Platform differences with Windows 10

[Mike Watterson]

You can dump the Win Licence key embedded in many BIOS using Linux, even from a USB boot. You can't see it in the GUI, but Win7, 8, 10 & 11 installs see it.
That key will certainly make a difference.

[ppppenguin]

Regarding Linux, I do use it for my mail server and databases, but quite a lot of software I use (particularly music creation stuff) is not available in a Linux port. Having spent a good deal of my working life on System 5 Unix, I'd be delighted if more vendors would take the trouble to support Linux.

If your music software will run in W7 or earlier, and perhaps even in W10, could you run it in a Windows VM under Linux using Virtualbox or other VM software? I do this for my older Xilinx FPGA software which needs XP - it's not happy with W7. Runs perfectly in a VM and because a modern PC is a lot faster than the PCs I used to run it on, the penalty for virtualisation is non-existent. It just runs quickly.

[MW0SEC]

Regarding Linux, I do use it for my mail server and databases, but quite a lot of software I use (particularly music creation stuff) is not available in a Linux port. Having spent a good deal of my working life on System 5 Unix, I'd be delighted if more vendors would take the trouble to support Linux.

If your music software will run in W7 or earlier, and perhaps even in W10, could you run it in a Windows VM under Linux using Virtualbox or other VM software? I do this for my older Xilinx FPGA software which needs XP - it's not happy with W7. Runs perfectly in a VM and because a modern PC is a lot faster than the PCs I used to run it on, the penalty for virtualisation is non-existent. It just runs quickly.

I have tried VB and dual-boot in the past, but have sometimes experienced problems with both, which required drastic action to rectify. No idea what caused the problems. I am quite happy with W10 for general PC work, once the nasty bits have been zapped!

[BusyBee]

I've never tried dual boot.

I have found it stated somewhere that, even with a dual boot system, Windows determines that it has overall control. I imagine that it down to Windows security but it's something which would put me off.

I run Windows and Linux on separate computers. I have found Linux is not without issues, from time to time, and with my lesser experience of Linux it's often not so easy to sort. A recent issue was my HP laptop had non adjustable maximum brightness, which was literally a pain in a dark room. Exploring online I came across a number of vague solutions but luckily a system update came along which sorted it. Although aspects are irritating, my experience is that Windows is far more polished although for hardware access it's becoming far too clever for it's own good.

Tracy

[Brunel]

Another good program for tweaking windows: https://winaerotweaker.com/

Numerous tweaks available.

[ppppenguin]

I have tried VB and dual-boot in the past, but have sometimes experienced problems with both, which required drastic action to rectify. No idea what caused the problems. I am quite happy with W10 for general PC work, once the nasty bits have been zapped!

In contrast to your experience, I've had very little trouble when using VB to run XP in VMs. I've done this with both W7 and Linux as host. I admit I haven't needed virtualised OS's to use physical ports so I can't say if that might give trouble.

If you don't need W10 and can work with W7 or XP for your Windows needs it might be better. The earlier OS's don't, for the most part, try to do things that you don't want and aren't loaded with bloatware.

[Mike Watterson]

USB & Serial seem to work OK via the VM in most cases. XP, W7 & W10.
MS broke NT multiboot with Vista. Before then it was very flexible and could boot OS on a different drive or partition, inc DOS, win 9x, OS.2, other versions of NT and Linux. You could copy a boot sector to a file and point to that with boot.ini, but when CPUs with virtualisation support, 64 bit and 16G or more RAM came it was simpler to use Oracle Virtual Box. That was MS solution for VB6 / XP / Win 2K / Vista / 32 bit Win7 on Win 10 64 bit, so then even released a tool to clone a PC to a VHD file:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint...s/disk2vhd
This is intended to clone older PCs to a VM on Win10, but with a bit of fiddling with settings it works for XP & Win7 (likely Win2K & Vista & Win 8 too) on Linux. The major requirement is that the PC to be cloned must be booting using "legacy" or BIOS mode, not UEFI. Even a PC with a UEFI "bios" a 64bit Win7 clone worked because someone had installed it in "legacy" boot mode.
You need the Guest Utils, so a VM of NT earlier than XP or Win9x is crippled as that is only XP or later. At some stage Oracle decided that the XP 3D accelerator (needed for Direct 3D, not always actual 3D) was a security risk and disabled it rather than fix it. So now some programs unsupported on Vista/Win7 don't work on the XP VM. Sometimes WINE works. The VB6 programs with OCX like serial port fail on 64 bit Windows, but usually work on WINE. You can install 32 bit WINE, but sadly by default you get the less useful 64 bit version.

Win9x / WFW3.11 / DOS are all better now in an Emulator on Linux than on a VM. There are some very accurate ones for games.