CharlotteTheHarlot

It is possible that Scanreg used a previously successful stored registry. If you see all the Avast icons and it runs correctly then at least SYSTEM.DAT survived. To be safe I would still grab all the registry copies that exist. From that previous post: Reboot ... begin tapping F8 after the BIOS screen At the black screen Startup Menu select: Command Prompt Only You are now in DOS. Enter these commands attrib -r -s -h C:\Windows\*.da* attrib -r -s -h C:\Windows\Sysbckup\*.cab md C:\Critical cd C:\Critical copy C:\Windows\*.da* copy C:\Windows\Sysbckup\*.cab dir >reglist.txt You are now still in DOS in a new folder called \Critical and there is a plain text file called reglist.txt. You can either copy it to a floppy or something to access it on another computer or you can reboot this one right now by pressing the reset button or CTL-ALT-DEL. When you get back to Windows just enter this into the Start > Run box ... C:\Critical\Reglist.txt ... and it should open up in notepad or something. Just copy/paste the contents into a post here into CODE or CODEBOX. The information in there will show the dates, times, sizes of the live registry files and any backups saved by ScanReg. You also will have successfully saved safe copies of the registries to fall back on in an emergency (restoring them manually is a simple matter of a few more commands in DOS). You should mention CPU and amount of memory. Is it Win95 original or updated OSR? If you do not want to go to DOS, it can be done in Windows. Start > Find > Files or Folders. Uncheck the Include Subfolders In Look In paste this: C:\Windows;C:\Windows\Sysbckup In Named paste this: System.da? User.da? Rb???.cab Click FIND NOW or press ENTER. I would right-click drag/drop COPY them to a spare folder. You will still need a filelist of that folder and this will still be easier in a DOS prompt. But I will wait until I know what you are planning to do before typing all that out.

There are definitely drivers for i865. EDIT: Well, definitely for Win98se. Not sure about Win95 gold and OSR.

Windows Protection Error with blue screen halt after installing a large software (Avast)? Could be registry size too large causing it to not be able to load one of the two hives. IMHO, ScanReg is the worst idea. Useless. And it will throw away registries for no good reason. It may already be too late to recover the last good working copy prior to Avast. Before going further I would get into F8 command line mode and copy whatever remains to a new directory like C:\Critical (for example) ... attrib -r -s -h C:\Windows\*.da* attrib -r -s -h C:\Windows\Sysbckup\*.cab md C:\Critical cd C:\Critical copy C:\Windows\*.da* copy C:\Windows\Sysbckup\*.cab dir >reglist.txt Then post what is in that text file. The sizes, times and dates will tell the tale (especially if you can recall the time of the Avast install).

<SARC> Perhaps one way to get rid of mandatory Metro would be to gather Stardock and the developers of the other Start Menu replacements and Program Launchers and with a united front contact the DoJ about this built-in-to-the-OS start screen. Somehow the logic began by Netscape and pushed by government lawyers carried a lot of weight in the past. Remember Microsoft: 'sorry, MSIE is integral to Windows operation' And remember the government techie showing how it could easily be removed! </SARC> Of course that is sarcasm but I want to illustrate the absolute nonsensical arrogance that is Team B&S. They are pressing ahead with a disastrous choice (replacement vs optional) with Metro and are severely alienating their natural allies (like myself) to the point of anger and disgust. They are not just walking into a potential repeat of the recent past, but hard-charging like a bull-in-a-china-shop breaking everything in sight. As much as I despised that petty MSIE Netscape fiasco (and still do) I have now learned to despise Team B&S even more. Microsoft Windows 8 : Because Freedom of Choice is overrated!

Well first of all, that model 8400 definitely has one of Dell's better BIOS chips with lots of settings, particularly those concerning SATA operation mode with AHCI and IDE. So whatever HDD you plan on dropping in there, the existing Windows installation (on that HDD) it's storage interface (which is cooked into that registry) would need to match the BIOS setting. This is the cause of so many Blue Screen protection errors. Toggle between AHCI and IDE to get past the first hurdle. But ... that is the least of your problems anyway because IIRC that is an i925 family chipset and I never have heard of chipset drivers for Win9x (but I would love to be proven wrong). Consequently I believe the best you can hope for is to run Win9x in 'compatibility mode' where Windows 95 disk access will be limited to something like 16 MB/s maximum speed. But ... the Dell 8400's I've seen all had P4 Prescott chips in the 3+ GHz range. There may be a CPU bottleneck because I remember some theoretical problem with using Win95 on far-off-into-future processors over 2 GHz (Win95 came out when the i386 and i486 was popular, even before the Pentium I, and all CPU's were still measured in MHz). If this error occurs it would most likely also be a BSOD (blue screen of death). The best chance for success would be to drop a HDD from a perfectly working Win98se system that is SATA-1 aware ('IDE Mode') and preferably has a late Win9x-compatible Intel chipset like i865 cooked into its registry. You'll probably still be stuck in compatibility mode, but since that HDD speed pretty much matches what he had back in 1995 to 1996 or 1997 it might just be interesting enough to try.

Glad to hear you got it sorted out although I am still unclear on whether it was Accessibility or just the need to click 'Apply' or something else. BTW, I looked at a bunch of XP theme sites and could not find any specific groups of msstyle or full theme packs specifically for the visually impaired (i have a few clients also interested in drop-in solutions rather than tweaking the settings themselves). There are things to be wary of ... - Many of the sites found through Google just copy and paste some boilerplate text about 'visually impaired' with the same identical lines appearing over and over presumably as Google bait (for all their talk Google still has not got a handle on this). Many of these sites just reproduce generic instructions on using the Accessibility high-contrast settings in Control Panel. - Some other sites appear to be just using your search term(s) to generate a page on the fly as click bait. - Some of the themes you try to download will instead send an EXE file (not the theme) or a downloader stub. The former is almost always spyware while the latter may be some stupid client downloader app which is not needed in any browser anyway. Just be sure to always click SAVE instead of OPEN or RUN, and also just cancel any download that sends an EXE. No theme needs to be in an installer, it's files just need to be unpacked into a subfolder in Windows\Resources\Themes, while the something.theme file should be in that root folder. Done. So be careful if you go hunting. EDIT: typos

As xpclient has mentioned, there is more subjective interpretation of telemetry data discussed at the official Micros~1 Destroying Windows Blog ... As we have often mentioned throughout this thread and as many others have said on other forums, if Microsoft actually used their telemetry data in a consistent fashion, they would gut Windows to the core, leaving only perhaps Outlook Express (heavily used in the past) and Notepad! Certainly the Start Menu has incredibly high usage compared to all the obscure utilities and administrative tools (even among the noobs and rubes that stay opted-in to the CEIP data logger). Ironically, the CEIP itself should fall victim to the telemetry axe! What I find more revealing and creepy is if we look at that same quote again with particular emphasis ... Let that sink in for a minute. That is as close to confessing to pure spyware as I can remember, spyware that can differentiate between Microsoft applications and 3rd party tools. Hmmm. It is not a short leap to assume they can easily be aware of usage of certain Accessibility tools (identifying users as handicapped), or medical imagery (through Dicom medical viewers) or any variety of stuff that someone would consider absolutely private and illegal to know about. Phone numbers, banking records, and all other critical personal data is truly within their grasp and lies only a single promise away from theft - 'you have our word that data is kept anonymous and will never be used for marketing blah blah blah'. This whole thing should be re-visited. It is strange when the focus of security concerns is on theoretical exploits from buffer overflows causing security update patching of countless files over and over again, but actual working spyware is built into the operating system and functions with such a high degree of precision as to distinguish between OS utilities and 3rd party software which implies gathering of file signing data or at least actual file properties (you cannot be sure only from a filename the source of a file!). And we're to believe that the IP address and Digital ID of the user's Windows and other identifying bits are magically stripped away before it gets to the servers in Redmond?

After thinking about this some more, I suspect a plan of action will include the invention of a completely new global variable for WinXP (both for running XP and especially for setup) that would likely be called %ProfilesDirectory%. A few quick searches tell me that it does not already exist (someone please correct me!). This variable could be put to good use during setup once it is edited into the necessary setup files. The next step could be replacing any non-variable hardcoded references to \Docume... and \Progra... and other derivatives with proper variables like %ProfilesDirectory% and %ProgramFiles%. Of course this first demands a thorough audit (and complete expansion) of the WinXP setup files! I can't promise when I can try this myself, I am not even sure which sources to use to cover all eventualities. But I have it generally outlined in my mind like this ... - Take a spare computer and completely copy several representative Windows XP CDROMs - Completely WinDIFF them, remove all duplicates, leaving one of every unique file. - Expand every compressed file (*.in_ etc) - Extract every Cabinet - Search again and expand any further compressed files and/or further cabinets - Repeat until all files are done. - Brute force search every file for the target variables and strings - Create a list of every file candidate for editing with its original state and location noted ... then post it up here and re-evaluate the merits of the project moving forward. I cannot even guess right now if the number of files will be huge and unmanageable or not. I hope that anyone else that has done anything along these lines offers their insight and tips

I'm no Apple fan obviously but I have to admit that for the first time ever I am hoping for a new round of commercials this time that skewer what should be named Microsoft Tiles 1.0. Seriously, like most everyone I despised Apple's snotty arrogance, their childish commercials, I even remember that banner back in the 80's from a Cupertino photo (still cannot find it online) of Apple Headquarters with the inexplicable 'Beat Microsoft' banner overhead. I say inexplicable because Apple has never even tried to compete in Microsofts' arena, and were the great beneficiary of important software like Word and Excel. But seeing how Microsoft fanboys are now acting even worse than their counterparts (in other forums) I am completely disgusted. I'm also starting to think that maybe Apple should let OS X out into the market just for the sake of competition (but I would prefer that Windows XP MCE, Vista and 7 were also available of course). Anyway, you know who must be one of the luckiest guys walking around right now? That Justin dude from the last set of Apple commercials. You know why? He is probably sitting around waiting for the inevitable call for the next campaign which anyone could quickly design to make fun of Windows Retro or Microsoft Tiles or Windows Sesame Street Edition. The material simply writes itself. Splice in the Sinofsky live fail and Microsoft would never live it down, even if they spend $500 Million or $5 Billion. Moreover he could name his price. ... But, the other reason that Justin dude is so lucky is if Apple doesn't call and Microsoft rings him instead. Turning him around in a commercial with praise for the touchscreen and their new childish OS would be a great coup and would demonstrate extremely smart thinking in Redmond. It is for that very reason I guarantee it will never happen. ( original ) Micros~1 Windows 8 : We changed our name to better reflect how Windows operates! EDIT: updated image URL, and again

Funny thing is that I was just thinking out loud in another thread about how great it would have been if Microsoft had done this for WinXP. Let me first admit that I have never tried retro-fitting the new Windows 6 (Vista/7) profile strategy to Windows 5 (e.g., WinXP). I have always thought it was theoretically possible but still have not found the time to experiment. So I will not be able to offer anything except perhaps vague, marginally useful, philosophical rambling here. Presuming you are confining it to the simpler 32-bit model, In a nutshell, is this your goal? ... C:\Documents and Settings ---> C:\Users C:\Program Files ------------> C:\Programs Also, what do you mean by "using scripts"? Do you mean VB or Powershell scripts using external commands like REG.EXE? Or are you referring to Registry scripts (.REG) to be imported? If it is the latter, and you are thinking about editing all occurrences of C:\Documents and Settings (plus all the possible short filename permutations e.g., DOCUME~1, perhaps complicated with French translation) and then importing the corrections, well, this begs another question. Do you know what registry Expand_SZ data types are? I guarantee you will be learning all about them if you don't know already. Backing up a bit, let's consider that broadly there are two ways to approach this heart transplant: (1) Altering an existing working WinXP installation after the fact. (2) Modifying the setup files to fresh install it correctly in the first place. IMHO, the strategy with the highest probably of success (mentioned by Ponch) is probably (2) and I suspect it will involve more than just using nLite. I expect this will mean completely copying the WinXP CDROM to folders on the HDD, integrate the SP3 if not done already, and THEN search INF files (and perhaps every single file on disk) for strings like Profile ProfilesDirectory ProgramFiles CommonDir as well as Documents and Settings and also Docume~1 and Program Files and also Progra~1. After all, this is Microsoft we are talking about, or should I say Micros~1. If you are lucky (well, me too since I would really like to try this) then perhaps some Google research may find someone that has already identified all the points of change that need editing. My guess is that it will probably be necessary to first search for SystemRoot in order to identify the vectors where Windows setup first initializes the variables for later use in the setup process. I suspect it may happen in more than one location. I can't remember if there is one variable in WinXP that singlehandedly sets it correctly, i.e., ProfilesDirectory = C:\Users. A quick look at Google did not give me any assurance that there is an easy way to accomplish this. Now, method (1) breaks down two more ways. One is theoretically simple, (1a) just adding a new user to the system (using the new C:\Users path you want) after you have somehow successfully changed the environment variables to point to the new physical path on disk. The other way, (1b) changing all existing accounts (including SYSTEM, etc) is much harder, perhaps impossible. I have often thought about the logistics of this, it is a giant undertaking because the Registry is loaded with references to the x:\Docume... convention, lots of them are in plain sight in normal Strings, but the more important ones are in Expand_SZ. Compounding this is the fact that sometimes paths with variables are found in normal strings as well as Expanded strings. Add to this the exponential complicator the tilde (~) possibilities. And don't forget to mount the registries of all the other existing users since they will also have references to correct. So there are many things to cover in doing the (.REG) import fixing. A quick checklist of possibilities (subject to later editing if someone thinks of something I forget) of data to search for ... Normal Strings containing only variables %UserProfile% etc (*) Normal Strings containing only paths C:\Documents and Settings Normal Strings containing only paths C:\Docume~1 Normal Strings containing both %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings Normal Strings containing both %SystemDrive%\Docume~1 Expand_SZ containing only variables %UserProfile% etc (*) Expand_SZ containing only paths C:\Documents and Settings Expand_SZ containing only paths C:\Docume~1 Expand_SZ containing both %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings Expand_SZ containing both %SystemDrive%\Docume~1 (*) Paths that only use variables would be OK once the global variables have been corrected. Some people might wonder why variables like %ProgramFiles% or %UserProfile% or %SystemRoot% would even appear in a normal string because ideally it shouldn't. Well it can. It all depends on the author of some program and what he chose for the registry data type and as long as his function expands the variable as needed then he can store it however he wants to. For example, %SystemRoot% and %UserProfile% are found in plain text in INI files by programs that expand variables themselves. They are also found in places like plain text theme (.THE .THEME) files. Some people might wonder why fully qualified paths (with or without ~tilde~) but without system variables are found in Expand_SZ strings. There is simply no good reason for it, but programmers are fickle. Some think they are getting free quasi-encryption which somehow protects them from casual users looking at the plain text of a registry export. Others might have just made a mistake. Murphy's law of computers again, given a set of rules every possible permutation of combinations will eventually exist. (~sigh~). Remember that the case can be mixed. So searching needs to be case-insensitive. This rules out searching a registry export for expanded strings (assuming you know the hex equivalents for the spelling of the path. This kind of search needs to be done live in REGEDIT or an equivalent tool like Registry Workshop or something else. Once again, extra user hives need to be mounted. Remember that any part of a path with more than eight characters might have a ~tilde~. This leads to exponential variation like Program Files\Common Files and Progra~1\Common Files and Program Files\Common~1 and Progra~1\Common~1 or more if the paths below are long filenames! Mathematically it is 2^2 = 4 different possibilities just for these two levels. Three levels deep is 2^3 = 8 and four is 2^4 = 16 and so on! Of course that is limiting it to ~1 and not the case of ~2 which would really suck! Therefore the two search strings that will cover the most territory in a single pass is probably these ... \Docume ... and ... \Progra Unfortunately this does not end at the registry. It is entirely possible for many files to also reference variables SystemRoot etc ... and/or strings with C:\Documents and Settings ... and/or strings with C:\Docume~1. INI files for example and CFG and BAT and CMD and LNK and INF and etc. As mentioned above, THEME files will often have variables, but they also work just fine with full paths. Therefore a brute force search of every file on an entire hard-disk will be the only sure way to locate every reference. As daunting as this sounds, the good news is that the 2nd pass and 3rd pass is much faster than the 1st pass apparently because of improved caching in memory of recent disk data between Win9x and WinXP. This can be demonstrated by doing a directory filelist twice, ex: dir c:\*.* /a /s > Filelist.txt. The first one is murder, the second one much better. You asked about renaming the User profiles after all the changes were completed. I would instead first do straight copies and rename the copies. Leave the originals for a while. Unfortunately it is impossible to perfectly copy the profiles while you are running. This means booting up in an independent OS and accessing the disk containing your Windows install remotely to copy the profiles, or dropping the disk in another computer and copying them that way. This is an offline job to be done by something like DaRT or unofficial equivalent. All of a sudden method (2) looks much better than method (1). But please note, I am NOT trying to talk you out of it, just pointing out some of the potential trouble along the way. Overall, I do believe this idea (method (2)) has merit because this is one area where a Windows XP design flaw was successfully corrected in later versions (and then they blew it again with C:\Program Files (x86) anyway. Let's not even discuss the Wow64 and System32 logic either). If I can find the time I will do what I suggest and expand an SP3 CDROM to a folder and brute force scan every file as I suggested and post a list that I find. Unfortunately I just thought of another problem, it is probably the case where some compressed files (i.e., Something.inf compressed as Something.in_) contain references that need edits. Such references will not be found in even a brute force file search. This could become quite the project if it involves expanding every file in the \i386 folders and probably even those found in .cab archives. Yikes! This means to create a complete inventory of every file path reference potentially used by Windows XP setup will necessitate a complete expansion of every file and cabinet. Then, locating the files, editing them and recompressing them and/or re-inserting them in cabinets (with possible checksum problems?). Finally, all of this may need to be done multiple times depending on the differences between Retail and OEM, Home and Pro, and even official MSDN SP3 Final versus SP3 applied to one of the other public flavors. I hope some others who have done some research here can comment and offer their own insight! EDIT: fixing my own stupid mistakes

--JorgeA This is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. I notice that few of the fanboys will touch it either. Microsoft is attempting to leverage and cash in on their unique monopoly position: their almost complete domination of the x86 computer world. They are acting out of desperation because other, newer, different markets escaped their grasp, it is palpable. This is their 'all-in' move, betting all the good will they earned, betting all the ground they gained in over 30 years of development. The seething anger at this move is also palpable among those that were part of this same history. Let us remember the path that took Microsoft here. The old saying 'Dance with the one that brung ya' comes to mind. It is undoubtedly true that the whole free-wheeling 16-bit and 32-bit x86 hardware and software world is who brung ya. This is how they got here. It was primarily the open-architecture driven by IBM (against all logic really, and could now be seen almost as a gift to the world) that invited everyone, hardware or software to the party. It was also Intel who steadily improved the x86 architecture (I believe with IBM input) and gave us the 286 and 386 even before the mid-1980's while Microsoft was not exactly lighting any fires to speak of. The hard work was getting done but most of it not in Redmond. Yes, Microsoft developed a few nice bits of code along the way (Excel and later NT were outstanding), purchased others, and by hook and by crook now control the entire segment. Perhaps the fork at the OS/2 vs NT fiasco is what hurt us, I don't know. Many others were more than capable of also writing an OS, but it is a very tough job, and seems pointless once standards are accepted and the ball is rolling. Nevertheless, Microsoft wound up on top and here we are. Many of us see betrayal here, it has been mentioned throughout this thread and many others. The 800 pound gorilla in the room is a plan hatched in the executive boardrooms in Redmond, 'how can we create an eco-system completely under our control' (Apple-envy) and 'how can we capitalize and monetize this huge user base we have accumulated'. Put simply, Microsoft wants to build a software system where they are the gatekeepers to what is allowed, they take a Sopranos sized cut on other people's work, they control the advertising and even the OFF switch. It is certainly a new business model for them, and like I said before, Wall Street will no doubt cheer because ethics and morality are in short supply these days. But is it okay? Is it responsible? To be sure there really are ethical issues, perhaps even legal ones too ('look and feel', anti-trust) that will come in to focus now. But this is almost unprecedented. Try to imagine if after John Rockefeller built Standard Oil and after nearly everyone was using his product he decides to change to natural gas phasing out petroleum so you need to get new cars and he takes a 30% cut on those cars as well, picks the models allowed on the road, and turns them off if he chooses (yeah, no auto analogy is perfect, but this one is very difficult to write because it is so unique). Ethically it is unsavory to take advantage of a captive audience, particularly one you are simply lucky to have in the first place. Microsoft is barely out of the last government action and already I see quite a few possible points of vulnerability. Perhaps they think they have bought off enough Congressman this time around? Some extra pro-active measures will need to be taken. I hope many more people are contacting their reps in Congress and as well as their State Attorney Generals making sure that Microsoft is kept on a shorter, tighter leash. The Netscape vs. MSIE thing was nothing compared to this. This is treading on dangerous ice with respect to anti-trust and they need to be reminded again and again. Something else that needs to be scrutinized is the OEM hardware industry. We have to make sure Microsoft does not try to pressure them into phasing out older Windows drivers, which is the surest way to murder the previous working OS in favor of the new Windows Tiles. Email MSI and Gigabyte and tell them to continue making Win7 and even WinXP drivers, ignore Microsoft. Again, pressure on the political Reps and State AG's will help, not to mention contacting the OEMs like Dell and HP directly warning them not to collude with Microsoft in an effort to save Metro. This is probably an easier sell now than in the past since Microsoft is actively competing against some of them. Most importantly we simply have to speak our mind. I feel the same as most commenters here. I can sense the anger. No-one likes to be lied to and no-one likes to be betrayed.

Well I would hope the "BARF!!!" is directed at Microsoft for trying to kill even the possibility of viewing HLP files in Windows 6+, another clear manifestation of planned obsolescence. I've got all those things you mention and more, all the official help dev tools, unofficial decompilers, all those pages saved and bookmarked, been there, done that. But my original comment stands - "... and no easy way to convert them".. The reason it is so difficult to 'convert' HLP to something else is because the format really does suck, but it is what we had back in the Windows 3.x era. CHM on the other hand is much easier to handle, which is just really a ZIP-like archive of HTML pages with relative links. Extracting them is fast, lossless, recompiling can be done in seconds (big plug for HTM2CHM by Yaroslav Kirillov), converting the extracted source files is as easy as processing any HTML. With one caveat, some people (~cough~ Microsoft) go to outrageous lengths to make the source unmanageable with over-use of Javascript and randomized anchor names and other tricks. But it is still not insurmountable. For a very long time, all the good programming references were only available as HLP, the Intel Opcodes, Assembler, the entire Win32 and other API's, C, C++, Javascript, Pascal, (fortunately most everything was re-done in CHM, er maybe unfortunately?). Many non-programming topics as well, country historical data, population statistics, even books and things. Again, much was redone later, but I doubt everything. I guess my point is simply that Microsoft must tread carefully here because they are more than just a software company. People rely upon them to access actual data, not just Twitter. But we're off the subject really. All I was saying is that Microsoft chose to deprecate HLP and later, CHM, which even that is fine. Deprecate their use for future development. But it is criminal to try to make it impossible to simply view existing files by eliminating the viewers. There is no excuse for that. What, they would have us believe that there isn't room in a distribution for a tiny Winhlp32.ex_ or Hh.ex_ taking a few KB as loose files or even less when scrunched into a WIM. They can tell that nonsense to their fanboys who will swallow anything but it doesn't fly with any logical person. What worries me even more than the HLP and CHM planned obsolescence (and it is just one example) is the danger of precedent should it pass UN-criticized. For example look at photography. There is a real possibility that an entire generation of photographs could be lost to the ages because of the fickle consumer that gobbled up cheap cameras and printers with no thought about the future, and the businesses that willfully feed them because of the race to the bottom. Their photographic 'negatives' exist as downloaded images on HDD's, often in lossy JPG format only. Few people if any even care that they are a single 'reformat the system' or 'HDD click of death' or 'lost cloud access' away from vanishing forever. As long as the cameras keep selling and Microsoft keeps making live tiles everything is just peachy to the bean-counters and the sheeple. But lots of data is truly at risk of being lost. Wouldn't it be ironic if a century or two from now a big gap of missing photos exists from the early 21st century but 1st generation photographs from the 1840's like Daguerreotypes still survive. Great thought and care needs to expended as technology moves forward. The consumerist model is an easy, selfish way to do business, it is probably irresistible to a modern executive or an average computer user. The adults who were not born yesterday need to stand up and point out the potential dangers of fleeting trends. EDIT: typos

There is deliberate ignorance, yes, but also a component of irresponsibility, as in 'with great power comes great responsibility'. In my opinion all facets of computers and technology, except for data, are expendable. Data is the only thing that matters and really is the only thing that carries forward through generations. It should be treated sacredly, not willfully destroyed ('reformat the system!' says Tech Support). Microsoft first began to worry me when the tired but widespread HLP format was forsaken with Windows 6. Yeah there is a download to fix it (though in Win8 it is doubtful) but they were definitely trying to kill it. There is a lot of DATA, not just program help but statistical and historical data locked up in those files all over the world and no easy way to convert them. Expect the same thing to happen with CHM shortly which contain far more data. I am not saying they are perfect formats at all (far from it!), I am saying keep the viewers in Windows because that is the responsibility you have taken upon yourself by maneuvering yourself into a position of authority and of monopoly. Besides, they regularly support countless other far more obscure formats in many of their applications. What worries me is the cavalier attitude they and many others display concerning user data in general. Deliberate data destruction through bad advice (reformat it!) or the usual planned obsolescence IMHO is a high crime of Computer Science, like a Doctor violating their Hippocratic oath. Their feet need to be held to the fire. If they fail to respect users' data or *any* data in general because of short-sighted marketing or profit decision-making, then something will need to be done. Moving, as you say, to a content consuming model, which is really the Twiiterizing or Facebooking of Microsoft is the easy and lazy thing to do (but the WRONG thing given their unique position). It suits the empty-headed executives in Redmond and it also suits Wall Street as well because the talking heads do not care if Windows even works at all, just that the perception is good. When Microsoft begins layoffs in a year or two Wall Street will cheer again for their bravery and willingness to appease shareholders (but no discussion of the effect their incompetence has on the technological world that depends upon their products). Very few feedbacks will ever make it into the executive boardroom that concern quality, only quantity and perception. The immediate problem I think is the undeniable envy, the Apple-envy and the Google-envy. As to which is stronger it is a coin-toss, but it exists and they are once again operating at a disadvantage, in full copy the enemy mode even though the window of opportunity will have likely closed by the time they get their footing. They learned nothing from the Internet and Netscape fiasco. In fact, the visible response was that horrific Channels thing on the Win98 desktop, a proto-Metro attempt at turning the desktop into an internet appliance. Almost nothing has changed! If they want to get out of the OS business (admittedly a very tough job) maybe they should just release the Windows XP or 7 source code as a gift to the world and step aside. If they are too cowardly to do that and insist on playing in this game they have to re-commit to their responsibility which is very large. People out here like us, long timers with the various platforms, are probably the only ones who really care at all about data and the literal Operating System. Ironically I think we are the only ones that even care about Microsoft itself. So we have to use the few tools we have to be heard, criticize them, ridicule them, influence them, and ignore the fanboys, before they complete their corporate suicide and forsake the awesome responsibility of their position.

'Show Desktop' is easily the most clicked icon in my own experience. No doubt about it at all. For me, the absolute arrogance of the Windows GUI team became cemented for all time when Windows 6.1 was designed and they pulled that stunt with the shift to the bottom right. Don't get me wrong, I like Aero Glass and Peek, but that was exactly the kind of insanity they are famous for. Microsoft has often spoke of 'Muscle Memory' and other concepts of GUI design, but they never fail at doing something that contradicts their supposed adherence to standards. People had been clicking on the icon near the Start Menu for at least 11 years by the time 'Windows 7' was released in 2009 and still that did not make a difference. I've come to terms with the fact that with every release of Windows, a non-trivial amount of time must be devoted to hammering the thing back into shape to make it functional again. Windows releases are no longer a matter of excitement but instead it is a matter of preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, (unfortunately with emphasis on worst).

Excellent summary. Traditionally we have a name for that design, Rube Goldberg machine, but perhaps now Ballmer-Sinofsky? See pages of them at Google Images. NOTE: we really should resist the urge to embed any Animated GIF versions here because it only takes a couple kill the page! Giant Full Screen demonstration of Microsoft's vision. Microsoft Windows 8 : No-one needs more than a screen of colored squares! (or 640KB of RAM)

Exactly! EDIT: RE: "wordless, tiny icons" ... I forgot to mention that there is balloon popup when you hold the pointer over the icons. This is a very good use of the 'COMMENT' field found in a shortcut's LNK properties (it looks much like the popup cell comments in Excel).

One good use of QuickLaunch as QuickDrop is for unknown files. At the moment I have Mitec EXE, Merijn FileAlyzer and Nirsoft ExeInfo in there (and shortly PEexplorer and a few others to be added). Any of them will give some good info on an unknown file just for an example. It looks like you have IrfanView in yours as do I. It also doubles as a quasi-FileSniffer like the others I mentioned since it examines files based upon strings in the header rather than using file extensions. IrfanView will prompt to rename when you drop a file with an incorrect extension. Of course the main purpose is for dropping images and multimedia files (or folders) which it does such an excellent job at displaying, converting and even light editing. SendTo is pretty much the same thing since it is also a folder of shortcuts that functions the same way, but using QuickLaunch can save time because the delay for the Context Menu is dependent upon the number of Shell Extensions you have installed, and dragging file(s)/folder(s) through the Context Menu is also subject to secondary delays when you drag them past Shell Extensions with flyouts unless you move the mouse quickly and adeptly. If the Taskbar is set to be always visible then QuickLaunch really becomes the quickest method for drag/drop processing of files and folders. I should point out that it is rather easy to mess this up though. If you drag a bunch of files onto an icon in QuickLaunch, *but* you make the mistake of releasing the button to either side of the icon, then you wind up with a mess of shortcuts or even the actual 'moved' files in the QuickLaunch bar! Undoing this can be difficult. So it takes a steady hand, a bit of practice and a feel for the responsiveness of a given system and mouse before it becomes 2nd nature. EDIT: typos

Yep. Double row rulez! And it is even better at 1920 pixels. I like to think of QuickLaunch also as QuickDrop. Nice place for shortcuts to programs and batch files that accept file(s) and/or folder(s) dropped onto them. Kids nowadays just don't understand such complicated uses for Windows.. This is how most of my systems end up looking like after a few days of screwing around. Lots of drop icons on an always visible taskbar (I just wish I could figure out a way to use that dead space below the Start Button). The VisualStyle is from one of the nice Royale themes, but I might have edited it though. The Opera skin is a modified version of an old one from the version 9 era. The newer skins are getting too minimalistic for my taste. Notice the "Identify" and "Author" toggles in the bottom right, an easy and very useful tweak. Edit: Image was full size 1920x1080. Now it is smaller ( probably from PhotoBucket )! updated image URL

Team B&S managed to gather some media attention today ... Microsoft will offer digital Windows 8 Pro upgrades for $39.99 - TechSpot Microsoft Announces Windows 8 Pro Upgrade $39.99 Promo - Tom's Hardware Windows 8 Upgrade Will Cost Just $39.99 - AnandTech Windows 8 Pro upgrade to cost $39.99 until January 31, 2013 - NeoWin (Fanboy Central ) Windows 8 Pro Upgrade to Cost Just $40 During Special Promotion - Thurott (Fanboy in Chief ) (~yawn~) Believe it or not ... that $39.99 price is for money you give to Microsoft ... not vice versa. With this spectacular deal they are offering to wipe away your fully working Operating System, including the Start Menu, Aero Glass, colorful icons, custom Toolbars, QuickLaunch and Jump Lists and replace them with Windows 8 with Metro and expect payment for the downgrade. No really. What a deal. And in keeping with the Microsoft tradition of clarity, if you read the articles, there is still some confusion between the various sites on whether Data/Files and/or Programs and/or Settings are in fact kept for XP/Vista users (also mentioned upthread). I just don't care enough to examine it further. Microsoft Windows 8 : Fast and Fluid Experience! (like Diarrhea)

What is this supposed to mean exactly? Seems to me that this is just a jab at Windows 8 using previous OS data, but I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 8 would BSOD if you overclocked. What about underclocking? The article and comments do seem a bit rambling and unfocused. But I think one commenter there called GrumpyOldBloke has a good point ... I endorse this point myself. For all the talk of slimming down and less resources, the fact remains that there is a pile of newly added checks and balances starting in Windows 6.0, some of it a bone thrown to the Hollywood IP Mafia and little if anything targeting the end-users' benefit. Seriously, you cannot even count all the startup services and tasks on a fresh install (even before OEM crapware), perpetual disk indexing, and Restore Points created for every little Windows update (even a KB sized toolbar). The Event Log has never seen so much activity. Windows never rests anymore. By design, the CPU is essentially there to service Windows rather than the other way around. Having unexplained freezes or crashes or slow-downs is to be expected for those that (who unlike us) do not stay on top of everything and weed out all the garbage and non-essential processes. Throw in some dodgy video and/or printer driver and/or application suite that adds 75 new startup points and it's a miracle it runs at all. One easy way to de-stabilize any Windows version is to blindly accept and install the Windows Live package of useless applications. Add this to a computer that is already operating in the margins with barely enough CPU cycles to spare, (e.g., Vista/7 on a single core), then you are right back to a dozen years ago when WinXP was taxing the less-than-capable (for WinXP, not Win9x or Win2k) current hardware. It is illustrative to run a simple app like CALC.EXE on Win9x with no filtering under FileMon/RegMon (ProcMon does not work there) and then do the same on Win2K and then WinXP (with ProcMon). There is a dramatic increase in both dependencies and unrelated backround process activity between the two platforms. This does not improve from Windows 5.x to 6.x, it increases even further so that tens of thousands of events are recorded by ProcMon in a few seconds. And there are errors too. A few more iterations of the Windows platform and it will be untraceable and unmanageable for x86 software to run at all, at least reliably. Perhaps that is their plan anyway, to let it die, and then welcome us to their new walled garden of MicroApps (where they take a 30% cut and control the off switch). It's a brave new world. BTW, didn't Microsoft miss a perfect opportunity here to re-design the BSOD, into a PPSOD, Pastel Pink Screen Of Death?

In the same sense that one can drive around the potholes on a really bad street but given the choice every day it might be more sensible to just use a different street. There is still the uglified Aero transparency. And there is still the low budget amateurish icon set that looks like it was stolen out of a public bus or airport terminal. Lots of people will be angry with the decapitated multimedia functionality which is designed to make you ignore the piles of optical media you already purchased and instead become a dumb terminal for internet based content and advertisements. There is a lot of freedom of choice that has been deprecated and that is the point really. To breed a whole new category, a stable of consumer Microslaves who are one click away from buying stuff. Frankly I think this thing is one of the biggest insults ever perpetrated on a company's existing customer user base while simultaneously a wild flailing stab for the non-users currently comfortable on their iPhones and other rival devices. See what they did there, designing one product for two completely different audiences. Metro should have been a self-contained simple add-in available for any Windows version, a VM-like protected sandbox building upon previous ideas like DosBox and Sandboxie that runs in a Window for developers or end-users on demand. Not smashed like a square peg in a round hold onto everybody's system that may be interested in the minor updates to the OS core between Windows 6.1 and Windows 6.2.

xpclient, Question: when you click the Start Button in Classic Shell, what message does it send to Ballmer and Sinofsky who are so busy watching the telemetry data from the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program? It be great if the telemetry was configurable, perhaps a custom message. Just sayin'.

I just followed these exact steps and got the correct result which is the old Windows 95 appearance with white text on dark blue background, this does appear correctly when right-click on the desktop (*and* in the flyout submenu with 'New'). We should full stop right here because getting something other than white on blue is a key symptom of something that needs to be fixed. Tinkering with Advanced Appearance will only mask it. Ideas ... [1] Accessibility feature or add-in of some kind? [2] 3rd party Theme Manager? [3] Some crazy policy setting or TweakUI adjustment? (Come to think of it, if you have TweakUI running and it has the 'persistent' startup thing where it loads on every boot, you could try to disable this and see if the Classic returns to normal. Just an idea). [4] Any chance that you overwrote the official Luna theme with another? Certainly this could cause something like this because I believe that 'Classic' is contained within Luna (luna.msstyles ... size=4,190,352 ... date=2008-04-13) Yes, Selected Items is the correct object to change colors for the menus, including the desktop context (right-click) popup. After you altered the Selected Items (NOTE: the upper font/size/color is for the background, the lower one is for the foreground), are you absolutely positive you clicked 'OK' to dismiss the Advanced Appearance dialog, *and* the clicked 'APPLY' in the still open Display Properties parent window, and then finally 'OK' to dismiss that window? Again, the problem should not have to be fixed this way, applying the default 'Classic' should have a known expected result here. NOTE: After this is fixed you may want to hunt around the WinXP themes sites for a custom VisualStyle that caters to your particular eyesight. I expect there are many special hi-contrast Accessibility versions around. Also note that this will require you to patch the UxTheme.dll first. EDIT: shuffled the quote around and fixed up the reply.

Maybe this is just another Windows 8 fanboy! He sounds like their target audience.

In the above mentioned NeoWin article: Microsoft killed the start button because it wasn't used one of the commenters linked to a recent Dilbert cartoon ... http://dilbert.com/2012-05-07/ Don't know if they actually had Windows 8 in mind but it sure fits right in to the discussion here. I'll try to embed it ... ( original ) Microsoft Windows 8 : That'll teach you for opting out of our spying Customer Experience Improvement Program EDIT: updated image URL, and again