New Windows 10 Insider Preview Skip Ahead Build 18860 (20H1) - Mar. 20 Insider

@jimbo45 - on your guest installs, are you altering the power options in any way, such as enabling / disabling fast startup?

If you think M$ values the PC gaming community, you'll probably be surprised if (more likely when) they release 1903 without fixes for those 2 issues in place.

But this build is not set to be released this year, hence the code 20H1

Just installed openSUSE Tumbleweed for the first time in quite awhile - significant improvement. Installed VMware WS 15.0.3 and the fix for kernel 5.0.0. Fired up one of 18855 VMs and 18860 was just awaiting a download. Righteous!

johngalt said:

@jimbo45 - on your guest installs, are you altering the power options in any way, such as enabling / disabling fast startup?

Hi there.

@martyfelker

I'm Still using CENTOS - I might have a play with OPENSUSE Tumbleweed. I've a spare HP Microserver Proliant Gen 8 to play with -- can't mess around too much with my other ones -- I'd get my throat slit if people can't get their Netflix/Kodi/shared files/music /vpn's etc on LAN.

@johngalt

Not touching those at all on VM's -- I cloned from Real physical machine from an HP Laptop (P2V - Physical to Virtual) -- essentially did it the easy way -- Macrium image and restored to the Virtual HDD defined in the VM. Macrium allows you to restore to different hardware.

I do have switch monitor off on battery after 5 mins, don't sleep and never turn disks off. I don't have hibernation enabled either. (Settings from the Physical Machine left unchanged). VM running on a Server so "No battery" but doesn't make any difference. In any case I have HOST Monitor to turn off after 15 Mins anyway and often run it headless and RDP into the VM's with a laptop. If using Linux install XRDP or similar to connect to Windows VM's - looks the same as RDP. With Windows RDP works fine. You need though W10 PRO on the VM to act as an RDP server for remote machines of course.

Used Macrium as well to "fix boot problems" on the initial boot on the VM if it doesn't boot. In the VM config I also set to UEFI boot. Do that in the advanced section of the config process.

After ist boot install vm tools on the Guest (I'm using VMware workstation).

I wasn't even asked for activation -- system kept its digital license but you can't always guarantee that though.

Important once you've got a working activated VM you can move it to other HDD's etc but on initial ist boot from new location choose the I Moved it option not the I Copied it option or you will lose activation (new Guuid / machine id).

You can also change size of VM HDD -- easiest way is from with in VM take an image and then restore to a new Virtual HDD of the size you want.

I was lucky with the VM activation as I created my VM on the same hardware that I had the Real machine on -- however in theory though a VM needs a new license -- you could get lucky though. In any case I still have a load of old Technet W7/W8/W8.1 serial numbers where the update to W10 still works !!!! Not sure when that particular gate will be closed though. Those old Technet / MSDN serial numbers can also be activated multiple times too so if you have those it's worth a try for Free W10 update. !!!


To all VMware users -- if you simply save a copy of your VM's you can update the ones you want to new builds so you can compare existing build with insider ones (I use UUPDUMP to get the relevant build). Note again though if booting a VM from a new location choose the I MOVED it option on ist boot not the I Copied it one to preserve activation.

Under the EULA though I suspect that you aren't allowed to run these VM's concurrently although Ms is so vague on what is allowed to be done with Virtual Machines -- I think Ms has just started learning about them after all these years !!!. Probably for another topic but surely Ms should provide for some better licenses for people to do testing - it's probably a much better value for Ms to get people to compare builds concurrently than for people to do 1 at a time and then do a whole slew of restores etc to compare.

Cheers
jimbo

Yes openSUSE is quite improved and I've only used KDE Plasma so far. I may wish to add a few repos but not until I crawl out of bed later today sometime VMware continues without problems but that is true for Windows as well - I may not boot to that for awhile.

I should (and have) also said I have CentOS 7.5 as a VM - it nice but a 3.x kernel is a bit dated. I assume you can install later kernels, however.

@jimbo45 - interesting. I wonder if Fast Startup is causing your issues then. I noticed rather recently that Fast startup stopped honoring my setting to disable it and started forcing it on after every upgrade to the 20H1 builds. Annoys me to no end, since I have an older machine that is BIOS based and does not benefit from Fast startup whatsoever. I suspect that VMs also do not benefit from Fast Startup - but if the OS recognizes (finally, as you say!) that it is, in fact, a VM, then Fast Startup may not have any affect whatsoever whether enabled or disabled.

It was just something that I thought of.

Real or Memorex? (an old commercial blip). These show a VM of my physical machine and the euivalent screenshot of the physical machine itself. I would say this is worth giving up Windows Sandbox (I might however get it to work on the VM). BTW Snipping Tool is good enough for my purposes. It's like the different between Notepad and Wordpad.

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