NoelC

Yeah, but a strategy of "keeping up to date" is largely good... What versions of OS files do you think new work will be more tested with? Frankly, Microsoft making their big updates optional is another "penny wise and pound foolish" mistake they're making. It's really a ticking time bomb. How does a company manage essentially multiple different distributions of an OS in the field? By adding more talented people to the test organization? What are the chances of that? Perhaps they want people to get into trouble by mixing and matching OS files, so that Windows 10 looks all the more attractive when the time comes. -Noel

My understanding is that this update is a full "roll-up" similar to the Spring Update, in which whole bunches of bugfixes and miscellaneous things that have gone into the code base are all built into a whole new system. Basically, by Microsoft's own admission, it's a "Service Pack" without any version change. By the way, since ditching Avast, all the latest updates have been working great for me. Almost 2 weeks of hard use with zero glitches. I recommend going ahead with the update if you're not running Avast. If you are, make sure you have the latest software from Avast first, as they claim to have fixed the incompatibility. -Noel

Keep in mind you can change the text to white by setting the ColorizationColorCaption value to 0x00ffffff. But for those who like dark text... Colorless borders with a light title glow: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/FauxBordersRoundedCornersColorlessBordersWhiteGlow.png -Noel

OK, I've done one up quickly without any blue color. The active window still has a more significant drop shadow, and the border is a bit lighter than the inactive window. This seems to work best at about 40% opacity (I hope Big Muscle will update his configurator tool). This still has a dark "glow" for white title text. I think that really fits with the look of it, but would anyone want a variant where the glow behind the title is light (for dark text)? http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/FauxBordersRoundedCornersColorlessBorders.png -Noel

I guess I remembered wrong; the release note was pretty terse: from: http://www.glass8.eu/changelog80.txt -- 1.3.1 -- * fixed the problem that the key was not accepted under rare circumstances -Noel

Microsoft need only release another dog an I think 3rd parties will come out of the woodwork. ReactOS could grow up, or VMS could be resurrected, or someone could make a Linux with WINE that's really attractive or... I don't think it would be Apple for me, though I have a good and brilliant friend who swears by OS X. -Noel

`EDIT: I apparently remembered wrong. -Noel

Not having seen that particular corruption I'll make a wild guess and say that something (possibly something the user ran in order to try to change his UI characteristics) messed up the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics] key contents. Here's one I use to set Windows 8 and higher systems to settings I like... Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics] "AppliedDPI"=dword:00000060 "BorderWidth"="-15" "CaptionFont"=hex:f4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,90,01,00,00,\ 00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,53,00,65,00,67,00,6f,00,65,00,20,00,55,00,49,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "CaptionHeight"="-255" "CaptionWidth"="-225" "IconFont"=hex:f4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,90,01,00,00,00,\ 00,00,01,00,00,00,00,53,00,65,00,67,00,6f,00,65,00,20,00,55,00,49,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "IconSpacing"="-885" "IconTitleWrap"="1" "IconVerticalSpacing"="-1095" "MenuFont"=hex:f5,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,90,01,00,00,00,\ 00,00,01,00,00,00,00,53,00,65,00,67,00,6f,00,65,00,20,00,55,00,49,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "MenuHeight"="-225" "MenuWidth"="-225" "MessageFont"=hex:f4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,90,01,00,00,\ 00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,53,00,65,00,67,00,6f,00,65,00,20,00,55,00,49,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "MinAnimate"="1" "PaddedBorderWidth"="0" "ScrollHeight"="-225" "ScrollWidth"="-225" "SmCaptionFont"=hex:f4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,90,01,00,\ 00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,53,00,65,00,67,00,6f,00,65,00,20,00,55,00,49,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "SmCaptionHeight"="-255" "SmCaptionWidth"="-255" "StatusFont"=hex:f4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,90,01,00,00,\ 00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,53,00,65,00,67,00,6f,00,65,00,20,00,55,00,49,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "Shell Icon Size"="32" -Noel

That's a neat way to say it - "terrain". When I'm no longer given the choice to do any color-assisted font rendering at all, I suppose my center monitor will look a hair worse and my side monitors will look a hair better, overall. There was once a time I thought things might get better. Those were the days of hope. I have to say the font rendering is not too bad in Internet Explorer. It looks about 95% as good as that with the color assist, properly oriented. The alarming thing is that we're given fewer and fewer choices, so where some of us take different roads or use different shock absorbers, etc. today, the future software will likely not offer those alternatives, not even through registry changes, if current trends are followed. I wonder where the point will be for me where the speed bump is just a little too high to go over, the value of the new software is just a little lacking, and I choose to stop upgrading.... I just reached that point with Avast a week ago - the value proposition turned enough negative that the decision became easy - and though it felt weird I just dropped them entirely and moved on. -Noel

Thanks, but I'm not getting lost. I saw enough of the destination to know it's not really where I want to go. I actually DO want the color used in the ClearType rendering for my center monitor only. That's foremost. On that (high quality Dell U3014) monitor, characters rendered in pure grayscale appear to me to be more color-fringed than those using color. The Myriad Pro I tested with was an OTF and DID in fact eliminate the color - everywhere. Of the two possibilities - no color used on any monitor or color on every monitor - I prefer the extra color on the side monitors rather than no color used in rendering fonts on the center monitor. Lastly, for all the tweaking I do, I stop short of hacking in an entire replacement theme. Just the theme atlas I use via Aero Glass with Windows 8.1's default theme, along with some alternate metrics settings, makes things just right for me. These things allow me to enjoy using my Windows 8.1 desktop more than I thought I would. Don't get me wrong, I VERY much appreciate your trying to help, and thanks for all the details you're sharing. I understand the magnitude of the issue a little better now. I think the only solution for me that will make me like the font rendering better would be for Microsoft to make the configuration application actually work as it's supposed to. -Noel

Yes, no respect for theme... I recall a release note for 9879 that said something like "got title bar right for Apps" or similar. We can only hope they'll clean up their act. -Noel

1.3.1 fixed my issue as well. -Noel

Yeah, I just followed your footsteps after having written the above. I don't understand the current crew at Microsoft. It's a though they want to hard code everything, and re-implement everything. How the heck hard would it have been to just set the default BorderWidth and PaddedBorderWidth entries in the registry to 1 or 0, use the existing theme code, and move on? Makes you wonder if someone completely lost the source code for some parts of Windows. They should contact the NSA. -Noel

Some applications turn off the system-generated chrome and do all their own drawing of UI elements in the client area. Why they would WANT to do that, I can't imagine, but they do - think Office 365/2013, for example. It's not hard to envision someone having re-implemented the chrome themselves, to match the theme of the then current Windows. We now see the fallacy of having done that. It's like Microsoft wants to make it okay for everyone to be sloppy, and create unintegrated applications. They're doing it themselves with Metro apps in Win 10. The chrome of those doesn't match the other windows. -Noel

Altering the drop shadows is essentially what I did with the Win 10 Theme Atlas I altered, aphelion, but I threw in some blue because I prefer the active Window to be rimmed in a color that differs from the inactive ones. Granted, the drop shadow is different as well... Perhaps I'll experiment in differentiating active/inactive windows by the shade of gray, rather than blue. Only problem I've run into is that I can't seem to bring the inactive window color down to be dimmer than that of the active window color that I like. But the partially transparent faux borders achievable through the drop shadow resource are still not as good as having a truly translucent border, and that only comes if the theme itself generates the accented color in a true border. Microsoft is being obtuse with their (near) borderless windows... It's as though they're allergic to doing anything they've done in the past. I haven't tried too hard to tweak the values in the registry... It might be possible to restore those borders, though if I could there would then be the same challenge faced in Win 8 to make rounded corners. Sigh. -Noel

I don't think the scores are anywhere near a linear representative of actual performance as they get near the top. 3 year old Westmere Xeons... -Noel

I know a lot of folks look to disable the counters to maximize system performance... Some time ago in developing Windows applications we instrumented our software quite heavily with performance monitoring and general logging. We created a special Beta configuration for building that would enable it, along with maximum optimization, while Release cut it all out. I found that lo and behold the macro performance of the fully instrumented build was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Release build. It was then I realized modern processors are so blasted fast that a few hundred thousand extra things to do doesn't even register as a blip on the radar. It's only when we turn things up so it logs hundreds of megabytes of messages that it becomes noticeable. -Noel

In services.msc, do you have the Performance Logs & Alerts Disabled? It's set to Manual (and currently running) here. -Noel

That would be true, yes, after of course disabling the automatic theme coloration by Windows. FYI, (like Liangkung on the previous page) I couldn't get version 1.3 to accept my donation.key on my main workstation (running Win 8.1 x64), so I've reverted back to 1.2.5. -Noel

You can't make one that follows the desktop background coloration, but the color of the active window borders can be changed to whatever you prefer. Any image editor capable of dealing with transparency could be used. I use Photoshop myself. -Noel

By the way, BigMuscle, Avast antivirus (which I'm still running on several VMs, but thankfully have eliminated from my main workstation) detects your release as "Suspicious" - specifically, as "Win64:Evo-gen [susp]". It'll install okay if one disables Avast (e.g. for 10 minutes via the Avast try icon), but then aerohost.exe has to be added to the file system shield exclusion list. -Noel

There are limits to what can be done by augmenting the drop shadow resources. The theme atlas is optimized for blue active title bar coloration. A theme atlas that returns borders this way is not going to be as flexible as a full theme implementation. -Noel

I'm running a productivity-tweaked Windows 8.1 system on my desktop workstation (Dell Precision T5500, well-equipped). Because I wanted to prepare similar desktop screen grabs, I decided to boot up 5 different versions of Windows in virtual machines (using VMware Workstation 10), start a few applications in each, and grab the screens. These are not small, insignificant VMs. Most have 8 GB of RAM and 4 virtual processors. I haven't gotten a single complaint or a hint of lag out of my system, which is running on the same boot from a week ago and having done heavy duty stuff every day (yesterday I was doing 3D rendering). With 32 bit XP and Vista, and 64 bit Win 7, 8.1, and 10 running in VMs, I still have 8 GB of my 48GB of system RAM available, and everything - including Pandora playing music - is smooth as butter. I even have Subversion Server, Photoshop and a whole bunch of other applications running. CPU usage is whopping 2%. I love it when a system really works right like this. I have achieved the setup I dreamt about for decades. http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win81/HostDesktop.png If you're curious, here are the five VM screen grabs. Note that they're all taken a few seconds apart: XP: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/WinXPProductiveDesktop.png Vista: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/WinVistaProductiveDesktop.png Win 7: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win7ProductiveDesktop.png Win 8.1: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win8ProductiveDesktop.png Win 10: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10ProductiveDesktop.png -Noel Edit: Corrected loss of the last character in the subject

I've been updating the theme atlas (which is not a full theme) that I provided for Windows 10 in place on my web site. Keep in mind it works with light title text with a dark "glow". It's still at: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/FauxBordersRoundedCorners.png It looks like this: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10ProductiveDesktop.png -Noel

Yes, indeed. Optimizing the thing to minimize stress leaves more room to spend that stress on real work. Like you I'm in front of the machine continuously, except for the occasional sleep break. My bed is in my home office; commute time is 3 or 4 seconds. -Noel