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Many thanks for this latest release, @bigmuscle I'll be installing this later today after my 1903 upgrade! -JT

I just downloaded July rollup KB4507452, and it is quite true that it only has an sha256 digital signature - which should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this thread. However, if Born's blog reader Gero H. (or anyone else for that matter) has been updating their Windows 6.0 on a regular basis, then why was April's servicing stack update KB4493730 skipped? We might assume that Gero H. intended to conduct a test, however the blog post states nothing of the sort. Even more questionable is this: MSFN member @artomberus reported successfully installing v2 on his Vista x86 system in a June 15 post in this thread, having earlier installed v1 only to experience issues with it. (Personally, I'm still running Windows 6.0.6002.)

Spectre can be exploited on AMD CPUs. Plus, updated binaries distributed with MS updates in general since these vulnerabilities became known are probably re-compiled with new compiler flag /Qspectre. MS guys said they did not notice any performance regressions of concern when building whole Windows with this flag enabled. But you know, they have powerful machines. Maybe mitigating Meltdown alone is more expensive? I haven't dug deep into the whole thing.

Interesting! You're multilingual! I'm not a linguist by any means, but I self-learned some of these interesting tidbits while taking a Spanish class, so if I may, I'd like to expand on and clarify your information a bit: English is, as you seem to imply, actually a Germanic language, which means it has common roots shared by German and Dutch (similar grammar and syntax). However, the language was heavily influenced by French and, by extension, Latin, due to the Nordic Conquest of England during the Middle Ages (around the 10th-11th centuries), primarily in the form of new words and phrases. So, as a result of this, modern English could be thought of as a sort of hybrid, because it has characteristics of both language families. OK, back on topic now! c

Oddly enough, when I discovered that I was getting an FX 3800 in my workstation, I actually put Windows 2000 as a filter for the driver search on the NVIDIA site and found 261.19 (December 21, 2010), which I posted in the "last versions of software for Windows 2000" thread. The changelog indicates that it is the very last one for Windows 2000. I used 258.96 with my GeForce 210, and @tomasz86 listed a few later versions that are working to some degree somewhere in the USP 5.2 thread. Initially, I was unaware that official win2k support stretched that far (NVIDIA started listing their drivers as XP-only in about 2007 or so) and used @blackwingcat's driver. I wasn't satisfied because I'd get a blue screen every time I'd try to stand by or shutdown.

Another thing that bugs me is the last set of official NVIDIA drivers seems to cause the OS to get stuck in third-stage boot on "preparing network connections" for about a minute or so. I observed this behaviour on two separate machines with a GeForce 210 and a Quadro FX 3800. Turns out that is the NVIDIA display driver helper service starting, which isn't really necessary. Disabled that and startup time dropped from 3:40 to 1:38! I also decided to investigate my CPU overheating issue, which has been exacerbated by a recurring sequences of heat waves with low temperatures near 25 C (room temp in the low 30s). A fix to the issue was to disable turbo mode, which caused CPU temps to drop by about 10 C under load. When a newer CPU with turbo implemented through dynamic frequency scaling is used, Windows 2000 will run it constantly at turbo frequency. Once I disabled it, the OS was able to properly make use of enhanced speedstep, idling the CPU at ~1.6 GHz instead of 3.2 GHz.

My thanks to erpdude8 and Dave-H for making it easier for me to fix the problem with the broken Office 2010 on WinXP. Greets :-)

Add DAZ Studio to the list of 3D modelling software that still supports Windows Vista: https://www.daz3d.com/daz_studio/ Requires registration to download, but is freeware, where they earn their money through plugins to the base program.

... I suppose politics isn't allowed here in MSFN (yes, according to rule 2.b: ), so I'll only skim the surface of things, limiting myself to the "technology/physics" of the issue: 1. The USA are a vastly industrialized country, its huge industry sector is responsible for a considerable percentage of global warming/climate change emissions. 2. The current US president, to my knowledge, has withdrawn the US from any global CO2-emissions control treaties, while "poor" Europe still has to honour them. 3. Global warming inducing emissions in one continent contribute to the whole planet getting warmer, as the "butterfly effect" applies here. 4. Using an air-conditioning device consumes major amounts of electricity, to produce this, more emissions are disseminated in power plants, especially if they are of the thermo-electric type (combustion of fossil fuels is used to generate steam, to drive generators). 5. Using an air conditioning device lowers the temperature in the inside, but excess heat is transferred to the outside, resulting in a change to the micro-climate of the area/town/city you live in (surrounding air gets even hotter). FWIW, I am poor (literally, i.e. I have only a reduced/unstable income), a European, but I do have AC in my apartment; for the record, highs up to 38°C are forecast for today, July 28th, where I reside, plus another spell of an African heatwave is about to strike, starting next Wednesday... This was not meant as an inflammatory post , I know what @glnz posted had a joking flavour into it ; still, I posted what I did as food for thought...