NoelC

Generally speaking, the fewer processes you run, the more resources will be available for other work. That being said, items scheduled via the Task Scheduler don't take up resources while they're not running. I don't honestly know the answer to your question about whether there's long-term harm in disabling the entire maintenance process. It's my impression that some of the things it does are actually beneficial. Like you, I'm interested in having the most resources available for use, and I actually have disabled a lot of stuff. But I've left the scheduled optimization running - with exceptions: Even though the overall scheduled optimization process is still intact, I disabled the defragger for some drives. If you want to disable scheduled defragging by Microsoft's software, then there is a direct way to do just that... If you bring up the Disk Defrag GUI, you will find the ability to exclude drives via the [Change Settings] button. This will leave the rest of whatever Microsoft chooses to do (which is opaque to us) intact. My philosophy is that I disable things I know the implications of, and so far I've had pretty good long-term success with keeping WIndows functional and fast. Good luck getting your system just the way you like it.. -Noel

I know how to work around the problem when I'm thinking about it. Trouble is, when I'm "in the zone" - concentrating on the work and not thinking about being careful with the scroll bar I find myself using the method that leaves me frustrated. It's quite often a sideways scroll - for example trying to reach the end of some very long lines in a log via my text editor - which gives me a lot more room to go "too far" (I have 3 monitors on task). I think maybe it was the addition of the 3rd monitor that's uncovered this. I have both more vertical space and more horizontal space on my desktop, and windows don't tend to be placed as close to the edges.. Don't get me wrong - the ability to "undrag" a scroll thumb without having to undo isn't a bad idea. But even if people want the ability to automatically lose their grip on the thumb, the threshold should be programmable, and it would be best if it could be made more sensitive to dragging off the side vs. the end. -Noel

I'm starting to believe that whatever programmer thought of this annoying "feature" didn't think it needed a configuration option. Or at least no one's found it yet. I've found some additional discussions on the subject: http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/ms-scrollbar.html http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/55623/why-do-scrollbars-revert-to-original-scroll-distance-when-mouse-is-dragged-sidew To me it seems like a violation of trust. I clicked the mouse on something. I expect the OS to consider that I'm holding on it the master input. Some say they believe this behavior is implemented as a way for an unintended operation to be canceled, and that moving the mouse away from the scrollbar is the way to make that happen. Maybe that's justifiable - but geez, make the distances programmable. I say "distances" (plural) because it's possible that it might be sensible to allow more dragging off the end than off the side, though frankly I find it too sensitive right now in both dimensions. -Noel

A tweak I know of that's at best only remotely related is one that changes the operation so that only the filename is highlighted, not the entire row. It's available through a 3rd party tweaker tool called "Folder Options X". It also has the welcome side effect of making the rows a little closer together vertically. But this doesn't address your issue in that it is still possible to have both the cursor highlighting and an actual selection highlight active at the same time... The only other thing I can think of is that possibly a theme implementation can affect this (I'm not sure, as I don't fool with themes much). Thus this is the right forum in which to ask; a lot of theme tweakers hang out here. -Noel

A long time ago I developed a habit of grabbing a scroll bar thumb and pushing the mouse toward the end and beyond without too much care when I simply want to scroll the window all the way to the end. At one time, as I recall the mouse would remain captive no matter how far off the scroll thumb the pointer actually was. This made this particular "gesture" valid. Lately I find that pushing the mouse a ways off the end of the scroll bar causes the mouse to "lose its grip" on the scroll thumb, the scrolling operation to be aborted, and the scrolled window to return to its starting point. I've seen some info online that implies the distance is 100 pixels. When a window has been scrolling in real time, then it "jumps back" to where it started right about at the time I release the mouse too far from the end, I find that very disruptive to my train of thought. I find anything that "automatically cancels" an operation I've initiated annoying; I believe anyone would. My question is this: Do you know of a setting that can be changed to increase the distance the window manager allows the cursor to move away from a scroll bar thumb with the left mouse button down before the thumb is automatically released? A setting to disable the behavior altogether would be fine as well. Thanks in advance. -Noel

I don't believe it normally defrags disks every day. More like once a week as I recall. And that's good for performance, not bad. By the way, it doesn't defrag SSDs, assuming the system has properly characterized the disk as an SSD. It "re-trims" an SSD, which is also not a bad idea and will help ensure best performance. There are other things it does, not all of which are obvious. The general thinking is that they're not bad. What is it, in particular, that you are you hoping to accomplish? This thread is about increasing performance, and disallowing the system to maintain itself seems the antithesis to that. -Noel

1. Dishonesty and ulterior motives almost never lead to an increase in accuracy, though accidents do happen. Marketing people prefer to think of those accidents as their having influenced the industry, but their heads are up their asses. 2. That you feel people paid to make predictions are expected to be accurate by hapless readers is the crux of the problem, now isn't it? I've always hated the phrase "perception is reality". It's going to be the undoing of modern society. -Noel

It's almost always bad to do if you don't know exactly why you're doing it. -Noel

Paid writers do not have honest opinions. Most often their intent is to influence investment in the company of those who are paying them. An analyst predicting flat pricing is likely trying to influence potential high tech product buyers into spending money now, rather than to wait for the inevitable big price breaks. A potential high tech product buyer will likely always save money and get higher capacity hardware by waiting, but at the expense of not having access to the technology for the waiting period. Choosing to buy high tech gear is always tantamount to throwing one's money away. The thing to do is to stop looking at products for a time after buying, and instead enjoy the gear without fretting over missing the next big thing for a lower price. -Noel

Also make sure you carefully go through and understand all the options in the Guide section on the site dhjohns linked-to above. For example, if you're trying to run it on a laptop, there's a setting for making it work while on battery. -Noel

Think about that... A declining market share. On a technical note, have you noticed the increasing number of folks on forums who get their Windows system into a state where it just doesn't work right any more, and they find themselves - because of the online-only upgrade policies, quirks in product key usage, etc. - in a state where they just can't easily get their systems back to a working state? I saw this coming and bought a full Windows 8.1 license on a DVD just in case (though I know how to avert system rot), but those who are unwilling to send Microsoft a few hundred bucks more aren't finding any easy time of reinstalling their systems, even with the provided "restore, refresh, reset" technology. And certainly Windows 8 isn't any more immune to being botched up into a useless steaming pile of bits by users, malware, etc. than any prior version. I don't remember - with any version - hearing so many people saying, "I'm going to give up and drop back to the previous version." So... Will Microsoft try the same BS again? Will they release preview after preview, sneakily "evolving" the parts into something their Marketing people think is "the next new thing"? Ignoring the geeks who review the betas at no cost to Microsoft and pick out the problems with the substance of the thing? -Noel

Some of all these things, possibly: Psychopathic executives working to make themselves insanely rich, planning to go buy basketball teams, etc. They couldn't care less about what happens to the future of computing. They'll have theirs. It'll be especially funny when the financial system crashes and they lose it all due to their selfish choices. Marketing people who believe that Marketing is the prime thing, nay, the only thing, and everything else is just noise in the background. These folks believe something big and visible MUST be changed, and the "new thing" must be made to seem fashionable or no one will buy the product. They can't understand that the substance is what makes or breaks an operating system. In their minds we geeks are useless. A new generation of "technical" people who are further removed from the discipline and sense of true engineering than ever, finding themselves incapable of actually improving markedly on the systems of the past. Rebellious, "new" is better than "old" thinkers, unwilling to believe that the designers of the past might have actually been both wiser AND just as smart as they are. The general public, who have been herded by marketing types and inundated by half-working technology into a state where they can't tell something that's shiny from something that's got true substance. Except that they actually still can - hence Windows 8's failure in the marketplace. -Noel

I'm going to focus on a different part of the paragraph than jaclaz did. Do you mean that they felt they could "afford" to fail witn Win8, or that some train of thought led them to try deliberately to screw things up with Win8? It's hard to fathom how anybody getting paid to work could think the latter, intending deliberately to botch up a new OS for the sake of the OS that follows it. --JorgeA Since I'm of the opinion that big things don't happen by accident, I'm becoming more and more convinced that at some levels they're trying to fail on purpose. Yes, it make no sense to reasonable people. -Noel

Flash memory has arrived and is here to stay. Economies of scale are influencing production. Consider that inside that memory stick there's not room to put very much hardware. How much could it cost to make? SSDs for computers are overpriced, because it's what the market will bear. It won't be long before there just won't be any more electromechanical disk drives. Note that the price of computer SSDs recently dropped to new lows of something like 40 cents per gigabyte for top-performing drives, such as the Crucial MX100. Because there is competition they will continue to go down and capacities and performance will continue to go up. -Noel

Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice dreamed up by a top executive making himself rich. -Noel

Two days ago we saw a big ol' snapping turtle trying to cross State Road 7 west of Lantana. We passed it before we knew what it was and we stopped about a hundred yards or so past it. As we were backing up to get back to it so that we could help it get off the road another person stopped closer, got out, picked it up, and walked it to the swampy brush off the road. The guy was good or lucky as these are quite fast and can actually inflict a painful bite. There are still good people in the world who try to help rather than harm. -Noel

Your a. / b. comparison is good, except that the choices could also include "looks like a cardboard box". It's pretty clear to me someone at Microsoft was thinking, "Windows 7 is a real hit, so we can botch up Windows 8 so that we can start over with something even better in version 9." It might have even worked, but the problem is they didn't realize they don't have something "even better" at hand, nor the talent to create it. This Metro thing they think is "even better" is something that even the folks who made Windows 2.0 would be ashamed of. Don't get me wrong, easy programming by the masses, distribution through Microsoft (with a healthy fee of course), little pressure (who cares if a game isn't perfect; it's not like people will do their taxes with an App)... All these were great conceptual ideas at the management level - how could they go wrong? Other companies have even succeeded with some of these concepts. But Microsoft just didn't / doesn't have the talent to pull it off, and they tried to be too manipulative by intentionally hobbling the parts that worked very well. Frankly I don't see them pulling such talent together by, er, NOW in order to release something worth having in the next couple of years. Until then, we have Windows 8 and things like my book and all these great 3rd party tools to help people turn it into a finely tailored, stylish garment. Unfortunately, few people in the grand scheme seek them out. -Noel

What kind of computer is it? Is it possible a fan has failed or has become blocked? -Noel

You make good points, Tripredacus. I'm personally an early adopter. No "change is bad" syndrome here. Most on this forum embrace change. Been there, downloaded the previews, ran the betas, wrote the books. If something is good I become and evangelist and try to teach others. I see that in others here as well. But... Like many others here, I just don't care for change for the worse. And it's unfortunately not hard to spot it. DIFFERENT is not better. BETTER is better. It's an important distinction! Wisdom is apparently required to judge it. We simply haven't seen truly better in a long time. We're starting to wonder if it exists any more. All the shills in the world don't make something better by saying it is. What is NOT better is removal of features people use or that were there to make a system easier to use. What IS better is when some 3rd party fixes the intentional omission and adds the functionality back. Who would say Aero Glass for Win 8.1 isn't better? Classic Shell? Options in general? Thing is, "Old Guys" have been around long enough to see what the industry went through the last time (and some of us the time before that, and maybe even more). History repeats itself. It shouldn't have to. We write things down. In the past decade someone got the idea that doing things right is hard. "Old Guys" know that doing things right can actually make life easier. In the new millennium, common sense isn't. Wisdom and doing things right have been discarded in favor of... Dumbing things down?? Manipulation??? We may be seeing the end of the golden age of computing. And it doesn't have to be! -Noel

Though I understand that it's probably not possible, an ability to influence the glow and text color of the titles of ribbon-enabled windows would be really cool, and complete the product. An idea for an effect I've been toying with, and I have NO idea how good or bad it would look if actually implemented, is a "curved refractive glass" type effect that would cause translucent parts to just slightly magnify the stuff they pass over, with a non-linear effect at the edges. Kind of like moving one of those flattened marbles over a page. Might be a really cool effect. Or it might look sucky. Other potentially slick ideas off the top of my head... Little bubbles in the glass. Irregular refractions (like 100 year old glass). Reflections of nearby stuff (e.g., reflections of nearby screen elements, as though from the top surface near the edges of that curved refractive glass I mentioned above). Subtle refractions that look kind of like what you see in gel buttons. Just free associating here. -Noel

Somewhere, someone thinks that "old" is bad and "new" is good (they've dropped the pretense of "...and improved"). It's actually HARD to improve on some of the things the previous generation invented. So instead of doing hard stuff, Microsoft is trying to set fashion and do things differently, in the hope that a great many rebellious youngsters will eschew the old and adopt the new because it's not the old. Just ALL the old stuff scrolled vertically. There was only one other way to go. They're forgetting that everyone actually does grow up, sooner or later, and that the world is actually run by adults. Fashion has nothing to do with operating systems. -Noel

File Explorer has an address bar. I take it that it isn't what you want. Could you please describe in a bit more detail what it is you're trying to accomplish? Is it that you want a path to show instead of the breadcrumbs? That's doable via, for example, the Classic Shell package. -Noel

It seems to me with usage habits like yours you need more RAM. 16 GB is pretty small. I also suggest directing your talents to productive tasks. Write some useful software yourself, set up an eCommerce site, and make a few bucks from legitimate work. -Noel

Sounds like you've run the switches together. DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth -Noel

Why bother? How is this in any way better than Big Muscle's own (beta) control panel? -Noel