Jody Thornton

Version 3.x and higher included indexing for faster message searching. I found that Thunderbird became slow after that, and that's when I switched to Outlook 2003. I never looked back. So I never ran past the last Thunderbird 2.x revision (2.0.0.23 or something like that). I loved Thunderbird up until that point. In all honesty though, I find even that Outlook is superior especially in terms of speed. Thunderbird as you know it somewhat lives on in the Seamonkey mail client.

The item of interest here was whether or not, FAT32 could support all of the folders and links in WinSxS without issue. I hate the bloat that seems to occur with WinSxS, but I know that over time there will be a LOT of folders.

I certainly appreciate your opinion. I'm not one of those who acts like, "Who Asked You?" I hate that when people say that; it's second place to when you ask someone a question and they say, "Google is your friend!" I hate that! LOL. ( a ) First off I always disable Indexing. I know Vista onwards makes more use of it in the start menu for that "Search Here" feature, but I don't mind slower searching (since my mindset is already set to "searching for something"). I would rather have the Indexing off and have those resources for unadultered speed of disk access or caching. I'd rather not have my system slower so that occasional searches are faster. ( b ) Next, with as much as 7 GB of RAM in my system, I turn paging off with XPx64, so I hope to do the same with Vista. Also I run an HP Workstation so I do not utilize Hibernation.or power saving features that store images to the HDD. ( c ) I would have to disagree (albeit with anecdotal evidence) that FAT32 performance benefits are nothing more than "pure folly". There is documentation supporting better speed of FAT32 on small drives < 120 GB. I will have to find that for you, but the speed increase is quite real I assure you. ( d ) The NTFS features that you cite not being able to live without (ie. sparse files and hard links/mountpoints) are not features I want. I just want to have a straight ahead file system. I don't even need permissions. Just a couple partially unrelated things, but they do illuminate my mindset towards operating systems. I hate this idea that for new OS interfaces to be popular, it's believed that I have to be able to hover my mouse pointer over an icon, and have it tell me five things at once via tool tips (ie, author, filesize, size on disk, version number, blah, blah, blah!). If I want the filesize, or any other info, I will right-click and choose Properties. I am somewhat saddened to move to Vista and upwards, because I am going to miss how lightweight Windows XP was (my truue favourite was Windows 2000). But to stay up to date, there are no "lightweight" options. Why can't Microsoft make an OS revision that will complement older hardware or even simpler hardware? Thanks for listening.

Occasionally when I mess up with system DLL's or the shellstyle of a windows 8/8.1 theme, it will force windows to load classic style buttons/drawn textures. It is still in the system. Just not available in the theme selection. See this is what prompted my original question. I figured the system would have to fall back to SOMETHING if objects could not be rendered. I was sure it had to be in there. A lot of naysayers commonly urge others to give up when something is too hard to find out about, you know, so that's why I'm stubborn. Now just to find a way to make it the default desktop appearance.

It's a U320 Drive and it's a Fijitsu Disk (I'm not home so I can't check). It's 10,000 rpm. Whether it NTFS or FAT32, XP smokes on it. Vista was installed last year on it for a couple weeks test run, and it ran well too. By the way, the partition takes up the entire disk. My reason for doing it is for the slight performance improvement gained on smaller partitions. In every instance I've tried, I find XP and Win2KPro ran better on FAT32 on partition sizes smaller than 120 GB. So on larger partitions and servers, I use NTFS. On smaller fast disks, I prefer FAT32 without the overhead of NTFS. Sometimes the added features and stability of NTFS aren't needed. I'd rather the simplicity of speed of FAT32 on smaller disks.

I understand that Vista/7/8 cannot install to a FAT32 partition, so I was going to convert the installation afterwards with PartitionMagic. Supposing I can get this done, I am concerned that FAT32 limitations will damage the WinSxS folder because of folder entry limits. Is this the case, or am I stewing over nothing? Will Windows Update work properly? I have found that on XPx64, my 80 gb SCSI drive takes a performance hit with NTFS (4k clusters), whereas it's faster with the simpler FAT32 system. I assume this would be the same case for Vista, no?

I was quite concerned about what real world security risks there might be if I continued using Office 2003 after the support cutoff date. I am sure that retaining Outlook 2003 would increase the security risk, but how about the other applications?

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)