g_m_1990_

Ah... Windows Me. Actually, I don't hate it... It's just a 9x system coated with 2000 UI. Several relatives of mine in my home country used to have rigs with Windows Me back in the old days. Didn't hear too many complaints from them. Probably their rigs were new ones, not upgrades from Windows 98. My understanding was that Windows Me played a role as a "Home Edition" client, on par with the 2000 Professional client and the 2000 Server. M$ wasn't too confident about NT kernel at that time, so they rushed to make a product like that to somehow retain a partial MS-DOS compatibility (plus, MS-DOS 8.0 serves a recovery mode) and force users to use Win32 programs, like browsing the Internet, using Movie Maker, and playing DirectX / OpenGL games. It has a bunch of USB drivers built in, so one doesn't have to use that 8cm driver CD that comes with the thumb drive to make the drive work. There were attempts (tutorial available on YouTube) to make MS-DOS 8.0 functional (not just boot into real DOS mode), just as Windows 95/98 does, but I haven't tested those approaches and can't say if that is just as good as MS-DOS 7. Fun fact: vanilla DOSBox (and probably an old version of DOSBox-X) works on Windows 9x, including Windows Me - A little bit of irony. For Windows 11, in my mind, everything after Windows Vista is just Windows Vista R[insert a number]. I have to work, using a valid Windows license.

This. Some indie titles that use later versions of Game Maker refuse to run under Vista x86/x64 and require DirectX 11 (Shader Model 5.0 / D3D 11_0 if 3D acceleration needed), despite the fact that Vista already has DirectX 11.0 full support (and of course 3D) once SP2 and Platform Updates are installed. Just because of "bad reputation", most 3D games or engine devs (and even 2D devs) automatically skipped Vista support, which is sort of like discrimination. Edit: Grammarly with Firefox is stupid and wiped out all my text for some strange reason.

It's just a 2016-ish Dell laptop with another 8GB of DDR3 RAM (16 GB in total) and a 1TB Samsung SSD upgrade, nothing too special. However, 16 GB of RAM could be costly back in 2009.

...and what's more, under Settings > About, they changed the layout of that panel to some utterly bad-looking expandables. Oh please Microsoft. Your art designer could've been better than this.

They seem to encourage every user to save a little bit of energy by getting rid of the second counter back when Windows 11 was rolled out. Now it comes to Windows 10, and they are completely dumping the time display in the calendar altogether. If you seek to display the second counter, the only place is in Control Panel > Date and Time. No official way to change the taskbar UI at this moment. (Windows 10 22H2 w/ all latest updates and MS store components/apps updated, plus Edge browser updates.)

Oh, and I saw this last year but I didn't post it here. Cygwin dropped Vista, as well as x86 32-bit (including WOW64) support back in 2022. http://www.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/Cygwin/timemachine.html The last version supporting Vista/Server 2008 "R1" and 32-bit systems is 3.3.x, released in 2021. Whether 3.4 is "installable-and-runnable" on NT 6.0 is not tested though.

I just visited their official website and saw this piece of bad news. Dropping 32-bit is okay for me, but how come these devs are so careless on Vista x64 Anyway, I'm going to install 7-zip.

Npcap https://npcap.com/dist/ A successor to WinPcap. Last installable version on Windows Vista SP2 / Server 2008 SP2 ("R1") is 0.9993. Any version beyond that requires Windows 7 (or 7 SP1, support for 7 RTM is not tested so I have no knowledge if they ever support 7 RTM). No support for any systems before Vista / Server 2008. For XP/2000/Me and even earlier systems, use WinPcap instead.

Not so lucky for me After running the installer I got this "stack-based buffer overrun" BSOD. I guess something in the newer installer doesn't like my VMWare Workstation player (17.0.2) settings. Or maybe some other niche things (patching only patch-able Server 2008 "R1" patches to-date?) on my side which I'm not aware of. Fun enough is that 6.1.44 installed well, but it has a faulty VirtualBox Guest Additions that breaks my minimal Windows XP guest (Yes, I was having fun with guest-on-a-guest). This could be a bad sample if anyone else doesn't have this issue. One more thing I've noticed is that the UI on my UAC settings on Control Panel is broken (always looks deselected), so definitely something is wrong with my Vista settings. Sigh. Luckily I can manually turn it on/off under msconfig.

I've learnt from somewhere that the latest version for x86/IA-32 of Windows 10 only reaches 21H1, and no enablement patches / builds / ISO image files beyond that version number were made for the architecture, i.e. no Windows 10 21H2 and 22H2 were ever made for IA-32. I'm asking if anyone tested and confirmed that, such as installing an IA-32 variant of Windows 10 from official sources like MSDN or official media creation tool, and potentially run Windows Update if 21H1 is installed to see if there's any further enablement patches available. If this is true, then Microsoft silently killed IA-32 support for Windows 10, as 21H1 support ended in December 2022.

More to mention... Last Visual C++ redistributable install-able on Windows Vista is Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 (version 17.0), file version 14.30.30378. Version 17.2 and 17.3 (file version 14.32.31332) won't install on Windows Vista without modifications of installer file. So Vista users need to download from here: https://my.visualstudio.com/Downloads/ Well this is better than Windows XP support as it was stopped at one point of 2019 according to Microsoft. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170

Haven't been here for several months. Dunno if anyone noticed this but Dolphin (Wii and GameCube emulator) dropped Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 support. The post has no support status mentioning on Windows Vista but potentially any future builds won't work on the system anymore. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2022/06/09/leaving-a-legend/ Edit: Alright I'm digging through a little bit and found out that last supported master build of Dolphin (Qt-based) that runs on Windows Vista x64 is dolphin-master-5.0-8253-x64. Any Qt-based builds (Dolphin.exe) came after that does not work on Windows Vista x64 any longer, as the next available master build dolphin-master-5.0-8255-x64 was updated to Qt 5.11.1. https://dolphin-emu.org/download/list/master/166/ Last master build that includes a wxWidgets-based DolphinWx.exe which is always working on Windows Vista x64 is dolphin-master-5.0-8277-x64. Any builds after that should get DolphinWx.exe removed, starting from dolphin-master-5.0-8279-x64. https://dolphin-emu.org/download/list/master/165/ I don't have any actual games tested as it would takes a lot of time for me and my VM storage is running low.

BTW I'm in China now; can't use Windows Update on my Windows Vista VM as that was "retired" due to SHA-2. As mentioned months before, that HP Compaq laptop was changed to SSD with Windows 7 and I need to find the pair of recovery disks to get Simplified Chinese Windows Vista installed. I doubt that would work and probably won't find any time for that. One more thing is that K-Lite codec pack updates seem to choke recently. klcp_update_1675_20220119.exe did not install properly as regsrv32.exe did not register a component; klcp_update_1677_20220122.exe simply throws out a modal to inform me to use Windows 7 and later... I guess this is the beginning of the end for K-Lite's Vista support? Well their website still mentions Vista.

Side effect of testing XB1 controllers: Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 can be played on Windows Vista x64. It's not so astonished to me, since it uses OpenGL 3.3 for 3D acceleration, and DirectX 10 is only used for GUI elements (maybe...). As mentioned in the previous post, that PDP afterglow controller works flawlessly even on a VMWare Player virtual machine setup. Also I used GOG.com version of the game since Steam client January 2019 no longer works for me... I don't really like this game to be honest; I don't have other games to test.

Maybe another off-the-topic question, but anyone here can help test Xbox One controller on Windows Vista x64 (I use mostly up-to-date 6.0.6003)? I found out any driver (either provided by @GTAGAME with version number 6.2.11059.0, or later version 6.3.9600.16384 on MS catalog, both drivers are for Windows 7 and not signed for Windows Vista) does not seem to work on my VMWare Workstation player setup connecting official Microsoft Xbox One S controllers, model 1708 with up-to-date firmware version 4.8.1923.0. Perhaps I shouldn't update firmware on both of the controllers in such a hurry... I didn't think I could use the controllers on my virtual machine one day. Both of the model 1708 controllers with aforementioned version firmware will simply just keep blinking on the Xbox logo button when connected to Vista virtual machine. Although Vista could identify them as "Xbox controllers" using the drivers, none of the button pressing could be registered by the system. However, I also tried a third party PDP afterglow controller for Xbox One and Windows with firmware version 1.0.62.19 (the firmware cannot be updated) and that works with my Windows Vista virtual machine without any problems. It seems like even a third party controller is more useful than the official ones right now; what an ironic thing. P.S. and FYI: 1. There are 3 factors to concern about: virtual machine setup, model number of the controllers, firmware versions of the controllers. 2. All controllers are connected to the machine with a USB wire (USB mini to regular, maybe you can try the later model type-C ones as well if you have one); at this time wireless adapter is not tested or concerned. 3. Model numbers of Xbox (One, Series X|S) wireless controllers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Wireless_Controller#Summary 4. Windows 7 x64 Xbox controller driver package version 6.3.9600.16384, Regular: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/ScopedViewInline.aspx?updateid=608cc98b-b470-450c-8fcc-28b452790351 (On MS catalog there are 6 different driver packages in total: Regular, DFU mode and Elite controller driver, and one each for x86 and x64.) My wild guess is Vista only works for pre-1708 models, or some point of a 1708 model firmware update. Considering sometimes Windows 7 could have hassles using them, I don't expect Vista to have more compatibilities.