NoelC

Ever have a debate with someone who claims "they can get real work done on a tablet"? I have, way too many times, and after much head-shaking finally came to the conclusion that "real work" must mean entirely different things to different people. -Noel

No nags here from FastPictureViewer as I've bought a license (quite a few years ago actually). I'm not seeing bugs with it - what was going wrong for you? Only thing wrong with FastPictureViewer from my perspective is that it's missing .PSB support. Also I looked at SageThumbs quite some time ago but their color-management logic was sub-par at the time. I haven't looked at WinZip in a long time... At what level does it integrate into Windows Explorer nowadays? -Noel

And anyway, the pertinent question to the discussion just above is not "how much does your computer cost", but this: How many gigabytes is your OS + applications + data you need sub-millisecond access to? Be honest, double that, and that's the amount of drive C: storage you really need. I doubt the math comes out to more than 2 TB for most folks. -Noel

It's a fair question. There has been altogether too little work to integrate things into the desktop environment that is Windows. Things that HAVE done so make a system marvelously better. I'm thinking of tools like the FastPictureViewer Codec Pack that augments Windows' thumbnailing capability, or even shell extensions that provide new right-click functionality like Beyond Compare or the Send To Toys. The real issue might be that few folks want to put a lot of effort into intergrating things into Explorer in this day and age. What's going to happen next version? Up 'til the past few months, one could be forgiven for thinking Explorer was going to be going away soon. -Noel

It's not a reasonable metaphor. Everyone's graph has different scales for both axes. If a person is willing to settle for a junk computer they may well get junk results. Not my problem. But if you want to talk about serious computing, I'm here to help. Perhaps my experience was gained with hardware that cost more than most, but today's SSDs are at the cheapest price point yet. You can gain from my knowledge because I've done for two years what's now becoming more affordable than ever. At 200 bucks each plus another 150 for a RAID controller, four 512 GB Crucial MX100 drives could make up a dynamite 2 TB RAID 0 that would give you a system that would blow your hair back and you'd be the envy of anyone who saw it run. Motherboards based on such processors as the i7-4770 are not break-the-bank expensive today. There may be configurations where you needn't even plug-in a controller card, just use the Intel ports on the board. If you really don't want to drop a thousand bucks on a good I/O subsystem, why bother talking about the technology at all? Just try not to get in the way of the big boys with the big boy toys. On the other hand, If you want a great computer, you just have to pay today's prices for great, which are affordable by mortals and are NOTHING like they were just a few short years ago. You should feel lucky. -Noel

Good quality SSDs have something like 2 million hour MTBF figures, which makes sense since there's motor, moving parts... And no one should be without system image backups. My experience (just a data point): I'm running my entire computing environment with everything I use interactively on a 2 TB system volume made from four SSDs. I've been doing this for a few years now. I'm using about 1 TB of the space right now. I do have 3 TB of additional internal HDD storage in my system for very low-access data (basically downloads, installation images, etc.), and backup. These drives are almost never spun up. My nightly backup is incremental to an external USB HDDs, and time to complete depends on how many data blocks I touch in a given day. It's usually done in an hour or two, and covers everything on C:, which is convenient. At the moment I have 14 snapshots available for restoral from one 3TB external drive. I have two main subtrees of files that take up the lion's share of my 1 TB of used space right now: They're my photo library and my virtual machines. These total about 700GB of the used 1 TB, and could very easily go on another volume if the 2TB C: drive became inconveniently cramped. At this time I have a dozen or more system image backups on my 3 TB external USB HDD. If I were building a new system today and looking toward the future, and wanting to go all SSD, I still wouldn't feel 2 TB is unreasonably small. -Noel

Everyone has different needs and goals, but a system based on a single C: volume, backed by performance hardware (e.g., an SSD array), and with everything organized by subfolder can be very good indeed. I run my own system that way. There are a lot of advantages. It's hyper-fast and stable (since every application prefers drive C: and is most tested there), everything gets the benefit of the full performance of the I/O subsystem, and everything's backed up with a System Image backup. I doubt there are too many systems on the planet that are more responsive. -Noel

Gee Whiz Toys always seem attractive, especially to the decision-makers - who aren't those that do real work. -Noel

I'd suggest overprovisioning if at all possible in the budget. Systems and SSDs both run best with a lot of free disk space. Besides the OS, make room for everything - OS swap, your applications, data, scratch space - everything. A system set up like that (I have one) SCREAMS. -Noel

+1 to DosProbie's suggestion, except that I'd suggest plugging in a couple (or more) of them and creating a RAID 0 volume. There's nothing like GARGANTUAN I/O performance coupled with near-zero latency. There is no one single thing better you can do that's more effective at making your system feel responsive. Oh, and by the way, since some of the sluggish feel is actually from intentional time delays (Microsoft doesn't want to cognitively overload the Windows for Dummies crowd), I posted some UI tweaks that make the desktop feel snappier over here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172302-taskbar-and-classic-shell-time-tweakage/ Even if you don't use Classic Shell, the Taskbar and menu speed improvements can make a system feel more responsive. -Noel

Wow. It's a shame that SO much effort went into Microsoft avoiding doing good engineering. In the end, all of it was a waste, Win 8 is a market flop. So the question is: Did anyone learn anything, or will the Marketeers redouble their efforts at piling BS and doing nefarious things, all in a supreme effort to avoid rewarding the people who do honest work? -Noel

Hate to ask the obvious, but are you using Aero Glass for Win 8 1.2.5? ONE doesn't do Aero Glass on its own. -Noel

I'm not sure a paid opinion could be called sane or insane. It's a bit like postulating whether a prostitute is enjoying her work. But the really funny part is that NOW, after a couple of years of tweaking and 3rd party development, Windows 8.1 finally can be made into a usable animal for desktop work. And NOW the shills are being paid to distance Microsoft from it's steaming pile. -Noel

You can restore a System Image backup from the WinRE environment (e.g., if you boot from the Win 8.1 disc or a recovery drive). There is no inherent file restoral capability (i.e., NO access to Windows 7 file backups, and only full restoral of a System Image backup made with 8.1), hence this thread. Fortunately I'm now happily using the Z-VSScopy tool for an occasional file restoral, and so far it's worked perfectly with the system image backups I've scheduled with wbadmin commands.. -Noel

I've read that the system maintains the ReFS system, including checking for "bit rot" (degradation of data stored on the disk but which is not accessed for a long time). Today I caught the System reading all the files on my backup drive. It appears it was doing a (scheduled?) check for bit rot, just as documented. The activity was not intrusive in any way. Only reason I noticed it was because of some fairly relaxed seeking sounds from my backup drive. My USB connection is capable of carrying about 60 MB/second, based on observations of deliberate copies of large files. Yet this activity was only about 15 to 20 MB/second. It wasn't sending the data anywhere, just reading it. I think it's pretty cool to see the new technology in action. -Noel

I wondered what you meant by click and drag. Glad you posted the videos. I didn't even know you could click (hold) and drag like that. Like dhjohns I consider the Aero Glass flavor an improvement, not a degradation, in usability. I shouldn't think BigMuscle would want to "fix" it unless, as you mentioned, it's an indication of some other problem. That said, I've been using the software for a very long time and haven't seen any other problem in practical usage, at least not the way I use Windows. It's very astute of you to have noticed the difference. -Noel

In another thread a discussion about Windows 8 taskbar animations got me to thinking about something I've done that I like very much. I like my desktop to feel as quick and responsive as possible (who doesn't?), so I've tweaked a number of things to be faster than the default speeds. As a result, menus pop open instantly, Taskbar Live Previews pop open immediately, etc. I don't spend a lot of time waiting on animations. Here are some ideas for things to tweak if you'd like to try some of these same tweaks... The steps are written as though you have a Start menu replacement, but that's not a necessity. Taskbar Speed Improvements The Taskbar Live Previews when you hover over buttons on the Taskbar can be made to show immediately. Click Start, type regedit into the search box, then press Enter. Add a new DWORD value to reduce the hover time to 50 milliseconds. This is the amount of time you have to hover over an icon or button in the Taskbar before the system puts up the Taskbar Live Preview. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced] ExtendedUIHoverTime REG_DWORD 0x00000032 (50) You can simply remove this value to return the timing to default. Menu Speed Improvements Menus system-wide can be set to open more quickly. Click Start, type regedit into the search box, then press Enter. Reduce the menu show delay time string from the default of 400 to 40 milliseconds. This is the amount of time the system waits when you hover over a menu item before it brings up the menu item contents. Note that this is a REG_SZ string, not a binary value. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop] MenuShowDelay REG_SZ 40 You can set this value back to 400 to restore the default. Classic Shell Menu Speed Improvements Menus in Classic Shell can be set to open more quickly. Items to change: Click Start, choose Settings > Classic Start Menu. Go to the General Behavior tab: Menu delay: 40 Menu Look tab: Main menu animation speed: 40 Sub-menu animation speed: 40 Fade speed: 40 You can set these values back to 400 to restore the defaults. If you have comments or suggestions for other things to tweak to improve UI responsiveness, please contribute! -Noel

Thanks for the clarification, Joel. I'm not seeing any noticeable animation of menus that pop up from the Taskbar, so I can't say whether I can confirm this. It's likely because I've tweaked the time parameters for some of the Taskbar operations to make everything more responsive. -Noel

Here's some of what's missing from Windows 8.1... This is the Windows 8 "Windows 7 File Recovery" dialog. -Noel

Windows 7 File Restoral did more than just allow a System Image backup. Here's all you see in Win 8.1: My backup is running right now, and I don't want to start VMware to boot up my Win 8 VM, but I'll follow up when the backup finishes and show what I see in Windows 8 for Windows 7 File Recovery. -Noel

I've been watching this conversation... My question is: Why would you ever want any menu behind the Taskbar at any time? Are you just talking about the time when an animation of the opening of the menu is occurring? For what it's worth, I avoid jump lists entirely, and I can't say I ever see anything in front of or behind the Taskbar at all. -Noel

HarryTri, there was a way through it without formatting. I don't remember the specific prompts any more. It put virtually everything even remotely involved with the OS into a Windows.old folder, which it then proceeded to delete things from a few days later. I already knew it would do that and I had a separate backup. The other stuff, e.g., folders I have like \BIN, \COMMON, etc. it just left in place. Shae, I'm thinking maybe the thing to do in this silly "new release a year" environment is to always wait for the SP1 or .1 release, and install that afresh. Get to know the .0 version in virtual machines. At least that philosophy would require a full install only every couple of years. And yes, I agree that a full system reinstall isn't something one should have to do often at all. -Noel

Good to know that the ISOs can be had. But I was moving from Win 7 to 8.1 directly anyway. I chose the "Update and preserve data" feature, where it was a clean install but preserved data in Windows.old (for a short while). I presume that would work from 8.0 to 8.1 as well. I only raised my head here to mention that the clean install seems to have led to none of the kinds of problems you mentioned. -Noel

I think it's in the billions now (30 bit color). a) Ironic b) moronic c) just evil d) all of the above Pardon me, I just got an eMail from a polar bear on an ice floe in a snowstorm... -Noel

Sorry, I misunderstood you. Yes, you can manually make a System Image backup from the FIle History panel as you say. I thought you meant the panel specifically entitled "Windows 7 File Restoral", which has been removed. -Noel