JorgeA

^^ Thank you! Apparently the GUI application disappeared off my hard drive during the switch from 10240 to 10586. It simply wasn't there anymore, not even the .7z archive! --JorgeA

I can't claim credit for creating the Vista theme myself, I got it from deviantArt (IIRC it was this one). In build 10240, it worked fairly well in combination with bigmuscle's Aero Glass -- not perfect, but good enough for a test system. Here are a couple of screenshots that I'd captured for other purposes; taking the two together, you can get a sense of how the theme looked in 10240. Now in 10586, of course, at least for the time being there's no Aero Glass and no clearly evident window borders. The distinctive Vista 3D Taskbar is no longer possible in later Win10 builds. --JorgeA

The first time 10586 booted up, I got a series of notifications about problem applications, in quick succession. One of them had to do with Classic Shell. Fortunately, CS then offered to repair itself, and it's now working great. If there is a log somewhere to look up what that notification said exactly about CS, I can go in and retrieve it to post here. --JorgeA

Uninstalling and hiding that update is the wrong way to disable GWX, so of course it is not effective long term. The correct way is to disable it via the registry while leaving it installed. Here's a batch file I made that will do this for you: I suggest posting that script far and wide. The GWX invite hasn't come back for me since I hid the update (that I remember), but my understanding is that it could return anytime, apparently depending on whether the file was changed. Beyond that, I'm not qualified to opine on whether your method or dencorso's is preferable. Let the experts talk it out. --JorgeA

Thanks, I'll try that and see what happens. --JorgeA

@dhjohns: Thanks very much! @Hadden: Thanks, too. Where does one go to get dwmcore.pdb? Also, for anybody: how to access the Aero Glass UI now? --JorgeA

Windows 10 build 10586 (purely a test system for me) broke Aero Glass. Here's a screenshot of the message I got: More information: the Aero Glass watermark does show up on the Desktop and Aero Glass is listed as an installed program in Control Panel. However, there no longer seems to be any way to access the Aero Glass settings (couldn't find it in Start Menu or anywhere else). What do I need to do now in order to get the Aero Glass effects back? I'm leaving the above notification showing on my Desktop until I hear something. --JorgeA

Downloaded and installed build 10586 last night. Here are some Deeper Impressions: * Five applications got broken: bigmuscle's AeroGlass, 8GadgetPack, Classic Shell, Spybot Search & Destroy 1.6.2.46, and Heimdal Free. The Gadget Pack and Classic Shell repaired themselves, but Spybot was declared incompatible with Win10 and got removed from the Start Menu and its Desktop icon disappeared, while Heimdal issued a message saying that the "connection to service failed." The nice theme I had set up with Aero Glass and 3D Vista/7-style buttons is back to flat buttons and no window borders, although there is some translucency left (but this may be due to a native Win10 setting). This may be the end of the line for the redoubtable Spybot 1.6.2, a program that had worked unmodified in every version of Windows since (at least) Windows 98 First Edition, up to and including build 10240. I'll see if I can reinstall it, but that had not been necessary after previous new builds. * A number of privacy settings were changed from the way I had put them prior to the installation of 10586. In particular, every switch in "background apps" under Settings, every one of which I had set to OFF, was now turned ON. As Windows 10 spreads among the user base (like an infection), no doubt there will be a certain number of users who'll trust that, like their document files, their settings will remain unaffected by the installation of the new build, and won't think to verify that they didn't get changed. Microsoft is disrespecting users' explicit preferences. * The "Get Office 365" app, which in 10240 had been annoying me with its notifications to the point where I uninstalled it, is now back with 10586. I flipped a switch to turn it off (rather than uninstalling it); we'll see if that works and for how long. --JorgeA UPDATE: Spybot 1.6.2.46 did reinstall fine. So it still works. But this leads to a new question: if it does work on build 10586, why did this new build claim that it was incompatible?

Big Tech continues to try to force-march users into approved computing environments... No more Chrome updates for Windows XP from April 2016 ...but, to judge from the comments section, the peasants aren't buying it: --JorgeA

Windows 10 powers 132M PCs as growth again decelerates --JorgeA

That's an excellent point!! Wonder how long it'll be before average users out there start realizing that trusting Microsoft ended up voiding their warranties. --JorgeA

Tech support reps are recommending users to uninstall Windows 10 to resolve PC problems Yup. --JorgeA

Anybody have insight into what this person is talking about? (I've highlighted above the question that I'm focusing on.) Thanks to @jaclaz for providing the link to the thread that eventually led me to that post. --JorgeA

^^ Any word on which one (0.0.0.0 vs. 127.0.0.1) is better to use on Vista and Win7? --JorgeA

Here's another idea: how about having your food (the food itself, not the fridge) connected to the Internet? Innit wants to digitize food so you know exactly what to make for dinner So, how would the meat dish communicate with your oven? Wouldn't it need to have some kind of embedded processor and receiver/transmitter? Hmmm... ...if nothing else, this would lend new meaning to the phrase, "fish and chips"... --JorgeA

If you think about it, it's really unbelievable that Microsoft would push its hundreds of millions of users into putting Windows 10 on their current machines. If users are as lazy and ignorant as MSFT seems to think they are (otherwise why would they be so busy "simplifying" the UI and dumbing down the language in Windows messages?), it's hard to imagine any procedure that's riskier and more error-prone than the installation of a new operating system over an existing one. Even if everything does go without a hitch, how many users will be naively expecting their current applications to just keep working as if nothing had happened? I'd be surprised if more than a small fraction of such users will be aware, going in, that they're going to have to reinstall lots of programs. Must be a fun time indeed to be a tech-support person for a major PC OEM. I wonder if Microsoft is compensating the OEMs for the additional support calls they're causing them to get. --JorgeA EDIT: typo!

I recently came across this hosts file list. Anybody familiar with it, and maybe how it compares to the lists maintained by MVPS and Spybot? --JorgeA

Broken Trust with Windows Update --JorgeA

Yeah, it IS really weird. We've come such a long way from the mid-1980s, when PC World's David Bunnell wrote an award-winning editorial for that magazine on how the personal computer was serving to liberate people from the tech priesthood. Today, not only are falling back into their grasp, but too many of us are jumping in obliviously. --JorgeA

Dedoimedo cites this thread as an information source in his guide to controlling telemetry and "up"grades to Windows 10. --JorgeA

A hint of the tech future that Microsoft is envisioning: below is a screenshot of one of the early questions from a recent Microsoft.com Panel survey. Respondents were asked to think about the following concepts and then rate their importance: Consider some of the ideas raised here: "the combination of data streams and services created by digitizing everything""ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive analytics""Computing Everywhere... serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments, as opposed to focusing on devices alone""the convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device""Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics""in a digital business world, security cannot be a roadblock that stops all progress"(Emphasis added.) I don't know about you, but this strikes me as a profoundly creepy vision of the future, where computers are embedded into everything to monitor and analyze our every move from an all-knowing central lab. It's reminiscent of 1950's-era science fiction movies where society was controlled by a big computer and by the technocrats who operated them -- movies made at a time when people still had a healthy skepticism of computing technology. With its increased focus on cloud and mobile, Windows 10 loks like a step in that direction. --JorgeA

I haven't dropped out, but I hardly ever use Windows 10 anymore. May uninstall it eventually -- I just don't trust whatever keylogging cr*p they might have put into the "free" versions they send to Insiders. (I put "free" in quotation marks because it is far from free: I've spent countless hours trying things out and sending them feedback and they can't even bring themselves to offer a "no strings attached" license in exchange.) That said, it's been months since I've received a new version through regular channels. I'm still on 10240. Is that where the Slow ring is still supposed to be? --JorgeA

^^ --JorgeA

Surfing through Woody Leonhard's site led me to his newest InfoWorld column: Microsoft pulls the plug on OneDrive unlimited storage Wonder how Microsoft apologists rationalize this one. Meawhile, here are some of Woody's observations: Score another point (not) in favor of trusting your digital life to the cloud, where your data becomes hostage to the whims and designs of someone other than yourself, and contracts aren't worth the pixels they're displayed on. Tell me again, how did "cloud" and "mobile" get to be so popular? Maybe what we need is a few more cases like this to disabuse the computing public of those bad habits. Bring it on. --JorgeA

What people really think about Microsoft’s “Get Windows 10″ campaign --JorgeA