NoelC

Note how the visually styled Reserve button built a moat around itself to keep from being infected by the Metroness. Has this been there all along? -Noel

I guess it depends on what you consider "useless". Despite Microsoft's best hopes, business does not need Metro/Modern Apps so far. As one who has run Win 8.1 quite successfully for years with UAC off, I find the inability to run Metro/Modern toys no big deal, as there is nothing in that realm I have needed or wanted. Beyond that one (admittedly obvious) limitation, I have no problem doing anything else. Most of that experience applies to Win 10, with some exceptions. Right now, with the pre-release builds we have in hand, I agree that it's probably not viable to try to run Win 10 with EnableLUA set to 0. With Win 10 more parts of the system are being ported to XAML / UWP and Microsoft is (mistakenly?) causing some things that really shouldn't to fall under the "UAC must be enabled" umbrella. I believe most of these things will be fixed by the time of release. Don't forget, there is still the fact that business IT people need to be privileged. This one single issue will likely keep me from upgrading to Win 10 until well after initial RTM. Then they will see the light, heed the need, and make the changes necessary for business to once again love the latest version of Windows. -Noel

Metro/Modern toys don't run with EnableLUA set to 0. It is an arbitrary limitation imposed by Microsoft. I would consider not being able to run such software a personal limitation IF I were to find even one App that does something I need or want to do. With the UAC slider to the bottom in Win 8 and newer UAC is still on you are still running with diminished privileges, and escalation has to happen for anything that you do requiring privilege. This is different than in Win 7, where dragging the slider to the bottom meant completely disabling the UAC add-on baloney. Unfortunately, it isn't true that it will never prompt with the slider pulled all the way down. There are some things it still prompts for, and some other things that it just refuses to do. Some need to do those things. If it's something where the system hassles you continually for trying to do what you normally need to do, UAC is a fail, plain and simple. Just because one person hasn't seen "Can't create a shortcut there, would you like to put it on the desktop instead?" or "Access Denied" when you've neglected to start an application "As Administrator", doesn't mean others don't see it. Add to that the fact that with UAC on some file system and registry operations are magically redirected to other places. Seriously - it's called file system and registry virtualization. I choose not to have my system try to sneak around behind my back and do different things than what I tell it to do. -Noel

A friend has reported to me that he's seen the hard sell show up in yet another place on his Win 7 system... -Noel

The implication of this just dawned on me. Wow, Microsoft already gave people the choice with UAC - disable UAC *OR* use Modern Apps. Now it seems again they're saying, re-theme *OR* use Modern Apps. I guess everyone hopes Modern Apps will appear that make the subsystem worth having, but up to now... -Noel

Gabe Aul of Microsoft announces that 10130 is moving to the Slow Ring. http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/06/12/releasing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-10130-for-pcs-to-the-slow-ring/ I saw a Windows Update requiring a reboot go in last night, but of all the updates listed on the above page I haven't yet received KB3070982 (though to be fair it does say some hardware configurations). ISOs of install images have been available for about a week already here. For those wanting to use Big Muscle's Aero Glass, I have not yet seen the symbols show up on Microsoft's symbol servers. -Noel

Seems like you want to push things to extremes a bit, vinifera... I used XP x64 and got good value. I used Vista x64 Ultimate for some years and got great value out of it. I found Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, after some tweaks and augmenting, gave me even better value. I now find Windows 8.1 x64 MCE, after some more extensive tweaks and augmenting, gives me the best value I've had from any OS yet. Maybe not by a lot - I probably wouldn't be much worse off if I'd stayed with Win 7. That I've found value in newer and newer systems doesn't mean Vista sucked. Frankly it provided me more value - on good hardware - than XP ever did. Vista was the first system I ever used that achieved the status not needing regular reboots. XP always needed a reboot about every week or so - even the x64 version - because some resource or another would get exhausted. Now I have computers at least 10x more powerful than the systems I ran XP on and they just run and run indefinitely, no matter how much work I throw at them. Everything before NT, frankly, sucked (though I managed to get value out of all the versions except Windows ME). NT - a reincarnation of Vax/VMS - was the first Microsoft package that tried to be a real OS. It finally succeeded somewhere in the life of Vista. -Noel P.S., Windows 10 is not ready to supersede Windows 8.1. Yet. Maybe in a year or two.

One of the things I've been doing with the Win 10 previews on my test systems is to apply Big Muscle's Aero Glass program and update the theme atlas to give a polished, attractive desktop look and feel. Even though I have found no reason to want Windows 10, all this updating of appearances got me craving a better look and feel for my main Win 8.1 desktop. Nothing stops us from re-theming Windows 8.1, and frankly if the newest OS doesn't give anything attractive or functional, why not stay with what works, and update the existing desktop to deliver a more delightful experience? I give you... Windows 8.1 with Big Muscle's Aero Glass, the Aero7 theme by DaMonkeyOnCrack (facilitated by Big Muscle's UxThemeSignatureBypass DLLs), my theme atlas updates, Classic Shell, Folder Options X, and some other tweaks, yielding an elegant, modern look with controls that have visual styles on an OS that works reliably, still has a rational control panel, has a rational Windows Update management process, and is perfectly stable. You can find the components here: Big Muscle's Aero Glass and UxThemeSignatureBypass software: http://www.glass8.eu/ DaMonkeyOnCrack's Aero7 V2 theme: http://damonkeyoncrack.deviantart.com/art/Aero7-V2-for-Windows-8-8-1-10-TP-build-9879-429412929 Classic Shell: http://www.classicshell.net/ Folder Options X: http://free-sk.t-com.hr/T800/software/FolderOptions.htm My updated Theme Atlas for Aero7: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win81/ThemeAtlasForAero7.png -Noel

Well there are different types of licenses that I work with, and in the case of the Windows 7 Home Premium I used, I can't see how they could invalidate it as it doesn't phone home to an activation server. The other types it could be possible as activation servers are used, but I am not worried that such a thing will happen. Given the aggressiveness with which Microsoft is pushing Win 10, I wouldn't put it past them to initiate different methods of checking licenses online through Windows Update. Be careful. I believe there are very real trap doors being set. -Noel

Yes. What happens if they invalidate the license you're upgrading from. -Noel

Have you found yourself cringing when you've heard Windows 8 compared with Vista? I have. Though a few things may have been improved (you can't fix bugs for nearly 10 years without accidentally improving something), there's simply more wrong with Windows 8+ at a fundamental level than there ever was with Vista. It's completely different for a system to be ahead of its time vs. have no merit (MetroAhemModern). Microsoft bets most people can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's true. -Noel

What are you going to do if the license with which you've "reserved" (and downloaded, then later formatted) no longer works to activate your prior system - assuming you want to revert it? I see it as a trap door that we can't possibly know if we want to step through yet. Jaclaz, you make a good point about it likely being a Marketing aid. It's no doubt multi-functional in helping Microsoft achieve its goals, which can no longer be achieved solely on the merit of the products. -Noel

What I want to know is... Where is the Justice Department? -Noel

I felt the thread had moved on beyond the original point and into more general territory. Kind of a "I need to put together a scratching post, which hammer should I get?" drifting to a "The Swiss Army Hammer has many great uses" kind of response... Sorry if it's forbidden to go off topic. -Noel

Having been through it and read all the screens, what do you feel you've accomplished by "reserving your copy", Tripredacus? Just curious. I'm having trouble reconciling the statement from Microsoft that we'll be eligible for a "free upgrade" for up to a year after RTM, and at the same time the statement "you may miss out" seen in at least one of the reservation screens. The only thing I could derive from it as a guess is that "reserving" is tantamount to giving permission for them to install the upgrade on the first day. The worrisome part of that is what it could do to your existing license. I doubt they're going to make it easy to go back or allow people to continue to run the old version. -Noel

Sure, but I'll bet void* is more used to using Win 2000. The point is, with a virtualization system you can run any and all systems you want (within licensing limitations of course). -Noel

**** sneaky of them to claim you "may miss out" on an offer that's supposed to be good for a whole year after Win 10 releases, eh? Pretty good stretch for the word "may" this time, eh? Shakespeare had it wrong. Lawyers as a lot are bad, no question, but he really should have proposed that we "kill all the marketers". They are the true creators of evil. -Noel

By the way, Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition RC is available, and it's free. -Noel

Hi Skrell, You're welcome. I tested PrimoCache pretty thoroughly. The short story is this: It does what it advertises, but it doesn't really help all that much with actual performance increases, because Windows already has a file system cache. I had one system crash when testing it on a system that never crashed before and hasn't since. The longer story... Windows maintains a very effective file system cache that can be set (see below) so that your application does not have to wait for a write operation to complete before continuing . So for virtually everything the system is already giving you true write-back cache performance. Having to copy the data to yet another cache will use up RAM and can actually slow things down, and in fact I found it to add about 5% more time to my Visual Studio system builds, even though it reported that its "lazy write" process resulted in a fair reduction in disk write activity. Where Primo Cache SEEMS to shine is for benchmarking. Since it's a block-level cache that essentially writes clusters of data normally headed to the disk drive to RAM instead, it makes your benchmarks, which try to measure actual disk performance, really glow. No doubt it's how many of the top performers on the benchmark sites get such great scores. But practically speaking it's not adding to your performance at all if your Windows file system cache is already working for you. PrimoCache requires you to dedicate RAM to it. That's generally not a good thing. By contrast, the Windows file system cache will dynamically shrink if your applications need the RAM. It does have one good feature: If your intent is to reduce the write load on your disk (e.g., SSD), it WILL do that, because its strategy of not writing data to the disk right away means that any file - say a temporary file - that's deleted a short time later doesn't actually ever get written to the disk. Since it's a block-level cache, when the OS emits a TRIM command it knows the block never needs to actually be written to the disk. The effectiveness of this will differ depending on what you do with your system. I have otherwise a perfectly stable system. It's well-tuned, and very high performance (I have an array of 6 SSDs, and my I/O throughput is a bit shy of 2 gigabytes per second). It normally runs all the time 24/7 between reboots mandated by Windows Update. Usually that's a couple of weeks to a month, and I use it pretty hard (I run my software engineering business, as well as doing a fair bit of engineering work, with it). The only crash I've had is while testing Primo Cache, in the middle of the night while the system was doing a backup. My conclusion is that, while it's pretty stable (it had run for a couple of days without fault), Primo Cache CAN introduce some instability. Primo Cache has an excellent statistics reporting interface, so if you like to see how it's working it doesn't disappoint. I liked that feature very much. By the way, if you want to increase your file system performance to true write-back cache levels, do this: 1. Right click on a drive in Explorer and choose Properties. 2. Click the Hardware tab. 3. Choose the hardware drive from the list for which you'd like to maximize performance and click the [Properties] button. 4. Click the Policies tab and see to it that you have the boxes checked as below: With the above you need not pay for a cache program nor dedicate RAM to get write-back cache performance from Windows. -Noel

Hm, I wonder if they're rolling those out in a staggered fashion. I had that one hidden already, and it's been listed here for a while: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173752-how-to-avoid-being-upgraded-to-win-10-against-your-will/ -Noel

If you have a powerful enough machine, as ralcool mentioned above, consider getting a copy of VMware and being able to then install other operating systems inside virtual machines. You could even put up a copy of Win2K in one of them. It sounds a bit daunting at first, but once you get over that small bump it's really quite straightforward to set up a VM, install an OS, then use it for the things you just can't do on your host system. I have had as many as 5 VMs running at once (XP, Vista, 7 32 bit, 7 64 bit, and 8.1) just to see if I could manage it. I guess the only downside is that you take on the task of managing more systems, but you need only do as much of that as you want. -Noel

I hear you about the visual appeal. Fortunately, we have Big Muscle and his wonderful Aero Glass restorer. Unfortunately, there's nothing one can do about SOME applications (thinking about Office 2013 or Visual Studio) that choose to leave behind the desktop theme entirely. I can't freaking believe Microsoft is choosing to make all of Windows 10, out of the box, look like Office 2013. I guess they just couldn't find anything that looked worse to model their work after. -Noel

No, because I hid the updates that would run it before they were loaded on my system. I believe at least one other person on this forum has reported being able to cancel it, though. The post was today or yesterday, though I've lost track of where I saw it. -Noel

If the RTM update is anything like the technical preview updates, most things you've customized will be overwritten (lost) by default settings. I've done a lot of testing of this sort of thing, as I publish a book on tweaking Windows that will of course also be applicable to Windows 10, and I've been researching what works and what doesn't. I can tell you definitively that many things you're used to in Win 7 will be quite different, though I've found that many customizations still apply. You will also find Microsoft has changed the permissions on a great many things so that even if you run Regedit escalated you will not be able to change them without taking ownership and opening up permissions. And of course UAC is no longer optional. If you're used to turning UAC all the way off in Win 7, you'll be disappointed to learn that's no longer supported at all. You can shut it off using the EnableLUA registry tweak, but then almost nothing that's new in Win 10 will work. Honest. Of course I don't know the tweaks/augments you typically do, so the only real way for YOU to properly anticipate and judge whether Windows 10 will suit YOUR needs is to join the Insider program and test it yourself (I strongly suggest using a virtual machine). I STRONGLY recommend canceling your "reservation" and waiting until you hear what the others in the world who get updated right at release say. The free upgrade offer will be good for a whole year. You can be sure Microsoft isn't going to shut you out because you wait a few weeks or months after the release day to see how things really work (and how they are accepted by other Win 7 users). -Noel

Out of curiosity, what do you imagine will be the difference between that and the application the OS provides to do exactly that? What OS are you talking about running on? -Noel