virtual machine

If you still own a shelf of old CD‑ROM game boxes, you can make those discs playable on a modern Windows PC — but it takes more than nostalgia: you’ll need a drive (or accurate image), the right imaging tools, and one of several compatibility approaches (Windows Compatibility Mode, wrappers...

Microsoft has quietly moved key virtualization controls out of the Control Panel and into the Settings app: the new Virtual Workspaces page in Windows 11 centralizes toggles for Hyper‑V, Windows Sandbox, the Virtual Machine Platform, Windows Hypervisor Platform, Containers and related...

If you want to get the most out of a weekend of tinkering, your hypervisor is a laboratory—and not every operating system needs a full‑blown, multi‑gigabyte VM to be useful. This feature walks through seven operating systems that are designed or well‑suited to run inside VirtualBox, VMware...

KubeVirt’s latest vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-64433, breaks a core assumption in virtualized Kubernetes environments: that a guest VM cannot read arbitrary files from the node or the container that launched it. The flaw allows a VM to read arbitrary files from its virt-launcher pod by...

I’ve learned the hard way that a Windows test laptop abused for years without a proper reset will eventually behave in ways that defy patience and expectation, producing crashes, broken built-in apps, and odd filesystem and UI quirks that aren’t fixed by the usual “repair” tricks. Background...

A veteran tinkerer has reduced a running copy of Windows 7 to a mere 69 megabytes on disk — a headline‑grabbing proof of concept that boots to a desktop but deliberately strips nearly everything that makes Windows usable, leaving a minimal kernel+shell that exists to teach, provoke, and expose...

A PowerShell script named Nano11 can collapse a full Windows 11 installation image down to a tiny, bootable ISO and produce installed systems that weigh in at roughly 2–3 GB, but it does so by deliberately cutting out large swathes of the operating system — including servicing, security...

If you’re committed to moving a machine from Windows 10 back to Windows 7, this guide gives a practical, tested playbook—covering the three viable downgrade paths (clean install, dual‑boot, and virtual machine), the exact preflight checks you must run, the driver-order and slipstreaming details...

Microsoft’s Secure Boot update FAQ makes clear that a coordinated, multi-step transition is now live: Windows will roll new 2023 signing certificates into UEFI variables and update the Windows boot manager to preserve Secure Boot protection ahead of the 2011 CA expirations, but the rollout...

A stripped-down, community-built version of Windows 11 has pushed the limits of what the OS can be when every nonessential component is removed: tiny installation media, dramatic runtime compression, and the deliberate sacrifice of serviceability and security to reach an astonishingly small...

If you still have a working copy of Serif PagePlus 7 and a stack of .ppp files, the short answer is: yes — you can usually move PagePlus 7 to a new PC, but it’s rarely a one-click affair and the right approach depends on three things: the installer and product-key you have, the Windows edition...

Proxmox can be run inside a Docker container — and yes, it actually works well enough to be useful for tinkering — but the method requires deliberate compromises, extra host privileges, and several manual workarounds that make it unsuitable for production and risky for anything beyond...

I am using Hyper-V in Windows 11 Pro. I have very little experience with Hyper-V and VMs, so treat me like I'm a 7-year-old. I've been using a USB drive in a virtual machine. I've been following the operation where I start the VM, open disk management on the host machine, take the USB drive...

Windows 11’s inbox app pile just got a new nemesis: Tiny11’s updated builder can now strip Copilot, the new Outlook client, Teams, and a long roster of built‑ins from a Windows 11 image — and the change is explicitly framed as a “25H2‑ready” rebuild that shrinks install size and prevents much of...

Microsoft has quietly made one of the most practical security upgrades for Azure virtual infrastructure far easier to adopt: Trusted Launch can now be enabled in-place for many existing VMs and scale sets, reducing the migration friction that has kept foundational boot security from reaching...

The end of Windows 10 has sharpened a decision many hobbyists and professionals have been postponing: if you’re ready to ditch Windows, should you move to macOS or switch to Linux? The answer isn’t a slogan — it’s a set of practical trade-offs rooted in apps, hardware, support, budget, and how...

Booting Windows Server 2019 into Safe Mode is one of the simplest — and most powerful — recovery moves an administrator can make, and it’s essential knowledge for troubleshooting boot failures, driver conflicts, malware, or service-level corruption. Multiple, supported paths exist (System...

If you’ve spent a decade — or three — inside Windows and the prospect of switching to Linux feels equal parts liberating and terrifying, you’re not alone; recent coverage and community chatter have distilled the crossover into four practical tactics that turn a daunting migration into a...

Elon Musk says he wants to build a purely AI-run software company—cheekily named Macrohard—to take direct aim at Microsoft’s dominance, and he picked August 22, 2025 to make the promise public. The pitch is audacious even by Musk standards: assemble a swarm of specialized AI agents that can...

Virtual machines are nothing mystical—yet a small stack of persistent myths keeps turning otherwise sensible choices into needless fear, wasted money, or fragile setups that break at the worst moment. The five misconceptions below are the ones most likely to trip up hobbyists, home-labbers, and...