A bit of info

This is where you can find old ISO files as well as several old VMs that don't get any updates. These are mainly here just for messing around, and should not be used for important use cases, such as visiting shadey sites. Do note these VMs are for QEMU/KVM.

Update! These VM images are now being provided as QEMU Copy on Write 2 (qcow2) disk images for maintenance purposes and to preserve disk space. If you need one or more of these disks in another format, such as raw (IMG) or virtualbox (vdi), please convert them yourself.

Windows XP

Above are downloads for Windows XP SP 3 and Windows XP Professional X64 Edition SP1 for use with QEMU/KVM. Both disks include Virtio drivers preinstalled for disk and network, and the NVDA screen reader for blind/visually impaired users. Both disk images are 32 GB in size.

Sound output

Windows XP does not have preinstalled drivers for the emulated HDA ICH6 or ICH 9 soundcards. For sound output, please use the AC97 sound card. If you have issues with sound output, you can pass a generic USB soundcard to the guest using USB redirection. You may want to do this if you can (see information below).

Sound volume issues

There is an issue with changing the sound volume from within the guest. If you alter the volume, it will become very low, even if you attempt to slide the volume slider all the way up. This is an issue with the Realtech AC97 driver, and not just virtual machines have this volume problem. The only problem you are able to fix the issue is to reboot the host, which is not always ideal. For this reason it is recommended to pass through a generic USB soundcard to the guest, as these should work fine and will also result in lower audio latency. The virtual soundcard plays at full volume until you do anything related to sound, including:


Disk support

Windows XP does not have SATA drivers. If you are not using virtio for the boot disk controller, Please use the IDE instead. Also, during testing, I found that Windows XP will pop up the found new hardware wizard whenever a Virtio disk is attached, even though the Virtio driver is already installed in the guest. This can be safely ignored.
Note: You can work around this issue by reinstalling the driver. You need the VirtIO drivers for Windows to do this, which can be downloaded by installing the virtio-win package from the archlinux AUR.

Restarting the VM shuts it down instead

One thing I noticed during testing of 32 bit Windows XP is an issue when restarting the virtual machine. For some reason, when you restart the guest operating system, it shuts down instead. It will need to be manually started again to complete the restart.

USB support

While intel did not ever make a USB 3.0 driver for Windows XP or Vista, Renesas Electronics along with several other manufacturers published a driver for These older operating systems. If you emulate the nec-xhci controler for USB, you should be able to get USB 3.0 support. If you are using something like libvirt, you need to edit the XML file to do this.

Display in Windows XP professional X64 edition

There is no QXL driver for Windows XP professional X64 Edition, and you will have to use the generic driver included with the OS. This only applies to 64 bit Windows XP, the 32 bit version has the QXL driver installed.

Windows Vista

This is a 64 bit install of Windows Vista home premium SP2. It includes the VirtIO drivers for Network and storage, as well as the QXL driver for video output.

Note: NVDA will not start automatically during the Windows OOBE. If you require a screen reader, wait 1-2 minutes until you're sure the VM has booted, then press shift+f10 and type start nvda. Note that on Windows Vista and Windows 7 alike, there is sometimes a delay before NVDA starts of up to 30 seconds. If nothing happens after that time, repeat the above steps.

USB support

While intel did not ever make a USB 3.0 driver for Windows XP or Vista, Renesas Electronics along with several other manufacturers published a driver for These older operating systems. If you emulate the nec-xhci controler for USB, you should be able to get USB 3.0 support. If you are using something like libvirt, you need to edit the XML file to do this.

Sound output

Windows Vista has a generic Intel HDA driver, but for some reason, ICH6 and ICH9 soundcards fail to start with error code 10. For sound output, please use the AC97 sound card. If you have issues with sound output, you can pass a generic USB soundcard directly to the VM. Just like in XP, there are volume issues with the Realtech AC97 audio driver that cannot be solved without rebooting the host.

Windows 7

This is a Windows 7 professional SP1 disk image. It contains the virtio drivers for disk and network, as well as the QXL driver for display output.

Note: NVDA will not start automatically during the Windows OOBE. If you require a screen reader, wait 1-2 minutes until you're sure the VM has booted, then press shift+f10 and type start nvda. Note that on Windows Vista and Windows 7 alike, there is sometimes a delay before NVDA starts of up to 30 seconds. If nothing happens after that time, repeat the above steps.

USB 3.0 support

Windows 7 does not have drivers for USB 3.0 out of the box. Microsoft began to include generic drivers for USB 3.0 with Windows 8 and later. QEMU relies on these generic drivers for USB 3.0 support, which Windows 7 doesn't have. You will need to change the type of USB controler to the Renesas model. The Renesas USB 3.0 controller driver is included with the disk image.

This one should go without saying, it's Windows 8. It was one of Microsoft's many failed Windows versions, mainly because of the metro UI, which did not look very pretty on desktop and laptop computers. It looked ugly, there was no start button on the task bar, and it had the charms bar that popped out. Oh, and it didn't boot into the desktop by default either, it booted into the start menu, if you can even call it that. Most people upgraded to see what Windows 8 was all about, only to go back to 7.
Try it out for yourself, you'll probably be able to tell right away why no one wanted to use it. The size of the disk is 64 GB, and the image includes Virtio drivers for storage and network, and the QXL driver for display output.

Windows 8.1, the update to the original Windows 8. Not nearly as bad as 8 was. It booted into the desktop like every other Windows version did, there was a start button on the task bar again, and the UI was a little easier to use for people that were coming from Windows 7. It was supported until January 10, 2023, unlike Windows 8, therefore it can run moddern software better. It still didn't look the prettiest on desktop and laptop computers, but at least it was a bit more usable.

Legacy Atlas OS

Atlas OS is an open source project that strips Windows 10 of all bloatware. They used to distribute ISO images on their website, but it is now a program you can run on a fresh install of the latest Windows 10 22H2. These VM images are only on here for archival purposes and are not supported, nor are they secure. If you want to use the latest install script for this Windows modification, head over to the official Atlas OS website to use it with more recent versions of Windows 10.


Archived ISO images


Here are old Linux ISO images of several distros that should not be installed unless you are going to be running it in a VM

Vinux

This is a Linux distro based on Ubuntu 16.04 that added accessibility tweeks. Orca would start on the login screen and also on the desktop. Other than that their was not too much different I could find from the vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 release.

Abandonware

Voxin TTS for speech dispatcher

The Voxin TTS driver for speech dispatcher, made by IBMTTS. It used to be available on oralux , a company that provides additional TTS voices for Linux. However, Voxin is now abandonware, which is why we're hosting it here. Note:
Because voxin is not being actively updated anymore, it may eventually become problematic with future versions of speech dispatcher.

To install, extract the 7zip archive and run voxin-installer.sh with sudo privileges.

Internet explorer 11

The installer for internet explorer 11. Internet explorer 11 was the last version of IE. It was included out of the box starting with Windows 8.1, but required manually downloading the installer or obtaining through Windows update on Windows 7. Unfortunately, the Windows update method doesn't work anymore, as you need IE11 to even access the update servers on Windows 7. I'm including this here because I downloaded this weeks before it was removed from Microsoft's website, and I was unable to get a 32 bit version.