NoelC

English seems to have enough depth to discuss the Royal We (or is that wee wee)... In any case, We can see that Microsoft has a long-term plan to become more predatory, which apparently is what a company must do if they're going to give away software and still make money with it. This isn't speculation. There is simply no evidence We can find to counter this claim, with plenty to support it. We doesn't likes it. Not one bit, my precious. -Noel

Have you come across reports of VMware actually knocking on doors? I don't fault you for your judgment of their licensing quirks, but it's pretty good software from a technical perspective. I get a lot of value from it. -Noel

Well, almost certainly the Marketeers are headquartered in Redmond, and I'd guess their primary language is English. Probably there are some good people in the language translation corps who are either excluded from the Secret Plan of Domination, or who simply didn't want to subject the rest of the world to the subtle mind games. You lot outside the USA borders usually don't stand for as much subtle abuse as we have to endure. -Noel

Here are the screens. I could not find a way through without entering them. This screen grab sequence illustrates... The weird thing is that after having gone through all of the above, the system rebooted and I had to go through some parts of the install again where it asked for not only my Microsoft account info, but also had me enter local account info. Once the dust settled from THAT, and the system finished installing, amazingly, I'm logged in with local account info - which was my intent all along. Microsoft has published that we should not expect to see big things in the remaining builds, but rather should expect stabilization and tidying up (no surprise with a summer release approaching). However... I don't sense a lot of tidying up in this! -Noel

I'm with Jaclaz. Clearly they're transitioning, over multiple versions, the subtle lingo and feel of the OS. There are clearly people who have a "brand plan" that spans multiple major versions. They have been executing to this plan for a long time (hence the My Computer -> Computer -> Your Computer subtleties). Somewhere someone (correctly) observed that to take the dehumanizing process further, to where we're all just goo attached to the tech, they would need to make us start to feel that the system is not OURs but THEIRs (which, since we just license it, really has always been true). I'm fresh-installing a build 10122 Win 10 Pro system on a VM right now. The option to sign in with a non-Microsoft account has either been hidden even better, or it's actually removed this time. They also gather your birthday info and telephone number now as well. Edit: I had to log in with my Microsoft account, then it rebooted, I had to enter a lot of stuff again, including logging in with my Microsoft account AND entering local account info, and now I'm in my first login with my local account. I can't really yet see the logic in what they're doing. -Noel

Doesn't seem nearly as mature/polished as 10074 did to me. They'll probably need a week or two to develop some updates for it. And yes, I'm seeing the double X under some conditions too. -Noel

Now Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and VIdeos all appear even if I delete the GUIDs that before this build would remove those namespaces. This used to work: Why does Microsoft continue to make it less and less possible to configure the system to do what we want? Anyone found different workarounds to get rid of these abstractions, for those who like to just use the drive and folders themselves? -Noel

Thanks for that info - yes, "Disconnect my Microsoft account" does indeed seem to be there. I have some other things to do first but I'll certainly give that a try. -Noel

Yeah, and not without some new challenges for Big Muscle... Edit: It does try to start at bootup, so the above may be a new behavior of the Task Scheduler. Or maybe I just have to remove and recreate the entry - I'm not sure. As could be expected, DWMGlass now cannot hook everything it needs to, and symbols are not yet available... ...And now the pattern match hooking, on pressing the [Cancel] key, just seems to crash and restart DWM. -Noel

Thanks! That screenshot doesn't seem to be from Win 10 though. If they've re-implemented it as a Modern App I have my doubts whether it'll be as useful. But we can hope. Makes me feel vindicated in that I have been continuing to use scheduled Windows Backup through the wbadmin command all along with Win 8.1. It's a very good feature under the covers, especially in the way it's integrated with VSS. Maybe some of us FINALLY got trough to them that they'll need to make the Win 10 product at least as good and capable as Win 7 in order to get Win 7 users to even consider upgrading to the current version - even for free. Just a couple of days ago I was scoping out Dell's top-of-the-line workstations, and even for $10K+ they still ship with Win 7 Pro by default. Kind of a "well duh" thing, but companies have a way of being more dense than individuals. -Noel

Actually it may have been another issue entirely that the others had. We've learned since that the current released version of Aero Glass for Win 8+ is fully equipped to find the locations to patch all on its own, without need for any symbols. -Noel

Your warning has been noted, Tarun, as has the disrespect you have shown me by actively discrediting my suggestions to others without bothering to back up your claims. The difference is that I don't hold power over your ability to post here. I'm done in this thread and with trying to share my knowledge of computer security here. -Noel

Security can still be decent with UAC disabled. As long as it doesn't run ActiveX the need for a sandbox is greatly reduced. One of the prime reasons its security model is very good is that it's quite configurable. I'll wager my system, with me at the helm practicing the security measures I outlined at the start of this thread, is providing both a more secure and better performing computing environment than most. By the way, the word "security" is almost too broad a subject to discuss in one broad swath. Secure from what? There's unsaid context in each statement. Secure from ads that install malware is just one aspect. -Noel

An interesting comparison in sizes between Earth, our Moon, and Ceres: From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ceres_Earth_Moon_Comparison.png With just 3% of our gravity, a 175 lb (80 kg) person would weigh just over 5 lbs (2 kg) on Ceres (though the necessary space suit would add another few lbs). -Noel

Nah. It's falling out of fashion to comprehend what you're reading. Anyone seeking to understand what they're reading is considered a "dinosaur". If you disagree with this you're a "hater". I read that somewhere online. I think. -Noel

Your diagrams don't seem applicable to me. How many people do you think reconfigure IE to lock it down as it can be for secure browsing? How many understand that when Microsoft puts up the message "Do you want to reconfigure to recommended settings?" that they may actually be OPENING IT UP to more vulnerability? How many do you think practice good security practices as an overall strategy? Do YOU allow IE to run ActiveX from the Internet Zone? If so, why? Why do some folks here delight in taking things out of context? -Noel

I'm guessing a (near) future build of Win 10 will offer the capability for full removal of the tiles again. -Noel

I don't personally see the logic in having column headings if the chosen display mode doesn't actually list things in columns under them. Sort options can be changed via a right-click context menu. That said, I do know of a workaround - though I don't think it's any better than the one you mentioned. A tool called Folder Options X allows you to enable "Column headers in all views", and it does work in Win 10 - but it only puts column headers back in File Explorer windows only. I guess you're wanting them in File - Open dialogs and the like, right? I think you may be out of luck. -Noel

The bul***** sometimes gets deep around here. IE has the best security model of all of the browsers - you just have to reconfigure it from its default permissive behavior. A good hosts file is a valuable cog in an overall security strategy and does not cause any performance problems. There is no technological substitute for thinking before acting. These are simple truths no matter what the self-proclaimed experts around here may say. -Noel

Avast has changed within the last year from a decent AV to a bloated mass that assumes the system exists just to run Avast. -Noel

I edited my post above about the time you posted the response. It's all good now! -Noel

I hope so, but unfortunately I'm not in a condition to check. Once I found out the Portable Device category was causing the extra software to run I just removed the entries. I'll check when I set up another new system. Edit: I was wrong, I have one system where I disabled the "Portable Devices" entries. When I re-enable them I do see the indication that the external drive's driver is the one using WUDFHost. Thanks for the fix. I had to manually remove the UMDFHostPlugin.dll plug-in that was put in place before. -Noel

I'm having no problems accessing networked systems by name here. Did you disable HomeGroup networking entirely? I do that. It seems to me to get in the way of everything. -Noel

Like you I had read that insiders who had installed the pre-releases would be granted a full, licensed copy when it comes out. Seems to me they're getting away with a lot by vaguely implying things, then later "clarifying" them. That's modern Marketing. Those people are evil. I recently took the opportunity to install Win 10 on a brand new standalone system, a Dell PowerEdge T20, as at the time I had only the internal backup HDD and not yet the main SSDs I was going to ultimately run it from, so to do initial testing I figured what the heck and installed Win 10 build 10074 from a thumb drive made from an 10074 ISO, which in turn was made from the WIM file provided by Microsoft. By the way, I've since gotten the SSDs and installed the OS I had intended for it to run - Win 7 x64. I did comparative Passmark benchmarks and in almost every way Win 7 came out significantly more efficient. One of the very few things Win 10 did better was the "Graphics 2D Image Rendering" test - by scores of 742 (Win 10) to 702 (Win 7). But other important things, such as "Graphics 2D - Windows Interface" it did worse - by scores of 95.6 (Win 10) to 116.0 (Win 7). This says that Win 10 should feel more sluggish, and in fact it does. This system uses the Intel HD Graphics GPU that comes in the Haswell Pentium G3220 CPU. -Noel P.S., Jorge, do you have enough computer power to run a virtual machine? Virtualization is a great way to test Windows 10. I like VMware Workstation for the job, but I believe you can actually run Win 10 under VMware Player, which is free.

 He's cropped off the right side of the screen grab. Note that there's no system tray or clock showing. If you resize the image to the 1440 vertical pixel count he touts for the LG 34 inch ultrawide monitor, the image is only 2455 x 1440 - it's missing nearly 1000 pixels. It might be a leaked version that he's not supposed to be running and writing about (but of course he wants the scoop), and what's over there in those deleted pixels is the message that someone will be drawn and quartered for leaking it. I can't quite make out what the two icons he's got up in the trees near the upper right say. One might say "Microsoft" EDIT: I developed a forensic image enhancer that employs anisotropic filtering some time back and just tried it... That worked well. The two icons quite clearly say IMG_7790 and IMG_7788. The thumbnails resemble images of phones or tablets. -Noel