OT. Windows 8 nearly drove me insane

[Johny B Good]

I'm sure that's true for the latest 1st person view shootem ups but when I can run the likes of Quake 2 and Unreal[1] at more than adequate frame rates in a VM installed instance of win2k SP4 on 4 year old hardware (admittedly using a dual core Athlon with 2 or 4 GB of DDR2 ram with the on board graphics adapter limited to a 64MB share of the system ram) in a Mint 14 host OS, I've got to say that virtualisation has made great strides even in this area.

Whether you'd get a playable game using the latest hardware with something like 'Call of Duty' I wouldn't like to say but I suspect it would likely to be possible if you forego some of the rendering features and throttle the resolution back to a more modest 1024 by

768. [1] These decade or so old games were installed primarily to test the VirtualBox video emulation driver performance to see just how hard things could be pushed. The winXP VM didn't perform quite so well in this regard but this was entirely unsurprising. However, the winXP VM did let me prove that it was possible to get a USB slide scanner working that didn't have win2k support despite the claim that it did.

[Mark]

Mine didn't. You can manually change the metro to a "classic" desktop but the Start menu is still missing[1]

[1] Yes, I know there are replacements.

[Mark]

The code itself doesn't change but situations do. Software always has bugs and, after support ends, they will not be fixed[1]

A lot of bugs only become evident when the program has been used for a long time.

[1] Although a lot won't be fixed even before support end.s

[Tim Streater]

And a lot wouldn't be fixed even if support continued. You'd just be told "works as designed" if you reported it.

[Adrian C]

So the CVE database means nothing then :(

Do you regularly patch your system?

[Tim Streater]

There are occasional patches. There was a security patch today. Not sure I can remember when the last one was, or the last OS update. Must be a few months.