NoelC

That's good advice going all the way back, but not nearly strong enough for Win 10... NEVER, EVER choose Express Settings! Choosing Express Settings is tantamount to saying "Microsoft has my best interests at heart". Think about that for just a moment given all we know about what they've been doing lately. This may devolve further into "Don't choose Windows 10 at all" - we shall see. -Noel

An optimist! No, I believe MrGRiM had it right. Windows is certainly not as advanced as it has been in the past. That implies negative overall progress. -2 + 1 Everything Microsoft does lately is like, "You stupid users keep complaining that you want ____ back. Well, we'll show you - here's a cruddy half-baked reimplementation of ____. Now STFU!" I've been a whole 24 hours without even looking at a Win 10 system (I've been setting up a new system with Win 7). Somehow I feel really refreshed by that. -Noel

So distance yourself. Don't let them bring you down. Unfortunately, it IS worth worrying about, but... 1. Smart people can't influence the idiots. That's plain for all to see. Whatever will be will be. They WILL pay for their mistakes (though some individuals, after having destroyed the computing world as we know it, will have golden parachutes). 2. We can keep using what we have now. Things will ultimately get better. I bought a monster computer a couple of years ago that might actually be good enough running the OS I have now for quite a few years. There will probably come a time (if it is not already here) to stop taking new Windows Updates. -Noel

That's what happens when a company believes its own BS. The line between planning and marketing to outsiders is blurred, then the snake starts to eat its own tail. That they think DECADES of development can just be pushed aside. It's clearly all executive think without rational technical guidance to bring them back to Earth. I've been in a big software company where a group (that I was most certainly not in) has gone down that path. Everything seems to go along swimmingly, with money being sapped from the parts of the company still rooted in reality - until one day the money really does run out and EVERYONE gets laid off. It marked the complete failure of the company in the case I saw. No less can and will happen to Microsoft. Those of us still interested in what's happening with Windows are more and more being convinced to step back, hop off, and let the runaway train go where it will. I just installed Windows 7 on a brand new system here. WOW, it works nice. There's nothing like seeing an elegantly designed system again to make one realize what a travesty Windows has become. They're just not smart enough to make anything new that works as well, nor are they patient enough to do it even if they could. -Noel

A problem with you not doing the caption is that the selected theme color is not used - the text is just black (or gray if the window isn't the active one). -Noel

It takes more work, but adding the color accent to the active title bar via the theme atlas (then just setting the opacity 0) to is still a possible workaround - assuming you can live without changing the theme color very often. It seems we just have to get used to a life without options. For what it's worth, the Theme Atlas from aero.msstyles appears to have remained the same between 10061 and 10074. Aero Glass is not finding the symbols for 10074 online. -Noel

It sounds like they did a half-baked re-implementation. No surprise there. As long as yours still works in the Win 10 environment that'll be a good thing. I have just set up a test system fresh and clean (in a VM) from an ISO made from the 10074 ESD. I see you've already updated the ModernFrame DLL. Thank you for your hard work on making the desktop usable again. -Noel

That's good - thanks. With an upgrade (i.e. a system that's been through 9xxx, then 100xx builds), older entries in the Task Manager become invisible. New tasks seem to be scheduled okay, just the old ones don't get brought forth properly. I just did this (install build 10074 afresh) and can confirm that the Task Manager seems to be okay. -Noel

http://www.glass8.eu/support.php -Noel

Just think a little bit harder, though... Replace the theme atlas in the stock .msstyles file, save it as an alternate theme (which will no longer have a valid signature), and load it courtesy the theme bypass software. -Noel

That new 10074 capability sounds very cool. Please post a screenshot. One of the key things is to be able to replace the theme atlas, which I suppose may still be possible via Big Muscle's UxThemeSignatureBypass tools. -Noel

With a fresh, clean 10061 installation (that's not been upgraded), do you see any weirdities with the Task Scheduler? Just curious. -Noel

FWIW, I got the dwmcore.pdb symbols just now for 10.0.10061.9. They're still available online. It's probably because it was released as a Windows Update and they followed standard procedure, which included symbol uploading. -Noel

Get a grip, guys. Nowhere did I ask him to fix or do anything. Sure seems to me that reporting problems Big Muscle may not have discovered himself might actually help him to make his next release better. I distinctly recall him saying he's not going to use build 10061 himself because it's too buggy. With all due respect, trying to act as "forum policeman" and advising others what not to post is not conducive to polite conversation. Keep it to yourself next time. -Noel

It's been highly unpopular / unfashionable, though, to come out and say that it's virtually impossible to get anything useful done on a portable electronic device. And why would I buy a new iPad, when the old iPad 2 we bought is still as functional as the day it was new. Even though it's been dropped on every corner. -Noel

Prior to KB3055415, Aero Glass would fall back to mostly working on Win 10 build 10061. With this update installed, after the several minute timeout after startup passes DWM appears to reset coincident with Aero Glass popping up its "Couldn't find symbols" message, and Aero Glass does not work. Uninstalling KB3055415 leads to being able to use Aero glass in fallback mode again, but since with Windows 10 one can't manage individual updates, it's really an unsustainable situation. -Noel

Nobody's missing the point here. They're releasing crap on purpose to get us used to receiving crap. -Noel

I'd say so, yes. I also honestly believe the travesty that is the new "Start Menu", which shrivels by comparison to anything they've implemented before, is being done on purpose. Kind of a "See? SEE? You didn't know what you really wanted. Nyah." from Microsoft. Gosh, those BS half-baked Metro/Modern Apps are starting to look better and better by comparison to the desktop. It's a pre-release, so nobody can complain, right? It's a free upgrade, so nobody can complain, right? -Noel

With build 10061, tasks scheduled before the upgrade to 10061 are somehow still running when they should, but they do not appear in the various Task Scheduler UIs. Newly scheduled tasks show up, implying Microsoft is adding some kind of additional check. We can guess that maybe it's to "enhance security", or maybe just another way to hide things from we users who would otherwise choose to disable things we don't want running (coughOneDrivecough). Anyhow, the problem needs solving. For those of us doing upgrades, we need to be able to control what's already scheduled (we can of course just install Windows 10 afresh from an ISO next time they bring one out, but that day is not this day). I've never investigated where the Task Scheduler stores its info, mostly because it's always worked, so I never became interested in finding out more. A few quick tests and some snooping turns up some XML files in Windows\System32\Tasks, and some corresponding entries in the registry at [ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Schedule \ TaskCache \ Tasks]. There are also registry entries at [ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Schedule \ TaskCache \ Tree ], and these are particularly interesting, because those that do show properly in the 10061 UI have a REG_BINARY value called SD, while those that do not have no SD. Could an SD value be a new requirement for scheduled task entries? On a practical note, ridding the system of unwanted previously scheduled tasks (e.g., so as to add new ones that show in the UI under the new rules) might be as simple as finding them under [ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Schedule \ TaskCache \ Tree ], then searching for the GUIDs and eliminating all entries that correspond. I'm testing that now. -Noel

I don't see this issue as fundamentally different than the rest of the stuff they've done to Windows, which also logically doesn't work. You CAN start things with the new Start Menu - that's Jorge's point - just not the things Microsoft doesn't make money selling you. Microsoft themselves have said, "just start those old, skeuomorphically ugly, boring applications some other way". There are idiots and irrational optimists out there saying, "okay, let's do that". Then they will exclaim how the new look is fabulous. WE are at the other end of the spectrum, and frankly, WE no longer matter to Microsoft. We're just too hard to please. I've been fond of saying I could turn Win 10 into something usable by tweaking and augmentation, but I'm really starting to feel like they're screwing up too many things for that to be the case at the time of release. This business of removing things, or more recently replacing things with code that is worse than not having it at all, is leading to not just failure, but epic failure. Pink elephants are simply no longer special when Microsoft's world consists of pink elephants on parade. Hangover's comin' baby! -Noel

Microsoft seems to be completely out of control. I can imagine they all feel the pressure is off since users aren't going to be charged money to upgrade to this turkey. But don't worry, even the facebook/twitter public just won't use a system which is that bad - even for free - and the advertisers won't pay Microsoft to show their ads to only the few people who don't know better. -Noel

There is no uncrackable security. Good security is simply that which costs the cracker an inordinate amount of effort / time / money. -Noel

Thanks! I'm waiting on one last SSD that's in the mail before the system is complete, then I'll report back on how it goes. Edit: I've received the last SSD and built the RAID 5 array (3 SSDs). Windows 7 x64 Ultimate is installed, as instructed above. Activation via phone was no problem at all. I didn't do anything fancy, just installed the released SP1 ISO let it do all its (several hundred) updates afterward. So far so good. The only thing even slightly out of the ordinary was that I had to install an Intel MAC driver for the network interface, since the system/chipset are newer than Windows 7 SP1 and no driver for it came in the ISO. The system boots very quickly, disk I/O is blazingly fast (disk read performance is over 1 GB / sec). Intel RST reports all is well. Explorer enumerates all files on drive C: (right click, Properties) at a rate of more than 50,000 per second. SFC /SCANNOW passes with flying colors. Takes about a minute to run. The system has been burned in for a week+ now, and the new SSD for a day. The only system error logged so far was a controller error on the Western Digital MyBook USB backup drive (I've seen these before on other systems as well; they're innocuous). Thanks for the good practical advice. -Noel

You can try to tune your system to use as little RAM as possible, but 4 GB hasn't been a lot of RAM for Windows for a long time. And Win 10 promises to need even more. -Noel

I don't have advice to offer, but keep in mind a Recovery Drive only has enough stuff on it to boot / restore an OS that's been corrupted logically (but is still mostly intact). Since you mention the partitions are gone, that hints at a more serious issue, such as drive failure. If you haven't done another form of backup your data files and applications may unfortunately be long gone. -Noel