NoelC

...And it nicely fixes the taskbar blur issue with Win 10. Nice job! -Noel

Nice tip, but that's still one small blue star too many. -Noel

Like me you seem to believe a properly set up Windows system should regularly log zero errors and warnings in the System error log, and that any such messages appearing imply that there is something wrong with the configuration or hardware. It took me a whole year after Windows 8.1 was released to accomplish this goal, and there are some warnings I still find logged occasionally, such as "Filter Manager failed to attach to volume" happening at the moment of making a system image backup. I don't think Microsoft shares our aversion to errors and warnings. They've chosen to release Windows 10 with less testing than at any time ever in the past. As far as they're concerned, it's off their programmer's desks to you. With a system this complex it's no surprise it would have system-level glitches. For what it's worth I see plenty of event 7031 ("The User Data Access_Session1 service terminated unexpectedly") errors in my Win 10 test setup. I don't believe it's because of anything I've set up wrongly. It's probably also a given that you would see an error accessing a connected drive that has a file system Windows 10 does not recognize. Windows / Microsoft are not tolerant of any other system. -Noel

Are they completey out of their ... mind?!?!?!?!?!!! Crazy like a fox. I personally think it will actually be worse than what's quoted. I believe a system that is "cut off" from updates will eventually expire / deactivate. Gabe Aul has said as much re: Insiders who now are running Windows 10 without having upgraded from an older license and who choose to no longer participate in the Insider program. It's entirely technically possible that any given build has (and will have) a hard drop dead date built in, and your whole ability to continue to run Windows depends on you continuing to say "up to date". We certainly know for sure that the technical previews have had such dates in them - it's been stated. What makes anyone think that the "RTM" will be any different whatsoever? What else would you think "Windows as a service" means? Be afraid, be VERY afraid, of "upgrading". -Noel

Don't get me wrong, I want everyone to get what Microsoft has promised and I'm not being critical of your desires or needs. What I'm warning against is that by "reserving" you may be giving permission to Microsoft to upgrade you the moment they want to do so - not when it's convenient or appropriate for YOU. Regarding putting up a test version... The time to become an insider has passed. I think it's impossible to put up a clean installation of Windows 10 right now because it won't activate, though I'm not sure whether any of the variants do or will provide a "trial period" (e.g., there's normally a 90 day free trial capability of Windows Enterprise). I'm not even sure that right now, just before the general availability, you could even install Windows 10 as an "upgrade" and have it activate. In a week I'm sure things will become much clearer. I invite anyone who knows more or has done a recent "Vanilla install" within the past week or two to chime in here. -Noel

I'm sure Wall Street loves him (or her). Get people to pay over and over again for something they used to only pay you once for... Now you don't have to work any more and you still get paid. -Noel

Yes, I had just read that. I like his writing. He's a bird of a feather. -Noel

Likewise. But we are a minority, and paddling against the current will get to be tiring. Note that Microsoft tends to return things back to "out of box" settings when they install updates in Win 10. I'm sticking with my (nicely tweaked) 8.1 for now. -Noel

Anyone else noticing that whenever Microsoft installs a Windows Update any more that a whole bunch of settings get returned to whatever Microsoft wants them to be? It's not even possible to protect files/folders/registry keys with permissions settings. I got KB3074686 and a couple of security updates last night and lo and behold things I had hidden in Explorer reappeared, a change I had made to prevent SearchUI.exe from running had been undone, and who knows what else. This trend of "You will set it Microsoft's way and you will LIKE it" is getting irritating! -Noel

Oh, great, I just bought an Office 2010 license since I no longer care to use Office 2013 or its pale successors. I wasn't going to move up to Windows 10 anyway, at least not right away. Do you know whether the same update that broke your Office 2010 was issued on Win 8.1. -Noel

Are you sure you know the difference between "reserving" it and "giving the green light to install it"? If you were to, say, wait 11 months and decide finally to upgrade, do you not think Microsoft will let you? -Noel

You actually WANT to reserve this turkey? Just had a Windows Update yet again undo a bunch of tweaks I've made. This "we know best" update policy is really ticking me off! -Noel

I applaud your desire for independence and for efficiency. I don't work for a hardware seller. I actually run my own software business on as small a budget as possible. Sometimes you have to keep yourself from holding onto technology that's inefficient, because new stuff can be very, very good. SSDs for example use almost no power at all by comparison to hot electromechanical disk drives. As an example: Not too many weeks ago I got a good deal from Dell on a PowerEdge T20 small business server. The thing is actually a serious powerhouse and can saturate the gigabit Ethernet that connects it to the world. I don't have $500 in it, and it boots and runs Win 7 x64 from a RAID 5 array of SSDs, with regular USB 3 backups to a Western Digital MyBook drive. It's virtually silent, and draws something about 15 watts of power just sitting there. No kidding. It literally stays cold to the touch - feels no different than its surroundings. In short, performance people only dreamed of a few years ago, hardly any power consumption, and not too much money. Why did I buy it? I had an old circa 2005 Dell workstation that I had repurposed as a file server. It worked well enough but was a power hog, drawing nearly 200 watts and heating the room (costing even more in A/C). When it finally failed due to bad capacitors I thought about resurrecting it - I even bought some capacitors - but before I could do the soldering I saw the PowerEdge deal and thought, what the heck. Now I have a system that will pay for itself in power savings in a few years, and with a 3 year factory warranty. Some of the hardware from the old server (e.g., keyboard, monitor, backup disk drives) from the old server now are part of the new server. Moral: That old hardware that you think is fine and should last 25 years may just be a boat anchor. Don't put more into it. Get something modern and enjoy. -Noel

No, Mr. Bond, they expect you to pay. -Noel

You make API calls that resolve KNOWNFOLDERID values. An example discussion on this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6827496/how-to-properly-use-userprofile-inside-code Environment variables are resolvable too, if that lights your fire. That which I have listed above is preferred. -Noel

Uh, yeah. The golden days of customizing your system via your own software are over and gone. -Noel

The situation I described is for people coding software. My point is that there's more code writing involved to create software that follows the rules and derives the proper locations rather than just hard-coding a path. Any good programmer would do it the right way. Not every programmer is a good programmer... -Noel

Another very good example, thank you. It helps make my point. -Noel

Actually, I can't imagine that people would expect a 3rd party antivirus package crafted to work on one version of Windows to work on another. Such software cuts too deeply into system internals to be expected to be compatible. And frankly it's unnecessary (see my Anti-Malware Suggestions post). Regarding what software does or doesn't work on the desktop overall... Honestly - outside of the degradation of the look and feel of things like the common controls - I haven't found there to be degradation of application compatibility in all the applications I've tested. In fact, one or two of my old ones seem to actually work a little better on Win 10 than on Win 8.1 (thinking, for example, of an old text editor package called Codewright). In some ways, the compatibility features of Win 10 see to be more like those of Win 7. Now, system software... Things that change the nature of Windows, such as start menu replacements, shell extensions, look-and-feel modifiers... These all tend to have problems with new OS releases, since again they often cut deeply into undocumented workings. Classic Shell has a mostly working beta version that now works decently with Win 10 build 10240, though it has a few quirks, such as an occasional delay in showing the Start Menu, a Run feature that doesn't pop anything up, and possibly others. I expect a fully working release soon. Aero Glass for Win 8 doesn't really work yet, because we haven't yet seen a version specifically engineered for a build newer than 10130. I assume that's work in progress. But parts of Big Muscle's software seem to work just fine - his UxThemeSignatureBypass DLLs work perfectly, for example. I use a nice little tool called WUNotify for Win 8.1 that, because of Windows Update changes, doesn't work with Win 10. Given what Microsoft's done, it's really not even applicable. In My Opinion, Microsoft clearly recognizes that they failed to win hearts and minds with Win 8, so they've put some extra effort into smoothing the transition from Win 7. That means you'll find very few programs, other than those that rely on undocumented interfaces, that are overtly incompatible. -Noel

Fair enough. Some time ago, before I found Big Muscle's software, I looked at the theme replacement facilitators, and at that time what I found broke system integrity. -Noel

Yes, it's probably best to use C:. The problem is that not every programmer follows the rules, or even knows them all. People tend to prototype stuff to work on their particular development system. A single system is complex. The design rules are even more complex. And people are lazy. Programmers too (these are not technically people, but machines that turn caffeine into code, and they do suffer from aversion to work). Gee, C:\Program Files is always there, right? Think how much easier it is to code... char *InstallRoot = "C:\Program Files\"; ...in source code than do the lookup for the KNOWNFOLDERID or CSIDL calls to derive where it's actually at on any given system. Your best bet, unless you LIKE dealing with ongoing problems, is to go with the flow. The simplest to maintain, most stable systems run everything from C:. Making a big, high performance C: volume can be advantageous. -Noel

According to Microsoft, there is no RTM. Seriously, they claim the term no longer applies. To me that implies they no longer care to verify the functionality of their software before unleashing it on the public. We'll see how well that goes. https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/4797/no-rtm-for-windows-10-microsoft-says That being said, it's pretty much agreed that 10240 is the build that's going to appear on people's systems, though no one outside of Microsoft can say for sure. Actually, the debug symbols for 10240 ARE available. Aero Glass doesn't work because the version available for download was never engineered to work with 10240. We can only hope that Big Muscle is having good luck working around the various new roadblocks Microsoft has thrown into their system to thwart anyone doing what he does. Microsoft clearly does NOT want people to "have it their way". -Noel

The old tried and true phrase, "that's not a bug, that's a feature" comes to mind. I don't understand a desire to use an inferior file system. That doesn't mean it's not valid, just that I don't understand it. Remember having to repair your disk all the time back when Windows ran from FAT? Remember real loss of data? How many times have you had to repair an NTFS volume because it became corrupted, even though modern computers now crunch through thousands of times more data? Now, don't get me wrong... I don't think NTFS is the best system that could be made. We deal with its limitations and some of the inefficiencies of its implementation all the time. I had hopes for ReFS but it's apparently stagnated. I'm not being critical here, nor am I any fan of bloat. I just prefer to pick different battles, and I do know how to deal with permissions issues. -Noel

Not even just a lack of added value, but destroyed value. Evil genius at work. -Noel

We shall be patient. Windows 10: The farce is strong with this one. -Noel