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The last time I built my own and tried to install Windows I got this. It was a bug that didn't allow Vista 64 to install on my motherboard chipset with more than 2gb of RAM. You try to fault diagnose that - windows install bluescreens and reboots. You can't see the bluescreen message, because you can't get windows to halt on errors because it's not installed yet. It just reboots.

Fortunately, I had a win2k installation on the same machine, and I managed to find other people who had had the same problem, and then got to the hotfix. However, obviously you could not install the hotfix without running Vista, which would not install. Fortunately I had 2*2gb sticks (rather than any*4), so I took one out and it installed fine. Applied the hotfix, stuck the other stick back in, and it worked.

When did you last install Windows?

So use a directory mount point. Yes, Windows does that.

Does assigning a mount point folder path to a drive support semantics equivalent to unionfs, where files on one physical drive overlay files on another, or does a drive have to be a single directory by itself? For example, if programs were unable to install anywhere other than %ProgramFiles%\Title of Program (which resolves to something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Title of Program), how could I tell Windows which drive should contain a particular directory? This guide from Microsoft sort of implies that the mount point has to be an empty folder, which %ProgramFiles% isn't. Besides, how hard is it for the end user to discover that "yes, Windows does that"?

Or grow the volume by adding a new disk. Yes, Windows does that, too.

I found a description of the process using Google windows grow volume. But how hard is it for people to discover that Windows does that? And the volume appears to be extended at the block level, not the file system level, so it's not so good for use with external drives that may not always be mounted at the same time as the boot volume.

Yes, it depends on how it was allocated. glibc uses sbrk for small allocations (as you said, under 128 KB) and mmap for larger ones. It's actually interesting to read the mallopt man page. It seems to be glibc-only, but it lets you tune all the settings we're talking about, and then some. In any case, small allocations are the big problem, because they're put in the data segment and the data segment can't be shrunk past any data still allocated, so fragmentation means glibc can't use sbrk to shrink it again (at least past the point it's fragmented at). If all a program does is small allocations, and it fragments a lot, then the memory usage of the program wouldn't really go down. Of course, it's worth noting that M_TRIM_THRESHOLD is, by default, 128 KB, so freed memory won't always be returned immediately. You can also change M_MMAP_THRESHOLD to control what size allocation will be done on the data segment and with mmap.

For large amounts, yes, glibc will mmap them and munmap them when freed. I had forgotten, though, that Firefox switched to jemalloc. It seems like jemalloc never uses sbrk, and it considers "large" allocations (large enough to allocate a dedicated block) 4 KB instead of 128 KB. It also uses multiple arenas, which seems like it would complicate things even more. I don't know if using jemalloc helps guard against memory fragmentation or not, but its allocation strategy seems sane. At the very least, some pages should be able to be returned, even if they're one of the older pages, which should help a bit. With sbrk in glibc and Windows using the heap, only the most recently allocated memory (and the freed memory before it, until it hits a still-in-use point) can be freed, but that doesn't seem to apply to jemalloc, as long as the freed memory makes up a whole page.

Of course, with Windows, they don't reveal everything about it as it's proprietary, but it does seem like memory is always allocated on the heap, and the memory will always get returned (perhaps except in cases of extreme fragmentation) eventually, but by no means immediately (in case the program wants to use it again). A program can choose to use a Windows-specific function to return it right away (_heapmin). _heapmin won't return things that are below blocks on the heap that are still allocated, though, so fragmentation is still a big issue.

I can understand why a process might want to free memory but keep it around for later allocations (and Firefox may very well tweak jemalloc to do it) but with virtual memory, there's no guarantee the first allocation was contiguous anyway. I think it would be better for the process to return memory so other things can use it, and maybe keep a small amount handy, but not everything that's been freed so far.

Also, I apologize if my post came off as rude. I re-read it later and it seemed rude to me, which was absolutely not my intention. As a programmer, I don't strictly need to know how the memory allocator works (as long as it works), but I find it extremely interesting, and knowing how things happen makes it easier to prevent memory fragmentation, so I think people should know, even if for no other reason than it's quite interesting.

http://careers.microsoft.com/

With Microsoft's NoReplyAll add-in with Exchange a user can disable reply-all (or forward) on a per-message basis. That page has links to the documentation on how to do it.

Switching to Office 2010 is required because the docx standard isn't supported in 2003.

It's trivially easy (and free) to enable OpenXML support in Office 2003.

As far as /usr/bin vs /usr/local/bin vs /bin vs /opt, windows doesnt have a conceptual differentiation between 'official' parts of the 'distribution' and programs the user installs that are not an 'official' part of it, although quite a few things that I guess would be considered 'expected to always be there' are in %WINDIR% such as regedit, notepad, explorer, etc.. but more than a few times I've seen Microsoft employees lament the fact that its necessary to keep those programs there because so much legacy software hardcodes that path that its just not worth breaking so many programs.

Pretty much all programs static data (executables, and so on) should be going under %ProgramFiles% while dynamic data shared by all users that normally shouldnt be tinkered with by the user should be going under %ProgramData% and if its per-user stuff then %APPDATA% .. and if its machine-specific (avoiding network mount) then %LOCALAPPDATA%

...and 'documents', that being user generated content, should be under %USERPROFILE% or %ALLUSERSPROFILE%

I know the naming kinda sucks (but these are just the environment variable names) and the actual locations that these token point to are inconsistent between versions of the OS..

In C++ (or most other HLL's) you would use SHGetSpecialFolderPath() with the proper CSIDL or the newer (not supported in XP and earlier) SHGetKnownFolderPath() with the proper KNOWNFOLDERID

You will note that Windows has attempted to standardize across applications the locations of various common document types (pictures, videos, etc..) There are both pro's and con's to this.. it is what it is, good or bad.

The point I was trying to make is that a linux developer was fairly careless, even reckless, when it came to dumping files in his windows port. At the time this was an issue, the recommendation on the Electric Sheep forums was to run the screensaver as administrator or turn off UAC on Vista because otherwise it failed to work (worked fine on XP only running as administrator, of course.) The screensaver went for months in this insane state, even though the solution was trivial and obvious. This is a programmer that had no problem loading up a video codec and leveraging it.. a good programmer turned into a moron as soon as he was targeting windows.

As far as /usr/bin vs /usr/local/bin vs /bin vs /opt, windows doesnt have a conceptual differentiation between 'official' parts of the 'distribution' and programs the user installs that are not an 'official' part of it, although quite a few things that I guess would be considered 'expected to always be there' are in %WINDIR% such as regedit, notepad, explorer, etc.. but more than a few times I've seen Microsoft employees lament the fact that its necessary to keep those programs there because so much legacy software hardcodes that path that its just not worth breaking so many programs.

Pretty much all programs static data (executables, and so on) should be going under %ProgramFiles% while dynamic data shared by all users that normally shouldnt be tinkered with by the user should be going under %ProgramData% and if its per-user stuff then %APPDATA% .. and if its machine-specific (avoiding network mount) then %LOCALAPPDATA%

...and 'documents', that being user generated content, should be under %USERPROFILE% or %ALLUSERSPROFILE%

I know the naming kinda sucks (but these are just the environment variable names) and the actual locations that these token point to are inconsistent between versions of the OS..

In C++ (or most other HLL's) you would use SHGetSpecialFolderPath() with the proper CSIDL or the newer (not supported in XP and earlier) SHGetKnownFolderPath() with the proper KNOWNFOLDERID

You will note that Windows has attempted to standardize across applications the locations of various common document types (pictures, videos, etc..) There are both pro's and con's to this.. it is what it is, good or bad.

The point I was trying to make is that a linux developer was fairly careless, even reckless, when it came to dumping files in his windows port. At the time this was an issue, the recommendation on the Electric Sheep forums was to run the screensaver as administrator or turn off UAC on Vista because otherwise it failed to work (worked fine on XP only running as administrator, of course.) The screensaver went for months in this insane state, even though the solution was trivial and obvious. This is a programmer that had no problem loading up a video codec and leveraging it.. a good programmer turned into a moron as soon as he was targeting windows.

There's tons of great games for the PC but they're 99% one player/machine with mouse and keyboard.

I've been collecting a list of multiplayer-capable games, along with links to other people's lists.

At best you'll get a few console ports who kept the console controller scheme as an option

That or indie games whose developers heed Microsoft's advice that "Applications should support multiple controllers" better than the majors do. So does the whole one-machine-per-player mentality on the PC come from a belief that not enough potential customers own multiple USB game controllers and a 20" or bigger monitor? Or is it more a matter of publisher greed?

I'm not a big fan of the M$, but ICE is way cool, and it has been around forever, but MS seems to just ignore it for some reason.

Mandatory. On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following: It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK. This may be implemented by simply providing the option to clear all Secure Boot databases (PK, KEK, db, dbx), which puts the system into setup mode.

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us

A large part of NTP's sophistication lies in its ability to identify falsetickers/truechimers among multiple candidate sources. NTP is built to survive failures like this, but Microsoft apparently doesn't bother telling its Active Directory customers -- it actually instructs them to single-source their clocks.

If your modern application needs to do stuff in the background then you can code a background agent and it will behave like an iOS app. Your app can still do stuff while completely closed. You could say schedule it to upload photos on an interval, etc...

Windows 8 didn't remove anything. If you need the power of a traditional Win32 app -- then develop a traditional Win32 app. Which probably more useful for desktop users.

However if I am using an app to read twitter, facebook, watch a video or listen to music -- I shouldn't have to worry about closing them. Just let the system manage it and when I want to come back to the movie or music just click on the tile and it brings up my paused movie.

The vast majority of people also don't have 8+ applications running at once. Most people get along fine on an iPad -- so clearly the need to have 9, 10 apps all actively running and visible isn't needed by most people.

Right now I have outlook, IE, Visual Studio and Powershell ISE open.

If I needed an app to run in the background you can do that with modern apps using background tasks: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27411

APNG and MNG are both to animated GIFs what PNG is to standard GIF, yet better...

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics

Still, Interent Explorer doesn't support them...

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie9-windows_7/apng-images-not-animating/92ba64aa-9d7a-e011-9b4b-68b599b31bf5

Why?!

Please don't confuse a bump in a major version number with a "huge rewrite". It's marketing for "we added more features," no "we've rewritten this for the seventh time."

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 still had GDI-related vulnerabilities in WMF/EMF handling left over from the Windows 3.0 days... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms08-021

"Huge" rewrite is not remotely the same thing as "from scratch"

Please don't confuse a bump in a major version number with a "huge rewrite". It's marketing for "we added more features," no "we've rewritten this for the seventh time."

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 still had GDI-related vulnerabilities in WMF/EMF handling left over from the Windows 3.0 days... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms08-021

Windows Phone 7 was based on the WinCE kernel, Windows Phone 8 is based on the WinNT kernel. if that's not a "huge rewrite", I don't know what is.

Please don't confuse a bump in a major version number with a "huge rewrite". It's marketing for "we added more features," no "we've rewritten this for the seventh time."

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 still had GDI-related vulnerabilities in WMF/EMF handling left over from the Windows 3.0 days... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms08-021

Just visit Microsoft Research and you'll realize that Microsoft has always been more innovative than Apple.

No, what you'll realise is that Microsoft publicises some of its research projects, including things that will probably never make it to market, whereas Apple keeps things secret until they're ready to announce them as a product.

Has Apple really ever invented anything?

Innovation !== Invention. Inventors can churn out as many bright ideas as they like, but unless someone gets behind that idea, builds it into a viable product, gets it to market and markets the hell out of it, no innovation will happen.

Apple didn't invent "retina" LCD displays, but the rest of the industry had stuck at ~100ppi for years and it was getting increasingly rare to see anything over 1080p.

They didn't invent tablet computers - but outside of a few niches nobody wanted one before the iPad came out.

They didn't invent smartphones - or even touchscreen phones - but if you don't think that the iPhone galvanised the smartphone market you never tried to use a pre-iPhone smartphone.

They didn't invent Unix, but every year from 1980 to 2000 had been touted as 'the year of Unix on the desktop' before Apple actually got a Unix-based desktop os into the mainstream.

They didn't invent the GUI, laser printer or local area networking, but Xerox didn't know what the hell to do with these until Apple came along and put them into affordable boxes (not that Mac/Lisa OS was quite the clone of the Xerox Star that some people claim).

Apple didn't invent the personal computer (nor did Woz) but they were among the first to come up with one that you could use if you didn't own a soldering iron and a punched tape reader.

Just visit Microsoft Research and you'll realize that Microsoft has always been more innovative than Apple (at least for the last decades). Apple does not even do open research.

Has Apple really ever invented anything? Just watch this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFeC25BM9E0

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=groups

Latency and functionality. You cannot easily do in a browser what any apprentice coder will easily do in WPF, for example.

Convenience has a cost. While Windows Mobile may support WPF, are you going to "easily" port WPF to Android and iOS? I find it odd using a technology that is only supported by one mobile phone OS as a poor example, CSS transitions especially those supported by webkit are very impressive. If you'd like to see the power of CSS and JavaScript in a mobile browser, load this up. jQuery mobile is also a great starting point that makes fancy transitions as simple as adding a property. Kendo UI is another impressive framework. Some other examples of optimizing for mobile.

Performance. You can't expect good performance if your code runs on a FSM knows what interpreter, in FSM knows what browser.

This is a valid argument and for certain situations native applications make a lot of sense (Client side data processing, games etc.). Unfortunately you've just doubled or tripled the work you need to do, unless you want to say your amazing application is only available on a fraction of the mobile devices out there.

The task becomes even harder if you have to support many browsers (and you can never support all of them.)

You're no doubt familiar with developing around requirements Android, iOS, and web development are no different. As far as the browsers are concerned the difficulties creep up with eye candy which most newer browsers support but there is always lag, especially if you use Android fragmentation as a measure, with CSS transitions and HTML5 support.

The worst bugs are not typos; the worst bugs are race conditions, deadlocks, and misunderstanding of how the controlled object behaves.

Unit tests, integration tests, followed by real world tests. These methods will not catch everything, but they help immensely. It's extremely frustrating to deal with environments, which as a developer, you have no control over (see onsite installations for example). How about dealing with projects developed with proprietary languages? On par with bugs I would also like to point out vendor supplied outdated API documentation mixed in with conflicting answers by staff. Nearly every payment processor I've dealt with suffers from this.

The best way to have bug-free code is to not insert bugs into it in the first place :-)

Absolutely true. I hope you own an OpenBSD shirt =)

CreateThread is very easy to use if you don't touch the same data with the threads.

The whole difficulty of multithreaded programming is the fact that avoiding a situation where you "touch the same data with the threads" is easier said than done in a nontrivial program.

You're also apparently overlooking the fact that Operating Systems run background processes as well.

Do enough of these background processes, tray icons, etc. run at the same time to require multiple cores?

I have currently 158 threads going across those 8 cores.

Big whoop. I have a 1-core 2-thread Atom N450 CPU in my laptop, and I have 177 processes on that (source: ps aux | wc -l returns 178, including the headings). How many of these processes are running and how many are blocked? Xfce Task Manager shows that the vast majority of these processes stay in state S (sleeping/blocked) rather than state R (running) the majority of the time. As I type this, the only processes that go to R are Firefox (because I'm interacting with it) and Task Manager (because it's animating).

What you need to measure is the number of threads that want the CPU. The "processor queue length" or "load" is the number of threads that are running or waiting to run at any given time. Linux makes a metric called "load average" available through the w and top; this is the average processor queue length over the past 60 second, 5 minute, and 15 minute windows. I'm not in front of a Windows box, but Google tells me Windows has a processor queue length monitor as well. Only when the 60-second load average exceeds the number of cores are you bottlenecked. And even then, Linux slightly overestimates load because it includes processes blocked on disk I/O, such as build steps called by the aforementioned make -j2.

...I run most everything not specifically designed to run native on my win7/64 host, in a sandbox instance of xp32/NT/*NIX/whatever. It's really not difficult: install a virtualising engine such as VirtualBox or VMWare, create or download a machine image, and get on with it.

By the way, 32-bit end-user versions of Windows (ie, desktop systems) do not support more than 4GB RAM+4GB swap in native mode. You *may* be able to bump it to 16GB using 4GT and 64GB with PAE (4GT requires that the system already has PAE support), depending on the kernel and system release. There's a slew of tables here.

Uh, you do know you could just change the email associated with the account ( https://commerce.microsoft.com/PaymentHub/Profile ) for the guy, then give him that account and set up a new one with your email address, right?

How does one get to be a software assurance customer? What is the cost? etc. Seems like it is only for "volume licensing purchasers", of which I ain't.

This was briefly mentioned earlier, but I wanted to state clearly and concisely:

Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate all include licensing for Windows XP Mode, a 32-bit virtualized instance of Windows XP SP3. It is an additional download (actually a couple downloads), but it is free. I use it every day at work (on my 64-bit Win7 machine) to run a 16-bit app that was written in 1992, while I wait for that app's replacement to be written. It works perfectly, in fact much better than VirtualBox did for the same use case (there was laggy/odd redrawing issues with VirtualBox, no matter how many resources I allocated to the virtual machine).

I use XP mode almost daily but find VMware player to be much faster and a more pleaseant experience. I forget the exact steps but it was pretty simple to use the free XP mode download with VMware instead of the default in Win7.

No, actually, it is a licensing issue. How else do you think Windows Server 2008 R2 32-bit could access 64Gb? There is a 36-bit memory interface, and physical memory can be remapped above the 4GB limit - it is just that it has to be supported by the motherboard chipset and by drivers, and far too many drivers were flaky. Besides, they wanted to push users to 64-bit anyway . . .

Windows 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter x32 will support 64GB of ram, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_server_2008

inability to have a default password for a single-user machine that the PC itself will enter on boot

That's called automatic login. Not only can you have that, you can have multiple accounts where the login is automatic.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-security/how-to-turn-on-automatic-logon-in-windows-7/99d4fe75-3f22-499b-85fc-c7a2c4f728af

As for compatibility yes Microsoft is back and forth on how compatible they want to be with other people's server or desktop solutions and in what combinations.

I also dislike the fact that vulns go unpatched for far too long.

I'd argue they've excellent at this compared to most anyone else. Arguably they shouldn't be creating such a large attack surface but the level of responsiveness being bad?

This was briefly mentioned earlier, but I wanted to state clearly and concisely:

Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate all include licensing for Windows XP Mode, a 32-bit virtualized instance of Windows XP SP3. It is an additional download (actually a couple downloads), but it is free. I use it every day at work (on my 64-bit Win7 machine) to run a 16-bit app that was written in 1992, while I wait for that app's replacement to be written. It works perfectly, in fact much better than VirtualBox did for the same use case (there was laggy/odd redrawing issues with VirtualBox, no matter how many resources I allocated to the virtual machine).

Yes.

See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896458?wa=wsignin1.0

64-bit versions of Windows do not support 16-bit components, 16-bit processes, or 16-bit applications

You are the first person I've seen to ever claim otherwise which is why I'm keen to hear more.

Windows XP Mode is NOT running 64-bit. It is a 32-bit VM running under Windows 7, which may be running either 32 or 64-bit.

Ahhh, I think I understand what you mean now. By "XP mode", you're in fact referring to this: http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows7/products/features/windows-xp-mode

When silly me was thinking of this: http://filext.com/images/vista_compatibility_mode.gif

Yes, the former will work for 16-bit applications. For those reading this thread, I should point out that "XP Mode" is not installed by default in Windows 7 or anything but it is a worthwhile addon if you run legacy apps.

Yes.

See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896458?wa=wsignin1.0

64-bit versions of Windows do not support 16-bit components, 16-bit processes, or 16-bit applications

You are the first person I've seen to ever claim otherwise which is why I'm keen to hear more.

Actually I think I've found a reasonable source that explains it:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff955767.aspx

So originally it was for 32bit DLLS, then Windows 95 went and ruined it anyway by putting 16 and 32bit stuff together (gj, microsoft). However these days the reason they do it is for .bat scripts that were hard coded to use System32 to do things like update the registry - the .bat would be running as a 64bit process but the hardcoded path to System32 would mean it would attempt to run a 32bit regedit.exe (for example), causing it to fail in doing what it was meant to do. So basically, the whole SysWOW64 thing is for backwards compatibility.

Nope, Windows 7 32bit limits you to 4GB of ram for driver compatibility reasons. The last 32bit consumer OS from MS that actually supported greater than 4GB of ram was Windows XP SP1.

But you should check if the PAE patches would work for you.

By $100, you of course mean $40? Pro edition (with Ultimate SKUs discontinued, it's now basically the highest client version) and digital download.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/buy?ocid=GA8_O_MSCOM_Prog_FPP_Null_Null

Microsoft could go a long way if they just stopped selling Visual Studio.... give it away so you can get the dev tools in the hands of those who need it (and have the most time to make apps for you...

You mean like they have been doing for the last 5+ years?

Here's a link to the latest: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-2012-express

Stick with being a prisoner of Microsoft.

A lot more people are choosing not to do that.

Even Microsoft knows Windows 8 is shit. They've just sacked Sinofsky over it.

"REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 12, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that Windows and Windows Live President Steven Sinofsky will be leaving the company and that Julie Larson-Green will be promoted to lead all Windows software and hardware engineering."

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2012/Nov12/11-12AnnouncementPR.aspx

It's not just about visuals, it's also about performance. It is now much cheaper (GPU utilization wise) to do today what was done yesterday. Also, keep in mind that a lot of games don't have that great of visuals because they limit themselves to match consoles. The Call of Duty franchise is a perfect example of this. Anyway, take a look at this to see what is new. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh404562(v=vs.85).aspx Also, this is what games could be doing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duSIE2TkpH4

In a few months, Mathematica on a Surface Pro will be more powerful and still be portable.

The argument that Windows 8 is going to put over Windows Phone with its similar interface and Microsoft's marketing billions misses an important point. We've been hearing that for years, and it hasn't started working yet. Windows 7 was "optimized for touch" on launch, and the following CES had 35 Windows 7 tablets on display - not one of which ever amounted to anything even though each had actual full Windows on it and would run all Windows legacy apps and connect to all your other printers and other devices too. Windows 8 is a phone interface that doesn't work well on a PC. Microsoft used to have a 40% share of mobile, and now they have at best 2%, so this strategy is so obviously negatively effective that it is suicidal. Their massive market presence didn't prevent them from falling so far off the map that they are reported as part of the "other" category now.

What would turn the corner for them isn't massive marketing dollars. It isn't forcing everybody to use a phone interface, ruining sales of their desktop and server OS in a forlorn hope of going mobile. It isn't hiring a Bangalore blog center to post in every Internet forum "I have iPhone but am moving to the awesome Lumia 920, ditching my iPad for a SurfaceRT". It isn't buying Facebook Likes and Twitter followers and retweets. It isn't bribing people to stand in line on launch day with concert tickets, or building a three-story standup nightclub and open bar at Burning Man. It isn't bribing every tech news site on the Internet with so many advertising dollars they lose their editorial integrity. It isn't giving away a free copy of Office RT with every tablet. It could be done, but this isn't how they will succeed if they do.

Just to get the info out there, because I see so many erroneous postings here concerning it ... there's a bare-metal Type 1 hypervisor version of Hyper-V, Hyper-V Server 2012, that is free, no charge. For the OP, a type 1 hypervisor is one that you install on the machine as the "base" OS ... then you run VMs for Linux, Windows, etc. within that hypervisor. That's opposed to Type 2 hypervisors, that run as a software package with in full OS that you have installed - like running VirtualBox inside Windows or Linux.

So now, having said that there is a free type 1 version of Hyper-V ... I have to caveat it by pointing out that, like you might expect with Microsoft, it's basically a gateway drug to their other products, in that to administer it effectively and use it in most real-world use cases, you need to have e.g. Windows Server 2012 installed somewhere, etc.

You go try that on a Windows 8 ARM-based machine and report back on how well that works.
Or if you want to save yourself the time, trouble and money, just read this:

Mandatory. Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement
the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be
allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv. A Windows
Server may also disable Secure Boot remotely using a strongly authenticated (preferably
public-key based) out-of-band management connection, such as to a baseboard
management controller or service processor. Programmatic disabling of Secure Boot either
during Boot Services or after exiting EFI Boot Services MUST NOT be possible. Disabling
Secure Boot must not be possible on ARM systems.

Be sure to take special notice of the very last sentence in particular.

Source? Official Microsoft Windows Hardware Certification documentation for Windows 8.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/hh748188

What red flag?

Windows has Windows Resource Protection (WRP). Unlike Linux/Unix, even if you run as an administrator (equivalent to root) you *do not* have permission to change operating system files. Only the TrustedInstaller account can change those files. Furthermore, the files are designated system integrity level raising another barrier. Even if a malicious process succeeds in fooling a user into elevating to high integrity level with administrator privileges, it cannot change those files. WRP also performs integrity checks upon system start. If any files have been tampered with they are restored from an encrypted cache before they are accessed. Is guaranteed security? no - but it pretty good protection and it is unlike anything you'll find in Linux/Unix where root access == pwned.

Windows has Kernel Patch Protection (KPP). KPP encrypts and checksums certain OS tables of the running operating system to prevent tampering by rogue processes which somehow have gained kernel access (e.g. through a vulnerable driver). A rogue kernel process will attempt to patch itself in so that it may intercept disk accesses, network access etc. If KPP determines tampering it will halt the system. Is guaranteed security? no - but it is unlike anything you'll find in Linux/Unix.

Windows has a kernel mode signing policy which requires all software (drivers and more) which are to be loaded in kernel space to be digitally signed. If they are not signed they cannot be loaded. If a driver has been tampered with, the signature will be invalid and the kernel will refuse to load it. Ubuntu and Fedora now does have some signing protection, but they are incomplete in comparison, e.g. they only protect executable modules, not configuration files.

Windows 8 introduced secure boot. The Windows 8 boot loader is signed with a key known to the UEFI bios. The boot loader will in turn check the integrity of the OS and configuration (using digital signatures) before the proceeds. This closes the vector where a bootkit takes control of the system and boots the OS in a virtualized environment through which it can patch the OS after boot.

The biggest distinction is that since Linux is openly developed with the potential for anyone to contribute and for everyone to see, there aren't large, untested milestone releases without public eyes on them like commercial OSes. By the time that the experimental version becomes the release version it's already been vetted.

If that theory is true then you would expect to see fewer vulnerabilities for Linux than for Windows. In reality, over a given time period Linux experiences many more vulnerabilities than Windows.

Windows Vista: Until now 377 vulnerabilities has been discovered.
Linux kernel 2.6: Until now 633 vulnerabilities has been discovered.

Note that the number for Vista includes the bundled software as well (i.e. data access components, window manager (GDI, explorer), windows Mail etc) where the number for Linux is strictly kernel vulnerabilities.

Microsoft doesn't have the same quantity of testing because while there is a beta program, it's not designed to be thoroughly examined.

Ahem. Microsoft has this process called Secure Development Lifecycle. They do not rely on users to test and find security bugs. What is the process followed by Linux developers (kernel, KDE, GNOME)? Is there a formal process or do we simply rely on them to be good craftsmen? Surely they do not rely on beta testers to find security vulnerabilities?

Since Windows 8 repurposed Microsoft Security Essentials as its new Windows Defender, which is built-in to the operating system, would these statistics hold true for Security Essentials on all systems, or are they unique to Windows 8?

Or is BitDefender just trying to stir up some business?

I was using Virtual Box and recently switched to Hyper-v. Hyper-V makes it easy to start machines automatically at boot. Also, my CentOS 6.3 vbox runs great, especially with these Linux Integration Components installed: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34603. Hyper-V seems faster, but have not measured.

Why should it strike me as news? Anyone who still has Microsoft after they issued excel 5 was angling for trouble. Ballmer is the man of the missed opportunities, but the balance sheet model was skewed from the start.
If anyone troubled to check the balance sheet these past years, he'd have noted that MS made big fanfare of stock buybacks: after all, its market position meant it was a big net cash machine, and investments in its sector of adequate size, and no antitrust considerations, are a bit thin on the ground. So where to put the money, if not in the company itself? the troubling bit is they put it in the manager's coffers; the issued shares where options granted to employees, and in many years they covered two thirds of the buybacks. So no net increase in Earning per share, thank you.
If the shareholders had been less index funds or tech fanatics, they would have pestered the company years back and insisted of a special dividend, like 40 bucks per share, with a big chunk of debt injected in the company. from then on, only cash dividends, no buybacks.