Where can one read Microsoft Knowledge Base articles?

submited by

Style Pass

2024-12-09 22:30:18

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Explore Teams

Until sometime within the 2010s or early 2020s, Microsoft used to maintain a repository of articles called the Microsoft Knowledge Base (MSKB), containing information about various products made by Microsoft, their quirks and common problems encountered with them. Each article was identified by a number prefixed by “Q” or later by “KB”; called a Q-number for short.

Microsoft Programmer’s Library and Developer Network CDs: Microsoft themselves used to regularly publish bundles of KB articles on CDs, first as bespoke help files on Microsoft Programmer’s Library (MSPL) CDs and later as CHM files on Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) CDs. If you can get your hands on one of those old CDs, you might be just lucky enough to find your article there. However, you will probably have to guess in which section your article resides, as the bundles are organized by topic. This need not be so easy from a Q-number alone. Obtaining the CDs may be a hassle in itself, and by modern standards it is probably not a very convenient way to access the articles, but it is the official one.

Dedicated archival projects: a number of people and organizations maintain public archives of MSKB articles. They don’t always contain every single article published, however – some projects restrict their coverage to a time period or specific products of interest.