41–50 of 318 posts
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I use a lot of virtual machines across all versions of Windows. What I've found is that almost every time online activation fails, if I do the telephone activation, it goes though. Just wanted to pass that along in case you or someone else runs into this again.
I tried phone activation as well, it was rejected. I typed all installation numbers correctly.
Can anyone comment if I can install old Windows 2000 games on this, like C&C Red Alert? Would it work?
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One notable thing is that in Windows the behavior of taskbar changed around the time of Windows 98SE/2000 (I'm not sure in which version exactly). Originally the "orphaned" tray icons just were there and you could not cause them to go away, "new" behavior is that first event (ie. hover) causes them to be destroyed.
Guesswork: once you hover over an icon in the taskbar, later Windows checks if the process (or, rather, window, as the icon will be tied to the window handle you get from CreateWindowEx) handle belonging to it is still alive. If not (aka it cannot find a target window to send the message to) the icon gets destroyed. ReactOS, another guess here, does either a polling check if all taskbar icons have valid process handl…
This has been one of my favorite software projects to watch, because it's such an insanely monumental undertaking and moves so damn slowly. There were people working on this two decades ago, putting in tiny fixes and little bits of code and whatnot, and they did it even knowing that basically nobody would see their work for decades. Hell, I have never seen a ReactOS installation in the wild, and I'm the kind of perso…
It's not especially common, but I do know of a couple kiosks and a PoS system that run ReactOS under the hood to avoid Windows licensing.
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Indeed a great read to catch up with the project. > Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows users may have noticed. Made me chuckle. This has bothered me since forever. It seemed like such a low hanging fruit to fix, I wonder why Mic…
> I wonder why Microsoft never did. I'm assuming it's because of the size of the codebase, available engineering resources, return-on-investment calculation, and a business prioritization of new features over refinement. Most engineers can look at their own work or codebase and think, "well, that's a bit shit but it works well enough." I can't imagine their backlog. I'm sure it's lurking in an issue queue somewhere.
Having worked at large corporations (not Microsoft) before, I can definitely see how things like this happen --- and the reason why "enterprise" software tends to have a lot of these superficially simple and annoying defects. To add insult to injury, the codebase is often offensively overengineered and in precisely the wrong direction to facilitate the change required to fix such bugs, and even the tiniest of changes requires a ton of extra paperwork, approvals, and reviews.
What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.
Recently I had an issue activating XP on Eee PC after a RAM/SSD upgrade (setting it up as a retro-gaming console, better performance than RetroPie). I had to resort to registry hacks and msoobe to suppress activation forever, despite having product key at the back of the netbook - XP CD wasn't accepting it at all. One more situation where legal owners have to waste more time than pirates... If ReactOS makes it far en…
What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.
Yeah, DOSBox is nice for retro gaming or even the oddball application, but it pales in comparison to the potential of this project.
First of all, no driver for the network card in Virtualbox, though Vmware worked fine.
Second, no web browser...
Third, the mouse sometimes freaked out and got stuck in a corner.
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I wish the Gnome release notes were more detailed, like this one.
I wish all release notes were as detailed as these... Now a days you're lucky if you get anything aside from "Bug fixes and minor enhancements" with some releases... What changed??? It's useless to have a changelog if it doesn't document anything substantial.
What I like about this project, besides the dedication and professionalism of the team behind it, is that it offers PC gamers a possible way to play Windows-era games moving forward. In a decade or two, we likely won't be able to activate a Windows XP machine (and wouldn't want to with all of the security hazards either) so it's great to have a free and open source project to run our Windows stuff.
Cracks will always be around... and XP is one of the "simpler" ones compared to the newer Windows. "security" isn't a big deal either, just keep all your ports closed and don't run untrusted code or unnecessary services. AFAIK all the exploits have been on services and such, which shouldn't be exposed to the Internet anyway.