When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.
Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.
I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.
It’s the Zelda that Nintendo “rushed out the door” - in order to get it to market in 15 months, they reused the engine and mostly reused the assets from Ocarina of Time. That’s quite well-attested.
My theory is that the short development time meant that they had to just go with it. The design team knew the tools, so all the content is pretty polished. They didn’t have time to refine it all, so there’s loads of stuff that is just plain weird. No other Zelda game has a UFO abduction section, but someone spent ages on it and it takes up about a tenth of the map, so fuck it, it stays in. That all gives it quite a “daylight horror” vibe, which is unusual in gaming - seems quite normal until you scratch the surface. The “groundhog day” conceit also allows for quite a few “bad endings”; most games wouldn’t allow things to go so wrong, but since you can put it right, it’s okay.
Less time for focus groups also means that there’s less time for Aonuma and Koizuma’s original vision to be changed. I don’t think it’s the game that Nintendo would have wanted to put out the door, but since it was the only game available, then out it went. Which I appreciate, because it’s my favourite game out the whole franchise. It’s unusual for Nintendo to put out something so dark, doubly-so at the time.
Obviously, fuck the down-the-well bit; that just wastes your time.