CharlotteTheHarlot

There must be a hundred stories out there about the imminent Windows 8 price increase, and with them are literally thousands of comments, almost all are ripping Microsoft a new one for yet another huge mistake ( hehe, well all except Thurrott: There's been a lot of whining this week. It's all unnecessary ). Here is the official Microsoft PR hack webpage ... Update on Windows 8 Pricing ( Brandon LeBlanc 2013-01-18 ) Normally I would quote him, but you really have to read the IBM Microsoft marketspeak for yourself and marvel at the enormous mess they have made of this. What is interesting is that the majority of the comments at this Microsoft blog are authored by Windows 8 supporters and Microsoft sycophants and I can only find a single one that blindly supports this complicated, confusing and irrational mess as a good thing. The bulk of the commenters are incredulous at the pricing plan and also the ridiculously complex SKU editions. As we have come to expect from this lumbering behemoth IBM Microsoft, Brandon chooses to respond to one single comment, where the person expressed his frustration like this: "I also love WIndows 8, so it saddens me that what's going to kill it is the horrible marketing and messaging around it. First of all, nobody's going to pay $200 for it. Secondly, the entire article above is INCREDIBLY CONFUSING. Why?!? Nowhere on this page or any of the linked articles can I find a description of the differences between "Windows 8" and "Windows 8 Pro" or the others. What are you doing? If you wanted to take a great product and ensure its demise, I can't think of a better way.". And what does he do, he sends the poor confused customer to an even less-helpful marketdroid page which starts off like this ... There really seems to be no hope for this company. Great comment that cuts right to the chase: "For the price of the upgrade you can get an Android tablet... oh, wait, that's what people are doing!" Over at ComputerWorld an example of the kind of press they are receiving ... Microsoft to raise Windows 8 upgrade prices by 5X ( ComputerWorld 2013-01-19 ) I believe this one particular commenter has nailed the situation exactly right ... "Windows is now a declining market. It makes economic sense to increase the rents as lowering price will no longer get market share. I don't see the value in the Windows product and I look to avoid their lock in.". This may be their actual thinking now, convinced by bean-counters that they failed at adoption with a severely reduced price and now they must stop the bleeding. Other poster have witty comments, some of my favorites ... "Wow, what a great price that is. Must wipe PCLinuxOS off my harddrive straight away and buy a copy....." "Now we are saving even more by not buying it." "Like shooting a torpedo at the Titanic... " "I'll bet MS brings back the start button on February 1st." EDIT: typo

Net Applications: Windows 8 keeps gaining market share ( NeoWin 2013-01-21 ) Yes, he went there ... 1.64 percent ... big growth ... 2.25 percent. Back in Post #1358 we found this ... That is a decimal point there in that 0.13 % or less than one seventh of one percent. Yeah, it doesn't mean much now. And there is no doubt that Windows 8 ( of which Surface represents only a subset ) itself will chart eventually. I mean how can it not? The user market is much larger now than six years ago, and they are literally forcing it into the world through the OEM channels ( again ). Plus, now we have billions of phones also. The real question is whether it will get as high as Vista did ( I believe it was 20% at it's peak ) before the bottom drops out once and for all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share ... 2012-12-12 ... Windows 7 = 41.35% ... Windows XP = 21.29% ... Windows 8 = 0.32% Unfortunately at that same Wiki page, they have changed things around, and I don't see an overall statistic like they had back on 2012-12-12. ( way to go guys ). No way for a comparison that I can see yet. This is what they currently show on the top two main charts ... --------------- Net Applications --- Wikimedia ---------------- December 2012 ---- October 2012 Windows 7 .......... 45.11 ........... 41.35 Windows XP ......... 39.08 ........... 21.29 Mac OSX ............. 7.05 ............ 8.54 Windows Vista ....... 5.67 ............ 6.28 Windows 8 ........... 1.72 ............ 0.32 Linux ............... 1.19 ............ 1.64 Other ............... 0.18 ............ 5.84 iOS ................................... 9.46 Android ............................... 4.80 Windows RT + WP ....................... 0.48 If the page format remains the same after the next update then we can use this snapshot for a direct comparison.

There was another review posted a month ago ... 9 Windows Start menus for Windows 8 ( InfoWorld 2012-12-12 ) This one covers: Classic Shell, Start8, StartMenu8, Power8, Pokki, StartIsBack, RetroUI, ViStart, and StartW8. A little less in-depth compared to the previously mentioned review, and no winners are picked. Just a broad overview.

You gave me an idea for a new, more specific thread about this.

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( this will be a picture heavy thread so I enclosed most in SPOILER tags to hopefully not kill the page load performance! ) Windows 8 and Metro has only succeeded in one identifiable area - the dumbing down of user interfaces to newer, lower levels. Thing is, they're not being creative at all ( sorry Jensen Harris ). Their level of aesthetic creativity and utilitarianism lies somewhere between the computer BIOS interfaces of the past and the newer UEFI versions. OEMs have always had the better ideas though, and although they only recently updated visuals in the BIOS to nicer menus, they managed to do this WITHOUT destroying functionality. One thing has always been true, and that is that computer BIOS options have been truly utilitarian ( save for the highly restricted versions on some motherboards for bottom end computers, ~cough~ Intel ). Actually, almost any BIOS screen is far more interesting than Windows 8 and Metro. ( originals: 1, 2 ) Microsoft has not only disregarded aesthetics in the name of "hiding the chrome" and "getting out of the way of content", they intentionally limited themselves to the tiny toolbox of HTML and CSS. I wish I was present at those design decision meetings where some genius said "Hey, I think we should use webpages for everything!", and presumably other geniuses agreed. It seems to have been in their plans for a long time too, going at least as far back as Windows 98 with those unimpressive "channels" and the poorly implemented active desktop ( 'sorry, you can't use this JPG as your wallpaper without first turning on ...' ). HTML and its later CSS additions were clearly designed for the low bandwidth era, environments such as fetching webpages and images from a remote server through a tiny pipe at a few KB per second maximum. It was not meant to be the programmer toolkit for broadband environments, let alone completely local environments with hundreds of MBs to GBs per second throughput. So, on a local computer with its huge amount of available horsepower Microsoft gives us a 10 to 15 year old level of creativity ... Just what I wanted, a webpage that configures my 4 GHz Core i7 uber-GPU and SSD powered computer! ( original ) On the other hand, the consumer electronics industry, never known for being intentionally user-friendly or aesthetically pleasing, moved forward thanks to intense competition and leap-frogged Microsoft with advancements in both style and substance ... Note the blatant ripoff by Metro of menu elements seen in the above photo. ( original ) Modern TV's, cameras, DVR's and other devices all have more pleasing and usable interfaces. What Microsoft is really doing is poorly copying the user interfaces found on countless consumer electronics, and really failing at that. Many more examples of common firmware menu navigation are easily found in Google Images ... So truth be told, there is no groundbreaking creativity at Microsoft. Windows 8 and Metro are poor knock-offs of what is already found in the firmware of common consumer electronics, but further dumbed down because of the ridiculous need to make everything a webpage. A quick glance at Google Images for fancy webpages will turn up countless examples that meet or exceed Windows 8 and Metro on all fronts. Even blogs and forums have better skin selection. I've long said that with respect to creativity and aesthetics Microsoft has just breezed through the past couple of decades without even noticing what others have long been doing with OpenGL and Direct-X. Just from 1996 to 1999 we saw Quake 1 to Quake 3 Arena and Unreal I to UT and their exploiting transparent drop-down consoles, superimposed menus, status screens and HUDs. Meanwhile Windows moved at a snail's pace from Windows 95 to 98se. It was at this time I began thinking they should be working toward a compartmentalized GUI using a "game engine" type strategy in which visual output could evolve independently of the other core operating system functions like input, file systems, networking and kernel logic. Here are some quickly found images during the Windows 9x era, and these standard visuals were routinely surpassed by independent work done by modders ... Clearly the transparent Windows 6.x taskbar and "chrome" concept was already long used as part of the HUD in these games, and their drop-down "~" console still is more visually appealing than the neutered CMD console today. More importantly, transparent menus, status screens and other GUI elements were implemented not for style, but instead to avoid hiding on-screen action. This lesson was learned and then quickly forgotten by Microsoft when they killed Aero Glass and it highlights yet another reason it is plain stupid to remove an unobtrusive and collapsible Start Menu. It sure would have been great if Epic or John Carmack had side-projects programming an operating system interface! But besides FPS games, there were even more clues around for Microsoft. Utilizing 3D in a GUI as an integral part of visualizing data objects was well underway and already visible to programmers, endusers and even Hollywood. How could they have missed this obvious clue in 1993 ... Not only was that actually real, but it was available to any users of that SGI system. That was exactly 20 years ago, while WinTel microcomputer users still suffered with PROGMAN under win3.x, and would continue suffering for at least two more years ( I'll leave LCARS from Star Trek TNG in 1987 out of it for the moment since it was only a prop, albeit an interesting and futuristic one that foretold the modern LCD appearance 15 years ahead of its time ). The eventual jump to Win95 gave us the possibility of a customizeable GUI, and to some degree it occurred with 3rd party themes and a few rare replacement shells, but the underlying graphics engine design was going nowhere. I guess I had higher hopes than most people of this era. Anyway, by rights we should by now have any and all object types and styles with an infinite array of transitional effects available to the enduser as selectable and configureable visuals. We should be able to navigate smoothly through a 3D interface designed to visualize the enormous amount of data objects we have accumulated. Instead, after more three decades Microsoft only last year first used the concept of pinch and zoom for the most minor of navigational enhancements, the shrinking or growing of desktop tiles on their putrid Metro interface. I could show some examples of 3rd party tools, mostly file managers that utilized some 3D elements or desktop decorations that used animated wallpaper and similar advancements, all of which far exceeded the bland Explorer concept, but I have surpassed the picture limit for this one post! We'll come back to this later. So let's dig up some other screenshots of interesting and useful GUIs and post them here and maybe Microsoft will learn something ( but I'm not holding my breath ). EDIT: updated image URLs, and again

Sinofsky is back with his fourth blog post, and finally we agree on something! This post addresses the recent dust-up in Twitter and blogs about Sinofsky using an iPhone ... Learning from Competition ( Sinofsky 2013-01-14 ) This is in sharp contrast to the attitude of Gates mentioned in stories just a few weeks ago ... Now we need to wonder if the insular thinking is actually cemented in place at Microsoft due to Gates permanent presence and his disconnect from actual product development, and is being advanced by his handpicked Mini-Me Steve Ballmer. It sure looks like Sinofsky is going to slowly redeem his image through his blog posts even though he carefully avoids direct references to Microsoft ( The Gates story does not appear in the blog ). Photograph of Gates' "Mini-Me" Steve Ballmer ... EDIT: typos

You'll definitely get more than one version installed. Perfect usability will require some customization however because one suite or the other will own file associations to the main files. You can build custom context menu entries for a filetype like XLS perhaps one that pops up like this ... Open in Excel 1995 ... Open in Excel 1998 ... Open in Excel 2000 ... Open in Excel Office XP ... Open in Excel 2003 ... Open in Excel 2007 ... Open in Excel 2010 ... ... And then make similar menus for XLSX and the Word formats and other filetypes. You can also make QuickLaunch ( which I call QuickDrop ) shortcuts to all the Office programs also and physically drop the document or spreadsheet right on whatever version suits your fancy. One important thing to remember ( not exclusive to Office ) is that the older you go, the more baggage they carried, in particular dependency files like MFC42.DLL and others that get registered wherever they reside, blasting away proper SYSTEM of SYSTEM32 registration. You may find yourself suddenly running by default a very old version of a key DLL. This is one of the best reasons I can think of for doing a registry export before and after installation and then WinDiffing and carefully noting all the changes. A simple REG patch can be made from this to correct such changes.

Microsoft hires designer who presented bold revamp of the company's brand ( The Verge 2013-01-19 ) Microsoft hires man who made his own Microsoft product logos ( NeoWin 2013-01-20 ) Microsoft has hired the guy from Minimally Minimal called Andrew Kim in order to further dumb down their already dumbed down image. See his Next Microsoft page that apparently caught their attention ( and in his defense does have some accurate criticism of Microsoft trends ). But overall, his great contribution to the world of modern art is the use of a parallelogram, or several in combination. He really should fit right in with the other professional under-achievers like Ballmer, Julie and Jensen. EDIT: typos, updated image URL, and again

WinInfo Short Takes, January 18, 2013 ( Thurrott at WindowsITPro 2013-01-18 ) Another Thurrott article, with two interesting paragraphs ... A little sloppy there with the words. AMD didn't so much create the x64 instruction set, it certainly implemented it first. Using larger register sizes that are completely backwards compatible are an extension, not an invention, it is implemented, not created. Yes, Itanium is a "walled garden" attempt and a deviation, however, "That boost came courtesy of Microsoft, which immediately seized on x64" is more fanboyism. They also seized on Itanium. Most importantly, since AMD64 aka x64 aka x86-64 aka IA-32e aka EM64T ( or simply: x86 +64-bit ) is an almost perfectly implemented backward compatible extension ( Wiki ), Microsoft is the one to BLAME for the incompatibilities seen by the enduser such as 16-bit and other planned obsolescence. They chose with their compilers and system file design to add bugs that a more perfect and conscientious company would have not allowed. Paul, you really had no reason to inject Microsoft into that paragraph about CPU architecture, you just can't help yourself from knee-jerk fanboyism. ADDED: I wonder if Intel has thought about simply making a compound architecture CPU. Perhaps with four x86 cores and two ARM cores. The operating system could be developed in two editions, Desktop x86 or Mobile ARM. The desktop edition would be x86 bound and direct windowed ARM apps to the ARM cores, vice versa for mobile. Simple. Consider that copyrighted. Impressive numbers! Now divide that by three or four to account for the reduced price and we have 3 to 4 million similar "sales" comparable to Windows 7 or XP. I'm wondering about something Paul, do you still think it was a great idea to tamper with and permanently damage the "Windows" brand with the stench that is Windows 8 and Metro? Was that transparent and cynical ploy to exploit their monopolistic position a smart or ethical move? EDIT: added an idea for Intel.

Fact Check: Windows 8 Pricing Identical to That for Windows 7 ( Thurrott 2013-01-19 ) His actual subtitle ... There's been a lot of whining this week. It's all unnecessary Thurrott writes another article intent on convincing everyone that he is almost as blind and deaf as Baller, Julie and Jensen. Hey Paul, it's okay, I'm convinced. Ya know, I don't remember ever thinking that all those crazy SKUs and high prices were a good thing. I actually believed they were outrageous as they target the most loyal and experienced of Microsoft Windows customers - that small percentage of people that get their hands dirty building their own computers and who are intentionally buying Windows, as opposed to the n00bs and that only get windows because it came with a computer. It is still ironic to me that Microsoft would punish with extreme prices their best and possibly their only voluntary customers. Yet Paul is unhappy because he must have read some of the tech blog community who are universally stunned about a price increase on a controversial operating system ... That emphasized sentence is another humdinger of a pull quote sure to make the rounds as a classic. It is right up there with "The Desktop Must Die!". Anyway, Paul, you're right. These insanely high prices are a good thing. We should be thanking them. Thank you Microsoft. Why MS is raising the price on Windows 8 ( TechBroil 2013-01-20 ) This great blog and many of the commenters around the net are pointing out facts about with they would follow through with this price increase. It should drum up a spike in sales for Q1 of this year. But there may even be another reason. You gotta wonder how many people are going to buy the $39 upgrade just to turn around and sell it later at 2x or 3x the cost. I mean, think about it. When was the last time you saw a sure thing? In stock market transactions, everyone thought the Facebook IPO might be one. It wasn't. Certainly buying shares of MSFT or most others has been anything other than a sure-thing. But here we actually have such a beast, an absolute, positively, no-doubt-whatsoever sure-thing. It is pretty safe to say that sales are going to spike now and then drop off the cliff as eBay picks up the slack later. I sure hope Microsoft is not involved in this thing, like when "Classic Coke" was rumored to be a huge sales ploy. That might just lead to big legal trouble. EDIT: added link

Microsoft's ARM blunder: 7 reasons why Windows RT was DOA ( UK Register 2013-01-18 ) Very thorough article ( and great comments as usual ), concentrating only on Surface RT and its Windows ReTard operating system. The only thing I would add is that the author plays down the controversy with the use of "Windows" label, which we know from other stories that Ballmer intentionally decided to use the name in spite of warnings from others. It is intentional deception. Microsoft is just out from underneath the last government action, they just recently experienced pushback with Vista and its own "Windows Ready" labeling fiasco yet they have doubled down and exceeded that one by a mile. Ballmer is just asking for FTC or DoJ scrutiny, and he would clearly deserve it. While reading this, something occurred to me. A thousand posts ago many commenters here were pointing out the obvious that Microsoft had to tie "Windows" brand to Metro rather than create a separate distinct mobile operating system that might not be able to stand on its feet and die in the marketplace. We already knew this was a cynical ploy to convert its monopolistic desktop position into an Apple-esque walled garden. The right thing to do would have been a separate OS, and it would have acted as a firewall from contaminating "Windows" as a brand. So what suddenly dawned on me is that this Surface RT device is exactly an instance of that separate OS ( except for the re-use of the "Windows" brand ), and just as we warned it is failing or at best is on life support. Once again, the commenters here and many other places long before the RTM and general release correctly predicted what Microsoft and its presumably well-paid staff of designers, marketers, forecasters and evangelists could not see. As far as I can tell, the only people out of touch with the obvious future are working in Redmond and/or populating the comment sections of The Verge and NeoWin.

UPDATE TO POST #1 The top post has been re-written to describe the current ZIP package suite dated: 2013-01-11. Win9x fans will notice no functional changes among the very few remaining compatible utilities distributed in the Suite. -CTH-

No problem. It's new for me as well, as I didn't see it until pretty recently. This is a golden one for sure. It uses many sources to compile its forensic history output. Details at the page. Another great new one is a WiFi sniffer called WiFiInfoView ( Vista and above unfortunately ) which displays a lot of details of what your router ( and your neighbors' routers ) are putting into the air. Obviously it needs to be ran from a computer with WiFi capability. Running this will cause people to examine their own situation and take note of what they are broadcasting and what others can see, and hopefully spend some time configuring their router settings.

Nirsoft has a nice tool that pulls in data from many sections of Windows and generates a forensic audit of activity, including the execution of programs. LastActivityView It is for Win2k and above ( Win9x not supported ).

Ah, that'll do it everytime.

Well like I said, read their rules here. I was just giving you a friendly heads up about zero tolerance for discussing things like circumvention. I apologize if you misinterpreted my comment, I didn't mean to imply you were going to do anything dirty. Anyway, I can confirm from seeing many laptops, even some a couple years old that those stupid stickers can easily wear off. What I always do is take photos of every sticker. The ones that are real bad can sometimes be read if you play with them in a good photo-editor, invert ( negative ) and play with brightness, contrast, intensity, and some other effects. If it is totally gone, you should at least have the manufacturer part number and serial number ( also on the bottom but on much more durable stickers ) which is proof of a model run that was obviously delivered with a genuine Windows installation. The manufacturer themselves might be convinced to look it up in their records. I don't know if you are here in the USA, but in addition to federal agencies every state has numerous bureaucracies that deal with consumer protection. The big guns are in the state attorney generals' offices who seem to enjoy going after companies that commit fraud or other malfeasance. I would tell them that Microsoft and/or your manufacturer are trying to defraud you by not supplying you with the legitimate Windows product key that has worn off your netbook. I have always wondered when someone was going to challenge this practice ( maybe it has already happened? ) of putting those non-durable stickers on the bottom and not on the keyboard where the Intel logo is placed. IMHO it is deliberate negligence and deserves class action. And why didn't Microsoft, who has so much to say about OEM practices not demand that the stickers be placed in a sensible area? A cynical person might think it was intentional planned obsolescence again. BTW, I'm pretty sure that if you never entered that key from the sticker into a Windows prompt, it will not be found in the registry or anywhere else. Others should take a lesson from this and remember to write down or photograph their sticker as soon as possible. If you have an old registry export saved from this computer, you can retrieve the digital product ID ( an often changing hash value ) and try to import it and see if activation is satisfied. That would be legal since it is the same exact computer, but I am going to stop there with my advice.

Microsoft employee approval rating of Ballmer, company increase ( NeoWin 2013-01-16 ) This doesn't pass the smell test. The only explanations are (1) that he drove so many people to quit that all remaining are either relatively new or longtime sycophants, or (2) the site that collects these anonymous reviews is rigged or being defrauded. But here is a different take on it ... Microsoft employees: We like Steve Ballmer...sort of ( ComputerWorld 2013-01-16 ) Stardock: 3 million Start8 downloads; version 1.1 launched ( NeoWin 2013-01-16 ) Pokki revamps Windows 8 Start menu program; hits 1.5 million downloads ( NeoWin 2013-01-16 ) Bring back the Windows 8 Start menu, say 1.5 million Pokki downloaders ( The Verge 2013-01-16 ) Well I guess we can say that in at least one way Microsoft is doing what it used to do in the old days - making millionaires. As you can imagine the comments of those articles contain a lot of whining and contempt by the Borg children about people who purchased Start Menu restorers. The same exact spoiled, childish, arrogant, Apple-esque rantings from Windows 8 and Metro lovers exists at both NeoWin and The Verge. EDIT: added Start8 article, another Pokki article, another Ballmer article.

No problem. Have patience. Speaking for myself, since the time I posted that reply I had to dig out from under the latest blizzard and I'm typing with jello arms. I've been out of enterprise IT for a long time, and back then during the WinXP era I saw mostly initial setups, sysprep, full image deployment ( with a lot of sneakernet patching as well. Hey, everything was still pretty new ) So I hope some current enterprise IT experts come in here since I guarantee they have an updated bag of tricks that will make your problems go away. As I understand it, you are using REG.EXE to mount the "default user" hive and are applying edits from your .reg script to this hive and then unloading the hive. But I am still unclear on something. Are you talking about existing users that log into the network or for new users? I could be wrong but I always though that "default user" is applied only when the user is first created, and just once. If that assumption is correct then that registry script ( and my commented one ) are aiming at the wrong keys. Follow this example ... If you were manually to mount that registry and give it a temporary name ( REGEDIT, select HKEY_USERS, Load Hive, select that default ntuser.dat, prompted to give it a name, enter #_Temp_Default_# ), now you can apply that script if you edit the key names to match that temporary names like this ... HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-500 ... to ... HKEY_USERS\#_Temp_Default_# So this ... [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2382118143-2802985254-1031643562-500\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager] ... becomes this ... HKEY_USERS\#_Temp_Default_#\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager] Those "user" keys would then be imported into the temporary mounted registry hive and it could then be unloaded. What I said earlier about using that specific SID with the -500 is still correct. It was targeting the user hive of a specific user, actually a built-in administrator. This should be able to be done with REG.EXE ( don't know the commandline options off the top of my head ) but you will need to specify a temp name for the hive and re-use that identical temp name in your script. But I am still not sure about "default user" at all. I believe this might need to be ALL USERS. But I will step out here and let current sysadmins help you. I can shed some light on lots of registry keys and functions if you need it. Here are some references that might be of use ... Default User's Profile vs. All Users Profile ( CNet ) User Accounts in Windows ( Utilize Windows ) Customize the Default User Profile in Windows XP ( Ramesh ) Changing the Windows XP default user profile ( Standalone SysAdmin ) Well-known security identifiers in Windows operating systems ( Microsoft KB 243330 ) Well-known SIDs (Windows) ( Microsoft MSDN ) NOTE: I see that allen2 has explained this as well while I was typing this. EDIT: note that he showed the commandline parameters ... REG.EXE LOAD temporary-key-name hive-to-mount so, that temporary-key-name is what you will need to substitute in your script.

If those NeoWin and Verge MicroBorg were even slightly intelligent they would understand that they are acting completely inversely to common sense. The most vital ingredient to technological progress is technological darwinism. Bad or impractical or inefficient or just plain stupid ideas must not only be criticized, but shunned lest progress be artificially detoured down every single rabbit hole on the road to perfection. What they are doing when they say "adapt or die" is reversing the order of who is servicing who. Technology is designed to service humanity not vice versa. Technology must adapt or die to humanity, not vice versa. They actually seem to believe we are supposed to bend and adapt to these products even though they are not vaguely designed to help the customer in any way. Clearly these products like Windows 8 and Metro are actually designed to benefit only Microsoft in the most cynical manner yet conceived. Frankly these children couldn't be more dense if they were made of lead. Their entire worldview exactly mirrors the borg, nameless, mindless servants of the MicroHive. "Resistance is Futile". ~barf~ They are using some huge error bars in their guestimates. As we say over here in the states, 'close enough for government work" Added: one more thing that I haven't seen yet in these unofficial numbers is that earlier dogfood announcement where Microsoft gave a WP8 phone and a Surface RT to each of their almost 100,000 employees. so if the total number was 1 million in sales then fully 10% of them were bought by Microsoft. If the number is 500,000 total, then 20% were bought internally and that would be incredibly embarrassing. Everytime these stories come out I worry a little about piling on or kicking them while they're down, and really feel uncomfortable from never being on this side of the argument before. But then I remember that even as we sit here and write these comments, their plan is still underway, feeding their Windows legacy destroying products into the OEM monopoly channel with little chance of correcting course. So then I stop feeling sorry for them and continue. This whole thing is like watching those Russian dashcam car crashes on LiveLeak in slow motion. P.S. For some reason when I look at that or any clown picture I immediately see Ballmer superimposed. EDIT: added one more thing

Tihiy, Congratulations, you win in a good review of 5 Start Menu replacers. Links in another MSFN thread. Look here.

Help! I've got Windows 8 and I miss my Start menu! ( Ars Technica 2013-01-14 ) Start is back! ( The Verge 2013-01-14 ) Head to head review of five Start Menu restorers: Start8, StartIsBack, Classic Shell, Pokki and RetroUI at Ars Technica. The 2nd link at The Verge is a commentary on that review.

Yeah, that is pretty much the only way other than firing up WinDbg. What I was trying to do was complete an old bucket list item, extracting these stupid Compaq drivers and hopefully get the install script directly, but it is probably impossible. I won't be repeating the experiment again soon because as I said the OP has a Compaq and is doing a full install and should probably have no problem. But if he does have more problems, someone here can walk him through RegMon/FileMon. If I had more time when I did these tests, since I was on WinXP I could have used ProcMon to locate the references the installer searched for. But time is money.

A Preview of the Ubuntu Smartphone OS from CES ( Tom's Hardware 2013-01-14 ) Part of the tidal wave of phones and tablets that are coming. Let' see, iOS, Android, Blackberry, WP, Ubuntu, WebOS, and more. What exactly was Microsoft's plan again? Oh yeah, abuse their desktop monopoly and push Windows 8 onto it so that the users would magically fall in love with the interface and run out and by enough phones to crack 5% of this behemoth market. Are drugs legal up there in Washington? Microsoft Surface sold fewer than 1 million units in Q4 2012 ( TechSpot 2013-01-14 ) UBS: Microsoft sold 1 million Surfaces last quarter ( NeoWin 2013-01-14 ) Tell Me Again How Surface Is the Tablet Consumers Really Want ( AllThingsD 2013-01-15 ) At NeoWin, the commenters are a marvel of cognitive dissonance. You gotta give them props for maintaining that optimism despite everything they hear. I almost feel sad. Almost. In fact their frayed nerves are on display in another thread ... From The Forums: Our readers debating Windows 8 ( NeoWin 2013-01-14 ) The holy war continues though I sense a little less spring in the step of the MicroZealots. What is interesting is a reference to the commenter called "mdcdesign" ( see Post #1464 ) who claims responsibility variously for Longhorn, Metro and Aero, has accidentally led to another thread there with more posts by him. I'll be getting back to this when I get some free time. Follow that last link if you can't wait to see his brilliant insight into why Aero Glass was sacrificed. EDIT: added link