JorgeA

Interesting angle! I wonder if that may be (part of) the reason that MS bought all those patents from AOL last week. --JorgeA

The following is probably OT, but since you brought it up... Best critique of iTunes that I've seen, if a bit salty. His experience pretty much matches mine. One time my wife, a pretty smart cookie, bought an iPod and asked me to figure out how to use it since she couldn't. All she wanted to do was to download MP3s of talk shows. I tried it and felt like I was being railroaded into doing things one specific, convoluted way that didn't work very well in any case. We ended up getting an unpretentious (and much cheaper) Sansa Fuze where we can simply download whatever and drag-and-drop it into the player, no muss no fuss. Never looked back. --JorgeA

CoffeeFiend, Wow, amazing. The "progress" (or lack thereof) is even more stark when you consider that those smaller Metro tiles show up on a bigger monitor screen, so that they come out to about as big and gaudy as those Commodore rectangles. Nice work putting the image together, BTW. --JorgeA

MagicAndre, What happened when you tried that method? I'm using a different method to boot to the Desktop (see post #3 on that page), but that one leaves me waiting for several seconds on the Metro screen. If I'm at the computer it would be faster to just click on the Desktop tile, but at least if I'm doing something else during bootup I can have the Desktop already up when I come back and not have to see that Metro start screen. --JorgeA

I just spotted a new method for booting straight to the Desktop in Windows 8. Right now I have the CP working OK with a different hack to boot to the desktop, I'll try this new one when the RC comes out in a few weeks (assuming MS hasn't itself made this improvement). --JorgeA

Fredlelingue, I agree! CoffeeFiend is right, there were no service packs ever issued for Windows 3.x, although there were several iterations, including 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, and Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and 3.11 (the one I have). One could argue that each of these successive editions served the function of a service pack, especially as some of them were issued not as standalone OS's, but as updates or extensions building on the previous version. --JorgeA

dencorso, Thanks, that was a fascinating read! It reminds me of a question I had a long time ago, which was whether it's possible to devise a CLI- or DOS-based system that addresses lots of RAM, such that you could dispense with Windows. (For the longest time, whenever the topic came up I would proudly announce that, "I don't do Windows!") I guess now that the answer would be that it IS possible. --JorgeA

Microsoft is currently projected to enjoy just 11 percent of the tablet market four years from now, with iOS and Android growing faster in absolute terms during that period. Projections can be famously wrong, of course. But assume for the moment that this turns out to be true: is that what MS diminished the Windows UX for? --JorgeA

Before that, people were saying the same thing about 20MB hard drives, and that was a luxury not many could afford either. Floppies also seemed quite large. I mean, you could fit several full games on one, and I'm not talking about 1.44MB floppies either! I remember one time my dad and I were at the computer store, probably 1983. He turned to me, pointed to a wall display with 10-packs of single-sided, single-density (160K) 5.25" floppies, and said: "What will I ever need ten of these for?!" I replied, "Yeah, really!" --JorgeA

Wow, not me! I was around back then, but I'd never heard of the Software Carousel. BTW, was that a photo you took of the monitor? It wasn't a screenshot, was it? (Nahh, couldn't be...) --JorgeA

I still have an Amstrad PC6400 that came with separate floppies for MS-DOS and GEM, the CP/M GUI. I was a DOS guy and never felt the urge to complicate my life with a GUI. --JorgeA

Tripredacus, So the whole "faster booting" thing may be just an illusion. Lovely. Speaking of Win8 performance, I came across this report from the field. What do you think? --JorgeA

Apropos of this topic, PCWorld has this slideshow. I never knew there was a version of Task Manager in WFWG3.11. --JorgeA

Citation needed. I'd hardly call it that. Not even near. Was it even an OS at all? More like a GUI. Rightly or wrongly, I always viewed it as a needless accretion over MS-DOS. --JorgeA

CoffeeFiend, Unbelievable! I did like the bit in the article about the root cause being a "faulty software bug" (as opposed to a properly working software bug? ). --JorgeA

belgianguy, I think you're right about Silverlight being phased out. This is the key passage IMO: It seems to suggest developers should start thinking in post-Silverlight terms. --JorgeA

It is still available from Microsoft, here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/0/8/c0872b4c-ddfc-4dbc-b3e5-ef385a4d349e/wucsp.exe bristols, Are you sure that that link works? I tried it on one of my Win98FE machines: it was only a 1.03MB download, and when I clicked on it to open, it didn't seem to do much of anything. There was a box that popped up with a progress bar, but it all went away quickly before I had a chance to read what it was. Could that be because the PC in which I opened wucsp.exe already has SP1 installed? I was hoping to download a large file containing all the SP1 updates that I could then burn to CD and install as needed. --JorgeA

erpdude, This is very good news, thanks! --JorgeA

Good, maybe it was just speculation. --JorgeA

Check this out: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=21860053#post21860053 Is there any basis for the idea that Windows 9 might be a "cloud-based" OS? If it is, then whatever chances Win8 might have with me will be completely gone with Win9. Ain't no way in h*ll I'm relying on a remote server to run my computer, let alone to store my documents. Internet service goes down often enough to render the cloud model too risky for serious work. At least today I can keep working when my Internet isn't. Not to mention that my documents are safely tucked away in my obscure corner of the universe, rather than as part of a big juicy target in some cloud service. --JorgeA

The thread has driven me deep into my archives. This book came with my WFWG3.11 machine:

Asok, It looks like I may be one of those cases that doesn't fall under "most." When I tried your registry change, next time I restarted Win8 CP all I got was a black page. Clicking on the Escape key or the Windows key didn't make any visible difference. Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del did enable me to bring up the Task Manager, from where I went back into Regedit, put the key back the way it was, and then rebooted to recover the previous behavior. I didn't disable the lock screen as you suggested, as I had already configured Win8 not to show it at bootup so that was not an issue for me. I'll go back in and do what you said, if you think it'll help. Thanks again for the idea -- we need to get something like this to work. --JorgeA

@ -X- : I just found this thread (happens when you only enter the forum via links to e-mail notifications of new postings in existing threads). Thanks very much for the screenshot -- ClassicShell looks very attractive there! I have Start Menu X installed in the Win8 CP, but when the RC comes out I may give this a try. I'm already using one feature of ClassicShell to bring back the status bar in Internet Explorer 10. @CoffeeFiend: +1 to that. --JorgeA

Foxbat, Just FYI -- qfecheck causes an invalid page fault (tried it twice, before and after rebooting), but WinUpdatesList worked great. Thanks again. --JorgeA

ppgrainbow, I was fascinated and delighted when the first IBM PC came out and a friend let me play with it. I knew that computers were the way to go when I tried a "learn typewriting" program and my typing improved more in four weeks than it had in two whole semesters in high school. My own home PC had to wait till I had the funds to get my own computer (a PC compatible). Once I did, after just six months of regular use I remember one time having to type a letter on my electric typewriter, and feeling like I was back in the Stone Age! So I was an enthusiastic PC-DOS/MS-DOS user back from the days of the 1.x versions. For me the UX was an interesting combination of simplicity and tech arcana with all those cryptic DOS commands. I remained happily in that environment for a dozen years, having moved to an Amstrad PC6400 when the needs of my business called for e-mail capability later in the '80s. I stayed on the Amstrad, using my beloved WordStar (anybody else remember WordStar?) until the documents I worked on started to get too big to fit on even a 1.44MB floppy. It was time to buy a computer with a hard drive, and thus was born my Windows for Workgroups 3.11 PC. TBH, I never really warmed up to WFWG. The Program Manager concept never made any sense to me; and when I clicked on the down arrow in a program it seemed to just disappear, only to be found (sometimes) completely by chance as a mysterious image under everything else on the screen. More often than not, when I wanted to go back into Word or whatever, I would just click on its icon in PM, unaware that the program was still actually open. And there was a ton of new technology and esoteric jargon that I never did learn (Winsock, Expanded/Extended Memory, Real Mode, etc. etc.). I had made the switch from computing explorer to practical user, and I had zero interest in any of this new techspeak except insofar as it impacted on my work. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was my approach. Even though I wasn't delighted with the OS, I stayed on it till 2002, when my customers' increasing needs meant that I had to adopt more modern software than Word 6.0 and CompuServe Information Manager (which was very limited in the kinds and size of e-mail and attachments that it could take). It was then that I reluctantly changed over to my Windows 98 machine (yes, in 2002) which I'd bought four years earlier to future-proof my business. And, this time, the change in the UI was a real and great improvement! Thanks to the taskbar, I no longer had to minimize other stuff to go hunting for other open applications. Plus the newly introduced Start Menu was organized in a logical, easy-to-follow manner with the cascading panels. To me, this is the high point of the Windows UI, which Microsoft has preserved and kept building on till now, when it threatens to undo all that usability with the phase-in of the Metro interface. I still have my WFWG3.11 machine, and in fact it was pressed it back into action three years ago (on dial-up) when my Win98 PC got sick and I had to wait three weeks over the holidays for the phone company to send a router and open my account. I still go back into it once in a while to look up an old e-mail or Word file, or simply for nostalgia reasons, but I'm glad that a better interface was developed. --JorgeA