NoelC

Regarding what you so aptly call "metrotards", Formfiller: Some people haven't a clue what they want and just join what they think is the winning team. The phrase that seems most applicable is "drinking the kool-aid". Others want things their way, and if they happen to find the latest thing that Microsoft does to their liking, they become evangelists for it, because they would rather have an advantage over others who don't like whatever it is. The lion's share of people - even those who claim to be experts - haven't got any business commenting about how an operating system ought to be designed. They've never done it, and wouldn't have the slightest clue how to even start. Nor do they think things through. You can't argue rationally with such a person. The number two punch of this one-two combination is this: Whatever the reason, it seems the folks with the most common sense are being marginalized, and I don't think it's by accident. Microsoft has its foot in the door of a billion+ computers. They see this as an opportunity to cash in above all else, and they know that people can't just change to another system on a whim (even if there were another, better system available). We are just fish on hooks and in nets to the Microsoft management. The vision that came from the founder(s) is gone, and it's all about greed now. -Noel

Ah, no. The file system implementation has substance; Metro/Modern does not. Probably why we haven't seen advancement of the former. No one's left in the Republic who commands the light side of the force. Some of the things ReFS brings to the party are actually good. That said, I've had zero problems with NTFS in all the years since there was NTFS. I don't see a need for a new file system, honestly, I just brought it up because one claim to fame is virtually unlimited size, and that bears on this problem. -Noel

Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will work things out so that ReFS becomes available for use as boot / system volumes, and in the process of doing so will rework the boot mechanics so that the boot / system volume can be any (practical) size and the setup of same can be done by any member of the Federation, not just the pointy-eared variety. Has anyone heard of any progress with ReFS? I've been running data volumes with it for over a year now with no apparent problems. Edit: But on reflection, I'm thinking they wouldn't give a darn about BIOS any more. Guess I need to start thinking about a newer workstation. More cores, faster cores, and of course the wonderful new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface - the answer to all prayers. -Noel

Ah yes, I do remember running across your writeup before - some of the only info out there on the subject. Though the backflips required to create such a setup initially seem daunting, I'm gathering that once it works, it keeps working unless you try to re-partition the drive. I'm not sure how the needs of the RAID controller might fit into it all as well. That might be a deal-breaker. I don't know how many assumptions they make between the BIOS setup and the run-time driver about what's where. Perhaps if I find myself retiring my existing array and building a whole new one (i.e., where I can just plug the old hardware back in and restore functionality in a few moments) I'll experiment. -Noel

I'm not completely solid in my understanding of the restrictions of installing / booting Windows with a huge system volume. I have a Dell Precision T5500 Workstation based on BIOS, without the possibility of UEFI as far as I know. Presently I have a 2 TB system volume (C:) with MBR partitioning. Works great. But what if I wanted to make a 4 TB system volume? The advantages would be that with more drives in the array making up the volume performance would be better, and also there would be a huge amount of free space. What would the steps be to partition 4 TB of space using GPT? Would I be able to install Windows on it? Would it boot? Thanks in advance for any wisdom and experience you are willing to share. There's surprisingly little how-to on this out there. -Noel

Seems to me your problem is that you choose to use Google software. -Noel

And a wonderful Christmas gift they are, given an appropriate translation: "We have not ruined your computing environment, and the free drivers you have just downloaded are hardly any slower than the ones you downloaded for free from us 3 months ago." Here's hoping all our Christmas gifts stop short of ruining our computing environments! -Noel

Here I thought you were a card carrying geek. Why would anyone play with a computer when they can create with one? But I'm not really disappointed - it's actually quite fast, just not faster. The only reason I posted this is that I don't think any Marketing dweeb ought to be able to write stuff that far out in fantasyland without being called on it (noting you didn't say that you've observed Catalyst 14.12 to be observably faster at anything). If they never get negative feedback, will the lies end? And actually, it's not really too early to measure reliability... 8+ days of hard use so far without fault seems a pretty good measurement. But that doesn't make it enhanced, since the last version easily did this as well. -Noel

I should qualify the statement "no more capabilities". I did discover one: It will compile OpenCL version 2.0 programs for the GPU now. Before it was version 1.2. That will possibly enhance capabilities in the future when application designers move up to newer features. At this point I'm not sure even GPU-heavy applications like Photoshop take advantage of the newer OpenCL version. -Noel

Some 8 days ago I got an eMail from AMD claiming a set of great new "Omega" drivers were available for my Radeon 7850 card. This is what it started off with: Something like that would make you think everything ought to be faster after the driver upgrade, no? And maybe (because of the use of the word "unlock") even have more capabilities. Nope. No more capabilities, and pretty much the same as or a little worse than its predecessor version, Catalyst 14.9, in performance. See for yourself: Benchmarks that imply performance for normal desktop use: Benchmarks that indicate potential 3D performance, e.g., for modeling applications or games. -Noel

I've been criticized because I've been negative about Microsoft's efforts, but as you've seen, where the rubber meets the road the tires are worn, flat, and have screws in them. Very perceptive, and absolutely right on. I've seen a syndrome many times where an engineering company gets infected with cranial-rectalitis, and what happens is either 1) the company just goes out of business, or 2) the company gets bought by a bigger company with a less advanced stage of the disease. Microsoft has been "too big to fail" so far, but that's not going to keep. With great riches comes great spending, and it's tough for anyone to keep that up. -Noel

-Noel

That last link you posted is worth following if just for the image. That article is oddly comforting. -Noel

Adobe is making good profits with their Creative Cloud model. ♪♪ It's raining money ♪♪ -Noel

Fun idea, DosProbie. Mine's optimized for productivity. I was not sure what to show, so I decided to show everything and start as many different applications at once as I could, including some big ones. There is apparently no practical limit I can hope to reach, so I got tired after a while and just did the screenshot. In software developer's terms: It's as far from Metro as Win 8.1 can get. Aero Glass just works. The above is with Win 8.1. Here's what I've managed so far with Win 10 build 9879... ​ ​ ​ -Noel

For what it's worth, on Win 8.1 I'm watching GPU-Z right now, and Memory Usage (Dedicated) and (Dynamic) hop around a little when I'm moving things or resizing things (e.g., Firefox) on the desktop, but they settle to 253 MB and 41 MB respectively if I leave things alone. I have 3 monitors and 4960 x 1600 pixels on the desktop by the way (with ATI Catalyst 14.12; I see you have nVidia). I'm forced to conclude the problem must be specific to your system somehow. lvh1, do you have the latest display driver from nVidia installed? Display driver bugs are more common than people realize, since display drivers are about the most insanely complex things on the planet. -Noel

Yeah, black title bars with big misshapen controls and only some of the resources (drop shadows) composited. How nice. This is the inevitable result of Microsoft no longer following any usability standards for its desktop. We knew it would happen. Their own work is as sloppy as any, and for some reason they all still think Metro is the only thing people will want to run. We need to face the facts that 1. Microsoft knows your product and themers exist, and 2. They're actively working to prevent people from improving the look and working of their desktops. Much as I value keeping current, if they continue to actively screw up the ability to improve the desktop look and feel, for me it's a no brainer: No glass, no upgrade to Win 10. Would have already been that way for me for Win 8 except your product fixed some of the worst of its desktop look and feel. Feeling a bit like Padme Amidala? "Microsoft, you're going down a path I cannot follow" Now where did I put my light saber... -Noel

No, I have not heard specifically that the November update supersedes any particular prior set of updates. I think you'll want to do whatever Windows Update delivers to you (which is probably to install them all). -Noel

No doubt that's the strategy we must all follow. I've submitted it as feedback so far for every build. Regarding the tenor of my original post... While I enjoy playing around with pre-release software as much as anyone, why are we seeing such unfinished work? Who said it's important to release unfinished software to the public? If they're looking for feedback on usability they ought to be testing it for quality first, and not letting any old bugs out into the world. Is it an attempt to lower everyone's expectations? If so, I guess it's working - but that's not a good trend! The good news is that the new setup I've freshly built and configured now does not repeatedly request reactivation, so I'm past that annoyance at least. -Noel

Microsoft claims to be "listening" to its users by asking them to provide feedback. They've already seen how interpreting telemetry can fail. So they're asking Joe Public to use the "Feedback App" and let them know what's up. Am I the only one who thinks the trouble with this is that what we'll get is an OS that's designed by untrained masses of people, who know about as much about designing operating systems as they know about designing rockets? I went to submit feedback about Internet Explorer not doing proper color-management, and not one person had mentioned it. So therefore Microsoft - assuming they're counting up comments - doesn't perceive there to be any demand for better color-management, and thus they will do nothing (even though IE gets the color wrong 100% of the time on most systems). When did the world forget that we expect higher tech than we could design ourselves? Of course it's easy to "just do what people want" and if you fail you can tell upper management, "But we did what the people asked for!". What's hard is innovating. Leading. Building a solid foundation. Getting it right. -Noel

Thanks, Andre. I wasn't really looking for a detailed analysis (the log is thick with errors), but if you'd like to scout around, please be my guest. Here are the specifics: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/CBS.zip The general form of most errors is: 2014-12-13 20:20:26, Error CSI 000010e0 (F) Failed on regenerating file [l:58{29}]"DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx"[gle=0x80004005] 2014-12-13 20:20:26, Info CSI 000010e1 [sR] Cannot repair member file [l:58{29}]"DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx" of NetFx4-defaultwsdlhelpgenerator_aspx, Version = 4.0.9879.0, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope neutral, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:b03f5f7f11d50a3a}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, file cannot be decompressed 2014-12-13 20:20:26, Info CSI 000010e2 [sR] This component was referenced by [l:160{80}]"Microsoft-Windows-NetFx4-US-OC-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.4.9879.0.NetFx4" Edit: Didn't Microsoft recently admit to getting something backwards regarding data compression in the Win 10 TP? Yes, I just found it, the info is in the Insider Hub App, regarding KB3020114... I only mention this because of the note about compression, and the fact that the SFC check is failing with the message "file cannot be decompressed". -Noel

Haven't seen this myself, but of course all our experiences are still very limited with Win 10. Do you have any other "system management" software starting and running on your system? Something from the manufacturer maybe? Have you looked through the Autoruns listing to see what things are starting in the background? Usually people discover a surprising number of things they don't need. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx -Noel

I've seen no problems so far with version 1.3.1 on Win 8.1. Runs smooth and clean for weeks without reboot. My thanks to you, Big Muscle, as well. I'm just now building a fresh, new Win 10 setup and let me tell you I feel like a fish out of water without yet having installed Aero Glass on it. I'll be remedying that very soon. There are people designing themes at Microsoft who do not understand even the beginnings of what the word "elegant" means. -Noel

Possibly also implied in The Old Man's question is "why would you WANT to use the Win 10 out-of-box Start Menu when there are much better alternatives available?" And yes, even those Microsoft is trying to quash can be installed. -Noel

Did you see the note about the newest software only reading the file "donation.key" not the old form (as I recall it was "license.key"). -Noel