NoelC

I don't give a **** about your politics. I'm sure it's important to you, but writing stuff like what you've put out above just makes you seem like a bit of a nut to me. Now you listen to my rant: As a software author myself, who feeds my family through sales of my wares, I'm highly sensitive to even the hint of someone saying they'll crack software rather than use it legitimately. If that's not what you meant, my sincere apology for the misunderstanding. If it IS what you meant, get lost! -Noel

Ecommerce is a necessary commodity in today's world. People are even ordering pizza online. It's time to get with the program. Your choice to saddle yourself with an inability to function in the modern high tech world does not entitle you to special treatment. If you want to play, you have to pay. One wonders how you buy your other software. -Noel

One could probably make the buttons a little smaller (shorter) so as not to fill all the space that's composited, then make the highlight buttons have color that extends beyond the edges when hovered-over. But it couldn't be a difference very many pixels, and it wouldn't extend above the window edge. It would probably only serve to make choosing a button a hair more frustrating, since the active region for the control would extend past the visible edges. That's kind of what's wrong with the borderless window concept. -Noel

Marketing dweebs don't have to make things work, they just have to think shit up. The forum will probably bleep out the word, but it is the only one that fits. Doesn't matter if the shit they conceive requires something to work in order to be viable. They're bold and reimagining things. Let the geeks figure out how to do it while they're away at their toga parties celebrating their success. -Noel

No problem. In agreement with jaclaz, it's likely Microsoft doesn't think that anything other than logging into the cloud with a Microsoft account needs to be worried about. -Noel

I imagine DP means a glow "around" the button being hovered-over (see post 76, above). With the stock theme the theme atlas doesn't have anything that gets composited around a button being hovered-over. -Noel

That double user avatar thing has been around since the first Win 10 TP release. I've submitted feedback on it as have many others. You can safely ignore it, though like you I hope they fix it before the first actual release. -Noel

That would beat having to put a colored gradient across the whole theme atlas to derive what UI elements turn which colors from what positions in the theme atlas... -Noel

Frankly, this is the most I've thought on this particular subject since I added the page on disabling it to my books some years ago. It doesn't matter much to me whether Windows presumes to use it, as I find even my large folders of images show me thumbnails as needed. In order to "work around" performance issues, I just got a good computer system with a good I/O subsystem. Most any computer has more power today than those when this "feature" was developed. Sometimes one just doesn't need to look back. And you're right, a lot of what we do with this commercial, opaque operating system is based on guesswork. We are never really going to know what's inside it, nor the reasons why. This Thumbs.db stuff seems to run along the lines of indexing, which is yet another stoopid idea of Microsoft's. Once you come to accept that they are just a bunch of IQ (near) 100 geeks you start to realize that there's no magic. If not using half the BS "features" they put out because they just don't work, or they make everything sick, or whatever, leads to an OS that's functional and stable, that's a good result. And it's all we can do, besides provide those geeks feedback on their next release (which they will mostly ignore). Other things of the "useless" genre that come to mind, and which I avoid if at all possible are... Libraries and other Explorer abstractions. Homegroup networking. UAC. Personally the best kind of guesswork I find is born from anecdotal evidence, experimentation, then worked around and backed by real-world experience. My strategy seems to work. Today I've primarily been developing OpenGL software in visual studio on my workstation running Win 8.1 x64, with a Win 10 x64 VM humming in the background - both tweaked. I have any number of other things running. While the Win 10 system is a curiosity for seeing what they've broken lately and trying stuff out, the Win 8.1 host is a bona fide workhorse, currently "keeping on ticking" after 3 weeks (since the last Windows Update) in hard use every day. -Noel

It's possible I suppose. I read that more as "Thumbcache.dll is writing to thumbs.db". But I admit to not having looked at the system with ProcMon for that particular usage to try to derive what's going on. I don't seem to have a reduced thumbnail display experience, but that may be because I have a powerful system. In any case, the system simply works much better without any Thumbs.db files being generated. -Noel

XP is old news. Thumbs.db is not read by Explorer since Vista. There are central databases for thumbnails now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_thumbnail_cache -Noel

One of my pet peeves with UAC is that it "makes it difficult somehow" in about eleventy seven different ways. You may be able to install the system software you want if you temporarily disable UAC (I mean really disable it, setting the EnableLUA value in the registry to 0 and rebooting), then when you've got the software installed, re-enable it by changing EnableLUA back to 1. It can be found here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System -Noel

One way to avoid having to type in a password at bootup - and I'm not sure it works with a Microsoft account because I do not use one - is to run the system tool NETPLWIZ and uncheck the [ ] Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer box. I do this for my Win 10 test system, set to use a local account, and it comes right up to the desktop. -Noel

I have never had a problem manipulating a folder in all the years since I've been applying that tweak (which I do whenever I'm setting up a system), so I hope it does solve it for you. It is definitely effective. I believe there must have been some significant application software package(s) at one time that made use of the thumbnails that Microsoft would put in the thumbs.db files. When Microsoft migrated their systems to use central thumbnail databases they left the logic in place that would generate the thumbs.db files so as not to make the newer system actively incompatible with the old application(s). Much as we complain about Microsoft, they HAVE made a priority out of compatibility. Perhaps they even lost or settled a lawsuit that forced this, I don't know. But I do know that the above policy setting does reduce the amount of unnecessary work Explorer does, and my thumbnails work great... I've been running Windows systems hard since Vista with it, and there's been no downside. -Noel

I wasn't presuming to know how he lays down his words, as much as digging a bit against the likes of Cortana. Perhaps one day automatic language processing logic will have the wisdom and smarts to be able to differentiate between "review / experiment" and "review slash experiment". But that day is not this day. Have you done an Internet search on Cortana, by the way? Most here probably know that she is an unclothed female icon of Halo video game fame. I'm surprised Microsoft is able to get away with promoting Cortana into Windows without some backlash. Even though they're not showing an image of her they're being pretty sexist just by using her name and voice. They must figure most everyone making decisions in the Windows world must be male gamers. Sex sells. Who amongst the gamers wouldn't want to talk to Cortana and fantasize about her digital likeness? Don't get me wrong, the gaming industry finances a lot of high tech development, but there still has to be SOME real work done SOMEWHERE. Authors need to be able to create the games and use high end tools to draw images of the likes of Master Chief and Cortana and animate them. I guess maybe Microsoft figures folks doing that kind of stuff will just stay on old Windows 7 workstations. Too much of a good thing. If all the world cares about is fun and games, who looks after our survival? -Noel

Assuming it really is Explorer that's got hold of your files, there's a very specific fix for this that works on all versions of Windows... It's not even really a workaround any more, since no program that I know of uses Thumbs.db files for anything. I agree Microsoft should change the configuration of the system to make this the default: -Noel

It's what happens when you dictate to an automaton. -Noel

It is telling about what Microsoft's thinking, but the ban doesn't have teeth. It installs (and runs) just fine if you change the name of the installer file. -Noel

Yes, that's why I set it back. It's just two values in two different nearby keys. This sets "the old way" Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX] "IsConvergedUpdateStackEnabled"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings] "UxOption"=dword:00000000 This sets "the new way" (which is clearly unfinished) Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX] "IsConvergedUpdateStackEnabled"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings] "UxOption"=dword:00000001 -Noel

By the way, I've just verified that re-enabling the "classic" Windows Update interface (via registry tweaks) and hiding the updates that are failing repeatedly does NOT hide them from ongoing attempts to download once the new UI has been reinstated. -Noel

No, that's not it, not entirely. I'm well past that faux pas. There's no ability to hide updates. I have an update that can't be applied, probably because it's for an old Microsoft application where the update doesn't make any sense any more (something about fixing a .NET 2 bug). The same thing would occur if, for example, a display driver update were made available but you keep your drivers up to date yourself by visiting AMD.com or nVidia.com and you don't want it. -Noel

Cortana sounds like it might be fun to play with but is really just fluff. Today I've installed more development tools, and I've got to say if Microsoft just avoids screwing up anything more and fixes one thing they've recently broken (the Windows Update process) I might actually be able to live with Windows 10. I've been able to make all my development and business tools work with it. That's a pretty tall order for them, though. I doubt they'll avoid screwing up more stuff. A rational company would keep the old control panels for doing EVERYTHING around until well after the newly re-implemented methods have seen hard service. It's just the right way to work. This business of deleting functionality then replacing it with something that's clearly less functional may be a preview-only thing, but it's just stupid. How many folks are already stuck in a "There were some problems installing updates, but we'll try again later." loop? -Noel

For what it's worth I'm not having any problems with that. My Win 10 test system sees network shares (e.g., accessing via \\SERVER\SHARE) just fine. But I religiously disable HomeGroup networking in favor of username/password (workgroup) networking, which has always worked better anyway, so maybe that's why. -Noel

Microsoft's share sounds small, but... I wish I could sell 38.8 million copies of something. But I agree with you, making Windows "work on anything" really embodies the "jack of all trades, master of none" figure of speech. Is this progress? Seems like only yesterday they were all about "the emperor's new clothes". Perhaps what's next is "what goes around, comes around". -Noel

You're spoiling us, Big Muscle... Your "experimental" releases work as solidly as other peoples' version 7.2 commercial releases. I've had zero problems with your FrameMargin tweak in a couple of days of fairly intensive testing across multiple monitors. I've settled on 2 as the number I like (which actually gives me a 3 pixel border plus the two additional pixels I add to the drop shadow resource with the theme atlas). The ONLY thing I've noticed, and it's a very minor thing, is that in a few cases some applications seem a little sluggish (e.g., when I resize Internet Explorer, or when I move something across the boundary between monitors). I can't attribute this specifically to Aero Glass, though - it seems like maybe it just has to do with Windows 10 in general, or the fact that I'm running it in a virtual machine - and I haven't done comparative testing without Aero Glass. By the way, implied above is that with Windows build 9926 I can now successfully switch to a full 3-monitor immersive experience - something I could only do before up to Windows 8.1, but not with 10. Apparently multi-monitor support in Win 10 is improving (back to the level it was at with Win 8.1). -Noel