Jody Thornton

Oh I get the gripes with Office. See, I detest the ribbon interface, so I don't ever want to upgrade past my current Office 2003 installation. Office 2007/2010/2013 leave me cold. And the Office365 initiative is not attractive to me at all. In fact, I would stay with Office 2003 if it weren't for security issues not being patched or maintained past April 2014. I have a REALLY nice system right now 7 GB of RAM, XP x64 Edition and Office/Outlook 2003. It works flawlessly. You made me think of Word v6 with fond memories. When I first used Windows 95, I ran Office v4.3 (16-bit) and used LFNs Now! to get long filenames to work with the old apps. I miss those simple days.

I guess what makes me wonder about that is this. You know when you run chkdsk or refresh the Prefectch cache in XP, and you end up with a slow boot. Sometimes the visual style will not render immediately and it shows remnants of classic object (such as title bars and caption buttons). So if the Windows 8 desktop doesn't render objects in time, what does it show as a placeholder? Don't mind my skepticism. I just never one to accept that something is a certain way only on Microsoft's saying so (there have been many times they cite something as impossible when in fact it's not). But if you say that classic objects are gone, then that's good enough.

Wow! That Adobe one looks nice. As for those that posted "Classic Skin for Win 8 Only", I was precisely mentioning that I was aware of these skins (I'm appreciative of your response just the same). However, is there a registry hack or whatever that will reveal the true classic desktop style with NO SKINS?

I'll return to the drawing board and try that again.

Does that mean bloat and duplication that comes with $hf_mig$ folder entries? (in the System32/SysWOW64 folder I mean)? Or does it just replace the files and that's it?

I use Seamonkey 2.22.1 currently. I think the new IE 9+ interface is snazzy though. And v10 works great on Windows 7.

What did Vista do to your compressed files? This is starting to make me nervous as I'm on the verge of switching to Vista.

My hope is that on my old Dell Notebook PC with 1 GB of RAM, running Windows XP Professional, I can install XP with an "nLited" a CD-ROM. This disc will include ALL of the updates right up to April 2014 inclusive. I will reinstall XP Pro with that CD-ROM, and then turf the $hf_mig$ folder altogether.

I know that you're asking for compatibility with Win9x; that I do not know. But, yes there was a Microsoft supported application that provided compatibility on Windows NT and 2000 Professional for OS/2 v1.3 binaries. It was flaky from what I understand. I will try to find links for you.

I wonder if there is any way to force security updates on Outlook 2003 past April 2014. I love this particular version of Outlook. And as for Office, I am EXTREMELY ANTI-RIBBON, so I do not wish to move to Office 2007. Kingsoft Office seems promising, but I am not 100% sure. How bad of shape would I be in continuing to use Office 2003 on Vista x64 SP2 Ultimate after April 2014 (with and without Outlook 2003)?

So if I use an application in XP Pro that uses DirectSound, is it incompatible with Vista?

Uh, I was trying to be friendly and definitely I'm not adheriong to mob mentality. But are you saying that you'd even ignore Micorosoft's own admission that ME had problems? I'm not saying don't be happy using it, but you seem really cheesed that other users had legitimate issues with the OS. That's not the users' faults, is it?

Is there any trick that would allow either a WinXP style theme (as in Royale Noir), or even the Classic desktop? I understand that there is a Classic Desktop style skin, and that the true Classic style was removed from Windows 8. But there must be some registry hack that can reveal it, no?

Yeppers. My girlriend's HP notebook PC runs Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition. I upgraded her version of Internet Explorer to v11, and Gmail began running slower than a turtle. No answers but lots of results from others when I researched the issue. So I uninstalled it and now everything works just fine on IE10. By the way, I observed all of the proper tricks (ie. disabling Compatibility View, trying both IE10 and IE11 view in the F12 menu, etc...)

I won't slam Windows ME, but I don't know how you could say Windows 2000 Professional was junk by comparison. It was probably THE MOST STABLE version of Microsoft Windows ever produced. SP3 onwars was quite mature and worked VERY WELL. Whereas, I had lots of stability issues with ME on more than one machine. I had good luck with it, but it's plain denial to say Windows ME was without serious issues.

Sorry for the delay. I'd be interested in your findings. http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/chum-spragge-jun17-63.ram http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/spragge-chum-june63.ram In fact, any *.ram link from http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/ will be worth trying.

I have noticed over the last few months that nothing has been left in the $hf_mig$ folder. I wonder if that should worry me. Updates are downlading and installing every month without incident.

Well I installed the experimental x64 version of VLC v2.11. It can load the stream by having the user provide the URL for the Real Media item (it even shows the time length). But since there are no 64 bit Real Media codecs installed (or in existence), it won't render the stream. Now it appears (though I've not tested this) that if I had the *.ram file locally present on my hard disk, I could then play the Real Media file. But it's a no go for streaming. So I gues I'm sticking to MPC-HC x86 (by the way, MPC has most of it's own codecs too; I only add the "Alternative" apps for Real and QuickTime)

I loved the silver/blue feel to both Windows ME and Windows 2000.

Two Fitjitsu U320 SCSI Drives

Notebook: Windows XP Professional Workstation: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Server: Windows Server 2003

Why is this automatically assumed that an OS will be outdated in 3 to 4 years? It's almost as if you buy into the planned obsolecense that Microsoft itself puports. Why couldn't an OS go on for ten years? If Microsoft needs to generate revenue, create another profit centre or revenue generator. Foucs on Office 365 or apps development. Perhaps they will pay for the updates on traditional Windows as it becomes less of a profit centre.

What makes you say that ? There are so many Vista haters out there who would say different. I liked the OS sure enough, but what makes it the Best Windows Yet?

Hi Vince4Amy: I did run a test install last year for a couple weeks. I admit that it ran REALLY well. Vista x64 with SP2 bundled in was nowhere near as bad as Vista x86 when it first came out. It was horrible.

I run some on DOS games and Jezzball (my only 16-bit Windows app) in DOSBox. It works quite well. I was already using DOSBox in XP's x86 build so it's no worse running DOS games on x64. I'm cannot agree that you have double the files in \Program Files and \Program Files (x86). The inital folder holds 64 bit app folders whereas 32-bit app folders are kept in the latter one. There is indeed a duplication of the %BootDir%\system32 folder and the \HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\Software Key (I think it's Wow6432Node or something like that; I can't remember). But that is necessary for 32-bit apps to run in a WOW64 session. Besides, that structure remains in Vista and 7 x64 builds too.