NoelC

If you are talking about people who actually work in high tech, that's a rather surprising statement as you seem to know a thing or two about that realm. I can only guess you must be insinuating those people aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. But in all seriousness this kind of thinking is no less than one of the basic reasons for the stagnation of technology in modern times! For some strange reason, few folks are willing to admit that to do good work on cutting edge technology one needs to juggle an uncommon number of variables and details, and everything that helps with keeping track of all that adds to the quality and productivity of such pursuits. Managers, who haven't a clue what their technical people do and who don't know the difference between a PC and a workstation tend to think like that (especially the "actually *need* it" part). You do software engineering, right jaclaz? You can't tell me that EVEN WITH all the automation modern IDEs provide, putting a header file (or several) up side by side with the source code you're working on wouldn't help you get things more right more quickly (I know it does because I do it). Now consider having some API documents and some internet searches up also, and just try to tell me that wouldn't help even more. I've wanted more desktop space to work since the very first computer I ever used with a display monitor (before that, and even after that for a time, I would spread fan-fold printouts around). And yes, I agree wholeheartedly with Tripredacus above, the productivity-oriented system needs top quality INPUT subsystems as well (and I'm not talking about a speech recognition program coupled with an inexact network search). Anyone willing to do without a top notch keyboard and mouse isn't working hard enough (or is working too hard, depending how you want to look at it). If you're a graphics pro, arguably a good tablet is a necessity too. I have a personal cache of new old stock Digital keyboards, as I personally found the DEC LK250 to be the best keyboard man ever made. There were IBM models that were pretty good as well, but I happen to prefer these. How many pieces of literally 30 year old technology are still best in show (or even functioning) today? -Noel Edit: Better wording.

I'm not sure how to tell what you have, but (assuming you have good networking) you could get the version you want from here and compare... http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media -Noel

You might think so, but since Microsoft is busily tearing down everything else, they're convinced it's for everyone. The Apps are, in their terms, Universal. -Noel

That sounds like a surprise, but perhaps not all that surprising. Why would someone be selling a perfectly good and relatively modern drive? Computer failure, maybe. No way to clean the drive. Or it might have been stolen. Not sure if you've already cleared all the files off it, but maybe you could check to see if the person you bought it from is the one whose files you found. -Noel

When I chose to move up to Windows 8.1 it was with the decision to completely disable UAC, as the things I do and the way I manage my system are generally at odds with UAC. So I have eschewed all use of Metro/Modern Apps. Since the Win 10 TP has been out, I've had another look at the Metro/Modern environment, as I have been gritting my teeth and leaving UAC enabled in my test virtual machine. I even tried to be the user Microsoft wants us all to be and took a virtual stroll through the App Store a few times. Trouble is, I couldn't find anything useful there. As an example, I went looking to see if there might be a calculator that would do everything the old Win XP Calc.exe tool did. Zzzzt. Nada. And the stuff that I DID find, download, and try (admittedly free) just was crap. Poorly coded, even more poorly designed. Beyond that, the Apps Microsoft has supplied with the system seem poor as well. My question to Windows 8 users of several years now is this: Have there been releases of software through the App Store for the Metro/Modern environment that actually do useful things? I'm not talking about fun and games, but stuff someone using a computer for relatively serious work might want. Yes, I realize that people in that realm don't have much use for full-screen operation. I ask, because there was always the thought that "sooner or later there might be someone who invents a 'must have' App that makes it all worth having". Found one yet? Thanks. -Noel

I am a Windows 8.1 user who left Windows 7 behind when I figured out how to do everything I had been doing with the older system. Windows 8 could not be made to fit that bill, but Windows 8.1 came along and (with plenty of 3rd party software to make up for what Microsoft had deleted), it just tipped the scales. I'm glad I made the switch; Windows 8.1 has been productive and stable for me. When Win 10 comes out I'll evaluate it (as I already am doing with the previews). My plan is to release the next in my series of books for it when it comes out. But I predict that for several reasons I personally will not upgrade to it on my host workstation right away... 1. New releases are not always as stable as they should be. The current preview build right now, for example, suffers from some resource leak issues that would make it unacceptable for long-term use. It's also reported that it's not a good host system yet for running several big applications I use (e.g., VMware Workstation). 2. Microsoft will have no doubt deleted some stuff that will make Win 10 even less functional than a tweaked and augmented Win 8.1. It will take time for 3rd party developers to take up that slack and make things available that fix the problems. That being said, several of the important 3rd party products I use are already compatible with WIn 10 build 9879. Usually support comes in a matter of weeks after a preview release is made available. 3. Nothing is being done with the OS that makes it a "must have" for a desktop user, so there's every reason to be conservative... If it were to add some new features that made it capable of doing things its predecessors could not do, then it might be more attractive to be an early adopter, but if it's just more Metro/Modern and LESS of other things, then why bother? Yes, there is merit to "keeping current", but it only goes so far. 4. In order to continue to evaluate it, and to test products for it, I can run it in a virtual machine (as I am now), so the traditional parts of "keeping current" so as to be able to develop for the latest and greatest system are satisfied without having to commit all operations to it. Who knows, we may be pleasantly surprised, but that's just not been happening with Microsoft in quite a while so don't hold your breath. -Noel

Even a top-end laptop limits what you can do. It's no multi-monitor desktop, which is where important things get designed. It's as though people became so enamored with gadgets that they forgot to work altogether. -Noel

Indexing is useless for my needs. Your mileage may vary. -Noel

Are you looking for instant backup, or would you be willing to settle for a backup done every so often (it could be hourly or less)? And do you want a true mirror, or do you want an ever-accumulating backup, which would give you protection against deleted files? You need to define your goals completely first, and keep in mind you can have multiple overlapping backup strategies. If it's just a simple mirroring of files in folders you want, ROBOCOPY - supplied with the OS - is a pretty good tool. It gets a bit geeky to get all the switches just right, but when you do it is kind of a set it and forget it solution. As an example, just one facet of my backup strategy is to schedule a job to run periodically that executes a batch file containing commands like this: ROBOCOPY C:\SVN D:\Backup\NoelC4\SVN /MIR /B /DST /Z /NP /NDL /R:1 /W:2 The important aspects of this command are (this is from memory, so I apologize if I paraphrase a bit): It's scheduled via Task Scheduler. Whenever it runs, the C:\SVN folder is backed up to D:\Backup\NoelC4\SVN. /MIR means that files that the whole subfolder structure under C:\SVN is copied, maintaining the same structure in the backup copy. /MIR also means that files found to be deleted from C:\SVN should be automatically deleted from the backup area (a true mirror). By contrast, if you wanted an ever-accumulating backup (which you would have to look over manually from time to time so it would not just accumulate data until the media filled up), you could use the /E switch, which would traverse subdirectories but not purge files found deleted in the source. /B uses "backup mode", which is a mode of copying that's less likely to fail if a file is in use. /DST allows there to be a one hour difference in the file modification time, which means that you shouldn't end up with a mess at the time when daylight savings time starts or stops. /Z says to copy files in restartable mode, which is more robust if copying across a link that can fail (such as a network connection) - but this probably isn't particularly necessary if you're copying to a local drive. /NP instructs ROBOCOPY not to display progress indicators for each file copy operation. This makes sense if the program is running unattended and redirecting output to a log file. /NDL says don't list directory names separately. It just keeps the log a little more tidy. /R:1 says if there's a failure, retry one more time. /W:2 says if there's a failure, wait 2 seconds before retrying. As a broader answer, my overall backup strategy on my main workstation is this: I run it 24/7 and schedule Windows System Image backups every night to an external MyBook USB drive dedicated to the task. These images could be used to recover from a catastrophic failure onto bare metal. The wbadmin command I use specifies -vssFull on the command line, so it is integrated with the Volume Snapshot Service. This means that once the first image is stored, subsequent backups are incremental and the drive can accumulate a number of backups. In practical terms, this means that if I had to restore the system image I would have choices of which day to restore, going back as many days as the drive holds. At the moment I have backups on the drive that go back to January 6th, 2015. I have two internal and two external backup drives. For maximum protection, I schedule a number of batch files that issue ROBOCOPY commands similar to those I listed above that mirror or accumulate various important folders. For example, I back up my eMail folders to a mirrored G: and an accumulating H: folder, I back up my SVN data to D:, E:, G:, and H:, I back up my photo library to G: and H:, etc. Occasionally I unplug drive H: (my largest set of accumulated file backups), move it to a separate location and put in an alternate H: drive. This helps protect against loss by a problem at or near the computer. Setting up sufficient and effective backup is important. Bravo to you for thinking about it. Take the time to mull over what would happen if you had a failure, or if you accidentally did something boneheaded (like deleting all your files - we all make mistakes), or if you had malware corrupt or destroy your files. In short, decide what you want to protect yourself from, and think through how to accomplish it. One parting thought: Most folks not working in a professional environment don't actually test their backups. If you really, really want to be sure what you're doing is viable, force a situation where you have to test it. A very good exercise, that minimizes your risk, could be to buy a new (e.g., larger/faster) hard drive, remove your old drive and put it somewhere safe, and see if you can restore all your system and data. When you're done you have both a backup drive you could conceivably pop back into the system, and you've verified you can recover to bare metal. Good luck. -Noel Edit: I forgot one switch... If you use ROBOCOPY to copy your Users area, it can be handy to exclude junctions - links you or the system have created that cause certain folders to point to other folders on the hard drive. For some of my ROBOCOPY commands I include the "exclude junctions" switch: /XJ On a CMD line, type HELP ROBOCOPY for a complete list of the options.

Here's an exercise to try: Search for the following string inside all files under your C:Windows\System32 folder: IEC61966-2.1 It's a simple text string, and it IS in at least one file. See if an indexed Windows Search turns it up, and time how long it takes. "But wait!" Microsoft would say, "Regular people don't need to search for stuff like that!" Now you begin to understand why I complain so much about Microsoft taking modern systems further and further away from serious computing and toward fluff. -Noel

How quickly can you find all the files that have sRGB in their names on your whole hard drive, out of how many files? The more typical search is of a few folders, which is virtually instant. In practice, this works just fine. Even when I'm looking for a file on the whole volume, I'm willing to wait 14 seconds for rigorous results, which Windows Search cannot deliver. If you're looking for things INSIDE files, this tool, grepWin, even tells you if it can't open a file. It also looks for Unicode strings - something Windows Search won't do. So if you get an empty result, you can be absolutely sure the string you're searching for is not there. And grepWin costs a whole $0.00. As far as why a Windows index would get corrupted, do you suspect Microsoft employees of writing perfect, bug-free code? That works perfectly on low quality computer systems bought for the lowest price? -Noel

But OMG, think of the security nightmare if they allowed people to insert whatever they wanted into the theme subsystem. It would almost be as though the user owned the system. -Noel

Example: 14 seconds to find all filenames that contain the string "sRGB" on a system volume with a little under 800,000 files: -Noel

Did you do measurements? At one point I did. It actually wasn't noticeably faster on the system I tested with to search for the kinds of things I needed (e.g., strings in files). I suggest you compare it to a good search tool, like grepWin. Perhaps that's different today, and is almost certainly different on different systems, but that the indexing doesn't cover everything, not to mention the likelihood of a corrupted index (no one's ever seeing that happen, right?) is enough for me to ditch it and not look back. When I get an indication that something I'm searching for is not found, I'm sure it's not on the disk. By the way, I think Classic Shell does its own indexing for Start menu searches if you turn off the system indexing. -Noel

Thank you, that explains it. Douglas Adams has never been that high on my list of literary favorites, though he's a hero to many of my technically-oriented friends. I freely admit that it's my fault. Perhaps I am missing the part of my personality that it would take to enjoy his particular level of tongue-in-cheek satire (though notably I did enjoy the point of view of Marvin the android). My aunt Roberta always used to tell me I was too serious. -Noel

When you get into the gigabytes per second range, everything I've read says that the overhead for creating the parity data is significant. In other words, you pay with every I/O operation for the safety from failure of a single device. That being said, I didn't try it myself. The extra overhead is less when the controller is sophisticated and implements the whole RAID management task in hardware. Mine's not - it's a relatively inexpensive one. Certainly if I were going to move up to a higher security RAID level (e.g. 5 or 6) I'd want to get a more powerful HBA. Such devices also come with baggage - they present a greater load on the power supply and produce more heat, for example, both of which tend to reduce reliability. Keep in mind I make very good (nightly) backups for safety, and I now have 2-1/2 years experience with the 4 drive RAID 0, with literally ZERO failures and ZERO downtime. I realize that's just limited experience in the grand scheme, but with 2 million hour MTBF figures these SSD drives are inherently a good bit less likely to fail than HDDs that people rely upon all the time. Increasing by one drive isn't going to change the math significantly. -Noel

Thanks, though that's the answer I didn't want to hear. I *could* just increase the total array space from 1920 GB to 2400 GB by adding the one more drive (though a 5 drive array just sounds wrong somehow). Then I could increase the one big MBR partition to the 2.2 TB max. That will leave a couple hundred GB of SSD space unprovisioned, but give me 280 GB more space on C: than I have now, as well as upping the performance as there will be one more drive running in parallel. Perhaps my plans to take over the world will have to wait for my next EFI/GPT workstation, Pinky. -Noel

Okay, I'm here ONE MORE TIME to try to get a straight answer on whether I should be able to do something very specific... I plan to increase the number of drives in my array from 4 to either 6 or 8. I have already picked up a drive identical to the ones I already have. They are now fairly inexpensive. Now the RAID array totals 1920 GB. When I add the drives and remake the array, the total composite RAID array will be in excess of the 2.2 TB "design limit" for MBR. At least one time it has been said that MBR can create two partitions on a "drive" larger than 2.2 TB as long as the second one starts below the 2.2 TB limit. Jaclaz mentioned a "suffusion of yellow", which frankly confused me more than cleared things up. Simple YES or NO question: If I create a "drive" that looks like it has 3840 GB on it, using MBR can I make it have two 1920 GB partitions (acknowledging that the second one STARTS before 2.2 TB), and boot Windows 8.1 x64 to one of them? In other words: C: - 1920 GB D: - 1920 GB Thanks. -Noel

Thing is, it's become PAINFULLY clear they're utterly allergic to "putting it back the way that it was" (not to mention quite possibly incapable), and so we are set up for disappointment. Brace yourself. Like you I sit in front of my systems all day every day. The value of elegance - or put another way the value of not being made to feel like putting a fist through the monitor - is astronomical. -Noel

A "think outside the box" approach I've adopted is to completely disable indexing. As I use SSD storage, actual searches aren't really slower than indexed searches. And it's always struck me that indexing the contents of a drive then storing the results on that drive just isn't a logically viable / reasonable approach. Beyond it adding instability (observed in practice), it also by design excludes a lot of data - it has to. You can't, for example, search for anything in .log files right out of the box. And you can only search for text strings that conform to some idea of what Microsoft things you'll want to search for. Disabling indexing comes with the upside that it will not make errors and log unwelcome messages in your logs. Just saying. If you're interested in trying disabling and walking away from it, here's the full monty on how to do it... Do these things in the order given: -Noel

Rubbish - an excellent choice in words to describe this. I'm sure there are people who still wonder why Microsoft has failed to gather interest in Windows 8. I mean, it's not like the Videos App is brand new, right? By now, YEARS after the introduction of the brave new Metro world, it ought to be perfect, right? Perhaps Microsoft DID get negative feedback on it, which is why the whole feature is removed from Win 10's Videos App. Deleting functionality is generally much easier than fixing it. Given the somewhat undisciplined genre of the universal development environment, I wonder if this says really bad things about the maintainability of Microsoft's OWN Apps. We can only imagine. Windows 10 is doing nothing I can see to reduce the myopic focus on Metro, which is the most disappointing and depressing thing about it so far. It's gotten to the point where I just avoid thinking about it. -Noel

Win 8.1 x64: I changed the EnableLUA registry key to 1, then rebooted. Then I copied the same four video files I showed above to my Videos library folder, which was empty. I started the Xbox Video App and the result was the same as above initially, but then I noticed a [ Personal Videos ] button that was not shown on the Windows 10 App. Upon pressing it, I saw the four videos I had copied, already in alphabetical order. Clicking the "By date added" link to change it to "By A to Z" changed nothing. The four of them are still listed in alphabetical order - probably because they were copied in that order. So I added another one, which appeared at the end. Since the name is a number, it should have sorted in front of the others when I changed to "By A to Z", but it did not - it stayed at the end. Closing and reopening the Videos App did not change the result from what you see here - the 25C video was listed in the order shown here no matter what I clicked. The failure to sort that you're seeing is hereby confirmed on another system. Someone please remind me again why a Videos App (that doesn't quite work) is needed or has any merit above and beyond the normal Media Player or Media Center applications for Desktop. Thanks for allowing me to confirm that completely avoiding Metro Apps has been the right choice. -Noel

Beyond not being able to run Apps because UAC is off, I find that entirely avoiding the use of Libraries seems to work around most/all problems with File Explorer failing to update the display properly after operations such as delete, copy, or move. It's possible the troubles with Libraries are at the root of what you're seeing as well. There are a lot of "new" things in Windows that make it not work as well as it ought to. Avoiding them and sticking to the traditional parts (which are all one really needs in an OS) make it work more predictably. I'm not willing to reconfigure my Win 8.1 main system, but I do have some VMs I can test more freely with... Libraries are hidden, so I'll have to unhide those. Win 10, with UAC enabled and able to run Apps I unhid Libraries, then copied 4 videos into the Videos "subfolder" of Libraries. Nothing at all appeared in the Video App. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I will not have a Microsoft account, but prefer a local account instead. This is one of many reasons I have no interest in Apps. I'm being called away from my desk. I'll check on Win 8.1 when I get a moment. -Noel

It's possible most folks here don't use Apps, or just don't use Windows 8.1. I'd try it for you but I personally never run Apps (I can't because I have UAC disabled), even though I'm running Windows 8.1 Media Center Edition. I organize files via folders on the hard drive and use File Explorer (which still seems to sort things properly) to access them. I play media on the desktop using the traditional applications such as Media Player. It's admirable that you're trying to embrace Microsoft's newest stuff, but at some point the lack of substance just frustrates a person enough that they walk away from it. If there were undeniably better things available from the Fischer Price interface, there's be a reason to suffer through the bad parts, but those things never materialized. -Noel

The numbers of fanboys praising the new stuff exceeded those kinds of numbers long ago, but I hope you're right. Over the past weeks I added my "Me Too" to those feedbacks. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to hear only what they want to hear, and they're just not doing much more of what adept users need/want in Windows 10 than in Windows 8. Someone who's still there just won't give up on Metro. It may improve - we all wish it will, and I'm of course looking forward to the next release in a week or two - but my worry is that Microsoft may no longer have the competence to actually improve it any more. It can't have been a good place to work for people who care about seriously making Windows better these past few years. -Noel