Tag Archives: Synology Virtual Machine Manager

Retro Computing: Windows 2000 Professional

After the painful (and unstable) experience of using Windows 95 and Windows 98, Windows 2000 Professional came as a breath of fresh air. It was the first version of Windows I used, based on NT technology. While going through the process of running it on my NAS, I tried to recall what I felt the first time I installed it.

This was almost 25 years ago, and I was apprehensive about moving to a new platform. When I consulted my friend Vishal Chopra about it, his simple advice was “2000 is a higher number than 98, so it is better”.

Windows 2000 Professional: Setup

The first phase of the setup process resembled Linux more than it did other Windows versions.

Yeah sure, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Oooh, a shiny, new, modern file system.

The part of copying files was extremely fast.

The first boot screen was less modern than Windows 98. The second boot screen was more modern than Windows 98, showing a progress bar for the first time.

The second phased of setup felt as if it was running within Windows.

Networking was pretty robust in Windows 2000 Professional. I always felt (maybe placebo effect) that my dial-up internet worked faster and was more stable on it.

The first version of Windows I used that encouraged you to configure a login password.

Windows 2000 Professional: Out of Box Experience

The first order of business was disabling the terrible “getting started” screen forever.

believe this bubble was redundant, as people were already familiar with the Start menu for many years by now.

Second order of business was enabling web content for the desktop and exposing hidden files and folders.

Thankfully, Windows 2000 did not put Task Scheduler in the system tray by default, disabling which was also an action item with Windows 98.

The shut down experience was also much better on Windows 2000.

Luckily, most of the games I played back then worked well on Windows 2000; although DirectX did not come out of the box.

Retro Computing: Epic Fail!

Continuing from the last post, we continue with my attempts to host Retro Computing VMs. However, there has been a change around how I host my VMs.

As I mentioned before, the performance running VMs on UTM SE sucks balls. No fault of the app itself, the problem is around the artificial limitations imposed by Apple on iPadOS. So I decided to find another way to run them.

Microsoft Azure Dv3-Series

I recently found out that service like Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure support nested virtualization. Basically you can run VMs inside the VMs they provide you. Due to my aversion to Google, I chose Azure.

Signing up for Azure’s free tier was pretty painless (If you don’t count opening each link within their portal in a new tab). Although, a few terms are a bit technical and require doing a bit more research.

I chose the below starting specs for my parent VM:

Zone: Asia Pacific (Central India)
OS: Windows Server 2022 Datacenter Edition
CPU: 2 vCores
RAM: 8Gb
Disk
: HDD 32Gb, 500 IOPS, 60Mbps

*I chose Central India as the Datacenter, because I also wanted to use this VM to access Indian websites, geolocked outside India.

It was a bit technical getting Nested Virtualization enabled.

I used the Windows app to remote-in to the parent VM and installed Oracle Virtual Box to host my child VMs. Luckily, the Windows app supports transfer of files from the iPad to the VM, but it is painfully slow (400-700 KBps).

Slow file copy via the Windows iPad app
Slow file copy via the Windows iPad app

Eventually, I ditched this approach, because

  1. The on-going costs were more than I was willing to spend on this project (Especially because there is no way to accurately predict how much you will be charged)
  2. There was no sound emulation

Synology Virtual Machine Manager

Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is Synology’s (mostly) free Hypervisor that can be installed on its DSM platform. Since my newest NAS now supports this, the next step was to run my Retro VMs on it.

The software is quite powerful and except clustering, almost all the features are free.

However, the Hypervisor doesn’t seem to be optimised to run such old OSes. I could get the Windows 98 installation to complete, but I couldn’t get the OS to boot however much I tried.

It was safe to assume even older OSes like Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 would never work. So I gave up.

My Retro Computing plans are on hold for the time being.