burfadel

Let's put this 'skipping' update 1 in another way. If you skip update 1, you might as well skip updating Windows in the future and turn off Windows update etc. This is especially true if you think it's so perfect as is. You better turn off Windows Update, since if you have it on default settings it will install update 1 automatically when it is generally released. I'm not saying you have to install it now, but if you don't install it once it is available officially through Windows Update, well, quite frankly, that would be stupid!

Ah ok, official support is different. The current release of it is supposed to be official, but you never know. It's not really an update you can 'skip', as it is a combination of a rollup package (previous security, general, and several hotfixes) and a feature update. Future updates may require or expect that you already have it installed.

Yes, and it never will. I will not fix it. That's unfortunate, because once update 1 is released officially it will be essentially a requirement to have installed

HIS Radeon R9-280X

I tried beta 2 a couple of days ago and found the same thing as infinality. The window (top title bar of course) is transparent, but isn't blurred. I tried playing around with the DWM settings, but to no avail. This occurred both with the standard Windows themes and another Windows 8.1 theme I tried. Adding ColorizationBlurBalanceInactive (from memory...) to the registry just resulted in a error window. Sorry couldn't be any more descriptive than that, I should have paid more attention before disabling it!

I don;t disagree that Microsoft should get into tablets ASAP (purely from a business sense point of view), but forcing the same interface across all platforms is just plain stupid. You can actually have a functional tabletesque interface whilst still being fully practical and useable for the desktop/laptop user. Microsoft want to use the same interface to encourage people to use Windows phones and tablets, but if anything it will probably turn them away! The issue is, because it really is an ineffective and unattractive UI on desktops and laptops, if they used Windows 8 on a laptop or desktop first you can safely assume that they'd probably go to an Android, Apple phone, or Symbian based (some basic smartphone) phones, or a Samsung/Apple etc tablet instead. If they used the tablet or phone first, they would probably use it on the computer (and be subsequently put off). The tablet to computer use really isn't necessary, people typically use Windows anyway so Microsoft aren't gaining anything! In fact, they're losing sales on desktop/laptops in addition to the lower tablet/phone sales. Issues with Windows 8 (there are many more, these are just critical) - it's unintuitive - apps are 'dumbed-down'. Apps may be useful on tablets or phone where their limited functionality really shouldn't be an issue (since they functions are there for their practicality on the move in that situation, NOT for functionality), but they are woeful on desktop/tablets - touch screen interface for a keyobard./mouse environment. Even with touchscreen computer screens, having to lift your arm up to put smudges on the screen isn't practical or ergonomic - ugly. Some elements look half finished like the icon look on the Metro screen (reminiscent of Windows 95 icons), and the same goes for the 'open-with' dialogue window - Office 2013 is not only ugly, it's a whole screen filled with while and slight off-white. This is very, very unpleasant to for several hours at a time, so I strongly recommend that people DO NOT waste their money on Office 2013, and hopefully Microsoft will get the message that some visual niceness isn't a bad thing, and that for continuous use a bit of contrast in the display colours is extremely beneficial. The Office 2013 interface just creates mental fatigue! You may notice that even in this forum, there are shades of blue and contrast, Office 2013 lacks all that! I mention Office 2013 because the styling cues resemble Windows 8 in that it's all about making the interface as plain, boring, and unpleasant as possible

It's getting there, looks good! The text colour is a bit of a problem though. I notice one or two unsigned themes have the glow around the text like in the picture below, which allows the use of black text. Maybe this could be considered as an option? Note, the pic is the standard demo pic for the theme, it isn't my machine!

I wouldn't leave that as a permanent thing though. Some programs/games run funny without a pagefile (never struck this myself, but apparently it does), and also it could hinder performance. With 16GB of RAM it won't make any difference, but with Windows x86 it will. Regardless of anything else though, the pagefile shouldn't have caused a BSOD issue unless there is something hinky with the computer... (whether it's a registry setting issue, buggy driver etc).

On a new computer I would get Windows 8 and make some changes to make it more useable. If you already have Windows 7, it is not really worth it as you pretty much get zero gain. The only gain you may perceive to as getting is the ability to use Metro apps, but these aren't 'high functioning' apps. Apparently ideally on Windows 8 you have your boot device (which realistically should be a SSD) initiated as a GPT type disk, in the scenario where you are running a UEFI BIOS, not MBR type disk. Most people will have it initiated as MBR . GPT allows for fast booting options, but also means you have to re-initiate the disk (and lose all its contents) if you want to go back to Windows 7 since Windows 7 doesn't support GPT booting. Basically, MBR is BIOS (old style) type booting, GPT is UEFI booting. Basically booting MBR with a UEFI bios is booting in compatibility mode which is why the fast boot options don't work like they should. Or at least. this is what I believe to be the case!

Maybe a repackage could be done? You can actually copy the requried VC runtime files into the program folder, you don't need to install the actual debug runtime on your system. That said, I tried it out and it did nothing! No black screen, no error messages either. It just came up with the message that it was a test, and once I clicked okay the screen went blank for a fraction of a second, but when it came back up there wasn't any chance.

Here are some more tweaks, all performance oriented, that are valid for Windows 7 and Windows 8. Some of the tweaks are really only beneficial for x64 (such as the memory management settings), but it won't hurt x86. ' MAVERICKS CHOICE', you have the paging file settings listed in your tweaks, those settings aren't applicable to others and may actually be problematic. Also, you have 'EnableLUA' set to 0. This is what I prefer too, but it does have a noticeable downside. If set to 0, you cannot use Metro Apps in Windows 8. If you have it enabled, you can use Metro Apps, but it prevents you from doing some other things, and also it can cause all sorts of problems with non-system drives with files created under Windows 7. Just thought I'd point that out! Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] ;setting the following to ffffffff doesn't specifically set it to that size, it signals Windows to maximise the potential of the two settings as required. This is ideal, especially for x64 environments. "PagedPoolSize"=dword:ffffffff "SystemPages"=dword:ffffffff "PoolUsageMaximum"=dword:0000003c ;the following may actually not have any effect on Windows 7 or 8, but is a setting still being able to be set through fsutil (even in Windows 8). Don't know why if it is useless. In any case, if it is useless, then it can't hurt changing the value from '1' to '2', right?! [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem] "NtfsMemoryUsage"=dword:00000002 ;the following values increases the maximum transfer size of USB to 2MB (from the default of 64KB). This may lead to better USB transfer rates. This is only valid when update KB2581464 or successors (and Windows 8) is installed. ;also the USB interface, which is the last bit in the keyname, may vary between systems. The following are the defaults for the Intel USB on Z77 boards, and also for the Etron USB controller. You will need to add other controllers (Asmedia etc) yourself by navigating to the registry path and copying the USB interface number into the code below. You can simply copy and paste the two lines for additional USB interfaces and change them as required. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\054C00C1] "MaximumTransferLength"=dword:00200000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\05AC12xx] "MaximumTransferLength"=dword:00200000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\05AC13xx] "MaximumTransferLength"=dword:00200000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\05DCA431] "MaximumTransferLength"=dword:00200000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\058F6362] "MaximumTransferLength"=dword:00200000 ;this increases the handle limit. The defaults shouldn't actually be exceeded, but the values below certainly don't hurt and can be beneficial in certain 'rare' circumstances. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows] "GDIProcessHandleQuota"=dword:00008000 "USERProcessHandleQuota"=dword:00008000 ;the following may give better performance in games (some of these may already be at the following levels). Basically it supposedly raises the game processing priority, same as those dodgy programs that you have to pay for, but this does the same thing. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks\Games] "Scheduling Category"="High" "SFIO Priority"="High" "Background Only"="False" "Priority"=dword:00000001 "GPU Priority"=dword:00000001 "Affinity"=dword:00000001