validate the software with Microsoft since for some reason it doesn't validate during install.

I used to do that religiously, then I started using WSUS all the time and it was just easier to let that spit them out. The issue with slipstreaming into a slipstream is the installer bloats. The other issue is that you can only add QFE files, you cannot add supplemental updates or MSI. Installing and patching XP is 144 updates, but once you add .net on, it becomes a monster chore because of the length of time they take to install.

In writing the guide, I ran through a clean SP3 install twice the first took about 4 hours to go through, largely because of .net. The second with a bat to do it took about 2.5 hours. My evil plan was however to use the state of the VM at the end of the second install to create a Windows 7 installer image for the Volume version of Windows XP Pro. That can be pushed out with the Windows 7/Server installer services and will install Windows XP, IE, Media Player, MSXML, .net 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 etc. all patched in less than 20 minutes.
It also means I can bypass the slow DOS setup. The only downside of this approach is that XP isn't clever enough to change its own kernel if it notices that it has a multi-core/cpu during startup, only DOS setup can do that. You can change it manually though!

Definitely worth it to save all that time.

Regardless of your method, it is good to have those updates since MS no longer supports XP, or will not be supporting for much longer, and you never know when they will disappear.

The very first thing I always do after installing XP is run Norton Ghost and make an image of my install so I don't ever have to go through all that crap again. It has paid off so many times...I mean I can flash an image to a new hard drive in about 10 minutes and it has everything just the way I like it.

I would have no idea how to install from a server as that is way beyond my skill set.

And even if your clean SP3 install took a long time, just remember back when it was 27 floppies to install Win95 and how long that took....FOREVER!

The main thing I dislike about DOS installations is having to install DOS drivers to access USB ports and trying to install from an USB CD/DVD. If it is a desktop with an internal IDE drive...no problem, but USB drivers can get downright nasty sometimes getting them to be recognized, especially during the install process with it stopping and starting.

Same thing when I try to use a bootable USB flash drive and do an install...it is fine if the BIOS on the computer has legacy support for USB ports...but some machines don't and it often times will just crap out during the install.

I recently flashed the AMD 50x15 BIOS and installed XP on it. It was actually easiest to simply remove the hard drive from the AMD, stick it into an external enclosure, and copy all the install XP CD files to the hard drive on another computer, and then reinstall it back into the AMD and install XP from there rather than trying to use a CD/DVD drive via USB.

You're quite right because they do vanish. That's why up until recently donations had been helping to support a few % of the bandwidth and electricity costs of the site each month. People couldn't get hold of the installer files, especially the offline, non-delta installer files.

The image that I've created doesn't require a server, you can do it from a USB stick. It just uses the Windows Vista/7 installer system instead of the NT3.1 - XP installer system. to do it. That said, doing it from a server is nice because you press F12 and go get some tea et voila, it is done.

Ha, was it only 27 floppies? I do remember doing it a few times I must admit. I have never done a USB install from DOS, I have done plenty of PCMCIA CD drive from DOS installs and plenty of Network installs via DOS. Painful. I worked in a school once where their imaging system required floppy boot and it had to read all 1.44MB from the floppy before getting to a wizard and then you had to wait for it to chug the disk some more to save settings before it rebooted and did it again using the answer file. I migrated that floppy onto a bootable USB stick and the 7 minute process became a 20 second one.

They threw me a ticker tape parade later that summer...

Sadly it was a time when they still had a few machines that didn't have USB booting - or more precisely, the board manufacturers said that they did but the boot ROM code didn't actually work. >_<

I have updated it to include IIS 5.1 and all other optional components

I wonder how long XP will hang around. For me, I still like it just fine. I don't have any problems with it whatsoever. The only drawback is that MS decided to no longer support IE updates...that is the big problem.

But with Chrome and Opera, there seem to be enough alternative modern day web browsers that that doesn't even detract from it for me.

I wish however that computers had evolved differently than they are today. I would have preferred some type of open hardware architecture that would have allowed for the entire OS to be off a RAM chip instead of software on a hard drive.

I envisioned a big box with slots or sockets in it. Within that box you would have plugged in a CPU, memory, an OS chip, a slot for a printer driver...you get the idea. Everything with READ ONLY memory chips in them so that the computers would be essentially immune to any virus. Designed in such a way that you could update your entire OS by pulling the OS chip and inserting a new one. So that when you turned it on, and it powered up, it would have been instantaneous.

Rich, that is a terrifying dystopian vision of an alternate reality. It would be a major inhibitor to progress. Imagine the cost of doing anything. You're better off with abstraction though virtualisation and sand boxing to achieve something similar. It is not easily accessible in the consumer space in as wide a context as it is in Enterprise, but virtual machine snapshotting is a good place to start. Some virtual desktop advocates say you don't even need anti-virus on the operating system because you separate the data out and monitor that, trashing the OS at log off.

App's are sandboxed - in the android, iOS sense. Look at the forum rage caused by the SD card changes made to Android 4.4.0, but also see those changes as a software version of what you've described.

I realize that the cost of doing stuff would increase. At least initially. But I think that it is possible that things would in the long term decrease in costs. For instance...it is estimated that 73% of all computers running Windows are running pirated or illegal copies. Games are closer to the 90% mark. With the costs of memory chips these days, a game or applications could be sold for just a few dollars and manufacturers would still make a nice profit without the need to mark-up the initial cost to compensate for lower sales due to piracy.

I realize that the entire computer industry would have to have evolved differently. Machines would have had to been created that had some type of standardization to them that allowed for both compatibility and expansion.

Alright...I guess I need to compromise and I have an idea. How about a slot on the motherboard for a programmable eeprom cartridge that can store all the 3rd party applications that I own. That way if my computer dies, I can pull that cartridge and stick it in my new machine without ever having to reinstall anything. Or maybe at least a PCI card of some type that would do the same thing. That it would somehow act just as if it were a storage device and let you run any program from it without it having to be reinstalled.

I guess I was just thinking of my old computers that when I turned them on...there they were...up and running instantaneously. My old SuperPet 9000...turn it on and BASIC or C/PM was running. True I had to load programs still from a floppy. But then what about some of the machines that had program cartridges...I guess that is what I was thinking about.

As far as Android...my Kindle Fire now runs Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean), and since it didn't have an external SD card slot anyways...it's moot for me. I thought the KitKat (4.4.0) changes only limited access to the SD card by the app that created the folder on the Android device so that other programs couldn't access that data. That seems like a nice feature, keeping unwanted apps from getting data I stored on the SD card safe...or am I wrong?

I'm not convinced that it would keep the cost down in the long term. It would inhibit computer adoption. Just think if all software had been hardware, would it be a ubiquitous and prevalent as it has been. We certainly wouldn't have the downloads industry and the Internet would be a totally different entity.

As hardware chips have to be addressed into the main address range, plus take up physical space, you'd constantly have to compromise over what apps were in the system, it would be just like the world of cassette tape again, just with an auto loader. Everything would require physical distribution from retailers, adding to costs and I think that would inhibit independent software development.

With the ROM idea, even EEPROM, where do you store application configuration changes in your model? Your custom word 5.5c spelling dictionary suddenly becomes tied to the machine and potentially wholly volatile?

You could achieve the PCI idea with a PCI pc card controller and an ATA storage card or even just an SSD / mSATA. You could make it read only and just use portable apps. Where you cannot, run a virtual os off of it and roll off the undo disk every time.

As for droid 4.4, yes, that's it as far as I understand it. Sandbox hardening.

Okay...you've convinced me that my hypothetical computer design is inefficient. Actually I guess what we need is a super-duper high-speed solid state hard drive which would accomplish the same thing. And it would be nice if you could at any time you decide, freeze an image of the hard drive so that it could no longer be changed by an outside force...for security protection from an unwanted worm/virus/Trojan/etc...

I'm thinking two distinct storage areas. One which would include your OS and apps, and another where all the temporary data and storage/configuration files would reside.

Back to the main topic...I still think XP will be hanging around for a long long time....though I'm a Windows 7 fan pretty much.

Like those write blocker controllers we discussed years ago?

Yes, like those. I actually bought some, and they worked just fine...but only under Win98. My machine then didn't have enough memory to use XP and a RAM disk. Still it was a cool little chip and everything ran fine from a RAM drive. The problem though was I actually forgot a couple of times that I was using a RAM drive, so I ended up losing some info that I had wanted to save and ended up having to repeat everything all over again.

From what I remember of them, they could be configured to write to a special partition on the disk rather than forcing you into RAM disk. I know they worked with XP with 256/512MB because I inherited a whole bunch of them deployed into teaching room lab machines running XP.

Oh they work fine with XP, it is just at the time, the computer I was using it on didn't have enough power for XP, so I was using 98.

I actually never got any instructions with the little cards....I just plugged it into a slot and when I powered up, it ran itself...which was nice. The default was a RAM drive and when you powered down everything was perfectly preserved.