11–20 of 25 posts
10LTSC + Office 2016 + open shell is the peak windows experience. 2016 was the last year you could autosave documents locally, then fucking OneDrive. Grab an ISO from Massgrave, write using Rufus and two scripts later your fully tweaked. irm https://get.activated.win | iex iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win | iex
Win7 + Office 2003 for me (pre-ribbon, thanks)
10LTSC + Office 2016 + open shell is the peak windows experience. 2016 was the last year you could autosave documents locally, then fucking OneDrive. Grab an ISO from Massgrave, write using Rufus and two scripts later your fully tweaked. irm https://get.activated.win | iex iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win | iex
using a disk image and some scripts from the web seem like a bad practice to get something 'secure' up and running. Note: never used massgrave. Just doesn't sound trustworthy from the name. If you can, download from msdn directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Win7 + Office 2003 for me (pre-ribbon, thanks)
Agreed, but risk to reward is off for me, potentially risky running old software.
I would certainly not recommend using Outlook 2003 in 202x, but then, I would not recommend running Outlook, full stop.
But using Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2003 today, on local files? Yes, that is pretty safe on an updated and secured PC.
First, you must install Office 2003 SP3:
https://archive.org/details/OFFICE_2003_SP3_INST
Then you are fairly safe.
It is very noticeable that if you install the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats" – still available on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/file-format-converters_202107
... then this installs a lot of extra stuff, and that means the PC suddenly needs lots of extra security updates.
So if you don't need it, don't install it.
Me, I use Word 2003 and nothing else. All my other needs are served perfectly well by LibreOffice Calc, Impress, etc.
I wrote an article about them:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/windows_10_ltsc/
I have them running under both VirtualBox (works but is a little fragile) and VMware (which is now freeware, of course) where it runs very smoothly and quickly.
Since I like old Thinkpads with full-travel keyboards, none of my own laptops can run Win11 without hacks. I dislike it anyway.
So although I mainly run Linux, I think come October I will nuke my dusty and rarely-booted Windows 10 partitions and replace them with LTSC.
The IoT edition only supports US English, which is a minor PITA, but it works and I can set a UK English keyboard layout. It's perfectly usable. I DGAF about US spellings in the UI but it's annoying that I need 2 locales configured, and a local switcher I never use, just to have a UK keyboard.
What's the best strategy for a full backup and recovery if updating to LTSC goes wrong?
To test recovery, take a third spare drive, restore to it from the backup image using clonezilla, and replace your boot drive with it. If this boots up well, you could even do your upgrade tests using this spare disk, restoring from the backup file as necessary. Then once you're confident, put your boot drive back in and proceed to upgrade it.
What's the experience with Windows 11? I haven't upgraded because Microsoft doesn't have a great track record of not screwing things, and I would hate their upgrade process to destroy the data in my harddrives. Which means I'll have to buy a NAS and do a full backup of everything before upgrading, and then pray that that software I bought years ago and that since then have transitioned to cough-money-monthly (like Zb…
What's the experience with Windows 11? I haven't upgraded because Microsoft doesn't have a great track record of not screwing things, and I would hate their upgrade process to destroy the data in my harddrives. Which means I'll have to buy a NAS and do a full backup of everything before upgrading, and then pray that that software I bought years ago and that since then have transitioned to cough-money-monthly (like Zb…
We upgrated about 400 computers to 24H2 in the last two months and it wasn't too much of an issue. It's largely the same OS underneath. In term of UI, the only improvement is tabbed file explorer (but some might not like it). Other UI change are for the worse (worse task bar, can't make it bigger, notifications only show part of the message (and you can't get the full message even by clicking, more stuff moved to the…