NoelC

"f***ed up"? "crappy"? Is there a reason you can't be civil here? If you ask nicely, I guarantee you more folks will try to help. -Noel

An animal - every time. Man can go, er, save himself. -Noel

I haven't done anything special beyond the CSS snippet I showed above. I'm using the standard with Windows 8.1 desktop theme along with Aero Glass for Win 8.1 and my own Theme Atlas file (available on Big Muscle's site). But I don't think Aero Glass or the Theme Atlas have anything to do with the scrollbar thumbs in IE. -Noel

You're not supposed to like the way the desktop stuff looks any more. And it's even worse with Office. The best solution I've been able to come up with so far for the nearly invisible scroll bar situation in IE11 is to set the thing to be darker gray than the default. You can do this by specifying a little bit of CSS code... html { scrollbar-base-color: darkgray; } If you put the above in a small file on your disk somewhere, then refer to it in the Tools > Options > Internet Options > "Accessibility" button > User style sheet you will get darker scroll thumbs. Example: Microsoft apparently the brilliant idea that if they can't make Metro/Modern actually better they have to make the desktop worse in order to get anyone to be interested in using it at all. Who thinks that stuff up? -Noel

I agree with that, jaclaz. But perhaps they were concerned that people would just discover the tweak to get the system to play DVDs using software on the system without buying the license, and that would leave them open to legal issues (because they'd not be paying the royalties). I wonder what else was changed by this "upgrade"... Something clearly was changed more than just the few files involved in playing DVDs; last night's System Image backup, via wbadmin, ended up being a complete copy of the entire terabyte of data on my C: volume, as though I had just installed a whole new system. It's been perfectly stable, and I don't see anything more running that wasn't running before. -Noel

I've seen Microsoft suggest the following command: netsh int ip reset Reference: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/e3d89862-6613-4515-b504-5b111978308f/tcpip-has-chosen-to-restrict-the-congestion-window-for-several-connections-due-to-a-network?forum=w8itpronetworking#e1588aef-2eb3-4b84-ac29-b17b24676ec9 -Noel

The article jaclaz directs us to is good, but there's actually another one as well, which I use. It hasn't to do with the speed, but the size of the "catch" region. From my book: To stop the cursor from catching at the corners between monitors: Click Start, type regedit into the search box, then hit Enter. Navigate into the key: [ HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop ] Change the following string value to zero: MouseCornerClipLength REG_SZ 0 Log off and on again for it to take effect. -Noel

Apparently not. As I mentioned above, I went looking for it. But beyond that, why did the OS accept an expired key to begin a path from which it is impossible to return, yet fail at the end? THAT's at the crux of the issue. Could the product code not have been validated fully up front? Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this feels like a trap to me. -Noel

That's the thing about the legal system - it doesn't matter what you think. What's written is what matters. You seem to be confusing a sense of what's "just" with what's "legal". While what Microsoft pulled is unjust and could also be considered aggressive and misleading, unless they do something nefarious with my credit card number it's not illegal. I agreed to pay the money before they took it. On the other hand, using software in a "cracked" or "hacked" fashion is illegal, plain and simple. Microsoft's actions could lead them to ill will and loss of customers, while the actions of someone running cracked software can land them in jail. You should work on clarifying your distinction of these two things. -Noel

Thanks. I've downloaded it and run it, so if I have another activation snafu, I will first try a restore with this product. One thing I'd have liked better, and I do understand why it's the way it is, is to have had the option to directly specify where to store its backup data. -Noel

Thank you, DosProbie, I will look into that. It sounds like a very good addition to a backup strategy. I take it you've had no trouble with any malware being secretly included in the package. Edit: This looks ominous, possibly making the tool useless in my case... Andre, dencorso has it right, I make nightly system image backups, so I was fully up to date and would have lost nothing but time. I had to make the decision on the spur of the moment, and didn't want to be without my computer for 8 to 10 hours while the backup was being restored. What I can't quite nail down is why they forced me down the $99 path rather than the $9.99 path. My best guess is probably because they've done it before and found it to work. -Noel

Ah well, it's done now. The part I'm a bit ticked off about is the business where Microsoft decided they couldn't sell me a Media Center upgrade to Win 8.1 Pro for just $9.99, which IS still available - regardless of what they told me directly (and I made very sure we were clear). I'm wondering whether they misjudged my setup as being not properly licensed before applying the outdated Media Center product code. They DID verify it, and said it was a valid Windows 8.1 Pro installation. -Noel.

You make some good points. Thanks for your input, dencorso. For what it's worth, I just don't optimize for quick system restoral. It's not something I need to do very often. But I optimize for a lot of other things... My 2TB system volume (about half full) is a 4 drive SSD array that accelerates everything my system does. It's even faster than a small "lightning fast" dedicated SSD for drive C: would be. This setup works well save for being a bit slow in a "need a restoral" situation (this is the first such situation I've faced in a VERY long time). I'm fond of the simplicity of backing up one big volume to know that I have fully protected myself. My last backup restoral was 2-1/2 years ago when I opted to restore a System Image backup from my HDDs to my new SSD array after having just built it. The restoral was done overnight (started at 9pm, ready to use before 8am some time). That saved me the time to reinstall everything. My decision today was purely because I'd rather spend the $$ than wait the hours to restore the drive, which I'm confident would be successful. Mostly I posted here because I feel Microsoft is being predatory by creating such a situation, where the software initially accepts the Product Code that they know is bad, even going so far as to call it "good" at the point where I had to make the final decision to go ahead with the upgrade - then leave the user in a situation not easily recovered-from. The phone support person was only too happy to take my credit card to "solve" the problem. -Noel

Rest of the day because I have a large system volume. It's possible an in place upgrade of the original disc might have gotten it back to where I was licensed with my original product code, I don't know. Worst case would have been a full restoral of about a terabyte of info. Sorry, I don't believe in illegal activity when it comes to licensing software. -Noel

Today I decided to add Media Center capabilities to my WIn 8.1 Pro system so I could watch some DVDs (yes, I know there are other ways). Seems simple enough - go to the Add Features section, put in a Media Center key, and voila. I decided to go this route because it was all going to be free - I happened to have such a key I had received from Microsoft as a promotion a couple of years ago during the first release of Windows 8. I'd just never used it before now. I entered the key where shown to do so, and the system accepted it, claiming it was "good". The system then went through its processes to install and reboot. Everything was smooth. After the restart, with all "success" messages, the system came up and showed Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center. This is where the problem started... Windows claimed it was no longer activated, and there was a watermark on my desktop. I figured I'd better contact Microsoft on this, so I called them. I spoke with Nathalie in India. Other than having a bit of an accent and the fairly long delay in the line making things awkward several times, she was nice enough. After much reading of keys and codes, Nathalie stated that my Media Center product code was "blocked". Apparently it has simply been too long since I had received that product code for it to be valid any longer. I allowed them to connect to my desktop to check things out for themselves, re-verifying the above. They verified my Windows 8.1 Pro license several times and I showed them the eMail with the Media Center product code that I had received from them 2 years ago. I asked for escalation, but the only answer I was able to get from every level was that this promotion was expired and not within the purview of the service department to honor. "Fine", I said, "let's put my system back the way it was". No can do. This was a one-way ticket. Can't get there from here. No dice. There are no System Restore points. There is no way to uninstall this "feature". Nathalie informed me that for only $99 US I could have my very own brand spanking new Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center Pro Pack upgrade license. This is one and the same license that upgrades Windows 8.1 non-pro to Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center. Overkill in my case. I explained that I need only the Media Center upgrade part of that, which is supposed to sell for something like $9.99, but apparently it's no longer possible to buy such a thing from the Microsoft Store. Faced with a decision to just quit and restore my last night's System Image backup, which would take my system out of service for the rest of the day, or move forward, I elected to throw money at the problem, and now I'm back up and running for "only" $99. Perhaps I shouldn't have decided to pay the $99, perhaps I should have wasted the rest of the day and restored my System Image backup. But I do need to get some work done today. But wow, from free to $99 just to play DVDs. Perhaps I should have researched the process more, and asked a few questions here. I was blindsided by two things: 1. That my key should be accepted yet turn out to be invalid, and 2. That I could not easily "undo" this upgrade with a Restore Point or something. Live and learn. Who says a service organization can't be a money-maker? -Noel

Score another one for the abomination that is Metro. What I want to know is how, in the same Dilbert world where some poor employee has to write a tome of justification to get a company to buy him a new computer (and probably not even a very good one) with which to do his job, some executive gets to embark on such a gargantuan turkey of a project and stick with it for SO long. Then walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars himself (presumably for doing such hard work). Why aren't there arrests? -Noel

And no technical person would ever think that they could get away with doing technical things like reading data files on a Unix system without being caught. Would they? -Noel

Yes, there's no apparent desire for them to be consistent with their own standards/best practices. Speaking of which, I guess this is related: A while back I found another, different instance of "what I started doing with regard to scrolling was undone by the OS automatically"... If I hover over the scroll bar in Word, and don't move the mouse, the scrollbar will self-disable after a short time and clicking the mouse to page up or down will stop being effective. See my thread on THAT subject here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_365hp-word/word-365-scroll-bar-becomes-unresponsive-after/7275cc93-28bb-4292-bb57-63874edea1ef -Noel

Why not? Because you'll see to it that he's fired if he does? What if his employer decided that for reasons of security the messenger will be required to carefully examine everything he carries. Then what? You'll find another messenger company? What if all of them decided to do that? In real terms, what's our alternative? Find a OS maker that doesn't push "cloud computing"? Set up our computers to use local accounts. Take them offline? Only one of those things is viable right now, and only just barely. Microsoft carefully hides in plain sight the options to set up systems with local accounts, and there are reports that an attempt to use things like Apps from the Windows Store invokes a process that leads your system to try to convert you to a Microsoft account. There's a completely opaque process in the Task Scheduler called "Regular Maintenance" with a "Custom Handler" for an action. What does that do, exactly? Does anyone really know? The point is that we enter a partnership with our service providers, and we need to trust them to have OUR best interest at heart. Trouble is, no one's giving us any good reasons any more to do so. -Noel

While I enjoy the USA being at the center of attention as much as any other patriot, they don't actually call it a zip code in the majority of the world. Regarding users with questions... I have some very obvious requirements near the [buy Now] buttons of some of my products, such as a very clear bulleted list of application versions they are compatible with, yet I get questions quite often about whether the product is compatible with a specific version. There is nothing you can do about this, except for every time it happens try to make the guide a bit more clear. Beyond that, some people have a need to be reassured about things. -Noel

My question to those surprised by their data being looked over is this: Why would you have any reasonable expectation of privacy with any data you put on or through someone else's computer? Frankly, given that Microsoft has its foot in the door (e.g., Windows Update, etc.) I don't really have a strong expectation that data on my OWN computer is private. CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow once pointed out wisely that in the real world it all comes down to "what a man CAN do and what a man CAN'T do." Savvy? -Noel

And once again I have you, xpclient, to thank for originally pointing me to Folder Options X. It has made my experience better. -Noel

The number to check the sum of the squares against would need to be 10000 (100 squared), but yes, you have a grasp of the logic. A Windows programmer might have inflated the rectangle that defines the scroll thumb by 200 in each dimension using InflateRect() then called PtInRect() to see if the mouse is in the vicinity. It would have been slightly more difficult to determine the direction (more horizontal or vertical) and so we can assume they would be lazy and not try to do that. Then some other programmer may or may not have come along and added code to handle screen scaling. We can be sure it was someone's responsibility to update the common controls, but given the inconsistencies among them we can only guess how messy the code must be. And a number of others who wanted their applications to work better than the norm, not finding the feature configurable, likely subclassed the scrollbar control in order to change the behavior so that the rectangle was larger. This ensures that, while it might be more livable in some applications, it won't be consistent between them. Apparently no one involved thought it would be a good idea to ask someone in charge to make the numbers programmable. Perhaps even inside Microsoft it's impossible to know how to contact others inside Microsoft. Or maybe they did find a way to ask but were met with a closed-off response. Microsoft knows best, after all. -Noel

The unsaid part is that the product would cost more if it's completely self-adjustable. I believe that to be true, if you focus specifically on the support organization. Thinking of extremes, if you released a "one size fits all" package with literally no configurability, it will be less expensive to support than one in which virtually everything is configurable by the end users. Engineering might even agree that such a system is easier to build. But both organizations, in their zeal to save effort (and thus money), conveniently forget that the process of dumbing down the system to further their goals actually reduces the value that the system provides. There's a REASON that so many things were made configurable in the systems of the past. It's because the engineers of the past realized that such configurability DOES add value. I would gladly pay more - much more - for a truly professional operating system. That's because I have a need for it. I actually HAVE paid more, in the past (thinking of systems that ran on computers the size of buildings). That Microsoft wants to abandon the realm of professional systems altogether in the pursuit of making toys for consumers is the crux of the problem. P.S., I'm going to guess it's probably a square, not a circle, that defines the distance the mouse can travel from the thumb before capture is lost. That would be easier to implement, and the same engineer who was too lazy to make it configurable probably wouldn't want to go look up the sqrt(x * x + y * y) formula for distance. -Noel

Yes, it does. I've been using it almost since the day I installed Windows 8.1 late last year and I've had zero problems with it. It makes Explorer incrementally easier to use, and may help slightly with your issue, in that moving the mouse a hair to the right will run it off the filenames and leave only the actual selection highlight for you to manipulate with the keyboard. -Noel