JorgeA

KB2952664 seems to be acting more and more like malware: --JorgeA

From a strategic standpoint, getting UWP apps ported over to Win32 would be immensely preferable to the current push, which is to port Win32 applications over to UWP. The latter tends to diminish interest in Win32, while the former would diminish interest in UWP. From our perspective, which of these results is preferable? Of course, @greenhillmaniac doubtlessly meant his remark in jest (there's little prospect of that actually happening), and I took it in the same spirit. --JorgeA

I second that motion!! --JorgeA

Now you see it, now you don't: Forget extensions, built-in ad blocking is coming to Microsoft Edge Edge won’t have native ad blocking but will support third party extensions --JorgeA

News from Build 2016: Microsoft: If you wanted to reach a lot of phone customers, Windows Phone isn't the way to do it Myerson is quoted as saying: One has to wonder if Microsoft even has a strategy at all, for right now they certainly seem to be flailing. Let's see: so you're letting the phone angle -- for the sake of which you wrecked the desktop UI -- suffer in neglect for a further unspecified amount of time while you continue to -- to do what, exactly? Wasn't the whole point of Windows 10 to go mobile? Here's a brilliant idea: instead of alienating major chunks of your user base with the phone UI which you admit you'll be ignoring anyway, how about restoring the Windows that we know and love. Ditch the mobile aspects of Windows 10 -- the flat, dull visual design; the telemetry; the forced updates -- and rebuild your standing among the hundreds of millions who made your company a success in its first thirty years. --JorgeA

That word actually works. Nice! --JorgeA

A very good question. Win10 has been trying to install an Intel graphics driver on my test laptop for months unless I use the update hiding tool. --JorgeA

Hmmm... <thinking> ...how about "worsebettering"? It hews more literally to the German, but OTOH it doesn't sound nearly as natural. Nobody can compete with German for the ability to glue words together. I'll go with your choice. To bring us back on-topic, it also happens to describe well what's been going on with Windows since Win8. --JorgeA

I thought the issue of megathreads had been thrashed out and resolved three years ago. Sorry to see that it's flared up again. Such threads serve a useful function in that they bring together for the reader numerous items having a common theme. This has benefits for both sides of the given issue. As a reader, if I'm bothered by the "IoT is a bad idea" concept (for example), then I would prefer that they all sat there by themselves in their own thread, rather than peppering the forum with little annoying items all over the place. OTOH, if I agree with the "IoT is a bad idea" concept, then again I would prefer that they were all put together so that I didn't have to go looking for them here and there and everywhere, with discussions broken up into bits and pieces and people having to link back and forth to other threads. Regarding the idea of posting these news items on the front page instead: Doubtlessly someone has access to the statistics: how much discussion do those front-page news items generate, relative to the Forum threads? If NoelC or TELVM or I were to start posting, on the news page, news items that highlight the problems with Windows 10 and with Microsoft generally, that could give off the false impression that MSFN is an anti-Microsoft site. But if the same items are posted in a discussion forum, then they are correctly perceived as the poster's take on the situation. Incidentally, I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, but that I am sincerely trying to understand the reasoning involved. --JorgeA

That is a GREAT word. The closest equivalent I can think of in English (though still not the same concept) is, "fix it until it breaks." --JorgeA

(OT) Comment on the new board software: notice how it deletes the items that you had quoted, so that the context is lost. Consider the first and second paragraphs in the above quote: a reader of my present post will end up reading the next (now disconnected) line and wondering what the heck. Looks like embedded quotes are now verboten. --JorgeA Also verboten, apparently, is posting consecutively on different subjects within the same thread, as seen three posts upthread and now here. The new material that follows this paragraph has nothing to do with my reply to jaclaz above, and yet it is now the new policy to fuse it together with that reply. The only ways to avoid this absurdity are to either wait for somebody else to post something, or wait three hours. Totally artificial -- when I sit down to create and submit posts, I'm ready to do it then because that and not three hours later is when I have the chunk of time to do it. What is the sense of making the user wait an amount of time before he may post in a logical manner again? Crapware Continues to Ruin the Windows Experience Paul Thurrott's broken clock matches the actual time of day once again, for a brief moment. --JorgeA

That's fine with me. Those are random events -- accidents, if you will -- and I can buy more drives to make redundant backups. But if Microsoft won't let my account have more than a certain amount, it is no accident, and I have no control over it. What would one do, open a new separate Microsoft account? That would be an administrative nightmare, having to keep track of which account you're signed into and when. --JorgeA Windows 10 market share breaks 20 percent, but pace of growth still slowing That "20 percent" means 20 percent of users of Windows, but despite the needless confusion there the writer makes an interesting observation about the impact of Win10 on gamers and of gamers on Win10: --JorgeA Yeah, it's mind-boggling that anybody would think otherwise at this stage. --JorgeA

Hmm... so now if I want to reply to your post, but also want to reply to Trip's post above, my choices are limited to the following: Reply to both posts in the same MSFN visit and let them get merged, so that if you or Trip wish to reply to my reply, you have to manually delete all the extraneous material relating to my other reply; or Wait three hours to avoid getting the replies merged. Is that correct?!? --JorgeA But if the new post is bringing up a new angle, or replying to someone else, then it's confusing to the reader, who must then sort out the different angles that are being discussed but got lumped together. I understand about bumping, but what we're talking about here is not bumping. In "Deeper Impressions" we run a headline or a funny image about an item in the news, then comment on it. One item could be about UWP, the next about Win10 privacy controls. It doesn't make sense to put them together, and if another forum member wants to comment on just one of the items, he will now have to go in and manually delete all the other news items, otherwise people reading his comment won't know what he's talking about. And if in addition I also want to comment on what somebody else said in the thread, now that too will get dumped into the river of shifting subjects within the same post; and people replying to it will have to fish it out by hand so that others reading his reply can focus on what he said. Logically and as a convenience both to the reader and to those who might wish to reply, posts about different angles within the same thread should be able to remain separate, as we've had it for years. --JorgeA

Tonight I submitted a post to a thread. Hours later, I went back into the thread to submit a new post on a subject that was different but still related to the thread (no one else had posted in-between), and the new post got "merged" into the older post. Is this behavior intended? It doesn't make sense to fuse together posts about separate issues, moreover it makes for confusing reading ("What does one thing have to do with the other?!?") and if you want to reply to only one of the merged topics, it makes more work for you as you have to delete the unrelated stuff from the Quote. --JorgeA

Microsoft OneDrive storage changes Ah, the joys of depending on outside parties for your storage needs: Hah, imagine if you'd bought a 3TB backup drive and one day all of a sudden it sends you a notice saying, "Sorry, starting next month this will become a 250GB drive." In contrast to ownership, the subscription model shifts control from the user to the supplier. --JorgeA

It turns out that somehow I got signed out of the system -- I have no idea how or why, since I didn't click on anything to sign out. Once I signed back into the Forum, everything looked normal again. --JorgeA

It hasn't happened again to me, as it did to @bphlpt. Trying other browsers on different computers from which I've logged in to MSFN recently, to see what happens. --JorgeA NOW FOR THE LATEST BOARD SOFTWARE STRANGENESS: In Pale Moon, when I typed this reply and went to click on Submit Reply, I noticed that there was NO way to submit the reply! (See first screenshot below.) Instead, I was being shown the previous posts in the thread. And then at the bottom of the page, even though I was already signed in, there was the following notice inviting me to create an account or sign in in order to leave a comment. (See second screenshot below.) The normal look, of course, is seen in the third screenshot (taken in Firefox):

In the last few days, twice it's happened to me that the next time I visited MSFN (one time each on two different browsers), I was presented with privacy terms for MSFN before getting to the post that my e-mail notification had told me about. Did the privacy terms change, and if so, what was the change? I'm not sure why that screen would show up all of a sudden otherwise. Thanks! --JorgeA

That was informative. The key post (IMO) is this one. FWIW, the new hard drive seems to be getting more consistently "normal" HD Tune graph lines, ever since the mysteriously lost ~50GB of HDD space managed to reappear just as mysteriously. There are still hiccups, but more and more they're looking like this, without the prolonged nadirs: Needless to say, I'll keep monitoring the performance. --JorgeA

There’s a special edition of Windows 10 made for the Chinese government My first thought when reading this headline was that maybe this special edition contains enhanced tracking and monitoring of users. But check out the following passage: [emphasis added] Maybe the Chinese edition comes with Aero Glass as an option. And the possibility of its coming without UWP crapps pre-installed would be another plus... --JorgeA

A ham sandwich is better than happiness. Why? Well, nothing is better than happiness, and a ham sandwich is certainly better than nothing. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than happiness. Italics seem to be working OK (maybe it got fixed?). One of the "nothings" above was highlighted by selecting it and then doing Control-I, and the other by selecting the word and then clicking on the I in the menu. Hitting Control-I first and then typing nothing also seems to be working as expected. I do remember that there used to be an annoying flaw in previous forum software, where if you selected a chunk of text to put in bold or italics, once you hit the B or the I the selected area would shift a character or two, something like this. I would have to go in and fix the formatting by hand. The new software appears to work better that way, at least in my case. --JorgeA

This is a test. Next paragraph starts after a Shift+Enter: This is the next paragraph. Another Shift+Enter: Now the next paragraph follows just Enter: Curious -- this time in the reply box there IS extra space before this paragraph. Let's see if it shows up when this is posted. Regular Enter again before my signature: --JorgeA P.S. For comparison, this is being typed following two regular Enters. Huh, the previous Enter behavior seems to be back. @xper: if that was your doing, then thank you! So if we want the extra space between paragraphs, we hit Enter, and if we want no additional space we hit Shift+Enter. Got it.

Not sure if this is the right place for it now, but I want to report that carriage returns/line feeds don't seem to be working any more. For greater readability, I prefer to add a blank line between one paragraph and the next (as if it were double-spacing). And the new forum software seemed to be doing this autromatically. But today there is no longer any separation between paragraphs, making posts harder to read (see screenshot below). Is this a problem on the server side, or is there something we can do at our end to fix this? Thanks. --JorgeA

FWIW, the previous hard drive (which had the same set of processes running) had always shown a normal curve. When it got sluggish, leading me to replace it, it was because the drive was going bad. Test results from one suite came back with every category showing the old disk to be either in "old age" or in a "pre-failure" state. For whatever reason, the new HDD is having the reported issues while the old one didn't. Now let me add another spice into the mix. Mysteriously, this morning the free space climbed back UP to the range where it should be, at 241GB. And the HD Tune graphs are looking more normal, although still not entirely so -- the steep drops are fewer, although still there are some. --JorgeA

Update: I've been running Resource Monitor at the same time as HD Tune, keeping an eye on the processes listed in the Disk section relative to how the HD Tune graph does. So far, there seems to be some correlation between the transfer rate (blue graph in the screenshots above) and the I/O activity of certain processes. This doesn't always happen, but frequently the transfer rate plummets to near zero when either Outlook, or the Search Indexer, or Norton-related Live Update log files show elevated read/write values. Hopefully this will yield some clues. --JorgeA