NoelC

Yes, that's a good example. I always work to understand my audience and I try to put things in terms people can understand, but there's a minimum level of communication needed to deal with some things! Beyond basic attention span issues, a further difficulty is that more and more people seem to want to make their problems someone else's and have their hands held. I suppose that's to be expected, but reminding them that their problems ARE theirs and not someone else's responsibility to solve often nets surprisingly negative responses. I suppose the ones who have some cognitive ability and do assume responsibility aren't asking for help in the first place in this world of abundant information and Google. -Noel

From the "lemons to lemonade" department... Believe it or not I've actually found a small advantage to the ALL CAPS MENUS under a particular condition... In my case I'm often developing / debugging Photoshop plug-ins. I like using dark UI choices for applications whenever they're offered - which they are with both Photoshop and Visual Studio 2013. It turns out that under certain conditions, when the windows overlap just a little, it's easy to tell which are Visual Studio's menus and which are Photoshop's because only Visual Studio's are in capital letters. That's a pretty tenuous advantage, eh? Otherwise... I agree. Departure from standard styles does nothing good. -Noel

It works well enough for my needs via wbadmin. -Noel

True. Someone once said, "life's too short". Thanks for reading my rant. -Noel

One thing I like to do is help people out with technical problems on forums. It keeps my mind sharp to solve problems, as well as taking me to places I might not go on my own, so I learn new things. Trouble is, I'm working at the "paragaraph" level, and many of the people I'm helping seem to only be able to handle "text message" communication. As an example, a person might have a problem that can be solved two ways, so I tell them about the first way in plain, clear sentences, then I double space and write something like "if that fails, the nuclear option is to reset all your preferences as follows...". They take the nuclear option and say "too bad now I have to recover all my preferences". They clearly missed/forgot the first paragraph entirely. I'm not writing tl;dr tomes, just a few paragraphs, straight and to the point. Not like real technical writing, engineering specification. But even that's too much for many people. I've had this happen at least a dozen times this week! It's not really a new phenomenon, but it's getting worse. Shockingly worse! The next generation is in for a sucky time indeed if all the adults can focus on is only half a sentence at a time. -Noel

To each his own. My system emits an excited "Huh?" when it pops up a question, "Whoa" for an exclamation, "Pop" for an informational, "Oops" for a critical stop. Wakes you right up at 2:30 in the afternoon when you'd rather be napping. -Noel

(Try to) check out this thread on Office 2013 (aka Office 365) on the Microsoft forum. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ed1de1dc-1389-4980-acf2-aefc95947ac1/changing-to-a-theme-with-color-in-office-2013?forum=officeitpro#eda67be0-0f6d-4da4-82f2-6faf05ce2d49 The thread is so long at nearly 400 replies of "OMG, Office 2013 hurts my eyes too" that (if you're logged-in) Internet Explorer can't jump to the bottom post in less than a few hours. That's just sad on SO many levels. -Noel

You don't know that he's not reading all the responses to this thread, just not answering. I hold no ire, and I'm glad to know another experienced person (though I wonder if our combined experiences before 1980 count for much in a Windows discussion). I can always stand to learn new things. But neither you nor I nor anyone else should find it important to play "forum cop", leading to this kind of conversation. That's just silly. We can all figure out how to interact with others (and who to argue with) on our own. In short, tell me what to do, and I'll tell you where to go. -Noel

Sorry. I forgot that folks over your way call it whinging. Be thankful you lead a charmed life in which you can debate such nonsense on a forum, while all your physical needs are well taken care of by the society you live in. If the worst thing you have in your life to complain about is a watermark on your desktop, you have to admit things are pretty good. Perhaps one day, when you put bread on your family's table through the software sales you make, you'll have a different opinion of crackers. -Noel

Sorry to hear that - I listen to music all the time while working and it would be irritating to lose it. Can't say I've had that happen, so anything I say is necessarily on the iffy side of SWAG... Have you looked for an updated driver for the Conexant hardware? Seems to me I ran across a post on the Microsoft forums some months ago where someone was having this problem, and they ultimately said that running through some part of the sound setup or audio mixer and actually changing a setting then changing it back re-wrote something in the registry that just fixed it. But I don't remember the specifics of what they said they did. I'm sure you've been through all the setup functions. Best of luck. -Noel

I wonder how much money you could make channeling your energy into something productive instead of whining... You might even have enough already to graciously send 10 Euro to the guy with mad skills who put in years of effort to make your system more pleasant for you to use, and you might still be humble because it's only a small token compared to the work he's done and the knowledge he has. By the way, I'm glad the software has the pop-up and watermark. It helps me keep things straight. I've got Aero Glass for Win 8.1 running with donation keys on several different systems, and just the other day I was doing some maintenance work where I updated my BIN folder from one to the other. By mistake I accidentally copied the donation key with the other files. The system notified me via a pop-up and I immediately knew what I'd done wrong. -Noel

I always did think sticking things in your eyes was a bad idea. 30 years with eyeglasses and all the harm I've got are some indentations in the fat in front of my ears... -Noel

So... STOP it! It's possible you weren't typing to me, specifically, but, respectfully... No. It's not really your place to demand that. With 38 years as a software engineer, a number of pertinent publications on the subject, having run engineering organizations, with hard time spent in front of every major OS release actually doing work with it, it's just barely possible my "opinions" are a bit more than idle whims, and as such they may be useful to others. So, sorry - I will not STOP offering my advice where it is pertinent. Please find a way to live with that. -Noel

Got a link? There was a tool I evaluated that sounded a bit like that, but called Shadow Explorer, that had a decent UI but actually corrupted the data when retrieving the backup files. The author seemed uninterested in making it work for Windows 8+. The product has gotten no further attention. -Noel

Don't get me wrong, I liked Vista and had it configured up to be a VERY nice system, but... A well-tweaked Windows 7 can actually be better than a well-tweaked Vista or XP. Windows 8 does not seem to be a better Windows 7, however - it's quite a bit worse out of the box, though a lot of tweaking and addition of 3rd party tools can bring it in line. Well-tweaked, it can be just about as good as Windows 7, but not really better in any way I can discern. Unless you're doing cutting edge research (or just love tinkering), Windows 8.anything doesn't bring any new substance to the party (this, coming from a person who's done all the work to tweak and augment it to be as useful as Win 7 and is running it as my main business system). -Noel

Mission statements... Meh. From my experience, usually that means the organization is incapable, so they feel they have to talk the talk. Think Dilbert. There's been altogether too much blah blah blah BS and WAY too little actual engineering lately. -Noel

Actually I'm the one he calls "Quack". We call him Quacky. And yes, he's real. His mother was attacked on her nest in the night (we didn't find her, but found blood nearby). We figured a fox or raccoon got her, and many of the eggs. We saved the several eggs that weren't broken and incubated them. Unfortunately most didn't hatch - they'd probably gotten too cold, but one did. Here he is less than a day old. He's thriving in the wild. We see him from time to time, last time was about 4 days ago. Unlike the other mallards he'll come right up to us and let us pick him up, since he imprinted on me and my son. In two weeks he'll be 8 years old. We're sure he's the father to several broods as he has been top duck around here for many years. I call that a success story. -Noel

I just call him "Quack" -Noel

After reading, here's a subtle hint if you haven't figured it out yet: Scroll down to the bottom! -Noel

Touching story. Don't worry, cruel people will land in hell, and before that we can only imagine how empty their lives must be, devoid of all feeling and caring. My wife and I haven't eaten meat or bought leather for over 20 years now. We rescue animals when we can, raise orphans, and return them to the wild when they're up to it. There's altogether too little caring in the world for all the wonderful living things we're blessed to share this Earth with. -Noel

I'm thinking it could possibly be intermittent SSD issues myself. Maybe something about resetting the computer immediately after applying large updates. If you go through it again, when you get to the "computer needs to be rebooted" steps, give a few extra moments. -Noel

Wow, I feel for you, man. Sounds like this particular customer enjoys raking you over the coals, and the technology isn't helping you succeed. She wouldn't accept the desktop because it's too noisy? How the heck loud was it? Is it something you custom-built from parts? If so, or even if not, could you have tried putting in quieter fans? I applaud your wanting to make your customer happy, but loud fans is not the same as "non-functional" and you really didn't owe her a refund for that. Maybe in your country things are different. Was the laptop display actually blurry? What did you do to try to correct that? I assume basic stuff like check the resolution and screen magnification? Did you assume that it MUST be blurry on that system? Windows 8.1 isn't evil, and can usually be made to work, though it does take tweaking. But what you've got going on with the startup problems sounds more like flaky hardware to be honest. I wouldn't doubt that Samsung is sending you other peoples' returns. Anyway, best of luck. -Noel

FYI as a follow-up: I've been able to use Z-VSScopy successfully as needed to restore backed-up files from volume shadow copies. What I do is leave the service not started, then when I bring up Z-VSSCopy it takes me to its Service tab, which allows me to start its service. When I've done that, all my shadow copies appear in the Shadow copies tab. From there, if I double click one of them, I can see all files and folders backed up, and can restore any one of them easily. Once I'm done with restoral activity, I simply return to the Service tab, and stop the service again. Pretty painless, and more functional ultimately than Microsoft's Previous Versions feature, because you can see the names of all the backed-up files, vs. (assuming having deleted an important file) having to remember where a file was and what it was named to use Previous Versions. -Noel

I like that. When something bad happens, minimize your chances of loss of data. wbadmin start backup -allCritical -vssFull -quiet -backupTarget:G:\ This takes a long time to copy all the data on your critical volumes the first time, then becomes incremental thereafter. The Volume Snapshot Subsystem, responsible for making shadow copies, is one of the things Microsoft got very right. At the moment I have 23 shadow copies of my 2 TB system volume on my 3 TB backup drive, any one of which can be used to do a bare metal restore or provide files for restoral through a 3rd party tool like Z-VSSCopy. Additionally, as a side effect of the backup, I have 9 nightly restore points on my system volume itself. Ask yourself, can you restore any and all data from any time up to 3 weeks ago? -Noel

Just to follow up, my ReFS formatted drives (one internal, one external) have been working flawlessly, going through terabytes of backup data without a glitch night after night. -Noel