NoelC

I too wouldn't dare yet put Win 10 on anything but a VM, and like Andre I run my VMs (at least the ones I use a lot) from my SSD array. And of course it's reasonable that experienced people would choose to run pre-release software in a limited environment - precisely because there WILL be problems, and the damage from them could be significant. It's the only way to test, and the advantages of being able to revert to snapshots vs. invoking an involved repair or restoral process... Well, you can only imagine. I'm a bit surprised so many folks are choosing to make Win 10 their "main" OS on their hardware. I guess most folks think that their data isn't worth much. That being said, there are always things - like this very power up state problem - that one can never be sure of until you run it on real hardware. I figure that's what everyone else is for. -Noel

I imagine the "forward thinkers", when helping plan what to implement (or what to delete, which is more likely lately) advise not to worry about network bandwidth. "Think of it as a freely available commodity." and "It's a network problem, not an OS problem." Microsoft apparently thinks its machinery can support some billions of users directly. -Noel

XP x64 worked fine in the time it did not leak its resources dry. That's what I meant by stable. Stable for the long-term, I agree - if it doesn't run the whole time between reboots mandated by e.g., Windows Updates then it's not acceptable. I've been experiencing that since Vista x64, which admittedly I did not adopt until after SP1 was released. Perhaps that explains my good experience. I actually find myself disappointed when an update requires a reboot nowadays, as I'd love to see how long it could go. -Noel

For me Vista was the first OS that would stand up to serious use and run virtually forever. XP needed rebooting from time to time, even though I had a well-configured XP x64 that was very stable. I don't think I could run XP for a week without a reboot. Some other things came to mind... Click Start, type the name of the application you want to run. Desktop composition, which eliminated a lot of the nasty flickering and turned the desktop into something smooth and professional. Improvements to the common controls that made using the desktop all the more integrated. GPU acceleration. Much smoother multitasking capability. The kernel didn't bog down as much under the pressure of one or a few intensive tasks. Personally I like cascading menus, so I have to thank XP and its parents for that. But that you could opt to use the "Classic" style for the start menu in Vista was a great thing about that later system. None of this modern OMG, you can't possibly want to do THAT any more, it's SO out of fashion. But let's not also forget that Vista introduced one of the worst ideas in the long, sad history of bad ideas: UAC -Noel

Thing is, Vista represented the best of what Windows could become, after the dust settled. I happened to put it on a good workstation, and because I waited until most of the initial problems with such a big change were over, I actually found Vista good to use. I had it on one of my systems, which became mostly a server, until last year when the caps failed and the system would no longer run, and it was stable for months on end. To this day the software I create works on Vista and above (I've left XP support behind). Why? Because it provides all you need for a good desktop application experience. Other than refinements, has anyone noticed that there's really been nothing fundamentally new since Vista? Right now I do substantially the same (productive) things with my desktop that I did with Vista, which were mostly the same things I did with XP and before that NT. But of course I've paid extra to allow Microsoft to screw up the OS and remove features and make it necessary to seek 3rd party software in order to do almost all those same things with Win 8.1. Bottom line is that Microsoft thinks they won't really make gargantuan piles of money selling new operating systems if they just keep making refinements (and the funny part is that they're wrong). No, someone decided they have to do something - anything, no matter whether it makes sense at all - and keep calling it "new". After the year 2000 geeks like those of us who frequent this site were deemed toxic (remember the transition? It was palpable), and the marketeers and executives decided they'd "take it from here". They're taking it all right. Getting rich while simultaneously diving the plane into the cold, hard ground. Regardless what we passengers can see through the portals, the captain is on the intercom telling us everything's great. Thus, there's nothing we can really do but ride it in. Might as well watch the movie. It will dull the anticipation of the crash. -Noel

I've seen it a couple of times too. I'm thinking that, since they want us to re-read their privacy statement, they feel we haven't given quite enough of our privacy rights up to them yet. After all, running Windows is all about Microsoft gathering info on how we run Windows. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-privacy-statement Bottom line is that no one should be using a pre-release copy of Windows for anything they'd prefer to keep confidential. -Noel

I don't have any problem using it, after having realized the initial selection dialog causes the application to load up the system-wide settings and show them to you if that's what you choose. But in the vein of trying to help Big Muscle make it the most usable it can be, I'm just pointing out how it works generally differently than everything else. We are not often confronted with a choice about whether to make settings system wide AND user-specific settings changes. Applications, for example, generally install one way OR the other. In your example, bphlpt, everything can be accomplished using just the user-specific settings. Perhaps a checkbox near the top of the dialog that's always visible that says "[ ] Change system-wide settings" might make it a little more clear what's happening. Oh, and if the intent is to make things completely flexible regarding configuring system-wide and user settings, you might want to consider a "Delete all user settings" feature, so someone could switch to system-wide configuration after having configured user-specific settings. -Noel

You should probably go easy on the hallucinogens, ROTS. -Noel

So what would be the reason for maintaining two sets of settings, one system-wide and the others one for each of some (but not all) users? Seems to me the greatest flexibility is had by ONLY having settings per-user (with no system-level defaults). A single user, who creates accounts occasionally might want the settings ONLY for the entire system. I just don't see a combo of the above being practical. -Noel

Altering the System-Wide settings, when I click the [ Save ] button, it reverts to the "Automatically compute from desktop background" setting and loses the color I chose. Edit: Never mind, I think I see the issue - there are settings in both the HKCU and HKLM trees, and the HKCU settings override the system-wide settings. Perhaps a better way to organize it would be to have the program only create ONE set of parameters, and provide the user a selector that allows him to choose whether to make the settings system-wide or user-specific. Just a thought. -Noel

It would be helpful if you'd actually describe the problem. I understand that there may be a language barrier, but "now I still reboots" simply does not sufficiently describe anything. Is your computer rebooting on its own? Or are you rebooting it and finding Aero Glass not to be working? Have you tried holding down the Control Key during the login process? That will circumvent Aero Glass loading. If it works okay without Aero Glass but fails in some way (which you should describe in detail) when Aero Glass is allowed to load, then you have confirmed what's causing it. If it still fails either way, then you likely have another problem unrelated to Aero Glass. -Noel

You'd think so at first, but note the color of the screen... "Hmmmm... Your computer encountered a problem and had to restart? Ah well, I guess Sinofsky and Ballmer go on the naughty list for another year..." -Noel

Out of curiosity, what doesn't run well when Aero Glass is active? I haven't been able to sense a difference in the way things run without or with it. -Noel

May your holidays be peaceful and joyful and your 2015 profitable! -Noel

I realize my goals are not the norm, but I have very good reasons for them. I know better than "conventional wisdom" with regard to configuring and running Windows systems. It comes from a lifetime of experience and an understanding of the architectures that led to modern day Windows. Regarding whether you'd trust RAID 0... If you don't you don't know what you're missing. It is very viable with good, high reliability hardware. I'm already doing it, and have been for years with zero problems. Backup mitigates the risk from data loss. Most people only dream of the kind of reliability and performance I enjoy. -Noel

Thanks for the clarifications, though some confusion still remains. Don't worry about it; I've clearly reached the bleeding edge and will have to derive some of the practical aspects myself. Jaclaz, I fear using mount points as that would corrupt (or at least complicate) the ability to restore a system image backup. I don't want to go there for that reason. And besides, that still would not consolidate the free space into one chunk, which is one of the goals. It's not about logical organization, it's about maximizing stability and utility. -Noel

Unfortunately, either because of varying terminology, or typos, or just my denseness it's NOT clear. Can you put that in practical terms matching my OP, please? In other words, not 3 Tb or TiB or whatever you want to call it, but 4 - i.e. what you'd get by adding up 8 x 512 GB drives in RAID 0. My ideal: Boot BIOS machine to drive C:, a single 4 TB volume, with all the free space available in one place. Worth a look if "ideal" is not achievable: Boot BIOS to drive C:, a 2 TB volume, with D:, another 2 TB volume right next door (C: and D: partitions on the same composite RAID 0 "drive"). Edit: I've not thrown out the thought that I could follow your footsteps to boot to a GPT partitioned (composite) drive using your aforementioned trickery if that's the only way to achieve the above. Thanks. -Noel

I'm sorry for seeming like a dunce on this, but you have to admit the huge amount of information on the subject is daunting, and I've only pushed up to the 2 TiB limit - but not beyond - in all my practical dealings so far. -Noel

Absolutely. Both the "LBA of first absolute sector in the partition" and the "Total # of sectors in the partition" are unsigned 32-bit numbers and count sectors (see, for instance, MBR#PTE), so that there are just 2^32 sectors available in total, for an MBR, and that's 2.2 TB or 2 TiB, for 512-bit sectors. Now, if 4KiB sectors are used, then the MBR can count up to 16 TiB. But that usually perplexes current OSes (albeit maybe not 8+ ?). More info from IBM: <link>... and at the Starman's page on MBRs, of course. As much as you tried to make that clear, you start with "Absolutely" then proceed to describe that the number of sectors in the partition must be 2^32. Noting that you did not say "in all partitions". So, please forgive me, but I'm assuming you're saying the following is NOT possible in a practical sense (notwithstanding jaclaz's special backflips) on a machine with BIOS only... One 4096 GB driveContaining two partitions, each 2048 GBOne of which is a bootable primary partitionOne of which is some other kind of partition comprising the rest of the drive ... because the MBR nomenclature specifies LBAs in 32 bits only. Did I get that right? Regarding sizes... We are only entering the age of huge data and huge performance. -Noel

I don't know whether ribbon-enabled windows such as File Explorer and Wordpad are those for which it's supposed to restore caption glow for windows but if so, it doesn't seem to work here. Such windows still do not show a caption glow for me. I've verified that the DLL is being loaded (e.g., by the event in the system event log)... Custom dynamic link libraries are being loaded for every application. The system administrator should review the list of libraries to ensure they are related to trusted applications. Please visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197571for more information. Thanks for trying. -Noel

You're living in the past a bit... I'm here, in this thread, because I currently find 800 GB to be approaching the limit of what I consider a "tight" space. Photoshop alone will chew through hundreds of gigabytes of free scratch space just stitching one big panoramic image. Just so it's clear, my current status: -Noel

Thank you but I back up system images every night which can be restored to bare metal, and also data images every night 2 or 3 different ways. I don't plan to lower the aggressiveness of my backup strategy. Are you saying that with MBR I can't create two partitions that are each within the 2.2 TB limit on a storage device with a total of twice that size? If that's the case, I have a misunderstanding and I'm back to wondering how to accomplish this. Of course, this is all still blue sky... It could turn out that I may not really need more storage nor performance until I get that next workstation, probably within the next 2 years, around the time someone invents one that runs twice as fast as the one I have now. By then, whatever machine that is will be capable of UEFI and GPT partitioning. -Noel

Thanks to all who made suggestions. It is now clear that there's no direct, supported way to accomplish my original goal with this BIOS-only system. I've decided to stop short of going through processes that require reading tens of pages of forum threads for specific instructions and downloads of different operating systems in order to set up a system that boots a single large partition. The difficulty in doing it and especially the risk of it stopping working in the future are too high. At this point my alternative is to set up 8 x 512 GB SSDs as a 4 TB RAID array that I partition into a max-sized boot partition (C:) and a second partition containing all that's left (D:). I'll move from C: to D: several large sets of data (in the hundreds of gigabytes range) that grow slowly or not at all - my photo data, astronomy data, and active virtual machines. This approach will 1) have all the drives working in tandem for all I/O operations, boosting performance a good bit over the 4 drive array I have now, and 2) there will be much more free space available for temporary use as needed on C:. Both partitions will have room to grow for quite a while. Using the current 992 GB of C: drive data usage at the moment as a basis, this reorganization would initially work out as follows: C: 275 GB used, 1800 GB free D: 717 GB used, 1100 GB free The only real downside is that the free space is not in one usable chunk, but two. And while having two separate partitions would complicate my backup strategy slightly a little, in fact it could be somewhat an advantage to remove a large chunk of data from the regular System Image backup and rely on my file backups (which currently also include these files) for the data moved to the D: drive. I'll probably have to get a bigger second external drive (right now I have a 3 TB and a 1 TB USB drive; the latter would be replaced with a 3 TB or 4 TB drive to allow room for growth). Thus I'll have plenty of room for both C: and D: partitions to grow, as well as improved I/O performance, for a long time, no doubt well beyond the time this workstation is obsolete (and then I'll just move the array to a new one). It's nice that SSDs are so compact and use so little power that it's quite reasonable to put 8 of them inside a desktop chassis. But even if I couldn't, there's the possibility of an external chassis. Decent RAID controller cards like the Highpoint 452x series offer both internal and external capability. -Noel

Might as well forget about it then. There are too many idiots in the world who think flat and lifeless is fashionable. -Noel

Jorge, it's pleasant be around someone else who gets it. Keep up the great posts. -Noel