JorgeA

Stop ragging on Microsoft. Don't you KNOW that their highly paid Professional Experts have metrics and focus groups and crystal balls to support their design choices?? Shame on you, you hater... --JorgeA P.S. I've always kind of liked the look of the iPhone screen, with the icons that appear to be floating in the air. Like a "legacy" Windows desktop. But then, I'd much rather have "a phone that's just a phone." Life is complicated enough as it is, to have to deal with yet another gadget that needs care and nurturing.

Thanks for the news items, jaclaz. Couldn't be happening to a nicer bunch of folks... instead of the correct: Sure, not a problem. I want to distribute this warning to my family and neighbors. I just sneezed, so let me just get a *leenex to blow my nose first, and then I'll ?erox the printout. The price of enormous success is that your brand becomes part of the language, a new name for the product itself. Should be a cause for satisfaction, not alarm. --JorgeA

Unlike the regular Start Menu, the Metro start screen takes over the whole monitor -- which is a hindrance to work, for instance when I'm trying to follow complicated instructions witn unfamiliar program names in a desktop window and the Metro screen covers up the next step I have to take. With the regular Start Menu, I can open it and look for the next program while still being able to see the directions telling me what I need to do. --JorgeA

So you didn't lose your update history, and you don't experience any slowdown when launching the programs that you added to the EMET list? --JorgeA

Well, this has actually nothing to do with WIndows 8 (i.e. it's collateral damage) it is evident how the idea is to push Chrome. Collateral damage is right. I don't think that (in this case) there is a general plan to push people off XP and onto a newer OS, but that's the effect. Assimilate or suffer the consequences. And within a few weeks, any regular PC user who finally gets pushed off XP and buys a new computer, chances are it'll have Windows 8 on it. --JorgeA

Microsoft software takes another step toward the feudal model (you pay rent to the cyberlords in perpetuity). Note that, despite the additional hit, if you tend to use your software for longer periods, then it's still a better deal to buy it outright. For example, using Office for six years (I used Office 2000 through the end of 2008) brings the yearly cost of the license (vs. a $100 yearly subscription) to less than $75. That is, unless they render the software practically unusable, as discussed in my previous post above. --JorgeA

This is how Windows users will ultimately be dragged into Metro-land: make previous versions of Windows able to do less and less. If you're on XP, you can (I suppose) switch to a different browser, but there are tons of "default" users out there who aren't aware that they can do that, and wouldn't know how to do it anyway. That's how they can pronounce a new sh*tty interface a "success." And in any case, resisting the upgrade treadmill is getting harder and harder to do, as all sorts of inter-related software keeps pushing you to the latest and worst greatest. Norton security products, for example, no longer support earlier versions of Firefox, so as a user I'm forced to choose between losing the Norton browser toolbar or switching to the current Firefox version. Increasingly, the Information Superhighway is constructed such that your current car will no longer run on it and you have to keep getting new cars. --JorgeA

So, neither of you, when you click on Windows Updates and then select "View update history," you're not missing the update history? --JorgeA

Monday night my wife's Windows 7 PC suffered a strange episode after she tried to close the entertainment website TMZ: instead of the window closing, dozens of new browser instances opened up within a few seconds. I had to interrupt a business phone call to address the problem. Running Windows Defender Offline revealed and took care of an adware infection, but that's not why I'm posting here. During the course of our Web research into the problem, we learned that there is a new IE exploit in the wild, which Microsoft considers serious enough to recommend deploying the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET; see the link under "Suggested Actions"). Other places recommended avoiding the use of Internet Explorer until MS issues a fix for the vulnerability. My wife was spooked by the weird behavior the night before, so we decided to play it safe and install both Firefox and EMET on my wife's PC. I already have Firefox (although IE8 is still my default browser) and had downloaded EMET back in July to my Vista machine but had never gotten around to trying it. This was the prod I needed to give it a whirl. Boy, am I sorry I tried that thing. Within an hour of installing EMET and adding iexplore.exe to its list of applications, a Windows Update icon popped up in my Notification Area. "Oh, maybe Microsoft has already found a fix for this IE problem," I thought. So I clicked on the icon and the usual "Checking Windows Updates" window appeared. Except that it never actually found anything! Normally, I find out within a few seconds what the Update is, or if there aren't any. But here the "Checking..." notice never stopped, never came to a resolution. It just kept running. Then, when I clicked on "View Update History" -- there was nothing listed!! Huh?? It claimed that I had "never" installed any updates!?! I tried System Restore to the point just before EMET was installed, but the restore attempt failed. Next I tried to restore to the previous restore point, a couple of days ago, and that failed too. "Nothing was changed," I think is how the System Restore failure message reads. Wonderful. An extensive Google search revealed little useful about the situation. I did learn where the Windows Update history log is located (DataStore.epd in Windows --> SoftwareDistribution --> DataStore). The current .EPD file was 80MB in size. Fortunately I'd done a complete system image at the start of the month, so I went into that to see if recovering the DataStore.epd file from there would help. This seemed promising, as the size of that file is 243MB. So I renamed DataStore.epd to DataStore.bak and extracted the September 1 version to the DataStore directory. This appeared to work, except that the recovered file was now 100MB (not 243, and not 80) and the update history still wasn't showing up. I went to bed feeling angry and frustrated, reviewing my possibilities for getting back an OS that can get updates. I left the machine running, backing up my data and e-mail files in case I needed to install a system image. Before going to bed, at some point (it's all a blur now) I uninstalled EMET from my computer. Slept for little more than four hours , woke up still mulling over what to do. Came back to the computer, saw the Windows Update icon again. With no expectation of improvement, I clicked on it out of curiosity, and -- lo and behold! -- it found and installed a Windows Defender update. (Three updates that I had hidden long ago also showed up again.) So that function seems to have come back, although I still lack the update history and another Google search has uncovered no way to recover it. Incidentally, my wife had added other applications to the EMET list, including Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, and MS Word, on the theory that she might be downloading or receiving documents of these types via e-mail, so the additional protection provided by EMET might come in handy. But the next time she tried to watch a video online (on CNN), she found that it took forever to load. Opening Word documents was also running like molasses. Removing Acrobat from the EMET list took care of the video issue, and removing Word from the list took care of the molasses. She ended up uninstalling EMET altogether -- it made using her PC an exercise in patience -- and is browsing with Firefox pending a proper IE fix from Microsoft. User beware. Oh, and I'd still like to know if there is any possible way to recover/restore/retrieve the Windows Update History -- you know, the one that tells you, in a neat chronological list, when you installed the updates and whether the attempts failed or succeeded. --JorgeA

Another utility to boot directly to the Windows 8 desktop has been devised. How many of these tweaks and hacks will be needed for MS to take the hint that we don't want to be herded into doing things one particular way? --JorgeA

Ars Technica has a lukewarm review of the Win8 "touch" experience on an all-in-one desktop PC: It's conceivable that Win8 touch PCs will be received in the market about as well as 3D TVs: with an "I don't need this" yawn. --JorgeA

jaclaz LOL, in the article somebody is quoted as actually saying that the design is "contemporary." If this is indicative of the design trend, then maybe I can change careers and become a logo designer. Which brings up another thing that's been bothering me. Even if I never get Windows 8, or even if I ever do get Windows 8 but manage to avoid the Metro screen -- my eyes will still have to be insulted by that plain ugly Metro look, as more and more websites are adopting it. --JorgeA

Well, as (I think) Tripredacus pointed out, MS already ran spots for IE9 barely two months before the official introduction of IE10, so they might bite on the suggestion. Picture Abbott and Costello lookalikes trying to explain this in a "Who's on first?" type of routine... --JorgeA

Well obviously not today but the theory is sound; ARM architecture can scale just fine to meet high-power computing requirements, and some software Developer/Publishers might like the idea of a 'reboot' on a new platform, with DRM and a walled garden that works and offers at least the promise of more profitability. However when you factor in that it will be Microsoft's DRM, Microsoft's walled garden, and Microsoft's dysfunctional Metro/Modern/NCI (where did NCI come from?) interface -- it's difficult to understand how any Developer/Publisher without a twenty year contract with Microsoft could find this any more appealing then any rational Consumer that's functioning above the neck... Thanks for filling me in on this, hoak. It's a little reassuring to learn that, if ARM wins the day, we won't necessarily be relegated to using low-power processors. But what will become of our "legacy" x86 applications as our PCs die and need replacing? At that point, I suspect, we'd be sucked into the Matrix world of pre-approved apps in a Microsoft cocoon, right? (By way of contrast, AFAIK pretty much any of my post-DOS programs will work on my current PCs if I choose to run them there.) --JorgeA P.S.: NCI = Nameless Crap Interface -- jaclaz's designation, devised after MS dropped "Metro" without apparently coming up with a new name that sticks

In light of jaclaz's experience, I'll resist the temptation to go deeper! --JorgeA

By pushing touch and the Win8 interface that supports it, Intel may be helping to dig its own grave. In Windows Weekly 271, Paul Thurrott predicts that (If you want to hear it yourself, the relevant portion begins at 1:38:12.) So, putting Thurrott's declarations together, "the desktop must die" and the Metro-faced PCs we use will be running on ARM. What will that mean for gaming, CAD, video and photo editors, financial analysts, and anybody else whose work and interests require the use of high-powered machines? --JorgeA

LOL, nice find Jorge! In fact I'd wager that 0.23% is within the margin of error of measurement of something as complex as OS adoption and market-share, so it could well be flat or even in decline... Thanks hoak. We've been monitoring the growth of Windows 8 usage since the DP. I hadn't thought of this, but you're right that the stats could well be margin-of-error and the real usage is even less. Oh, very interesting about the tech fashion weenies. That'll be a hoot if the fab raves over at Neowin actually die out once the OS hits store shelves. Good point. Even in good times, the #1 rule of survival in a bureaucratic setting is not to stand out, thus when a product fails "mistakes were made" and no one in particular is responsible for them. Hence the Edsel, New Coke, and Microsoft Bob, plus how many other flops that nobody remembers -- because they flopped. Like you, I'm really curious to see how the market's reception of Win8 unfolds over time. --JorgeA

Sample bias: I suggest that people who use their PCs to create things and do actual work, are too busy to participate in a stupid survey. --JorgeA P.S. and totally OT: Cool that here we just managed to nest a quote within a quote within a quote...

Umm... isn't that what they told us when they phased out DOS in favor of Windows -- that it would present a "consistent" interface from one program to the next? And, how long before "app" developers break through the intended sameness of look in the-interface-formerly-known-as-Metro? (Thereby zapping this particular rationale for it.) "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- Jorge Santayana. (Yes, he did have my same first name!) --JorgeA

jaclaz, Thanks for the links, very interesting. The crux of the matter: You hit the nail on the head! If the information isn't gathered, it can't be used against you. --JorgeA

In a recent blog post, Ed Bott examines, generally sympathetically, Microsoft's pledge of "no compromises" when it comes to Windows RT. But there is the following passage: --JorgeA

Windows 8 skyrocketed to 0.23% in OS market share last month, from 0.20% in July. At a similar stage in its development, Windows 7 already commanded a 1.18% share, despite the physical and psychological hurdles involved in obtaining an OS that didn't come installed with users' PCs. We can argue over the meaning of these figures, but one thing seems clear: there's been no stampede toward Win8 during its free phase, despite claims for its being the best thing since sliced bread. --JorgeA

Wow, do you think they'd go so far as to delete updates and utilities for their previous OS's, in the campaign to herd everybody into their brave new world of "personalized computing"? --JorgeA

When you warn of the risk of creating security/stability issues, is it stuff like that Metro Remover that you have in mind? Good questions you posted over in BetaArchive, BTW. Too bad nobody's seen fit to answer you. --JorgeA