Yes, version 12!
You read it right, VMWare Player has made the jump from version 7 to version 12.
Big changes are better support for Windows 10, both as a host and as a guest, along with DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3.3 support. vCPU support has been bumped up to 16 processors, and the memory cap is now 64GB per VM and 2GB for video.
Get ready!
I know I’m crazy, but for some reason the update didn’t kick off automagically on my 7 box, so I fished around and found the direct download here.
From what I’ve read VMware Player 7 updates should work with 10.
Time to see what breaks, and what works!
The first issue I had is that after the upgrade, VMware Player couldn’t connect to the bridge adapters. Â Luckily the fix is really easy.
Bring up your network connections, go to your physical Ethernet adapter, bring up it’s properties, and add in a ‘service’.
Restoring the VMware Bridge service
Then select the VMware Inc, vendor and the VMware Bridge Protocol. Â Now with that done, all I had to do is then bind the bridge to the Ethernet adapter.
Configuring the Bridged virtual interface
And now my VM’s can talk to my network without any of that NAT nonsense. Â And I didn’t have to re-install VMware Player to fix this either!
Some real fun came from upgrading my wife to 2015.  She uses Outlook 2013 to talk to an IMAP server.  No big deal right?  Well after upgrading when she tried to send an email she would get the ever so helpful error 0x800CCC13 .  So her server is setup to use SSL to talk to the outbound SMTP server.  It even has a valid certificate!  The best part is that verifying her account and IT WILL SEND THE TEST EMAIL.  Yes, that is right, Outlook 2013 cannot send to SMTP servers, but the test and diagnostics work.  And in the age of multigigabyte installations all the user is left with is a hexidecimal error code of 0x800CCC13.  Frankly this is totally inexcusable in 2015, let alone in the 1990s.  Hell even OS/2 had a system to look up cryptic error messages.  I guess that was an IBM thing.
So anyways, the best part is the ‘fix’. Â Apparently according to here, the upgrade to Windows 10 corrupts some DLL’s that are a part of Outlook 2013, and they need to be repaired. Â Simply run the following command as administrator:
sfc /scannow
It can take upwards of 10 minutes to complete. Â After we ran this, we re-ran Outlook 2013, and all of our dozens of attempted test messages sent.
Another possible problem is that the Exchange server pluggin is interfering with the IMAP/SMTP plugins, and it needs to be disabled/deleted. Â I haven’t had to go there since she can send emails now.
In this attempt to get NT 4.0 running on my machine, here is what I did. This holds true for 2008r2, and 2012 along with the Windows 10 preview.
old versions of Windows are not supported, but with a little bit of fun from PowerShell you can get them to work.
First make sure you run PowerShell as Administrator!
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> get-vm
Name State CPUUsage(%) MemoryAssigned(M) Uptime Status
—- —– ———– —————– —— ——
NT40Â Off 0 0 00:00:00Â Operating normally
Windows 2000(wks) Off 0 0 00:00:00 Operating normally
As you can see here I have two virtual machines. Â Both of them are ‘off’ since there is no memory assigned, nor is there any uptime. Â It’s weird to me how they are “Operating normally’ since they aren’t running but I guess that’s a feature. Â Make sure the VMs are powered off before trying to do this.
Restricting the CPU capabilities was the checkbox to enable in the first version of Hyper-V. Â Now it’s hidden from the user, so you need to enable this in Power Shell.
First let’s check a VM:
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-VMProcessor NT40 | fl CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled
CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled : False
As you can see it’s disabled. Â Now to enable it with:
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Set-VMProcessor NT40 -CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled $true
Now we can verify it’s turned on:
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-VMProcessor NT40Â | fl CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled
CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled : True
And we are good to go.
NT 4.0 Service Pack 6 on Hyper-V / Windows 10 Technical Preview 9879
Now for the networking part, remember to remove the existing network adapter, and add the ‘legacy’ network adapter. Â On my PC there was an additional snag, which is that every time a VM reboots, or is powered on the legacy adapter will receive NO packets. Â Go into the Hyper-V console, and disconnect the legacy adapter, and reconnect it, and network traffic will flow.
And additional note on installing Windows 2000. Â You *MUST* change the HAL uppon instalation. Â By default it’ll detect an ACPI system, but the driver ACPI.SYS will bluescreen the VM. Â Hit F5 when it prompts about storage adapters, and select the ‘STANDARD PC’ HAL from the list.
So I thought I’d try Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and yes, I did update vmm.sys from here, and what happened?
CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT
Of course.
As much as I’ve put it off, it looks like i have to use Hyper-V.
As much as I’ve been enjoying 10, there is one issue, which is that I use a lot of VMs. Â And I didn’t notice this until it was time to run updates on the Windows & Linux VMs.
As they went to reboot the system locked up hard. Â Event viewer gave me this…
Event 1001, BugCheck
I tried updating one VM at a time… crash, updated my BIOS for the heck of it, crash. Â Downgraded from Player 7 to 6.0.1 and crash. crash crash crash!
So I had to look to the user forums where more people seem to be greiving for their Pentium 3’s with 256MB of ram. Â This issue was effects both Workstation & Player, as they have the same core tech. Since I’m cheap this hits Player 6 & 7. Â I saw this buried at the bottom of the Workstation 11 release notes (workstation & player have the same core)
Shutting down a virtual machine on a host running Windows 10 Tech Preview can cause a blue screen.
If you have Workstation installed on a host that runs Windows 10 Tech Preview, occasionally when you shut down the guest operating system in a virtual machine, the host computer might restart unexpectedly. In this case, you see the following error code on a blue screen: DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION. This issue can sometimes also occur with power-off and suspend operations.
Workaround: If a newer build of Windows 10 Tech Preview is available, try updating to the newest version.
Fantastic.
Unfortunately, a new full build isn’t expected until after the first of the year.
This will be the last new build of the year for Windows Insiders
So there is no workaround.
A’int that a kick in the head?
One crazy thing I’ve found is that MS-DOS & Novel Netware 3.12 work fine. Â You can reboot/turn off/pause them without any issues. Â But if you think about installing NT/2000/XP or Linux onto a MS-DOS VM something that it does to the virtual hardware sets it up for the same issue where a reboot or shutdown will cause 10 to lock up.
I’m not sure how dependent this on my upgrade to Windows 10, but while trying to launch Fallout 3, I was getting this fun error:
I hate errors like this, but it turns out the ‘Microsoft Games for Windows – LIVE Redistributable’ is too out of date.
So stepping up to version 3.5.88 from 2.0.672.0 did the trick.But of course a download location was a little bit crazy to find, I guess keeping up with the MDAC_TYP legacy, of naming every version the same thing, here is the 3.5.88.0 download / MIRROR (70MB)
Oh and now that my ‘new’ old laptop has an intel integrated video card it needs this DirectX bypass, otherwise itll crash once you launch fallout.
Thanks to the PCGaming wiki!
Yes. I know.
Ok first off Windows 10 was not activating. Â In the control panel it’d mention the error:
Good thing we’re back to crap error codes. But google to the rescue, and I found this article.
Run “SLUI 3” as administrator, and use the following product key: PBHCJ-Q2NYD-2PX34-T2TD6-233PK
Then re-run the activation and all is well.
Also the upgrade tries to leave things like device drivers in place. Â Sounds good but nothing I had game or AV wise would work properly. Â And worse anything OpenGL/D3D based would actually crash the system out. Â So I went and removed all of the old NVidia, drivers I could find, along with everything else driver related, re-ran windows update and rebooted and it’s working again!
Sadly old games on Steam that use DOSBox seem to be failing…
No idea why just yet. Â But of course I can just go and get a newer version of DOSBox.
VMware’s networking won’t work at all, no matter what you do. Â I had to uninstall & re-install to get my networking back. Â That even includes the builtin NAT (non VMnet8). However bridging physical NIC’s doesn’t work.
I’ll probably add more stuff as I find it.
Now why the interest in Windows 10?  It’s those $100 USD Windows 8.1 tablets.  Surface was just too expensive, but a $100 tablets, such as the Toshiba Encore Mini WT7-C16MS, HP Stream 7 and Pipo W4 really could change the game as it were by lowering the cost of ownership of a computer.  Make no mistake these are quad core x86 processors, running real Windows.
Looking back years ago and spending far more for a 286 I had to assemble in parts, back in 1991 an AT clone keyboard cost me more than $100. Â Amazing times indeed!
Telnet & echo, daytime?!
So I went ahead and downloaded the Microsoft Windows 10 technical preview, and while I was enabling .net 2.0 (how is that optional??) I went to see what else was in there. Â Telnet is the same since Windows 2000, but daytime/echo and friends go back to what? NT 3.1?
How is it we lost the OS/2 and Posix subsystems, but we still have echo and daytime?
Even worse, they bought Interix, and have completely destroyed it.  I know it’s missing from 2012r2 but I was hoping that now we got back the desktop, and something like a start menu, why can’t we have SFU/SUA?
If only the whole subsystem thing was ‘open’ maybe someone could step in and provide a real *NIX layer on Windows. Â MinGW/Cygwin on top of Win32 is all we have left, and it’s so slow compared to a subsystem, but way to go Microsoft!
Microsoft Solitaire Collection
Even more crazy, the game that established Windows dominance, partially due to it’s buggy shuffling, Solitaire is an optional download. Â I’d still think they’d install that on everything.