xpclient

Oh gosh! I hope someone creates an unofficial SP3 for Windows XP x64!

Great so I got all English files installed now. With this batch file, I installed all the cab ones without making any mess of tons of files in the folder where the cabs themselves are located: md %tmp%\Updates cmd /c for %%U in (*.cab) DO pkgmgr /ip /m:"%%U" /s:"%tmp%\Updates" /quiet /norestart rd %tmp%\Updates /q /s

Yes thank you I got around it by mounting with a different tool, Virtual CloneDrive with another format.

I just clean installed Windows Vista SP2 in a VMware Workstation 14 Virtual Machine. Usually I mount an ISZ image (Compressed ISO) on the host using Daemon Tools and then passthrough that mounted image to the VM. This has worked for Windows 95, NT4, 98, 2000, Me, XP, 7, 8.1. Daemon Tools doesn't emulate a DVD drive but a Blu-Ray/BD-ROM drive. But Windows Vista shows the drive as an "HD DVD ROM Drive" and won't let me read/access the contents? WHAT is this nonsense? 😆 I need help accessing a mounted drive in a guest OS! I am sure no Blu-Ray drive requires any special drivers. Why is it misrecognizing it as an HD DVD ROM Drive? 😆

Must be some telepathy because I just TODAY installed Windows Vista with SP2 just for fun in VMware and found they broke Windows Update due to SHA-2. Offline updating is always better. Thank you! By the way, Windows Vista offline updating finishes must faster if you disconnect from the internet otherwise every update tried to check applicability online and gets super slow. I hope everyone knows this. This was fixed in later versions of Windows. @greenhillmaniac, which updates exactly are language-specific? I noticed some Ultimate Extras folders were named in Portuguese. I did find the updates with pt-pt or ptg in their file names. Any others too? Are Ultimate Extras non-English?

Speaking of which...what program would you recommend as the best one to see which apps are programmed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and heavily multithreaded? Is the "Threads" column in Task Manager/Process explorer/Process Hacker indicative of that? On my PC, amongst the programs that consume a significant amount of memory and CPU cycles, I see Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Telegram, OneDrive, foobar2000, MPC-BE, Everything Search are heavily multithreaded. All the other smaller apps are single threaded.

Well they broke the Event Viewer: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-latest-patches-crash-event-viewer-but-microsoft-has-temporary-fix/ Maybe they corrupted the Event log too.

Intel might support Windows 7 on a special Coffee Lake chipset: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13201/intel-preps-h310-revision-with-win7-coffee-lake-support I wouldn't be surprised if they support Windows 7 but not 8.1 on it, although I would like to have both 7 and 8.1 drivers. Desktop users are really lucky. Mobile/portables will be stuck with Windows 10 Windows-as-a-Scam.

That's all your subjective opinion and your perspective of looking at things which you are trying to pass as facts. My own eXPerience was quite different. XP gave me no issues right from RTM and whatever minor regressions it had were easily fixable. Despite increasing the requirements on paper, it booted faster than Windows 2000 and was generally more responsive, very fast. Due to improved defragmenter, faster chkdsk, and prefetcher, apps started faster. Visually it was a treat but if you didn't like it, you could go back - you had all the options, you always had a "classic" option or could simply copy the missing app from earlier version. But XP was more than that. Logon and logoff were faster, there was no stupid Regsitry size limit. Reliability was a step ahead with the ability to go back to older driver with Last Known Good Config if the new one broke the system. The MFU list in the Start menu alone was a huge productivity boost. You could finally click the Start button by shoving the pointer into the corner - no more requirement to precisely position it over Start. There was simultaneous multithreading, bigger addressable memory space, better memory management even for low RAM systems, better Registry performance, a kernel heap resistant to fragmentation, a more reliable NTFS thanks to a redundant Master File Table copy. ClearType was yet another big advancement. Compared to Windows 2000, XP had far superior USB and WiFi stacks, System Restore and a Task manager that doesn't truncate filenames at 8.3. Video playback was smoother, audio DPC latency was lower and battery life was longer. Inclusion of RDP and quick user switching was a blessing. Apps that stopped responding were indicated better with window ghosting. Finally there was just 1 Regedit. Explorer was much faster with WebView gone. Any annoying features like the Search Dog could be disabled to return to the saner Windows 2000-search UI. Port forwarding in a network behind a NAT was eliminated due to UPnP. Unicode language support was vastly improved. And we got some really neat tools as part of the updated PowerToys. All this was before SP1 and SP2. There were dozens of under-the-hood and user experience improving changes well worth the upgrade with no performance tradeoff, at least for me. In fact it was always faster than 2000. It's a pity you remember it differently. I remember getting super-impressed by what it brought - the visually pleasing theme as well as including the superior responsiveness. But let's not turn this into another XP vs 2000 thread. I will give you the satisfaction of saying XP was only bells and whistles without any objective and convincing arguments to back it up with. It doesn't matter any more as Windows 10 is the crappiest crap of all crap and only gets worse over time due to the insurmountable bloat getting piled up by more bloated updates.

Never mind. It's a matter of opinion. I don't think the features mentioned in the link I posted are bells and whistles. They're all sorts of important improvements.

XP was the greatest Windows ever and a HUGE, HUGE leap over Windows 2000 in every possible way, right from day 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_XP With SP2 and SP3, the security was bolstered too. Windows 10 is truly the apocalypse and dumb people are to be blamed for accepting it and the shite that started with Windows Vista, got worse with 8/8.1 and eventually the malware-OS, 10.

I am curious what are the few thing you need 10 for?

Upgrade to Windows 7 and change the logon screen image.

Very well said. There are many, many more issues but you covered most of them. If I get started, I'll run out of time to criticize this Windows 10 monstrosity. I can't believe how much this degenerate system has devolved from my beloved Windows XP Professional. It is out of control !!

If you have overridden the defaults using EMET to make ASLR system-wide and mandatory, you should apply a reg fix.

I've had many issues with Windows SMB networking with Microsoft BOB 10 too. I also know a little something about Windows networking. Never had any issues with XP/7/8.1- network discovery, permissions, authentication, folder sharing "just worked" all the time. I think they broke something in SMB sharing or credential manager in BOB 10. I've tried everything, even turning on the legacy and deprecated NetBIOS, turning on SMBv1, disabling it, setting all the advanced sharing settings and permissions correctly, entered all the credentials properly. All other machines can talk to each other, just not the BOB one. Thankfully, I only boot into BOB only once a year or so, to test a compatible version of Classic Shell. Obnoxiously behaving operating systems will be ignored by me for as long as possible. Every few days there's a useless 1 GB update of nothingness - no value for me and only annoyances in this OS.

Actually the benchmarks that I've done and my own usage of Vista and Windows 7 over the years showed me the same thing - that dwm.exe was consuming a significant amount of memory as more apps were opened in Vista - the memory usage scaled linearly with the number of windows opened, whereas in Win7, 8, 10 it is more constant. So I didn't just "believe on stupid words of ms."

Don't get me wrong. I love Vista for its innovations and it's far better than Windows 10! I think the animation smoothness might just be an internal setting? that you can't control - they tweaked the animation speed in 7 and again in 8. I remember they were smoother in Vista (especially noticeable when minimizing windows) but it's such a minor thing. My eyes aren't sharp enough to notice any differences between 7 and 8.1's animation smoothness, but now that you mention it, I'll check this when I reboot to 7. But Vista's DWM does consume more memory (read the Reduced Memory Footprint section of this article: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-graphics-performance/). And Windows 7 does support TRIM making use of SSDs possible without the SSD's performance reducing over time.

Vista doesn't support automatic TRIM for SSDs in its storage driver. Also its DWM is very memory-inefficient compared to Windows 7/8/10's. No support for Bluetooth Low Energy either or NVM Express or USB 3.0. Or proper DPI scaling. Or WiFi Direct. Or USB attached SCSI. So yes it's a lost cause on modern hardware.

Linux has several deal breaking flaws for me. For instance, I cannot stand a case-sensitive file system! Deal-breaker! Nothing to further discuss for me about trying it! It's just bad design.

WMP 10 was decent although nowhere near as good as third party media players. But they annihilated the UI in WMP12.

Without Windows 7's crappy Start menu, there would be no Classic Shell. Without its crappy taskbar, there would be no 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. I think even Voidtools Everything was born because Vista's search was so crap. MPC-HC and VLC became popular because of WMP 11/12 garbage. VistaSwitcher exists because of the ruined Alt-Tab. The cracks appeared in Windows quality with Vista and now the whole dam has collapsed.

September Update has left Windows 8.1 users unable to sign into their Microsoft Account: https://mspoweruser.com/september-update-left-windows-8-1-users-unable-sign-microsoft-account/ Besides this, for me, it has broken DISM and SFC. DISM reports now that the Component Store is corrupted and /ScanHealth /RestoreHealth do not work. I hope Microsoft Windows gets irrelevant and more unpopular and that gets the satanic management fired. I am so sick of updates screwing up working systems. We desperately need new leadership at Microsoft that does not have a mental illness about pushing new features at the cost of breaking things that came before it.

Thankfully we have SysInternals AutoRuns to explore and manage all the built-in scheduled/malware tasks.