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
No comment on the other scripts. Although the source is available...
> If you can, download from msdn directly.
Using anything from Microsoft "seem like a bad practice to get something 'secure' up and running. "
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.
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.
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.
If you right click something to bring up the context menu, you get a gross liquid ass style menu and then you have to click through to open the classic context menu to get the option you want. Why. Literally what is the point of this?!
Everything is worse, more annoying, and uglier in various quantities. They actually even managed to make Bluetooth even worse than in W10, which is frankly an astonishing achievement
Desktop Windows Versions Percentage Market Share
Win10 53.19%
Win11 43.22%
Win7 2.48%
WinXP 0.54%
Win8.1 0.29%
Win8 0.22%
Desktop Windows Version Market Share Worldwide - May 2025
roskelld•7mo ago
Looks like the IoT LTSC version will work. I'm still hoping that Microsoft relent on this move. Last I checked Windows 10 is still a very popular OS and I find it unlikely that people are going to update if they haven't already. If some kind of WannaCry attack happens due to a security hole it's going to look bad on them.
Also, as a kinda dark humor moment. October 14th is the retirement day of Windows 10, which is also international e-waste day. Unless I missed the memo, I thought it was an effort to prevent creating e-waste not one of planned obsolescence to try and make more.
winrid•7mo ago