NoelC

Microwave UIs suck. Had one with a pure electronic keypad switch on spontaneously and cause a fire once in an RV owing to line noise when I was connecting the power (didn't realize the breaker was on). Do you know how hard it is to find a microwave with a physical on/off switch now? Very little technology actually works. If it did, people wouldn't crave new technology. Regarding smart phones... Occasionally my son visits. He has always prided himself in keeping up with the latest tech. His current "smart phone" actually bends. When we go out together we often need to know something simple, like "what is the address of a pizza place near here" or "does Walmart have xxxx in stock", or "is Jurassic World sold out" we ask him to look it up on his "smart phone". Every time - every single stinkin' time - he fools and fools with it, then announces he either "can't get the info" or "the signal isn't good enough" or some other lame excuse. He's working on a PhD in Photonics, so I don't think the problem lies with his ability to operate the tech. Try to talk to him on the thing and we might be able to understand him. Or maybe not. Virtually every cell phone conversation is interspersed with - if not entirely composed of - "please repeat that, you're breaking up". The folks who make portable electronic devices - Microsoft only being the latest - all fail to grasp that the "to work" option is a necessary evil in their designs. Google is no different - their attention to quality has been lacking since they started, and they've been as predatory as Microsoft is becoming all along. Their definition of a search is "turn up some interesting distractions" and oh by the way, now sell the info about what you searched for. -Noel

I suggest having no smart phone at all is better than being constantly distracted by technology that doesn't work. Actual human social interaction could be good for the world. -Noel

Interesting. My Win 10 VM doesn't auto-update any more, and hasn't for a month or more. I have to manually request Windows Update, at which time it goes forth with whatever updates are pending. -Noel

And if you are using Android you are using a derivative of Unix, which is simply the "wrong" operating system. -Noel

Not quite yet. Another 6 and 3/4 hours to go. I suggest screen-grabbing your favorite online atomic clock showing 23:59:60 (and please don't tell us you don't know of one or you'll need to turn in your Official Geek card). -Noel

Today is going to be the longest day* you've ever experienced, and maybe ever will. Tonight, June 30, 2015, at 23:59 UTC an official leap second will be added, making today 1 second longer than most - 86,401 seconds to be precise. Leap seconds have been added 25 times since 1972 in order for atomic time to accurately track the Earth's slightly varying rotational rate, which is generally a few milliseconds slower than 86400 seconds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second See what happens when we can measure time more accurately than the accuracy of the motions of celestial objects? What are you going to do with the extra time? I plan to sleep in. -Noel * As mentioned above, since 1972 there have been other years with days this long, but none longer. Given that the ITU is considering eliminating leap seconds in the future, this may be the longest you'll experience for the rest of your life.

That might make sense if it were malfunctioning in any way. Ivo's beta software is better than Microsoft's (and most others') released software. -Noel

'Bout time. If they're bouncing people for driving people away from the cesspool of an OS they're about to release, Drew was doing an awesome job of alienating anyone who had at least two brain cells to connect together. I'm sure he means well, but it doesn't come out that way. -Noel

You can't be sure of it. Business contracts supersede even the Constitution of the country, and they withstand challenges all the time (look up people vs. condo associations, for example). Given the modern change in nature of corporations, where they're becoming ever more evil/predatory without bounds, this is especially disturbing. -Noel

Thanks for the heads up, xpclient. Working great in Win 8.1! Working great in Win 10! It's nice to have the Apps menu back. -Noel

What Microsoft has done with the UI in Windows 10 is really a bad joke. It's not the "Aero Glass" people have been calling for. Aero Glass is much more than just a hint of translucency behind the start menu or Taskbar. In its full implementation - e.g., in Win 7 - it embodies the entirety of the theme, which extends not only to the caption buttons and window borders (they're solid white in Windows 10), but also to the theme that governs the display of buttons and other controls within the desktop applications. Windows 10 is all white on white "polar bear in a snowstorm". Aero Glass, as an entire theme, paid attention to usability - you could easily pick out, visually, the controls you need to use. THAT's what people who crave the return of Aero Glass mean when they ask for it - not token translucency behind a Start Menu that everyone's going to replace anyway. Ideally, once Windows 10 releases someone will update a theme implementation to work with it and Big Muscle's Aero Glass implementation and maybe Classic Shell or Start Is Back to fully return usability to the desktop. Frankly until that happens Windows 10 is not worth having. What Microsoft has done in Windows 10 is begrudgingly bring back something they call Aero Glass to try to placate users who don't know any better. Bob, you've fallen prey to their "marketing press release" strategy. It's not comparable. A whole solution like this, presently doable in Win 8.1, is what I mean: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173976-craving-an-updated-ui-experience-re-skin-windows-81/ -Noel

Sure. He just wants it modernized, so it runs without fault doing today's work. It's Win 8.1 with all the fluff disabled and the base desktop functionality restored. I'm living that dream... Basically a modern (in the true sense, not the marketing sense) desktop with all the stability and capacity of the latest OS kernel. Out of the box the latest systems have needed work to become good. It's not impossible, you just have to have a plan. -Noel

Legally or technologically? Regarding the latter... You're running their OS. They didn't suddenly turn evil overnight. It's been a gradual process. Yes, I can visit the forum by logging out (my comments above should have given that away). But why would I want to? -Noel

Sorry, I can't log in there - I'm banned for criticizing Microsoft's policies. I imagine big bad bombastic bob will be hit sooner or later. SRFreeman is probably the most maddening participant there. I came to believe, before I was pushed out, that he may be an exec at Microsoft. There is no good way to "deal" with him. Best to just ignore him and most certainly don't let his twisted world view get to you. -Noel P.S., A business contract trumps all else, even the Constitution of the United States.

There's nothing like an OS that out of the box does nothing particularly useful for you. It might as well do something useful for THEM, right? Even though out of the box it was a real loser, Windows 8.1 (tweaked) is hands down the best OS that I've used so far. But certainly not because of what Microsoft delivered. Add-on software, secret config changes, and (courtesy of Microsoft not allowing it to run with UAC disabled) avoidance of anything to do with the Metro debacle makes it the service pack for Win 7 that never was. And yes, there are still a few nags I haven't yet tweaked out of existence. Accidentally Shift - Alt - Tabbing to the "Show Desktop" icon is one. But Win 10 will not become that "next service pack" I fear. ALL the development is in the Metro BS, which even after 3 years of Win 8 hasn't turned into anything useful. Years ago I predicted it would fail - just like the Windows Live Gallery, Gadgets, and a host of other Microsoft "initiatives". Most of us kind of figured that would happen with Win 9 10. I wonder whether Microsoft possesses the critical mental mass to pull back from the threshold. Of doom. -Noel

In my opinion, on a scale of 1 to 10, the effort required to tweak/augment/work around OS deficiencies in order to derive value: XP - Tweak effort needed: 3, resultant value: 6 Vista - Tweak effort needed: 5, resultant value 8 Win 7 - Tweak effort needed:6, resultant value 9 Win 8.1 - Tweak effort needed:9, resultant value 9.2 Win 10 - Tweak effort needed:10, resultant value 8 -Noel

My math is based on the tech inside SSDs, not manufacturer's claims. Flash memory is good for many thousands of write/erase cycles (a good rule-of-thumb number has been 10,000). Given that there's wear leveling and write amplification (owing to the way the internal controllers work) a figure of 1,000 write cycles for any given logical block on the disk is reasonable, if a bit conservative. But you're right to be wary of claims. The good news is that some tech reporting sites have taken it upon themselves to actually test write endurance of various SSDs until they actually fail. Google "SSD wear test" or "SSD endurance test". Maybe throw the word "torture" in there. You'll find that, for example, in testing some 240 GB drives will actually run up to near 1 Exabyte (1000 Terabytes) of data writes before actually failing. This shows my 1000 x capacity figure is a decent estimate of expected life for planning purposes. My main workstation has 6 SSDs and 3 HDDs in it, along with two external USB HDDs. The system boots and runs from the SSD array, backed by a HighPoint 2720 SGL PCIe RAID controller, 24/7. The HDDs are only there for backup and very low access data, and they literally stay spun down virtually all the time. My small business server in my office has 3 SSDs and 1 HDD in it, along with one external USB HDD. Same reasons, same characteristics. HDDs are only for backup and stay spun down. The thing boots and runs from the SSD array (RAID 5 in this case) and literally stays cold to the touch. Total system power draw is about 15 watts when the monitor is sleeping and the machine is idle. I only have HDDs at all because I had them before I got the SSDs. I have been running essentially off of SSD since April 2012. My one piece of advice: Don't skimp on the storage capacity. If you feel you really need 100 GB, opt to get a 256 GB drive. If you think you need 200 GB, consider getting a 512 GB drive (or better yet, a pair of 256 GB SSDs and set up a RAID 0 array). SSDs run best when you leave a fair bit of free space (it's called "overprovisioning"). Actually any operating system runs best with a fair bit of free space, so it's a good idea to overprovision for multiple reasons. SSDs actually RAID better than any HDD ever dreamed of, since there's virtually no latency. You literally add up the performance of the individual drives right up to the point where the other parts of the system can't keep up. My workstation can sustain about 1.6 gigabytes / second low level I/O throughput (yes, I said sustained throughput). That becomes 3.5 gigabytes / second with caching. Latency is something like 0.1 milliseconds. This means that even if I have several really high demand applications (e.g., Photoshop, maybe some VMs, Visual Studio, Subversion, and virtually anything else I can want to use) all running simultaneously I just don't feel a slowdown. By comparison the typical throughput of an HDD is 120 megabytes / second. Try doing something like this with an HDD equipped system. -Noel P.S., if you want to dabble with the tech and get started for not much green, look on eBay specifically for OCZ Vertex 3 drives. They're not overly expensive, and are the ones I've found tried and true in real usage (all my drives are OCZ Vertex 3 models). Just now I saw three different Vertex 3 240 GB drives listed for under a hundred dollars. These really work.

That's intentional (and unrelated to the taskbar thumbnail border thing). The white line is because I co-opted the drop shadow resources to restore a border around windows that makes them easier to see on a dark background. I regard that as a feature, not a bug. But I realize the same look and feel are not for everyone. And it's not a "theme" thing, per se, but a "theme atlas" thing (the latter being just a replacement of SOME of the graphic resources that go into compositing your desktop). The theme atlas is just one small part of an overall theme change. Trouble is, right now full theme support for the latest versions of Win 10 is lacking - people simply haven't had enough time to figure out Win 10's reorganizations and reimplementations yet and develop a decent replacement theme that goes all the way inside applications and does things like make the controls easier to see/use. The theme atlas, the replacement of which is facilitated by Big Muscle's Aero Glass GUI application, pretty much just skins the outside edges of windows (including the title bar caption buttons). -Noel

Not seeing the sluggishness here in VMware 11. Many of the display driver calls are passed through to the host from VMware... What GPU do you have on your host? I have an ATI 7850 card. Also, did you get the VMware 11.1.2 update, released this past weekend? Did you install the updated VMware Tools? -Noel

An alternative might be to use something like Primo Cache, which separates the file system from disk via a dedicated low level cache and implements (very) lazy writes - though again there's the possibility of loss due to instability, and in my experience the cache subsystem adds a bit of its own instability. With the lazy write process, if a temporary file is created, used, then deleted (which happens quite often), the data never ever makes it to the disk - which does reduce the I/O load quite a bit. It doesn't, however, appear to push performance up over what you get with the normal NTFS file system cache. -Noel

Well, I admit I did them piecemeal, solving each deficiency as I saw it arise. You might think the Aero7 theme installation should be first but actually that was the last thing I did, which restored my button visual styles. Then I made a theme atlas that made the caption buttons look more modern (I was never that big a fan of the specifics of the Win 7 Aero Glass look). I'd suggest something along these lines... Install Classic Shell and go through all the config options (there are a lot).Get Aero Glass working, and make sure you can use the Aero Glass GUI config tool.Install the UxThemeSignatureBypass DLLs and get that working (to restore properly colored captions on ribbon-enabled windows.Invoke the Aero7 theme.Override the theme atlas. One thing I did was test it all in a VM before going "live" with it on my main workstation. There's no substitute for doing it yourself and seeing what crops up in an environment where you can just throw it all away and start over if need be. Don't forget to look in my book. Stuff like Vista Shortcut Manager, Folder Options X, Quero toolbar, and a bunch of others are listed in there. That reminds me, I should write up the Aero7 stuff... -Noel

From what I can see there's a Group Policy entry to avoid allowing Windows to choose when to update but to wait for you to run Windows Update when it's convenient for you (which could be never, I suppose). I guess, if you want to take on installing the hotfixes directly, you'd have to have a separate test system set up somewhere that will let you know exactly what updates are available and when, so then you can go vet them and ultimately install them. Just checking for updates with the aforementioned group policy setting is tantamount to giving the green light to install now. -Noel

Try the "No Color" one I posted here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170233-aero-glass-themeatlas/page-8#entry1099384 -Noel

There are no promises because that would make donating indistinguishable from buying. Donation is just a way of supporting the development of this fine tool. You're not alone in thinking the desktop could look a lot better than what Microsoft provides. Those who support development often find out there are benefits to having done so. Rest assured you can have Aero Glass without a watermark or pop-ups. -Noel (not associated with the development of this product, just a happy user)

ModernFrame.dll doesn't install with Aero Glass. It involves changing the AppInit_DLLs registry entry and some related ones. When ModernFrame is loaded and doing its thing, a second CMD window will open showing debugging info. If you're not intimately familiar with what loading a DLL with every executable in Windows does, and especially considering the ModernFrame version currently available is not fully functional with Win 10 build 10130, it might be best to just go with Aero Glass alone. Personally I like having UxThemeSignatureBypass running as well (which also runs through AppInit_DLLs), as it helps color and shade the background of title text on ribbon-enabled windows. -Noel