Sometimes, you just need to take a deep breath and have some fun. That"s what "@NTDEV", the developer behind the popular Tiny10 and Tiny 11 OS modes, decided to do earlier this week.
On his YouTube channel, NTDEV decided to see if he could run multiple versions of Windows inside each other, like a virtual version of a Russian nesting doll. It"s something that"s been promised for close to a year now by a Linux developer.
You can check out the final result in the clip above. On his X (formerly Twitter) feed, NTDEV says he used VMWare Workstation for this particular "Winception" and an AMD CPU that supported the nested virtualization.
Ultimately, he was able to get Windows 10 to run in Windows 11, Windows 8.1 to run in Windows 10, Windows 8 to run inside Windows 8.1 and finally, he managed to get Windows 7 running inside Windows 8.
He also showed that while the CPU usage at that point wasn"t terribly high, he mentioned that it was still getting sluggish after he started running the Windows 7 virtual version. That"s the main reason why he didn"t go further with, say, running Windows Vista inside of Windows 7.
While this kind of demo is ultimately just for fun, it also shows how virtual desktops and virtualization in general has advanced along with powerful CPUs that can support this kind of cool nesting OS experiment.
Of course, NTDEV is still best known for his "Tiny" OS mods. Just a couple of weeks ago he launched his latest Tiny10 release, version 23H2. Among other things, the new version added some improvements to make it compatible with more Windows components.
Users can now install a number of standard Windows features in the new build, including Media Player, while also restoring support for NET Framework 3.5 NET Framework 3.5. You can download the latest Tiny10 version right now from the Internet Archive site.