NoelC

Are you speaking of build 10041? -Noel

Tablets and phones have limited storage, not because of size but because the manufacturer wants to maximize their profits. I'm a little surprised Microsoft hasn't gotten into the flash manufacturing business. But that takes bright hardware engineers, and Microsoft apparently hasn't got bright anything. Microsoft is clearly no longer interested in whether we can actually use the Windows OS for anything useful. They only want money for ​facilitating our playing of games, purchased in the App Store. It's all too obvious now. The writing has been on the wall since Windows 8. Optimists amongst us hoped it was temporary insanity, but apparently the greed is just too great, even in the face of overwhelming public opinion, for them to actually follow the company's original charter any longer. I can imagine executives thinking to themselves, "history will show that we were a flexible enough company to adapt to the new economy of frivolity, rather than trying to continue to do serious work and failing". Modern times. Dark times. -Noel

Try holding down the Control key when starting up. If you still have the problem chances are it's not related to Aero Glass. -Noel

Not to detract from your comments above, Jorge, but some other food for thought, especially given the stated policy that we'll all be "given" a Windows 10 upgrade for free... Who are the customers? We users used to be the customers. But the customers for Win 10 are whom? Advertisers, App Store authors. Not users. This explains SO much... -Noel

"...continues to refine and improve the user interface..." Somehow a headline like that outrages me. -Noel

On Windows version __? For me, with Win 8.1, just changing the Inactive frames slider makes the inactive window borders opaque. With Win 10 the rules are different. -Noel

You might want to reword that - specifically, change "does" to "doesn't" or "does not". -Noel

Tornado, you don't happen to have a very large value for blur radius, do you? -Noel

Dumbing down, yes, as well as a fair bit of sheep herding. I am curious what you feel about the installation process is "terrible" though. Is it that Microsoft all but hides the ability to create a system that runs from a local account? Outside of Microsoft acting predatory, technically it seems to go fairly easily. By the way, did you catch the note that they're going to make the installer download things from the Internet at install time? That way they can change it as time goes on. Call me jaded, but I see it as facilitating these things: Release of software that doesn't work right, because "it can be fixed later". An increase in predatory behavior as time goes on and the market will bear it. Less certainty that just because you have "a DVD and a license" you'll actually be able to do a fresh install. -Noel

I have Win 8.1 x64 fully updated with rev 17674 and Aero Glass appears to work okay. The most recent symbols I've got in the symbols\dwmcore.pdb subfolder are dated November 20, 2014. This is what's listed in my debug.log... [2015-03-12 21:36:40][0x518:0x51C] Installing DWM hook...[2015-03-12 21:37:04][0x518:0x51C] User: SYSTEM[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0x518:0x51C] Module: C:\BIN\DWMGlass.dll[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F4] Machine ID: PHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F4] Checking key 3db01833f7c2f2db8cf686449b9be5a26b02efb19f4fcc70cd35106a125b356e2620e104e9056575a7344743beb8082 for ID PHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ...[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F4] Hook (USER32.dll!DrawTextW from udwm.dll) installed[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F4] Hook (GDI32.dll!CreateBitmap from udwm.dll) installed[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F4] Hook (GDI32.dll!CreateRoundRectRgn from udwm.dll) installed[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F4] Aero Glass for Win8.1 v1.3.1 x64 correctly loaded (C:\BIN\DWMGlass.dll).[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F0] DBGHELP: Symbol Search Path: .;SRV*C:\BIN\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F0] dwmcore.dll version 6.3.9600.17674[2015-03-12 21:37:05][0xBC:0x13F0] udwm.dll version 6.3.9600.17415[2015-03-12 21:37:06][0xBC:0x13F0] Symbols loaded from patterns: 0x7FF[2015-03-12 21:37:06][0xBC:0x13F0] Loading settings (flags = 0x1) from HKEY 0x0000000000000328 for session #1-Noel

Please let us know, Dave. I don't see anything in the screen grabs being published that makes me think they have to have reorganized things in Aero. Such as it is, Aero does seem to work okay in build 9926. I wonder whether Microsoft publishes the symbols for inner ring builds on the normal symbol servers. They might, considering the audience for those builds, while restricted, isn't trivial, and I'm sure not all co-located. -Noel

Agreed. Trouble is, most users don't seem to see the difference between "download and (if you 're conservative) schedule a time to restart with all the updates in place" vs. "vet each update, decide whether the potential benefits outweigh the risks, then choose to download / install it when it's most appropriate". And the level of the documentation they produce for the updates is dismal lately. It's a case where they know that doing less means people will care less. They'd say it's a win-win situation. That being said, keeping up with updates actually HAS been viable up to now, though not without a few stumbling blocks, for some of us anyway. It's another case where the devil is in the details! ULTIMATELY having chosen to install all updates to stay current is quite different than blindly and blithely installing all of them on the very same day Microsoft feels like releasing them. Hopefully they've gotten the message as the feedback has been strong, but there's a clear conflict of interest. Accepting their updates means everyone will be pushed further and further toward Microsoft's agenda, while a user retaining control means Microsoft isn't in control. Don't we all wish it was Microsoft whose slogan is "don't be evil". -Noel

"Fail" is not a hard and fast thing. It's an oversimplification. Microsoft could continue to "fail" to make the newest versions of Windows a market success. You might think, at a big picture level, that such a thing would mean that they would just go out of the operating system business, but the simple fact is that they've got a lot of manufacturers by the short hairs. There has been and will be no absolute failure. Microsoft themselves would say that Windows 8 is not a failure, with some tens of millions of users. They could "fail" to deliver anything more than we've already seen in the Technical Previews. In that case, I already know that (with the help of 3rd party developers and a lot of reconfiguration) it can be made it into a decent, workable system for me - I already have such a configuration running. The worry, of course, is that they may break even more stuff and/or delete more features we need before release. Personally, I imagine I'll work out the details to where I can continue forward with my engineering business running on Windows 10. Should they suddenly make that impossible to sustain, I'll either stay with what I have at the time or at worst case drop back to an earlier version that I already have on hand. And, as I have done with the several prior major releases, I'll have my book on configuring and augmenting Windows out, so in a small way I'll be turning their failure into my success. The one real issue I have to confront, however, is that if Microsoft, as they say, diminishes then I'll need to branch my product development into other markets, with other systems (e.g., OS X, Linux, Android, Unix, ???) - something which I'm already doing in the background. That'll just have to pick up a bit. -Noel

I think the push to wreck the desktop experience goes deeper than just not focusing on it. I sense it's actively being dismantled. -Noel

I'm pretty sure he was joking, Dave. -Noel

Thanks anyway. I'm pretty sure I've got it right. Next bootup - I guess in April - I'll watch to see that the process is shortened. -Noel

Hi Andre, thanks for your interest. You have infinitely more experience analyzing these traces than I do, and I'd be grateful if you'd look over the data to see what you think. I'd rather not make it public, but I'll be happy to send it to you personally... Watch for a PM... Bootup isn't something I pay much attention to since I do it infrequently. FYI, I have my volume snapshot space set to 50 GB. Edit: I finally figured out what I did that caused this process to stretch out like it has: Late last year I increased the space available for volume snapshots on my external backup drive up to some 900 GB. Thus it has been dutifully accumulating snapshots due to my nightly backups. On looking just now I see that I have over 2 months worth (e.g., 60+ snapshots) available. Thus, the process that the system normally goes through at startup validating volume snapshots quietly has gone from just a few minutes to tens of minutes because of the sheer additional volume of snapshots. Now that I know that the system does this, and the downside, I'm happy to know that it's normal activity. For what it's worth I've just reconfigured to be a bit more conservative. I really don't need the ability to do a restore from any snapshot in the last 2+ months. Just a few weeks is enough. -Noel

Thing is, I don't know if it's typical, and I do like to know why things happen. This only started relatively recently. And though the 4% isn't missed, the inability to do certain things for 20 minutes after bootup is definitely not something I want to live with if I don't have to. I have captured an .etl file, now on to analysis... Edit: Early analysis results: Looks like the system is validating all its volume snapshots... Specifically, the ntoskrnl.exe!KiStartSystemThread going through volsnap.sys!VspOpenFilesAndValidateSnapshots, boiling down to low level I/O control calls. Now what I need to figure out is why this activity became [more] noticeable / intrusive not too long ago. -Noel

I don't reboot very often, maybe once or twice a month. Over the past couple of months I've noticed that after reboots my Win 8.1 x64 MCE system runs one thread and does more or less continuous but low-rate I/O for some minutes (e.g. 15 or 20 minutes, after which it stops). I noticed it again after Windows Update dropped its load this week. Today I did some reboots to try to diagnose this. The process that's running is System, and it's using up one of the 24 logical processors (i.e., it shows a continuous roughly 4.2% CPU usage). After, say, 15 or 20 minutes of doing this the System CPU usage just drops suddenly to near-zero (e.g., 0.01%) and the system runs normally thereafter. During the time System is running that thread I can't start such things as CHKDSK and System Restore. They just hang, then they proceed when whatever System is doing finally ends. I've watched the Resource Monitor and the System process accesses the master file table of my system volume or backup drive (i.e., G:\$Mft),. I also saw it occasionally write to C:\Windows\System32\config\SOFTWARE.LOG1. But those may be coincidence - it's not consistently showing any disk or network access, even though the I/O is constant, so I suspect whatever I/O activity it is doing may be something like IOCtl calls. To do what, I don't know. My system is otherwise well-tuned and stable, and free of malware (verified with MalwareBytes Anti Malware), and I actually feel no significant impact from this - other than if I'd like to do a System Restore or something right after reboot I can't until it finishes. Nothing is logged in the System Event Log that gives any clue as to what it's doing or why it should be doing this. SFC /VERIFYONLY reports everything's healthy.Could it be Windows Defender doing some kind of after-boot scan (though I'd expect that to busy MsMpEng, not System)? On my list of things to do is to disable Defender and see what changes. This activity by the System process shows increasing I/O rates up to a point where it peaks, then it drops to zero and starts up again. Some of the increases are gradual and some quicker. Check out this oddball pattern of the thread's I/O rate, from Process Hacker: It's clearly following an algorithm of some sort, and not random, as it does finally finish. Maybe some kind of cache compaction or... ??? My next step will be to set up the Windows Performance Recorder to see if it will shed more light on exactly what's being done. Any other suggestions? -Noel

Heh. I always figured Apple users just put their thumbs in their mouths. -Noel

In investigating something else I finally figured out why WUDFHost was running for my external backup drives. Turns out among other things these drives are considered "Portable Devices" in the Device Manager. This doesn't seem unreasonable at first, but a "Portable Device" turns out to be the term for something like a smart phone or music player that can be plugged-into a USB port. WUDFHost is NOT started when the devices are disabled in Device Manager in the Portable Devices category. Yet I do not lose the ability to access the files on the drives. I noticed that media player would look all through these backup drives occasionally, and that plus some warning messages in the System Event Log that I finally was able to find some info on lit the bulb over my head. One less service running, no loss of functionality. -Noel

Works for me; it's the same page I see if I visit www.outlook.com. But I don't see any problems with any "Boss" message. -Noel

Thanks, I'll do some searches. -Noel

I do know what you mean. Drivers matter. The RAID controller card I run (Highpoint 2720SGL) was very innovative but got an initial bad rep because of the drivers it shipped with. Basically they had been written in the time of HDDs, not SSDs, so when used with SSDs the performance was essentially dismal. Then they rewrote the drivers and lo and behold the performance skyrocketed. But it was too late. The Internet reviews were out. It was not the thing to buy. All that conspired to make the price initially low and was of course good for those of us who paid attention to the later figures (e.g., here). What I don't know yet is whether ReFS will play well with this controller and its drivers. I'm still short one SSD before implementing my planned expansion, in which I'll have all the drives in RAID 0 and set up an additional partition and data volume over and above the 2 TB volume I have now. I believe I'll set that up, at least for initial testing, to be a ReFS formatted volume and see what happens. -Noel

My understanding is that the ReFS implementation is supposed to embark on the recovery activities itself, absolving the user from having to mess with it. Whether that's comforting or disturbing... All I can say is on both internal and external drives I haven't encountered any problems yet. I buy decent hardware that doesn't often fail, so mostly my interest was/is the performance. It's not really noticeably better, except as I mentioned it seems not to get as balky when the drive is nearly full (who has a drive that's not normally nearly full?). What I was hoping was that by the time of the next OS (e.g., Win 10) they'd make it possible to format the boot/system volume (C:) with ReFS. At this point I've not fooled with ReFS on SSD hardware yet - I believe I'll do that soon. It will be interesting since when the hardware gets more efficient the differences in the implementation of the file system become a bigger factor in the performance. -Noel