JorgeA

Windows 10 will save disk space and no longer require a recovery partition Windows 10 compresses system files and removes recovery image to increase disk space Microsoft Explains OS Compression in Windows 10 Windows 10 will ditch conventional recovery image and give space back to users The main reason given for these changes is to "save precious disk space." Given that disk space isn't so precious on a 1TB HDD, one hopes that Microsoft will have the sense to allow recovery partitions to continue to exist in desktop and laptop computers. While not a panacea, they are a useful additional line of defense when it comes to getting back to business when Windows gets borked. Or is this going to be yet another area where serious users with real PCs will get shoehorned into the midget footwear of a mobile device? The recovery process is described as follows by, for example, Neowin: The question that came to mind immediately was expressed by a Neowin commenter: Any thoughts? --JorgeA

Yeah, it's looking ever more like Windows 1 or 2, isn't it? The thing that gets me is how they keep throwing good money (and good customers) after bad. The latest financial report says that Microsoft sold 10.5 million Windows phones in the second quarter of fiscal year 2015; that's about as many phones as Samsung sells in two weeks. On the tablet side, Microsoft won't release actual numbers of units sold, but sales were recently estimated at about 1.275 million Surface tablets in the same quarter. Projecting that out to a full year, compared to 2014 global tablet shipments of some 230 million you get a whopping 2.2% share of that market and you're in Blackberry territory. For these anemic results Microsoft is alienating so many in their core customer base, where historically they've been so successful. The mobile tail keeps wagging the desktop dog. --JorgeA

Thanks for the rundown. It's "nice" to know that they've made it even harder to work in a local account. Evidently the idea is to make it as likely as possible to catch the user in the Microsoft net without getting accused of actually requiring her to have this account. About Aero Glass, I guess it was too optimistic of me to bring up that possibility. --JorgeA

Check out the following tidbit from this article -- Windows 10: Microsoft continues to refine and improve the user-interface I'll be curious to see if the transparency option extends to window borders (Aero Glass). --JorgeA

I get that sense, too. BTW my latest feedback to the Windows team (via one of the "Your Mission" tasks in the Insiders app) involved Windows Updates. I told them that they need to restore to the user the ability to read what an update is about BEFORE agreeing to download and install it. We've had enough disasters with Windows Updates already that this is the prudent thing to do. I also told them that, in the Settings app, the infobox that pops up when you click on "more details" for a specific update needs to stay open for more than a half-second so that one can actually read and absorb the information. Also noticed that the more times I click on that to try to finish reading the box, the faster it goes away again. They also need to include a button to cancel the download in case something happens or the user changes his mind. (Not holding my breath for that one. ) From the user's standpoint, the changes Microsoft has made to how Windows Updates work could turn out to be more troubling (both literally and figuratively) than anything they've done to the UI. --JorgeA

Personally, I will stay on Vista and then Win7 for as long as the software I need to use continues to work on those operating systems. If Windows is still broken at that point, then I'll move over to Linux which certainly offers no lack of customization options. Right now my leading candidates have been Zorin OS, which offers the closest "look and feel" Windows-like experience; and Netrunner, which offers a visually stunning desktop. (@dencorso says that this is because they use KDE.) It would be nice if the ReactOS folks were to actually finish a fully Windoows-compatible operating system, but I'm not very hopeful that will ever happen. --JorgeA

Tablet Computer Growth Slowing To Low Single Digits At 4%, Windows tablets are projected to show the greatest proportional gain in shipments next year, but that's on a 5.1% base. (For the non-statistically-minded, that doesn't mean that trhe market share of Windows tablets will jump from 5.1% to 9.1%, but from 5.1% to something like 5.3%.) And for this microsocopic gain in a declining market, Microsoft is wrecking the Windows Desktop experience. --JorgeA

Uh-oh... Oh god... screenshots from Windows 10 build 10036 look worryingly like Windows Phone Exactly. --JorgeA

Oh, I can tell some stories about machine "translation"... Way OT, sadly... --JorgeA

As I wrote over in the Windows 10 First Impressions thread, IMO this lack of timely (link to) documentation is a sign of either abysmal incompetence or supreme contempt. One way or the other, I'm afraid it suggests what the Windows Update is shaping up to be like going "forward." I've only installed updates of types that seldom require reboots (i.e. for Office, but not Windows Updates). --JorgeA

One of my PCs was offered 11 Windows Updates in today's Patch Tuesday bundle. Not a single one had a working link to a page providing information about the update. This shows either abysmal incompetence on the part of the Windows Updates team, or supreme contempt for users by Microsoft management in expecting us to blindly install these updates without the faintest idea of what they are supposed to do. Used to be you could count on Microsoft to have the KB information page available at the same time as the Updates got pushed out. No more. In recent months, the number of updates having no information available concurrently with their release has grown from none, to a smattering, now to all of them. Even the update descriptions within the Windows Updates applet have gotten vaguer and less useful in the last year or two. Doubtless this foreshadows what it'll be like to be on Windows 10. They might inspire more confidence if they demonstrated greater competence in producing updates that won't screw up people's computers, or in keeping their customers informed as to what they're proposing to do to PCs with these updates. --JorgeA

Woody Leonhard gives us 20 reasons to be skeptical of Microsoft's idea of automatic Windows Updates for everyone: 20 epic Microsoft Windows Automatic Update meltdowns ...which makes the following report by Mary Jo Foley all the more disturbing: [emphasis added] You know what -- forget Aero Glass, the Start Menu, and all the Metro stuff. If Microsoft really does intend to start shoving Windows Updates down users' throats with no option to decline them, this is a deal killer. They could bring back Aero Glass and remove Metro root-and-branch, and I'd still not take such a product. Nowadays, installing Windows Updates is too much of a roll of the dice. Nor do I care to allow the 'Softies to decide for me when and if my PC must reboot. Because I participate in a distributed-computing project, my PCs are literally always in the middle of something and there is no "good" time to reboot them blindly. Thanks to Woody for alerting readers to this possibility, which I had missed when Mary Jo first brought it up. --JorgeA

The print in the image says that, "The old out-of-box experience (OOBE) that involves Microsoft sign in/sign up has been replaced with a new, cloud-hosted OOBE process." Wonder if the option to sign in without a Microsoft account (and without placing anything in the cloud) will remain. Note, too, that the link to IE will now be buried under Windows Accessories in the Start Menu. Maybe a prelude to putting Spartan front and center? --JorgeA

About those redesigned desktop icons, apparently this has generated some heat. The most interesting (to me) part of that article, was the screenshot of an early version of Windows 8: As Mr. Spock (RIP) might have said: "fascinating." --JorgeA

No need to reinvent the wheel. They can just use what is in the Wingdings font!

^^ Yeah, that hand print would be too skeuomorphic for Jonny Ive and the Metrotards. (That's not the name of a rock band. ) And speaking of that stuff, here's an interesting discussion of the subject: Skeuomorphism Will Never Go Away, And That's a Good Thing Only thing I disagree with is where the writer refers to "fake wood, fake leather, fake shadows" as a "gross misuse" of the concept. Personally, I generally like having applications on my PC screen (where applicable) look like what they emulate from the real world. In fact I've always considered it really neat that they do that, and I'd go so far as to say that my computing experience would be comparatively boring and ho-hum were it not for that remarkable capability. Leave those stripped-down UI's to the soul-less machines who populate the Neowin comments sections... Hooray for fake wood!! --JorgeA

Is it just me are anyone else's senses OFFENDED by the icons having no perspective? Who imagines orthographic projection for human user interfaces would be good? I wonder if an age demographic might be involved in this perception. I'm an old codger; been around in the real world a long time. Do young folks find stuff like this less bothersome? -Noel That would seem to be right in line with the whole flatness trend. It's a computer screen, why would you think anything you see there has depth? Consistent application of that logic would mean eventually extending it to TV programs. We'll all be watching cartoons, as images of 3-D people and buildings are oh, so unreal. --JorgeA

Leaked screenshots from the latest TP build suggest that standard Desktop icons have now been given the flatness treatment. See, in particular, the Network and Control Panel icons. I have not seen such crude, simplistic graphics in Windows since 2.0. Win10 is shaping up to be the most visually repulsive version of Windows in more than a quarter-century. --JorgeA

Windows 8.x still nowhere near as popular as Windows XP In other words, XP went up just as much as Windows 8/8.1. Here's the graph (hover over Operating Systems and then click on "Desktop Trend by Version"). --JorgeA

--JorgeA

One more tidbit from that Windows Weekly 396: This ties in with what we were saying before about not being able, in Windows 10, to get the details about an update until you agree to download and install it. Apparently they've decided that less information is better. "Ignorance is Bliss." NOT. --JorgeA

IMO it depends on how much "stuff" you have loading into the system at bootup. I have a lean-and-mean Vista Business machine that boots up as fast as any Windows 8 box I've seen in action. (Not that I've seen that many of those... ) --JorgeA

I know you do. --JorgeA

I have the same experience. Incidentally, that led me to poke around a bit: have you noticed how hard it is now to change that default search provider? If and when you finally get to the iegallery, there's a p*ss-poor selection of alternative search providers -- no Ixquick, no StartPage, no DuckDuckGo. Now here's the kicker: if your homepage is Ixquick and you're there and you click on "Add to IE", then Ixquick gives you a direct link to the IE Gallery page to make Ixquick your default search engine. But if you go yourself to the IE Gallery page, there is no way to select Ixquick, and a search for it turns up no results. Way to go, Microsoft. --JorgeA

I think the two main examples that are given to support the idea that Win10 is more desktop- (that is, PC-)friendly than Win8 are (1) the boot to desktop instead of to the Start Screen, and (2) the revived Start Menu, half-a$$ed though it may be. Of course, against those obvious changes we have to weigh a bunch of more subtle changes in the opposite direction. For example (and I've been meaning to mention this), there's the new way that Windows Updates are handled in build 9926 of the Technical Preview, where you can't know what an update is about until after you agree to both download and install it. [sarcasm]What a brilliant concept -- what could possibly go wrong with that??[/sarcasm] To me, that's additional evidence that Microsoft is making a play for the know-nothing crowd who doesn't care what goes into their computers and is content to let "the experts" have their way with them. That is, until their black boxes suddenly stop working, which given MSFT's recent record is bound to happen soon enough. --JorgeA