Monday, December 1, 2014

How to use old versions of Skype

Microsoft has killed all the versions of Skype below v6.13 for PC, probably so that they can feed you adverts and get back some of the money they paid for the app a couple of years ago.

Anyway, there is a way round this. You need a patched exe and an old version of the offline installer.

I was using the last version of Skype 5.3 (5.3.120) as I liked the old school emoticons and that was the final version that had them but I'm too lazy to find the right part of the code to patch so I'm now on v5.5. So firstly grab the version you want to run here (I didn't patch these or upload these).

skype42i_patched.exe
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:427TQ5VZHET36B7A5HZMDRVCCKI6BLA3


skype55_patched.exe (32,27 MB)
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:8003250D6A73DC766B5937C3DA28755FEE67D9E7

skype59_patched.exe (32,27 MB)
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2B2BA7F265A95FC117EEBC8CCCA98C48DBE139EE


UPDATE: When I moved over to my new laptop, I grabbed a version of Skype 5.3.113 (offline installer here):
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:7aba94dac8659ffec6d5f303223a47f944761bb0 and then logged in with the 5.5 exe above. After that I was able to use the 5.3 and get my old school emoticons back.