NoelC

I exported the whole thing before and after to text (.reg) files and used Scooter Software's Beyond Compare to check them against one another. It's an awesome tool for doing all kinds of comparisons. All our software change reviews employ it heavily. -Noel

In my opinion not enough people care enough about subtle things to have provided substantial feedback to Microsoft that will cause them to restore Aero Glass capability. An awful lot of people who have no knowledge and only a frivolous need for computing hardware - and therefore NO BUSINESS guiding the direction of operating system development - say things like "I love the new UI". Look over the top feedback entries if you don't believe me. By the way, since you mention the Task View layout... In my opinion the new Task View (Alt-Tab display) is a major failure - for many of the same reasons a Start Screen is a failure. It's another step in the wrong direction! When you're juggling a lot of details trying to use a lot of open programs the LAST thing you need is for the system to rearrange everything and replace your desktop with something else. Somewhere around the time of Vista the ordering of the list provided by Alt-Tab was changed. It's no longer completely based on the Z-Order. Someone at that time I guess must have made the decision that more people don't keep mental track of what they've been doing, and instead they need to search visually for the program they want to use by looking for it in a list. The trouble with this is that it completely gets in the way of an adept user, since that adept user gets well in tune with what he's doing and just wants to switch to a task in a known position in the Z-order. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to put a fist through the screen after I've accidentally hit the "Desktop" entry and minimized everything. Yet none of these things are configurable. At least they're removing the "Desktop" entry in Win 10. -Noel

Well, to be fair things like Visual Studio offer local help files. But they're often out of date - regardless of whether you keep the software updated. I still keep "Googling for info on the wild Internet" as a last resort, but more often than not it turns up the info needed, while the documentation falls short. -Noel

I'm thinking not everyone understands the context behind the set of versions offered by the 7-Zip web site. There's what appears to be "released" code (9.20) and there's what appears to be "beta" code. When you realize virtually everything there has always been at pretty much "beta" level, then it becomes more obvious that the latest beta would be the most functional. And without asking around, it's not clear whether the "latest beta" is likely to be less stable than the "released" version either. Personally, I haven't found any downside to using 9.36. I didn't realize a 9.38 was made available a week ago. -Noel

I tried it out on a test system. It makes impressive improvements in benchmark results, BUT... It doesn't actually speed up the normal operations I do: Starting big applications like Photoshop a second or third time is NO faster, and software builds with Visual Studio - which I always figured are I/O bound - are NO faster. Basically, block-level cache is ineffective considering the Windows file system cache is already on duty. All a block level cache like PrimoCache really does is fool the benchmarks by inserting a RAM cache below the direct I/O calls, but it comes with baggage: It permanently blocks off a big chunk of RAM and what's worse, my test system rebooted spontaneously in the middle of the night during a backup. My conclusions, given a system with high I/O hardware performance: There were no measurable practical speed advantages to using it to do the normal I/O-heavy operations I do. The Windows 8.1 file system cache is already very effective. According to its own statistics, configured for "lazy writes" with a long delay, it can reduce the write load on the hardware a fair bit, but this depends on how many short-lived temporary files your applications make. Again, the numbers are skewed by benchmarks. It is not perfectly stable. Thus it decreases the reliability of the system to unacceptable levels. Based on before/after registry checks Its uninstaller appears to completely and cleanly remove the program. The baggage is unacceptable and the benefits dubious. PrimoCache is a non-starter for me. -Noel

Anyone use PrimoCache (aka FancyCache)? If so... Is it reliable? How much did you find it to benefit your normal operation? I have a lot of RAM and even though I have a high performance I/O subsystem I have received the suggestion to try this product to boost performance even more. I've been experimenting with it on a VM and the results are fairly impressive, especially in that it's quite smart about not actually writing temporary files to the disk. -Noel

What's actually quite interesting is that the amount of software that must run perfectly for your computer to remain functional for even one second is staggering. That takes more than just will; it takes good, solid documentation. Anyone notice that the amount and quality of documentation on virtually everything is declining rapidly lately? Try to find info on an event in the Windows event log, for example... -Noel

It's possible. I don't always check immediately before and after, just after, but I'd give better than even odds it's update-related. I don't recall changing much else around that time. The very same thing happened once earlier in the year at the time of a Windows Update, and at the time as I recall Microsoft had said something fundamental was done to change Direct 2D. Then soon thereafter another update came along and sped the performance back up again. Maybe it was tied to one of the updates they ended up having to back out for another reason, then finally put back in. Like I said, it doesn't seem to affect what I normally do at all. -Noel

And while you indulge in self-mortification (aka reading Microsoft documentation) may I remind you of "the path of moderation"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way And never forget that drive makers gotta pay for their kids' college edumacation! -Noel

Can't say I agree completely with xpclient, but I also don't think the newer systems are a wholesale improvement either. It's a mixed bag. Many of us strive to reconfigure the new systems to restore the "to work" experience of XP AND keep the smoothness and elegance possible (but not actually implemented out of the box) by the newer systems. Hence great projects like Aero Glass for Win 8+. That being said, of course everyone has slightly different needs and desires, and we're not going to all agree on what was best. But there's room for all of us - as long as the UX is configurable. When that goes away - and make no mistake, it IS going away - we're ALL screwed. Besides the UX, XP under the covers is just clunky and old by today's standards. It was headed in the right direction and made for real work on 32 bit systems, but the kernel was still growing up and simply wasn't the workhorse the newest systems can be. -Noel

The Disk Mark test has jumped around a bit more than I like over the past year, though it has done so much less lately I since I've resolved performance issues stemming from Avast antivirus. I completely ditched Avast at the beginning of December and have been getting more consistent 11,000+ readings since then. As an example, I build several of my software products completely from sources into 32 and 64 bit executables in about 30 seconds now. It was 30 seconds early last year, but late in the year got much worse (almost a full minute). That led me to a root cause analysis that pinpointed recent changes in Avast's product for the worse. Fortunately I had done benchmarks around the time I installed Win 8.1 at the end of 2013 with and without Avast, which at the time showed Avast to be a little faster at doing its job than Windows Defender. That's WAY different now. Operationally my I/O subsystem feels back to its former self, so I don't think that was Microsoft's doing. -Noel

Can't say I've seen too much in the way of benefits or problems with it. Seems to just work. Right now I'm running on my current bootup 10 days of heavy use on my fully updated workstation without any problems. A Subversion Server update installation mandated that reboot; before that it ran a couple of weeks without trouble. The System Event Log is pretty clean. Used to be my nightly System Image backup jobs at 2 am would log occasional errors, but that seems to have stopped. Careful benchmarking (which I do after every update and software installation to keep abreast of problems) shows it to be no faster than its predecessors... In fact one particular measurement got quite a bit slower with the last big update: As of the November update, Direct 2D has dropped to about half its former speed (Passmark PerformanceTest reading dropped from 17.6 to 8.0). I am not sure if anything I use actually does any Direct 2D so it's not been a problem. I've not noticed anything I do slowing down. Based on observation I think the latest Win 8.1 uses a little more RAM (per Task Manager) while it sits idle, but it fluctuates, and I have enough RAM that I'm never really pushing limits, so for me this is a non-problem as well. If it's found something good to do with the RAM (e.g., increased file system caching) I'm happy it's using it. If it's at all interesting to you, here's a sequence of benchmark results, showing recent months, then the various major Windows 8.1 updates, and one measurement done with Windows 7. These are listed older to newer from top to bottom, with my last Windows 7 benchmark at the top and my most recent Windows 8.1 benchmark (with all updates) at the bottom. Note that the overall performance trend is for the worse as time goes on. Microsoft is certainly not making things faster as time goes on, regardless of their marketing hype. -Noel

I had occasion to boot up both a Win XP VM I keep on hand for testing and I also happened to boot up a Win 10 TP installation I've been experimenting wtih. Both are updated, both are set up to be stable and functional. What a poignant difference when viewed and actually used side by side... Simple vs. Bloated. Small vs. Large. Functional vs. Fluffy. Utilitarian vs. Fun & Games. Clunky vs. Polished. I can think of a bunch of other metaphors, usually - but not always - complimentary to XP and detrimental to Win 10. I'm no great fan of XP (my personal favorite system so far has been Win 7), but it's a quite interesting experience to jump all the way from one to the other in literally seconds in an equivalent hardware environment. Some contrasts that jumped out at me... Both booted up in a few tens of seconds. Under two minutes after bootup and login, with just the Task Manager and a Clock application running on the desktop XP had settled to 24 processes running in just 190 MB of RAM. After 20 minutes Win 10 finally settled to 39 processes and 1.1 GB of RAM used. And this is after having run through and disabled unnecessary processes/services. On XP, the Details tab of the old tech Task Manager showed the 24 processes in about 1/4 of the vertical space of the screen. I think one of the reasons we often feel XP was more "serious" or "utilitarian" than the newer systems is that the UI elements and text were generally more densely packed, which was often a good thing in my opinion. The 39 processes in Win 10 took most of the vertical space on the screen to show in Task Manager. And there was no one screen that would show the RAM used and the list of processes. In the same vein as the above, items in Explorer are more densly packed in XP. Again, usability over dumbing-down. I have been able to get the items in Windows 10's Explorer more densely packed, so that it is more usable, through the use of not one but two augmenting 3rd party tools - Classic Shell and T800 Productions' Folder Options X package. However, they're still not as dense as in XP. The MSFN main web page is a bit messed up on XP's IE 8.0, though the forum pages seem okay. It bleeps on every page as MSFN wants to install an Add-on I won't allow. Win 10 seems to display the whole site fine with IE in Experimental mode. The add-on message is there on every page load, but it doesn't bleep. The fonts are darker and a little more readable on Win 10's browser. XP's "Classic" start menu right out of the box gives a functional, rational cascading menu experience. Win 10's out of the box Start Menu isn't worth using. However, it can be completely replaced by Classic Shell, which is better than XP's implementation. Overall XP seems a bit choppier or clunkier to use, with occasional slight delays in the UI. However, the UI elements (e.g., scroll bar thumbs) are easier to recognize visually. Win 10 seems to deliver a more fluid UI experience, without the noticeable slight delays, but the metrics aren't quite right, and I find myself occasionally missing (e.g., when resizing windows). Aero (with augmentation by Big Muscle's software) gives the desktop more feeling of depth. If you get a chance to run XP and the latest Windows side by side, take the time to do so and try some operations with both of them so as to get an objective view of the differences. Time has a way of making old things seem different than they actually were, and of course the machine you may have run XP on way back when likely didn't have the same capability as the one you're using now. Win 10, out of the box, is not really better to use. With a lot of tweaking and augmentation it's a bit better. -Noel

Agreed, though a labor of love (noting that I wrote "fascinating" and meant it) can turn into an unacceptable nuisance. I've been there, done that too. Near 10 years ago I had a "workstation class" video card from nVidia, in the time of Vista, that cost me a small fortune (well over $1000). It worked okay with a single monitor, accelerating Vista nicely, but it would never quite work right with the two monitors I needed to use. I fought and fought to combine driver versions and settings and system tweaks to try to get my system stable, and I did get close a few times, but my computing experience basically sucked for a month, with virtually everything being unreliable and having miscellaneous failures of all kinds. Finally, in exasperation, went to the local high tech store, and bought a newly released ATI "gamer" card for about 1/10 what I had paid for the nVidia card, and voila, my system changed from a nightmare to something that just worked, and was even just about as fast. Such is the speed of advancement of high tech. Moral of the story: Even a challenge a geek like us can love can change into an annoyance after a point, and we are occasionally pleasantly surprised when new, affordable technology comes along that just eclipses the path we've chosen. -Noel

We all know it would be better if MS themselves did the software right, but that's just not happening. I know you're just prodding a bit, but I'm just about things that work. When a shell or browser or any 3rd party software comes along that's actually better I'll use it. Don't forget I already use Classic Shell, Aero Glass, and some other 3rd party stuff that actually works now. If you're suggesting I should want to use Chrome or Firefox just because it's not made by Microsoft, it's understandable that some folks feel that way but alone it's not a valid reason to make a choice which software to use. If I'm not waiting for anything, am able to see the data I want online, and am not getting infected by anything tell me why I should want to change? Neither Google nor the open source community writes software that's actually any more functional for my needs, in my experience. Some folks think Chrome is faster, and it may well be faster on a run of the mill computer or tablet, but Internet Explorer is plenty fast and is perfectly stable on my setup. Some folks think Firefox has a better color-management model, and it does under some conditions, but those conditions don't exist for me. One of the few problems I had with Internet Explorer 11 was initially on this very site. I couldn't paste things into forum posts with the editor implementation here, but that was resolved a long time ago - presumably by changes to the site and/or the browser (via Windows Update). At the time I used Firefox or Safari occasionally to work around the issue. Both icons are on my desktop in addition to IE. But I didn't experience some magical improvement in my web experience. I know you're just giving me a bit of a hard time, bphlpt, but in reality those of us with experience are just looking for things that really work, and for whatever nefarious motives Microsoft is making broad moves away from "better mousetraps" and seemingly toward "outrageous fashion", probably because it's easier. -Noel

Given how sloppy they are regarding implementing new windows (e.g., that Metro/Modern title bars are just black and big, without adhering to the theme AT ALL) I'd suggest that the time that controlling the desktop through the registry key that MrGrim's control panel alters is limited. It's the inevitable result of Microsoft removing control of the desktop elements, and will spell the doom of "have it your way" desktop look and feel - assuming of course some 3rd party doesn't come along and just re-implement more and more of the desktop management. I can imagine that at some point someone might completely replace Windows' desktop management / Explorer entirely with an entirely self-contained UI. But even then, applications will assume they're running on the Microsoft-supplied desktop, which will mean that they're poorly (or non) integrated. The inevitable demise of the desktop is at hand. And with nothing useful yet to replace it. That won't keep of course. We have seen the golden era of Windows computing come and go. So... What's next? I'm game. -Noel

I don't want to jump in and propose giving up on this (fascinating) problem, though you may be close to doing just that... In the interest of practicality, what's your time worth? At this point, I suspect you've put (too) many hours into this... Maybe just getting another drive - e.g., a USB MyBook driver or something - so that both systems have their own backup drives might be worth considering? Another possibility, if the systems are networked, might be to do backups through the network from one to the other. I've had very good luck with leaving my backup drives just plugged-in essentially permanently. -Noel

I wonder whether anyone has a good handle on the web stats reporting any more. As an obviously flawed example, I just requested the stats re: visits to my own web site for the month of December. Take a close look at the versions of the OS being shown. See any popular operating system missing from the list? Windows 7 is probably lumped under Windows 2008, but beyond that the numbers sure look odd. I only put this up to illustrate that the state of the art in web stats reporting - well, can't really put it any other way - sucks. I get the distinct impression - over and over in modern times - that in high tech very few people care about getting details right any more, and in this field more than any other Details Matter! How does a culture effect a return to greater discipline and care in everything they do? I'm not sure it's possible. -Noel

No surprise there. You seem to be in touch with reality and have been for some time. The Ability To Recognize Something Good is a very handy personality trait, though largely under developed in modern times in many of the younger folks. I blame smart phones and tablets for that. Among other things, we had written with it at the time a wrapper to PVCS that extended Explorer and worked VERY much the way Tortoise SVN works today. We had surprisingly productive engineers on Windows for Workgroups. -Noel

Only problem with that is: A geek without insatiable curiosity is an old, tired geek (or one with attention focused elsewhere ). -Noel

I'm willing to stand corrected any number of times. My high tech life is more like a blur than a series of well-defined moments. I do remember basing the development environment of a whole engineering department on Norton Desktop. To this day I occasionally use WinBatch, a derivative of the Norton Desktop scripting language (and not associated in any way I can see with Norton or Symantec). -Noel

I stand corrected. Time flies. That was 30 years ago - back when the keyboard I'm typing on was made, and engineering was Real Engineering. Good ol' Norton was a smart businessman and sold his wares - presumably for a fortune - to a bigger fish. I remember envying him at the time. Having your photo on shrink wrap software boxes was the 1980s form of "going viral". -Noel

I'm thinking mostly the smart ones will shy away. So the feedback Microsoft has set itself to get is by irresponsible or uneducated people, or from basic usage of the OS that doesn't involve doing "real" things. See also my thread on why "crowd driven" development is a bad idea. Trouble is, Microsoft shows NO signs of using even basic common sense when interpreting the feedback. They remind me of an old joke that ends with "then the statistician says, 'What would YOU like the answer to be?'" -Noel Edit: P.S., I may be guilty as one of those "self important experts" who says "don't use Win 10 for real stuff". If I have offended, I apologize. But I still say "don't use Win 10 for real stuff".

I'm thinking Norton was good 18 to 20 years ago. -Noel

Do you know he was let go, taking with him a whole boatload of OUR money, so he could go buy a basketball team? What kind of ridiculous person aspires to own a basketball team? Or the other guy, who no doubt got HIS golden parachute too. -Noel