NoelC

Not for me. I embedded myself in Win 10 all morning, and when I got back to work on other things using Win 8.1 (and Big Muscle's product) I really liked the change back. I'm no stick in the mud - more like a dyed in the wool early adopter tempered by common sense - but the only thing good about borderless windows is the feeling when going back to using a "legacy" system. I couldn't get the themeatlas replacement to do anything useful by the way; Aero Glass and DWM just got into a reset loop. -Noel

They require you to use a Microsoft account - nothing more than an eMail address really - to get to the download. I already had an eMail address that I use as an account to post on their forums, and I just signed up as an "insider" with that. I do not use that for my Windows login, though (as I mentioned I only set up local accounts on my systems). The computer can be named anything you want (just as it always has been). I named my VM W10EVM (for Windows 10 Enterprise VM). When Homegroup networking is disabled (and thus files are shared the traditional way, with username and password gating access), it appears by that name from another system. For example, I shared the C drive root (and set appropriate permissions) and unshared the Users area (which was shared by default). This is what I see from another system: Furthering a comment I made above... DISM apparently cannot be used to correct the servicing database corruption (as shown by SFC). Just to make absolutely sure it wasn't something I've done (which is very little so far) I tested an SFC /SCANNOW command on a fresh W10 setup just seconds after seeing the desktop for the very first time. It's corrupted right out of the box. -Noel

Heh, I'll try that and see how it works. I see that Win 10 desktop windows are nearly borderless now. That'll be something I'll want to fix. Beyond it being ugly, it's almost comical to have to resize windows by grabbing their edges from some pixels outside the actual visible window.... -Noel

First impressions of Windows 6.4.9841 Enterprise Technical Preview I installed the Win 10 x64 Enterprise Technical Preview in a VM... I think of it as "TP", and my point is to try to see how well it can work for traditional desktop use. I'm not even going to run a single Metro/Modern app. Installation went smoothly and quickly, and I was able to create a local account by taking the same almost-hidden-in-plain-sight links as with a Win 8 install. So far, interacting with the desktop, Windows 10 looks like more of the same - a point release taken further, if you can imagine, in the direction of what's wrong with Windows 8 (and Office 2013), and with little substance amongst window dressing changes. Looking back at Windows 8, it's clear in hindsight Microsoft made the UI during all the Previews EXACTLY the way they did on purpose, to try to wean us off nice, comfortable desktop styles and onto a Metro/Modern look. This feels like more of that. I've got to say, the UI style (if you can call lack of style a style) at first blush is so UNintegrated that it really seems developed by amateurs. The word "polished" doesn't come to mind, nosiree. It's all about flat, even more lifeless user elements. It's brand new, so we don't have things like Aero Glass or UXStyle yet, and it's clear it's going to NEED them to help us avoid a gag response... Now desktop windows are nearly borderless, so even uglier than Win 8 if you can imagine - reminiscent of Office 2013. The place you have to grab the edge of a window to resize it is quite a few pixels outside the visible edge of the client area. And it's got this really big but not quite dark enough drop shadow going on under windows now. Maybe the intent is to make pop ups look like OSX, I don't know. The drop shadow is a *tiny* step of UI style in the right direction, amongst almost everything else backsliding, but it's not consistently there (for example, the Start menu doesn't emit a shadow), and it's not the same depth as the shadow that appears behind the text (but not graphic parts) of desktop icons. I'm not sure it's additive either when there are multiple windows overlapping. It comes off as unintegrated, but it IS a welcome change. Yep, it has a Start Menu, and it's not bad at providing a Search Box to type commands into. Example - "Click Start, type regedit, press Enter". It's possible to unpin all the Metro/Modern apps from it. I left one - the Windows Feedback app - which is just a web page. I normally like to keep my Taskbar hidden, and lo and behold it won't come out if I drag my mouse up to where the Start button will appear. The whole left end of the Taskbar is dead for that; I have to move the mouse to the right of the Start graphic, "Search", and "TaskView" icons (that cannot be unpinned, by the way) to get it to come out. Thus Auto-Hide is useless. Hovering over things on the Taskbar invokes a little "light" below the icons that's reminiscent of an OSX dock. And what's up with IE pinning itself back to the Taskbar even though I unpinned it (several times now)? Haven't Microsoft been dinged enough about pushing IE on people. Europe is going to love taking them to task over this. With regard to the taskbar, I'm not sensing much in the way of "have it my way". Some icons are reworked and some are not. So we have a new non-3D "This PC" icon for the desktop, but the recycle bin is the same as it was. Microsoft couldn't finish the update of all the icon graphics before release? Maybe they couldn't think of a stylized Recycle Bin graphic that represented its function any better than a little trash can. If "hodgepodge" could be called a style, that's the look Microsoft's going for here. It's IE11 - not IE12. Seems about the same, and thankfully I can configure it just as on Win 8 to open new Windows (not new tabs) when I want a another session. The CMD window has a few new features, labeled "Experimental". For example, it has the ability to be made partially transparent. I've installed exactly two Windows Updates that were already pending. I have installed NO applications. An SFC /VERIFYONLY command already fails. This might be excusable in an alpha version but Microsoft is pushing us toward accepting streaming updates virtually constantly. Doesn't the update process actually have to WORK right to do that? More as I learn it. If you've not got your own copy running yet, let me know what you'd like me to check and I'll take a look if I can find time. -Noel

Seems to me a constantly updating operating system will be an operating system with a new incompatibility or failure each day. It's just more BS by marketing types who don't have a clue that stability matters. Stability in both feature set and reliability. Then there's the implicit problem with "trust us to make your system better and better, we will always have your best interests at heart". And we thought high tech life was fun and exciting before. -Noel

Somehow I'm having trouble seeing where that XP line has fallen below that Win8.1 line. Plus the shills all use adoption numbers to imply "A is better than B". Lots of people get Win 8 (try to buy a computer in a store with anything lower), and they don't think it's better. Hell, I adopted it myself with my eyes open. I use it every day and I don't think it's any better than Win 7, and in fact find it worse in some ways -- and I'm adept at reconfiguring it to do precisely what I want/need. I can only imagine the frustration of someone who's adopted it and doesn't know the literally hundreds of things you have to do to make it worth using. -Noel

Yes, of course I noticed. Microsoft stepped up their process of what I deem "Sheep Herding" with the pre-release versions of Windows 8. They figured they'd ease into what was quite obviously an uglier desktop theme gradually, to try to wean people off the quite pleasant and integrated desktop experience of Windows 7. The ugly realization is that they've done all this on purpose. It's so ugly that it makes you want to turn away from it in disbelief. Someone perceptive and intelligent in Marketing (but still evil) quite clearly realized that Metro/Modern didn't hold anything that was worth having that would actually draw people to that side, so they instructed their minions to make the desktop side actively worse to use. Beyond the overt square, flat, lifeless look, there are subtle things, such as the mouse not *quite* grabbing the edges of windows where it should, or the missing sound effects for some error dialogs, or not allowing Metro/Modern apps to run with UAC disabled, or... The list goes on of subtle things they've broken on purpose. Remember when "Build a Better Mousetrap and the World Will Beat A Path to Your Door" defined an age where things truly did get better? Someone got the %*$&@ bright idea that they only need to say they have a better mousetrap and people who, out of experience, still believed they would build one would keep beating that path. Fool me once... -Noel Edit: typo

Um, no. Not only that but... HELL NO! Some things are just bad. That's precisely my point. Perception AND performance make up reality (though I would normally list them in the other order). It's NOT only about perception "in the eyes of the beholder". When someone allows it to be only about perception then we get... Windows 8: No actual substance, no additional actual usefulness (beyond a few bugfixes) beyond Windows 7. And they couldn't even make the window dressing better - all they could manage were deletions. Clearly even though supposedly a geek has taken the ship's wheel (and I question whether he's really excellence-oriented), a course change will take time. Microsoft needs to stop this bull$#|+ where they roll out release after release with Marketing names until they get their act together. NO ONE would fault them for saying, "we're regrouping; it's going to take longer than we thought to release the next version, but when we do watch out! It's going to be great!". -Noel

Stuff like that makes me want to barf. According to whatever spin doctor wrote that, Windows 9, er, 10 will be more more more! of what was wrong with Windows 8. If all they have left are spin doctors, being paid to think up things like "10" instead of "9", and few actual engineers implementing things people NEED, Microsoft is truly an abysmal mess. Well, that dashed what little hope I had remaining that the Technical Preview could be a little bit interesting. -Noel

Sure. First, in a nutshell, Windows 8 (if you haven't reconfigured it not to use Hybrid/Fast Boot) can and does leave the file system in a "dirty" state when it is shut down. One of the first things I recommend is to disable Hybrid/Fast Boot, even if you're not going to dual-boot. But imagine shutting Windows 8 down with a dirty file system, then having another (older) OS come along and clean it up at bootup. Then there's the LFS Version... Consider the following command: C:\TEMP>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c: NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0xdc00eddf00edc11e NTFS Version : 3.1 LFS Version : 2.0 Number Sectors : 0x00000000df846fff Total Clusters : 0x000000001bf08dff Free Clusters : 0x000000000c120f4a Total Reserved : 0x0000000000000fc0 Bytes Per Sector : 512 Bytes Per Physical Sector : 512 Bytes Per Cluster : 4096 Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024 Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0 Mft Valid Data Length : 0x0000000053f00000 Mft Start Lcn : 0x00000000000c0000 Mft2 Start Lcn : 0x0000000000000002 Mft Zone Start : 0x000000000f6a8d80 Mft Zone End : 0x000000000f6b55a0 Resource Manager Identifier : 2AFD1794-8CEE-11E1-90F4-005056C00008 Do the above command on a Windows 7 system and note that the Log File Structure version isn't shown. That's because it's 1.1. I don't know all the implications of having the Log File Structure unrecognized by an older system, but it surely doesn't sound good. This link has info that's exactly pertinent: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15645.windows-8-volume-compatibility-considerations-with-prior-versions-of-windows.aspx -Noel

I just had something odd happen... I logged in and Aero Glass started repeatedly crashing/resetting. I was able to stop it by holding down the Control key, and when I looked in the folder in which Aero Glass is installed (in my case C:\BIN) I saw that I had somehow accidentally overwritten my themeatlas.png file with a huge half-gigabyte panorama I worked on in Photoshop a few days ago. This was the first time I'd logged out/in since then. I can't really think of how I would have saved over that file - I don't normally work in C:\BIN - but it clearly must have been me somehow. Mental parity error I guess. Anyway, no harm done; restoring my proper themeatlas.png file from a backup has me back up and running perfectly again. In any case, if you get a DWM reset loop going remember that you can stop it by holding down the Control key, and if you find these messages in your Aero Glass debug.log file, check your theme atlas PNG file. [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 [2014-09-30 14:21:21][0x32C:0x3D4] CDrawingContext::DrawVisualTree failed 0x80004001 -Noel

I can't contribute too much meaningfully to your plans, but I saw your mention of ReFS and wanted to mention that my experience with ReFS has been all good. All perfect. I wonder whether Microsoft is going to have Windows 9 booting from a ReFS volume. SSD storage is still somewhat gold plated by comparison to HDD still, but 2 years ago I made a (nearly) 2TB RAID 0 array of 480 GB OCZ drives and have never had a lick of trouble, nor a single regret. SSD works, and when set up right it's so potent I will surely never go back to a system that does not run from them. I have some HDD too, but they're virtually always spun down - they're just for backup and low-access downloaded files. I'd suggest that you might benefit from shifting a lot of your files to SSD. The responsiveness of a (way) sub-millisecond latency I/O system that can also sustain GBs (plural) per sec data throughput is thoroughly addictive. -Noel

Of course, but in a VMware virtual machine. Multiple booting is getting to be a bad idea, with Microsoft thinking they don't actually have to leave the file system in a stable state any more. -Noel

Wow, I genuinely felt a pang of dread when you mentioned that. I remember, with every prior Microsoft version release, it was a feeling of eager anticipation of what's new. Either I just suddenly got old or Microsoft's strategy did. As before, please let me know if I can help you beta test your work. -Noel

Mine's been intermittently popping the progress/confirmation window behind other windows since I first installed it. And no, there's no way to fix or work around it I've been able to find. There is also NO WAY to justify this as any sort of "feature". You have to get used to watching for the flashing button on the Taskbar. The worst of it is that most operations don't positively indicate success, so if you don't notice the Taskbar there's no obvious difference between having copied a file successfully into a folder, and having tried to overwrite one by the same name already there. It doesn't even bleep with an error sound! That's just wrong! Edit: I have several Win 8.1 systems with all the updates and none of them CONSISTENTLY pop the progress/confirmation dialog behind other windows. The worst of it is that Microsoft has caused this ON PURPOSE because they want us to start to dislike using the desktop. Someone missed the fact that the Metro/Modern Weather App isn't actually suitable for copying files from place to place. -Noel

This time zone talk does illustrate another rather more serious issue, though... As we progress through time we're expected to advance the state of the art. Everything engineered today is supposed to be better in every way than everything engineered, yesterday, last month, last century... No one would think a car made exactly as new cars were made in the 1970s is acceptable. Remember those, that rusted-out in about 3 or 4 years? That killed their occupants in the most minor of collisions? To advance the state of the art requires that a great deal more thought be put into things now before deciding to build. To some extent, things are codified (e.g., building codes) to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past, but not really for commercial stuff. It's expected that things get better and better. And in general they have. But there have been hiccups along the way. From the stuff of legend to everyday stuff, occasionally we humans demonstrate our natural, almost overwhelming tendency to do stupid work rather than good work. Remember the wonder of cell phones? Everyone naturally assumed that they would work as well as a real, wired phone (heavily governed by law) and would just be wireless. In reality... When have you heard a conversation by someone on a phone where they didn't spend a lot of time asking people to repeat themselves, or outright talking about how bad the connection was? That technology has been "almost working" for how long now? And now we have operating systems. For a while, things seemed to get better and better. For a while. -Noel

EXACTLY. It's as though someone suddenly turned off a switch labeled "care about serious computing". Was it coincident with Bill Gates turning his attention away and toward eliminating malaria? Say what you will, he IS a geek, and geeks have more noble motives than most jocks. Does this say it's improbable a high tech company can maintain it's original charter and course without the original visionary at the helm? -Noel

Keep perspective here... Microsoft REMOVED your ability to do this ON PURPOSE. -Noel

C:\TEMP>diskshadow -? 'diskshadow' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. -Noel

Not sure if you were asking of a specific person, but so far all I've seen is reminiscent of what I'd expect of a Windows 8.2. Doesn't there kind of need to be some serious substance to make a full version release? Where is that substance? What have Microsoft's tens of thousands of engineers been doing? Why aren't our computers capable of speech recognition and very good synthesis? Why don't we have spam protection that works any better than in 2003? Why can't the system remember where every application window was last time we used it? Why can't we describe an image or music in terms we'd normally use and have the system search for it (and actually find it)? I'm reminded of times past when people all thought we'd surely have flying cars by now. Yet all we have is stagnation. Brand new ways to play Solitaire and removal of features we really need don't a full version release make. What's next? More of the same, or something truly better? Who here doesn't think that just restoring the source code for Windows 7, applying a few choice bugfixes, then working to make it better might be a better approach than making Windows 8.2, er, 9? -Noel

Just an extra thought... Imagine that the manufacturer of a PC hardware component has a quality/testing organization that puts their hardware (and by implication drivers) through the paces quite thoroughly before they release. The organization is probably somewhat underfunded, but they DO test... Which of these scenarios do you think is more likely: 1. They do hands-on testing during the day, rarely if ever allowing the systems to go into power-saving states; and when they go home at night they leave their test systems on, doing automated tests. 2. They spend a lot of time allowing the PC under test to go to sleep then wake it up by wiggling the mouse or pressing a key or something (presumably with a robot arm or something if they're not there). Based on my experience, I'd guess testing of power state management is probably little more than an afterthought. But that's okay, testing is redundant anyway because no programmer ever creates software with bugs, right? -Noel

Doesn't matter how many people use it. It's half-baked because it simply doesn't work very well. It's not a robust feature, because Microsoft makes the assumption that drivers outside their control will work perfectly in modes they're not likely to be as well-tested in. I'm not making up the fact that a lot of systems have problems during power state transitions. Did you happen to notice that Windows 8 has adoption problems? Ask yourself why. Hint: It isn't just the missing start menu. Users aren't that utterly shallow, even though that's all Microsoft thinks of them. It's not hard to imagine people en masse noticing things like Windows being a little flakier when they try to use it in its default configuration. The real shame is that the kernel in this version is probably the most solid of any Windows version, when used in ways that make sense. -Noel

I just did a bit of math. Let's say Windows takes a full minute to boot up without hybrid boot (I have systems that boot up in 20 seconds, but I have good hardware, so I'm being conservative). Now let's say that if everything is working properly you save 30 seconds off that time by having hybrid/fast bootup enabled. Further, let's say that you boot up Windows twice a day on average. The net gain is that you would save a minute a day waiting on Windows to start. Good stuff, right? Time is precious. But let's consider: If you use power saving states... On a typical system, something WILL fail more often if Windows is not freshly booted, especially on portable systems more likely to be using power saving states. This is based on observed reality. Let's say you get one more failure every two weeks, and it costs you 15 minutes to recover, redo your work lost during the crash or whatever. You've just chewed up your time advantage. We can even postulate that every few months you'll have a major failure and lose hours of work. Even a perfectly good backup takes time to restore. At some point, because drivers - where many of the problems following power state transitions lie - work at a low level, Windows may corrupt itself, and you'll have to spend time doing a fresh install. I shudder to think of the time to redo the setup of everything again. I have written a soup-to-nuts book that I follow when I need to set up a new system, and it still takes me the better part of a day to create a fully functional system. Unless you've been careful to save all your license info, and write everything down about what you've configured, I'll wager there will be things you've done that you will not remember how to do again. So tell me again... Why do you want to use a half-baked feature that Marketing dreamed up so that Microsoft could say SOMETHING about Windows 8 was better than its predecessors? -Noel

Thanks for sharing that. I love seeing products that leverage the Volume Shadow Copy Service. It's an amazing feature that operates at a high level of technical prowess and elegance not normally associated with Windows (which is probably why they are de-emphasizing / deprecating it). I believe it conceptually (if not actually) came out of work originally done at Digital Equipment Corporation. VSS would be a really great feature for Microsoft to embrace fully once again in Windows 9. By the way, Thanks to a bit of help (I think it was from xpclient, but if I remembered wrongly I'm sorry) I have found a "hacked" version of vssadmin that provides to Windows 8 users the same level of utility the command of the same name provides to Windows Server users. See: http://flaming-grackles.tumblr.com/post/41091667883/some-notes-on-reinstating-shadow-copies-on-windows-8 Note that someone named Guillaume followed the instructions and provided a download link in the user comments at the bottom. Compare the Microsoft-provided VSSAdmin command to the hacked one: -Noel

Or the Windows Backup facility. -Noel