NoelC

It's working okay for me... Since it's not a basic compatibility problem can you please describe what's going wrong for you? -Noel

Touché! That's what I like so much about you, jaclaz, you simultaneously present complementary AND complimentary viewpoints. And working PRE-10 Windows installations are what allow us to have the free time to play with words. People sure are going to miss that. In other news, elsewhere I've been learning about the secret, unmodifiable firewall rules we are all subjected to when the Windows Firewall service is run. Microsoft is distracting us with stupid bugs while secretly shoehorning nasty s*** into Windows in order to take over control. To Microsoft, regarding that, I say... -Noel

That's not punny! -Noel

I think the word you were looking for was "complements". -Noel

Just a hunch, but I'm guessing the fault lies in the servicing database maintenance tools (e.g.,, DISM, et. al.) rather than in cleanmgr.exe. It's probably not a big problem; maybe a number is 1 byte too small (causing 0 to go to 0xFFFFFFFF). Notably when there IS something to clean up the number is more reasonable. The 3.99 TB appeared after I ran a cleanup. But that showed the second problem - the process taking over an hour to complete - which I suspect could be related to the problem Windows 7 people are seeing where update checks take a really long time. This seems to me to be new levels of bloat, never before seen even at Microsoft. -Noel

Take the 10 out of the thread subject and this thread is all quite on topic. I find it fascinating what people have been able to do with component mix and match using debugging tools et. al. I'm reminded of a good DJ remixing good music to make even better music. Makes me want to go and play some chill remixes. I wonder what Windows could become if Microsoft would just open the source code up to the world. -Noel

Oh yeah, thanks for noticing the firewall sub-question, Tarun... I forgot to mention: Sphinx Windows Firewall Control version 8 has just been released. It's breakthrough claim to fame is that you can manage the setup with names, rather than addresses. It takes care of the ongoing correlation between names and addresses by watching DNS traffic. VERY slick. It handles things like content delivery networks and banks of servers adeptly. You can take controlling things to a whole next level (e.g., describing just what sites a particular program can and cannot contact, or enabling/disabling Windows Update from contacting the several servers with mutable addresses that it normally talks to, etc.) and still not be overwhelmed with ongoing maintenance. I run a tight ship and often go weeks at a time without messing with my firewall configuration (I've been testing version 8 betas for a while). I'm willing to share my Sphinx configs as examples/starting points. PM or EMail me if interested. -Noel

Where do you think you're more likely to get the ransomware from... Do you download executables from the wild Internet and run them? Or do you think you'll get the ransomware from web pages? Nothing can really help you much with the former. If you're going to download software and run it then it would be a good idea to vet it in a virtual machine before ever allowing it near your critical systems. If I were looking for an active protection program I'd probably look into the MalwareBytes Antimalware product, then at least scan every executable before running it, and maybe consider installing the active protection components. It's one of the better scanners, though I have no experience with the preventative side of the product. I only scan with it myself. For the second possibility I follow a very good strategy for having all my systems just avoid visiting sites that host malware. It involves downloading various blacklists of host systems and domains and compiling those lists into input data for a DNS proxy program I run called "Dual DHCP/DNS Server", modified to handle large lists. Another almost as effective strategy involves gathering the same info and putting it into your system's hosts file, though beware: Some folks claim that's a bad approach in that it can introduce undue overhead into Windows networking. I personally have not seen any problems. You can read more on these approaches here: http://win10epicfail.proboards.com/thread/105/build-own-hosts-file The better way to do it, and the way I'm doing it now for my systems, is described in post 12 of the thread at the above link - I now use the Dual DNS/DHCP Server package to blacklist sites. If a site being resolved to an address survives a lookup in the blacklists, it's considered legit and is forwarded to an online OpenDNS server to be resolved. I can't emphasize enough how effective this strategy is at not only reducing the chance you'll be infected by malware but also to improve the performance and pleasure of your browsing experience. Beyond the above, all of what I mentioned in the original post of this thread still applies. Disable ActiveX, don't run things in iFrames, remove all the Add-ons you don't know you need, etc. Don't be afraid to take control of your security setup. Not everything is configured to be as secure as it can be out of the box! -Noel

I didn't say it wasn't broken. What I said was that there is some question whether a recent Windows Update was at fault (yes, I'm picking nits). People are apparently uncovering evidence that the problem is occurring in systems that have not been updated. One theory is that it was latent and something triggered it. But it doesn't really matter, for the purpose of criticizing Microsoft for releasing untested code, whether it was broken by a recent Windows Update or came with the "Anniversary" version, or whatever. -Noel

You didn't quote anyone... Assuming you're asking me about my tweaked/augmented Win 10 setup... aerohost.exe is part of Aero Glass for Win 8+. ClassicStartMenu.exe is Classic Shell's start menu replacement. conhost.exe is there because I have a beta build of Aero Glass for Win 8+ running. ProcessHacker.exe is the tool shown in the above screen grab. ShellFolderFixUI.exe positions Explorer windows per where they were used last. TSVNCache.exe is part of Tortoise SVN, which is a SubVersion client used to access software. 2 vmtoolsd.exe processes are because this Win 10 system is running in a VMware virtual machine. Windows10FirewallControl.exe and Windows10FirewallServices.exe are part of the Sphinx firewall. WizMouse.exe helps with sending mouse wheel events to the windows under the cursor All these things work very well together. Some other pertinent information... -Noel

I guess it boils down to what you consider the "operating system" to be. Me, I always think of what the system can be made into (because, like you xpclient, that's what I do with it), with the goals being high usability, an strong level of stability, and minimal maintenance. Windows 10 gets 95% of the way on the first, maybe does a bit worse on the second, and is way worse - in the wrong ballpark worse - for the last. It's just not better, or even as good. Do you think of anything as improved when you think of Windows 10? Apps? Cortana? Easier to keep running? Mobile? Cloud storage? 3D? Security? All of these things are what MICROSOFT wants us to think of, and their marketeers are relentless at telling us that, but do any of them actually do something better than what we already had? I really, really have tried to find the good in it, but I just can't answer yes. I did tweak XP too (and all those that came before; remember tweaking DOS with SMARTDRV in high memory?), but we've never had the tremendous resources of the Internet that we have right now, today. All that shared knowledge and experience took a while to accumulate, and good apps took a long time to write. Decades. Dibya and others still using XP are probably using it more adeptly today than I did more than 10 years ago. Was XP truly better out of the box? Or did we just expect less of it? Or NEED less of it? Certainly our computers were nowhere near as powerful back then, our monitors and networks not as good - and frankly even we users have learned a lot since then. I still use skills and good habits today that I learned going all the way back to before Windows or even Microsoft existed. -Noel

One wonders how, without that internet connection, they'd be reading the instructions to "reboot your PC" in the first place. And is that not most everyone's first action anyway? Probably they'd visit the web with their iPhone or Android and do a Google web search. For what it's worth, there is not a consensus that a recent Windows Update caused the "DHCP connectivity" problem. It might have been latent and triggered by something. Microsoft's response may just be damage control, since a lot of the web "journalists" are attributing the problem to Windows Update, whether or not it's true. -Noel

The other day, when I ran it, Disk Cleanup literally ran for over an hour, consuming roughly 2 cores of CPU continuously. And now note how much space Disk Cleanup claims to be able to free on drive C: through Windows Update Cleanup vs. how big drive C: really is. This is yet another good example (couple of examples) of why Microsoft needs to test its own software, and not send it out to the world in an unfinished state... It takes a new level of not caring to turn Disk Cleanup into a CPU-intensive activity, then to report a bogus result like what's shown above! Thinking about what must be going on in Redmond, I'm seriously reminded of the old "if an infinite number of monkeys..." joke. And I'm not laughing. -Noel

This is EXACTLY why I don't use the Windows Advanced Firewall interface any more. Microsoft adding rules to support its own desires at your expense to allow a computer to communicate online - without of course any input from you whether you WANT that done. No thanks. That's not why the firewall feature is in there. W/regard to your specific firewall question... I normally keep all the Windows Advanced Firewall rules deleted, and the Firewall state set to Off. I verified that my list was empty not too long ago, so this is an opportunity for me to see whether some recent process has added some rules back in... Lo and behold there are new firewall entries (%&#*@ Microsoft)! In the Inbound Rules section: Two new rules for "DIAL protocol server (HTTP-In)", one for the Domain profile and one for Private. These describe themselves as "Inbound rule for DIAL protocol server to allow remote control of Apps using HTTP. [TCP 10247]". In the Outbound Rules section: No new Outbound Rules appeared. And, if it's at all interesting... Here's the list of scheduled tasks I have allowed/disabled in my up-to-date Win 10 build 14393.579 system (noting that I don't do Apps at all, not even Cortana): Because I take regular status readings of the above, I noticed that something (other than me) has re-enabled the following tasks. Doesn't really matter for me since I keep the Windows Update service disabled and (as you) protected from succeeding via the firewall. In any case, I re-disabled them. \Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator\Reboot \Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\Scheduled Start Microsoft has crossed onto the slippery slope of changing configuration parameters that should EXCLUSIVELY remain the purview of the user. It's one thing to set things to default on a new installation; it's another entirely to change parameters. They need to be put in prison over this. -Noel

You never, EVER, have to worry about what's OT in any of my threads. I think "on topic" is an invalid concept and many things can be learned from a freely ranging conversation. I enjoyed your image. It reminded me a bit of a particular Greek donkey that wasn't quite so apt to work without complaint. Or at least without music. -Noel

You have done much with XP. Congratulations. It is impressive. A few days ago I was testing with an image that was 90,000 pixels on a side. Not really possible with a 32 bit address space. It illustrates why I prefer x64. Personally I found that, while some things were slower overall (e.g., the file system), Win 8.1 didn't "get sluggish under load" as quickly as Win 7. I've found myself craving more than 48 GB of RAM lately, though. The more powerful the system, the bigger the jobs we tend to give it. Though it seems like there is a "war" brewing here, I'd say it's not - it's healthy conversation and we're all learning. What's funny is this is a thread where most or all of us agree that we're not interested in changing to Win 10 on our hardware, so has become a discussion on "how new a system can I tolerate". -Noel

Thanks. I wasn't sure when the multi-core support was added. -Noel

If you count 8.0 and 8.1 together, we probably number more than XP users at this point. Something like 8-9% of all Windows systems. Microsoft just doesn't care about quality in general. By the way, there's a bit of a hoohah about Microsoft publishing and unpublishing and publishing etc. updates going on right now. See: https://www.askwoody.com/2016/microsoft-pulls-the-kb-article-for-last-weeks-win10-1607-cumulative-update-kb-3201845-14393-479-pulled/ -Noel

FYI, Sphinx Firewall version 8.1 is released. This one uses a quite innovative name-based configuration process, which turns hard work into a breeze to keep up to date. I've been using all the betas and now the released version on all my systems, and if you're looking for serious firewall sophistication I highly recommend it. -Noel

Horses for courses. You prefer a Thoroughbred and I like a stable of Clydesdales. Do you by chance have PassMark PerformanceTest handy to where you could run it under each different OS, and post the comparative results? At least some of the tests show 3D rendering performance, which no doubt you'd be most interested in. I'd be more interested in disk and CPU performance for my needs... Speaking of which, could XP handle 12 cores / 24 logical processors? FWIW, I've never had to reinstall any Windows OS more than once. That's just a matter of knowing how to maintain it properly - and MSFN is as good a source as any for how-to on that subject. I have always thought that Microsoft's provision of "Refresh" and other similar capabilities in the WinRE environment were a cop-out, and that they should make the system more robust so it would not NEED reinstallation when someone mucks it up. -Noel

Sorry; I had forgotten. -Noel

My recent experience - and it DOES actually speak to my decision not to put Win 10 on my hardware - is that ATI (AMD) isn't doing as well at writing drivers as they once did. Every Windows 8.1 compatible driver release after November 2015 has been missing features I actually use. Two things, specifically, that are somewhat related: The ability to define a custom calibration, and the ability to auto load that as a preset. They deprecated the auto load first, but I found a workaround. The last straw came in mid 2016 when they just removed the ability to calibrate the output per port entirely. There's an old saying: "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler". They chose to make it simpler. So here I am, with a still decent ATI Radeon HD 7850 but unable to use drivers newer than November 2015. Imagine what drivers may be required to run the latest Windows 10 release. MAYBE those older drivers would work. Or maybe not. I really hate the "Dumbing Down of Things". -Noel

Gaming has financed a lot of advances in desktop computing. The integration of Win 10 with Xbox may ultimately provide your particular recipient some extra value, so given an emphasis on gaming, Win 10 may be as good a choice as any. What video card are you thinking of putting into it? One of the top-end nVidias? -Noel

I don't have any Apps besides Settings, but for me when I start Settings I see a console window titled C:\WINDOWS\system32\ApplicationFrameHost.exe open. I presume that's because ModernFrame-x64-Debug.dll is a Debug build. Is what you're seeing something different than this, UCyborg? -Noel

Does it really matter? XP was a toy, plain and simple, because it was 32 bit. Maybe it worked well enough for the things you needed. It didn't for mine. MANY tasks require access to a larger address space (and freedom from fragmentation issues) now when processing real world problems. XP x64 was a start on the right path, but it took until late Vista or the release of 7 for x64 to be a serious system all on its own. It took until Windows 7 or 8 to get most everything in the system up to native 64 bit. And it's not like the later systems are fundamentally different architectures than XP. They're all a derivative of a Vax/VMS virtual memory system under the covers (re-implemented as NT by Dave Cutler). Even today you can carve off a lot of the extra fat, and lo and behold the kernel underneath isn't bad at all. Not surprisingly, a trimmed, lean system is pretty fast, even by comparison to your beloved XP. The last time I EVER remember having any disk corruption was back around 2003 or 2004 when running XP. NTFS on newer systems is more reliable than ever, and beyond that I run ReFS on several of my disk partitions. I remember a very specific incident in about 2003 when I still worked for an engineering firm... I had to copy about 5 gigabytes of data in multiple folders from one system to another, and I absolutely could NOT get XP to do it all in one shot. It would just fail with some esoteric error code or another. So I had to break the job down to multiple incremental XCOPY commands and run them more than once to get it done. By contrast, I haven't had to worry about the amount of data I was copying with any newer 64 bit Windows system. Nowadays hardly anyone worries that a video file of a few gigabytes is going to copy correctly. Systems today simply DO more than XP, and run longer. My systems running 7 and 8.1 today are at least 10x faster than the ones I ran XP on, and while I had to reboot XP every few weeks, these run for months. The last time I remember having to regularly reboot my systems because of things that either stopped working or crashes because of things like resource leaks chewing up the entire available pool was in XP and early Vista. I agree that every new system gets a bit slower, mostly because no one at Microsoft really gives a d*** whether the code is optimized. They never have. Here's a statement for you: If it HAD been optimized, XP (and any Windows system before or since) could have been quite a lot faster than they actually were. Microsoft had a stated policy for a long time that they never polished or optimized anything once it was working, since the world cares more about innovation than they do efficiency. So they just moved on. XP was great for its day. That day is not this day. -Noel P.S., I think that if you feel strongly about something, you should feel free to post it as often and in as many places as you like, and be prepared for debate. I've also been told my criticisms of Win 10 are repetitive and negative. To those who feel that way I say: Feel free to read something else.