Depends on where you are in the world. Could be a time difference. It is 9am where I am and since UK is 5 hours ahead it is 2pm there. Perhaps you don't live in the UK?

JEDIGEG,

"I can't understand why the game is not working under Windows XP ."

" LuckyPanda.exe - Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point ReleaseSRWLockExclusive could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNRL32.dll "

Long story short, including XP in the requirements was an error.

Windows software, including games, tells Windows to do stuff, for example your web browser tells Windows to display a window showing this GOTD page that you're reading and its contents. When software tells Windows to do something, it uses specific instructions that are built into Windows -- win7 has more of these instructions to choose from than XP. And the software used to program other software, including games, often uses those instructions that are there in win7, but that XP just cannot understand, because they were never included in XP.

So, when someone(s) writes software, the software they use to write that software can determine whether or not it works in XP. There are also some work-a-rounds that may work so that their software [including games] is XP compatible, but not everyone writing software bothers. Likely the only problem with your installed copy of XP is that XP is now very old.

JEDIGEG,

Hoping this helps...
If your hardware will run it, Windows 10 has almost no limitations when it's not activated, e.g. you can't set the wallpaper image, while a license is $16.53 for win10 Pro at SCDKey, which usually drops to around $10 - $12 when they have a sale. You won't find a deal like that with win7, but, you can extend the win7 trial every month for about a year, if that's the better option. With Linux there's always Wine, which lets you run Windows software, and is probably a better alternative then a Windows virtual machine, since Wine runs quite a few games, which on a VM is iffy.

As far as win10 goes, I just did a quick Google, & while there are posts that initially win10 reported it was not compatible with your CPU, back in 2015, the consensus seems to be that it'll run on your PC just fine. Googling on the graphics card it seems there were problems when win10 1st came out, but nothing after that, so hopefully Nvidia got their drivers for that card working properly.

JEDIGEG, I posted it around 4.30am.

It depends. I used to be a night owl, and usually slept when the kids were at school and my wife was at work. But over the years I decided going to bed at 7am wasn't conducive to a good relationship, so I slowly changed my bed times. i usually go to bed around midnight unless i'm playing a cooperative game with a couple of friends. Sometimes I may stay up to finish a review and then end up staying up all night because I don't want to disturb my wife by creeping into bed when she's asleep.

Thankfully I can sleep anywhere.

When I was in the army, I even slept on a cow pat after doing an escape and evasion exercise, where we were escaping but were nearly caught. This was in the Moselle valley, Germany, where it was pitch black as we were in the middle of nowhere, no road lights, no moon and it was cloudy. We were being chased by another group of soldiers (as we were the escapees). We jumped over a fence into a field and remained there for about 4 hours. They knew we were nearby becasue we could hear them talking, but because no one had torches and you literally couldn't see anything we were hidden from view. I fell asleep while we were waiting for them to give up the search. (Teams were awarded privileges if they either caught groups or escapees managed to survive the 24 hours without being captured. When I woke up my back was soaked; when I checked later it was obvious where I'd landed. Thankfully I had spare combat gear with me. :)

JEDIGEG,

That event was after a grueling day of escaping from the catchers. At one point I got separated from my group; we'd split up into pairs and had arranged to meet at mutually chosen map coordinates after working out some different routes for our group which if I remember correctly numbered 12. Most of the routes involved cross country trekking and we had around three hours to rendezvous. The idea being that it is better for the group to split up into smaller grpups so that there was less chance of all of us being caught together. Anyway, me and my colleague ran into an enemy patrol while still on one of the few roads that crossed our path, so we legged it in the opposite direction from the patrol. They gave chase, but I was a decent cross country runner; (I'd even ran in races with Steve Ovett a long distance runner from my youth, who won gold medals at the Olympics in the late 70's early 80's), so easily managed to escape. I became separated from my colleague who had also manged to escape by hiding in a farmers barn. Unfortunately for me he had the map, so I was map-less, but remembered the general direction one of the other pairs had taken. As I would be hard pressed to find the actual meeting point without a map, I set out to catch up to one of the other pairs, who I remembered had chosen to go via the only high ground in the area. I initially hitching a lift from an American soldier and his wife (we were in the American sector of Germany) for a couple of miles to get closer to the hill in question as the other group had at least an hours start on me; that was an embarrassing moment as I'd accumulated a swarm of flies who followed me into the vehicle as the day was a scorcher and I must have been , well you can imagine loaded up with a full pack, army clothing (itchy woolen shirts in around 35 degrees C). After being dropped off I then wandered into a field surrounded by forest. At the opposite corner of the field I spied what I thought was a large lynx like cat; so started to back track to the road as I didn't know how dangerous the cat could be. While doing this I saw some boot prints in the muddy path that were unmistakably army issue boots and more importantly were fresh. I caught up with the other pair soon after that. The incident where we were almost caught was several hours later when it was pitch black. We'd sent a guy about 50 meters ahead of us on point to warn us of any patrols, because we couldn't see anything at all. I remember him shouting ''run, I've been caught'', then we heard the sound of running boots on the road, which is when we jumped over the fence. By the time we were almost caught it must have been around 2 or 3am and we were all exhausted after wandering around the Moselle valley since the previous morning, plus my own solo adventure after getting separated from my colleague. I fell asleep within minutes after jumping over the fence, so no, I didn't notice the smell until I awoke a few hours later.

:)

JEDIGEG,

If you installed & activated win10 when the upgrade from win7 & 8 was free, then that license should still be associated with your PC -- Microsoft keeps track of win10 licenses based on a secret hardware ID it assigns to PCs, laptops, & other Windows devices. In that case, if you install win10 it should automatically activate. If OTOH you installed win10 when it was in beta, rather than as an upgrade once the final version was released, I have no idea if that applies or not.

intowindows[.]com/how-long-can-you-use-windows-10-without-activation/

howtogeek[.]com/244678/you-dont-need-a-product-key-to-install-and-use-windows-10/

Both of those links talk about running win10 without activation. As far as buying a license goes, I used one that I bought from SCDKey in March, 2017, until I upgraded the motherboard & CPU in June, 2018. After that upgrade win10 deactivated, & I used another key from SCDKey, which has been working without issues since. Running slmgr /dli at the command prompt shows it as a win10 pro retail license.

As far as transitioning to win10 goes, the version upgrade/update due in Spring 2020 looks to be a big one. If you were thinking about moving to win10 at the start of 2020, it **might** be easier if you hold off until that version is released. I know it took me a couple of months to get used to win10, and it could be confusing having to get used to the new version's changes when you're just getting comfortable with the older version.

JEDIGEG, I added more detail to my story as after writing the original I remember more of the day, especially it being a scorching day, dressed in army gear with a full pack and not allowed to go shirtless, you can imagine how I was feeling after several hours of walking and occasionally running those those conditions loaded up with a 50lb pack and my sterling machine gun (no bullets though)

:)

JEDIGEG,

This article is from April of this year. I am still running Win 7 and I will be keeping it plus running Linux in Jan. I have NOT tried this!!!! Nor do I want to but just giving you the info.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/

JEDIGEG,

RE: the win10 beta, something like 8 months before the 1st version was officially released, Microsoft restarted their Insider program letting anyone sign up, supplying beta versions of win10 along with fixed license keys. Later they restricted Insider builds to copies of win10 that had already been activated, which is still their current policy. AFAIK the license that went with those activated pre-release copies remains in effect today – I’ve got VMs that started as pre-release versions, have been updated ever since, and are still licensed. But I don’t know what would happen if I wiped the drive & installed win10 fresh, and I’ve never come across anything that said one way or the other. I **think** it **might** work the same as a copy of win10 that was activated as a free upgrade from win7 or win8, where as long as the hardware was the same, you could wipe that copy of win10, then later install win10 fresh, and it would automatically activate based on the Microsoft hardware ID. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work – Google & you can find posts where people had problems. I’d also guess it helps if you use the same Microsoft account that was used originally, but that’s only a guess, and Microsoft is tight-lipped about this stuff. At any rate, win10 was free to everyone as a beta, but once officially released it was only free as an upgrade to win7 & win8.

When/if you’re ready, all you can do is backup what you’ve got already and try… it may work better upgrading win7, or you may get better results installing fresh. Fresh is generally better but going the upgrade route will try to re-use some existing drivers and may be necessary if current win10 drivers are not available for every component used by your PC. During setup skip adding a key and see if win10 activates on 1st run. If not, try using your current win7 key – nirsoft has a free app called PRODUKEY.exe you can run in win7 if you don’t have it written down anywhere. If neither works you’d have to either buy a key & enter it or use win10 as a trial.

As Ed Bott writes [thanks for the link delenn], license info regarding win10 has always been, in his words: squishy. In 2017 I was reading all sorts of reports of win10 deactivating with almost any hardware change, and my hard drive wasn’t getting any younger, so when I saw a chance to buy a win10 pro license for $10 [at SCDKey], I figured it was worth a shot – if nothing else a normal license should let me replace my hard drive, and if it didn’t work, I’d be out $10 but otherwise no worse off really. Since then however Microsoft has quietly relaxed their rules… no one outside Microsoft knows quite what those rules are now, but lots of stuff works now that didn’t [AFAIK] work originally. Then again win10 itself is kind of squishy…

Myself, I feel that win7 is superior to win10 when it comes to consistency, reliability, and stability – I never had to worry about win7 breaking itself, it always behaved identically from one installed copy to the next, and I always knew what the results would be installing it. But then Microsoft had as many people checking for and fixing problems with win7 as it had writing & developing win7, and those folks are all gone now – the people writing code are now responsible for fixing their code, which as many coders will tell you, as well as experience with win10, doesn’t always work so well. If you didn’t see the problem to begin with, odds are you won’t see it right away when you look at your code a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time, whereas a fresh pair of eyes often will. I like win10’s Disk Cleanup, A Lot, letting me get rid of 2-3 GB of junk after every update, but as an example of inconsistency, for the last month it’s worked hit or miss with 4 updates across several copies of win10. Hopefully they’ll eventually get whatever fixed, but for now it’s likely not on their radar, and will only get fixed when someone makes some other change to related code.

XP was superior to Vista/Win7 IMHO because it was simpler – my current XP VMs are about 11 GB, where the comparable win7 VM is 32 GB. Win7 64-bit was faster than XP 32-bit, but because of that overhead, the same tasks in the same apps took the same amount of time, even though XP could only use less than ½ the RAM. But like you found with Steam, JEDIGEG, I had to use win7 for more & more software, and then after a hardware upgrade, I couldn’t run XP at all.

That said, win10 is not all bad. We’ve got 4 devices that I consider marginal regarding the hardware – 2 tablets running Intel Atom Chips, a mini-PC running an Intel Celeron, and a 2-in-1 running a low powered Intel i3 dual core. They run Far better using win10 than they would any prior version of Windows – one of the tablets was originally win8, & the difference is quite noticeable. Our youngest son has never looked back when it comes to win10 & gaming – I think I’ve heard/read similar from WR. I don’t worry a whole lot about win10’s privacy issues – while I’m sure Microsoft collects more data than it needs & probably should, compared to all the other companies, government agencies etc., they’re still more of a minor player IMHO. And there are so many ways that people can be tracked nowadays, other than basic stuff like the TOR browser & using, then deleting VMs, I’ve sort of given up, though I’m Not saying that anyone else should – that’s an individual decision.

delenn13,

" I am still running Win 7 and I will be keeping it plus running Linux in Jan."

No one really knows what will happen in Feb. 2020... Microsoft will release patches for supported versions of Windows, and details of the fixed vulnerabilities will get published. Some cybercriminals will develop exploits based on those published details, because not every copy of Windows gets updated on Patch Tuesday. That much is fairly certain.

Microsoft is extending its extended support options, and there may be a way to get win7 patches that were released under that program. When XP went EOL there was a registry hack to continue getting updates intended for the version of XP installed in things like ATMs -- there may be something similar with win7. And copies of win7 running on home PCs may well get ignored -- cybercriminals targeting home users do just fine with simpler scams, and may decide it's just not worth the bother upping their game to something more complicated.

With all the bad press about those people who still use XP, you'd think there would be loads of malware activity targeting that obsolete version of Windows, but there isn't. Check the CVE lists [cybersecurity vulnerabilities] for XP & there's much less there than with still supported versions of Windows. It may well become the same way with win7 -- who knows?

Long story short, you may not have to bother or worry or spend too much time using Linux, unless you want to -- nuthin wrong with Linux.