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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.

Where can those articles be found today? If I have a Q-number of an MSKB article, where should I go look for it?

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  • Did you try the obvious, just googling for something like "kb 123456". I worked in MSFT support for 12 years and just tried a handful of the kb numbers i remembered (and found), I got results each time
    – Flydog57
    Commented Dec 10 at 4:54

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There are a number of sources you may try consulting when searching for Knowledge Base articles:

  • 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.

    • Jeff Parsons’ archive covers products up to Windows 95. All are backed up in plain text only.
    • Beta Archive wiki is a reasonably complete archive.
    • PKI Solutions’ archive seems to mostly redirect to the Internet Archive, but has a few articles backed up.
    • kbupdate.info only lists the titles, but may occasionally be useful when looking up articles in other sources – for example, it might clue you in about the general topic of the article, so that you know which category to look up on an MSDN CD. It may also be useful when searching for an article without knowing its Q-number.

  • Generic web archival services: MSKB articles used to be also available to read on Microsoft website, so there is a good chance they have been captured by a generic web archival service like the Wayback Machine or archive.is archive.today archive.ph. That said, finding the article can be rather tricky, as the URL formats where the articles were published varied wildly over the years. Depending on the time period from which you want to obtain the article, you may have to try any of the following formats:

    • http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q12/3/45.asp
      (a variant with omitted q was also observed)
    • http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q12345
    • http://support.microsoft.com/kb/12345
    • http://support2.microsoft.com/?id=12345
    • http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/12345
    • http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12345/
    • http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;Q12345
    • http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/12345

    You should not treat these formats too rigidly – an article may have ended up archived under many altered variants of those formats, some differing in case, some with different language identifiers, some with extraneous text attached stemming from misformatted inbound links.

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    Since you mention CDs, another option is the Microsoft Programmer’s Library, which is a great resource for older environments and compilers; it includes language-specific KB articles (which are also available on the PCjs site, and included in Jeff Parsons’ archive, unsurprisingly since Jeff is PCjs’ author). I don’t think PCjs includes an option to run MSPL directly, but it sometimes turns up on auction sites.
    – Stephen Kitt
    Commented Dec 7 at 20:57
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    Quite by chance I was reading learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/… today and I noticed that it had "Original KB number: 241215" in the body.
    – tschumann
    Commented Dec 10 at 1:27

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