"This question has been retired" (learn.microsoft.com)

What was the question?

Retire the question, so it can be asked again and answered by an LLM, which based its answer on a human answering a now retired question.

Some truths are naturally temporal. Such truths are not necessarily of non-historic value. This feels like a cheap move by Microsoft.

Honestly I dont feel it's a loss. Community Support was always very low quality. Lots of terrible low grade problem reports with 59 "me too!"s and a poor agent typing a scripted response that was only tangentially related to the issue. Frankly, a bot trained on reddit and SO would comfortably replace the majority of answers. This is not the Raymond Chen level of problem solving we are talking about.

Deleted. Say the word. Say "I deleted it."

At least the title is still there in the URL:

>can-i-open-16-bit-application-in-windows-8?forum=windows-all&referrer=answers

I had good luck using the 32-bit version of W8 & W10. Had to manually enable NTVDM manually beforehand.

For 64-bit Widows IIRC it would open in DOSbox, but it was actually a DOS aplication.

Now there's this:

https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

I clicked through hoping for an interesting Raymond Chen post. I was disappointed.

This question has been re-homed to a farm upstate with other retired questions, and never has to worry about being deleted.

MS used to have uservoice pages. They ignored issues, no matter how highly-voted they were. I once asked someone at MS about this, and they said they take their cues from other sources, like what industry partners ask them to fix at conferences.

What a waste of time to have uservoice pages, induce people to post/vote on them, and then just ignore them. I guess it's for the best that they nuked them. They were replaced with pages that said "tweet us". Maybe they have something more robust now, especially since twitter is politically charged/divisive.

My go-to reaction to these things that Microsoft does, removing content, is always the same:

Microsoft, are you running low on hosting space, or something?

I mean, how does one of worlds largest software corporations, handing people OneDrive accounts left and right, not to mention all the other digital waste they're busily involved with, lack storage space for some valuable archive pertaining to use of one of the world's most popular OS and associated software suites? Someone should just forbid them to "retire" content, especially if posted by actual people.

Fortunately, The Wayback Machine / Internet Archive works overtime to take upon themselves the responsibility I think would have been best left to Microsoft.

How many computers run windows 8?

This info is not some special epoch to anything. Save the resource use.

This is high tech not conservative politics. What's high tech about old operating systems?

"This was not called deletion. It was called retirement."

Hi, I’m an Independent Advisor. It sounds like you expected Microsoft community support to be a valuable resource for answers to your technical problems. I can understand how frustrating that would be. At this point, the most reliable solution is to perform a clean reinstall of Windows.

The most frustrating aspect of learn.microsoft.com is putting a -learn.microsoft.com at the end of every search engine query.

I can't imagine using MS products for anything important these days. There are more reliable options for servers, databases, and OS, and those options all have better docs.

It got its gold watch and is now quietly sipping a Tom Collins by the pool after trimming the bushes, mowing the grass, and reflecting on that that was enough work for today and thankful for not having to get up early and commute into the city anymore.