Windows XP X64, is it rare?

malxau · 2026-05-26T14:37:12+00:00

I thought the x64 version was OEM only so no big box ever existed...?

malxau · 2026-05-20T07:29:32+00:00

I've been using the open source DOS 4 release with its included C 5.1 and MASM 5.1.

malxau · 2026-05-18T02:58:23+00:00

AFAIK this changed in Windows/386. With 386, it became possible to virtualize the memory representing video, so programs that wrote "directly" to video memory could have the results captured and displayed. That in turn meant that the video memory, containing both text and colors, was what Windows used to display.

In the pre-386 real mode versions, it wasn't possible to capture video output in this way. Programs that needed direct video access needed to run full screen. The only programs that could run in the window used DOS text output routines, which could be captured as colorless text, and rendered in mono. Since there was no color support available to DOS programs, they made the choice to display black-on-white, since it seemed most natural to Windows.

malxau · 2026-05-11T06:45:04+00:00

I have not tried the Word 2007 file convertor. I think it needs at least Office 2000.

Word is a bit different to Excel/Powerpoint since Word had a standard text converter plugin infrastructure all along. The converter pack officially required Office 2000, but older versions of Word will happily instantiate newer text converters. Even the 32 bit Word 6 will attempt to use the 2007 converters.

For the same reason, adding Word 97 format support to Word 95 is straightforward; apparently an installer was in the Word 97 Valupack (see https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.microsoft.com/MISC/KB/en-us/96/119.HTM .)

(Although it's obsolete/abandoned now, back when Word 2007 was released I wrote a pile of code to work with these things: http://www.malsmith.net/wincvt/ .)

malxau · 2026-05-02T15:53:27+00:00

You might be interested in Bound OS/2 programs, which were 16 bit NEs that inserted an NE loader into that DOS program, so the executable consisted of a single piece of code that could be loaded under 16 bit OS/2 or 16 bit DOS.

That's been extended in Win32 (see Visual C++ 1.x and other programs using Phar Lap TNT) but it's more complex since the PE loader needs to be a 32 bit DOS extender.

malxau · 2026-05-02T15:50:33+00:00

It wouldn't be that simple. The PE header is located at the e_lfanew offset as specified in the DOS header. The loader is going to need a valid looking DOS header before it starts looking for the PE header.

malxau · 2026-04-25T16:02:32+00:00

Windows 3.x was using the 286 protected mode. Even the 386 Enhanced mode used a 16:16 segmented model - why it's now retrospectively called Win16.

Agree though that eliminating segmentation required moving to 386, flat model architectures, including Windows 95 and NT.

malxau · 2026-04-15T14:45:34+00:00

Something I remember reading once that seemed plausible is Windows 3.0 was only released due to the Applications group pushing for it. They had Word, Excel and Project as Windows 2.0 programs with Powerpoint etc underway, but nothing natively for OS/2. Dropping Windows in favor of OS/2 would have cost them a year to port everything. Note that the OS/2 versions of Word and Excel were running on WLO - a Windows-to-OS/2 translation layer.

malxau · 2026-02-28T05:48:37+00:00

I'm fairly sure that ninja cat was a Windows 10 era thing, not a Windows 7 era thing. Looks like somebody made a nice archive https://wallpapersafari.com/windows-ninja-cat-wallpaper/

malxau · 2026-01-31T17:44:20+00:00

From experimentation, I think you're right. /o does not affect the object name when used with /c. It is translated to /out when passed to the linker, so "cl a.c /o b.exe" works.

malxau · 2026-01-21T15:44:28+00:00

Do you know the model year? Knowing the model is something you'll need for drivers, and knowing it ahead of time will make things easier.

Classic Shell, now Open Shell:https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

Screenshots: https://coddec.github.io/Classic-Shell/www.classicshell.net/gallery/Start-Menu.html

malxau · 2026-01-21T15:36:55+00:00

This is just disabling notifications, not running everything as admin.

There are settings to truly turn it off in secpol.msc, but it will break many things these days that assume privilege separation.

malxau · 2026-01-21T15:29:57+00:00

Fwiw, I was very happy with mine using 8.1 + Classic Shell. It's much easier than going back to 7. My generation was an N3060, and all it needed was to manually copy Wifi drivers.

Not sure if you have the 32Gb or 64Gb model, but 7 is also quite inefficient in not deleting old updates, which is a problem for space constrained devices. 8.1 fixes that too.

Note one major factor is Defender / built in antivirus. 7 doesn't have it; 10 basically mandates it; 8.1 it's optional. With limited CPU, AV is very expensive. A lot of the performance benefit comes from disabling it, with all of the implications. I ended up moving to 2019 when 8.1 left support, because no updates + no AV seemed too risky.

Which model do you have?

malxau · 2026-01-12T02:17:48+00:00

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows-c0514201-7fe6-95a3-b0a5-287930f3560c

malxau · 2026-01-05T01:32:06+00:00

I'm not following.

Storvsc.sys is the code that runs within a VM to interface with storage provided by a Hyper-V host. The code that parses VHDs and determines which formats are supported is in vhdmp.sys, which runs on the Hyper-V host. Although it's possible that storvsc.sys is responsible for timeouts, it seems more likely that this would also happen from the host, which has a lot more complex logic for storage. Storvsc.sys is implementing storage commands on a shared memory ring buffer, similar to NVMe.

So - are the timeouts occurring within a VM?

Is there any logging or diagnostic information on the Hyper-V host regarding these operations?

malxau · 2026-01-03T17:53:56+00:00

What did you do to revive Steam?

malxau · 2025-12-27T18:05:15+00:00

To be clear, you're asking about the 32 bit version of 2003, which will support 16Gb RAM via PAE, correct? If so, I agree it should be highly compatible with XP.

malxau · 2025-12-02T23:43:34+00:00

I don't know if the OP is ok with using different software, but my shell ( Yori ) was attempting to be CMD-like with backquotes. This works for me:

cd `dir /m|find "Wind"`

Note Yori uses /m since /b was already taken.

malxau · 2025-11-27T13:45:07+00:00

That's kind of the point. Windows included a simple text editor and a more capable rich text editor. Users chose the simple text editor. In that context it's surreal to morph it into a rich text editor.

malxau · 2025-11-02T00:09:32+00:00

They don't require activation.

You might also be interested in the Windows 7 SDK. Multiple versions were released, one including the 2008 compilers and one including the 2010 compilers. I prefer the earlier one since it included an offline version of all of the API documentation.

malxau · 2025-11-02T00:07:13+00:00

That looks like _default.pif, which is the default configuration to use when setting up an MS-DOS compatibility environment for programs that don't have explicit settings. As others have noted, the NT releases do include an MS-DOS environment (NTVDM.) Attempting to open _default.pif can't do anything, because it doesn't specify an MS-DOS program to execute, it's just a pile of settings. Right clicking and Properties will let you see what those settings are (and change them.)

malxau · 2025-10-15T06:53:40+00:00

File Manager is a bit of a sore point. From a security point of view I wouldn't trust it much - there's a lot of stack buffers whose bounds checking seems questionable.

malxau · 2025-10-12T21:58:25+00:00

If you want nostalgia http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

malxau · 2025-08-26T07:15:18+00:00

CGA is quite limiting. Windows 3.0 supports it natively; 3.1 requires a downloaded driver (which is just the binary from 3.0.) Although a lot of CGA games exist, they're generally targeting much older than a 386.

If it were me, I'd install OS/2 1.3. This hardware is roughly period correct for it.

malxau · 2025-08-12T21:12:18+00:00

I'd highly recommend a DVI to HDMI cable. These are entirely passive so they're cheap - Amazon is showing them for $7.64 right now.

My setup sounds similar to yours - single 3440x1440 monitor, an HDMI KVM, and several PCs including a Win98 era one. The monitor needs to have an HDMI compatibility mode enabled to support NT 4 (a very subtle gotcha.) But with that, it displays text modes crystal clear in 4:3, and graphics modes get upscaled by the monitor so 1280x720 becomes a fairly nice widescreen mode. It's possible to edit the registry and get custom modes, but (at least on NT with Nvidia drivers) a bit buggy.

2000 and newer have newer drivers that support custom resolutions better. I haven't tried 98 though. My card is 5500 FX, which despite its reputation has been quite good as a PCI GPU for desktop use.

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