NoelC

Please describe HOW you got it figured out. That might help others who find this thread. Thanks. -Noel

Doesn't really matter. Either way you look at it - giving them the benefit of the doubt or not - the wrong direction was taken. I suppose you could make the point that "stupid" is better than "evil". A Marketing guy was in charge, after the Engineer excused himself to go chase mosquitos (more power to ya, Bill), so Marketing drove the bus. Engineers take everything into account. Marketeers don' listen to nobody. -Noel

No, I certainly don't suspect Microsoft of inventing new kinds of marketing. Just using what they have, between toga parties, in the worst possible ways. I'm glad the world is responding to their "Emperor's New Clothes" scheme in a rational manner. The sheeple aren't quite as dumb as Microsoft Marketing hopes. I'll bet someone somewhere must have said something like "if we bet on public stupidity we can't lose". If I were running Microsoft right about now I'd probably ask every employee for a short essay on their thoughts about Metro/Modern. Anyone positive or even wishy washy about it - i.e., not blasting it and anyone who supports it as the evil that could bring Microsoft down - would be laid off. They are clearly evil or at best dupes. It's been a growing cancer for a while. Remember the "Windows 7 was my idea, right in the back of a taxi" commercials? -Noel

With VC6, did you use SSE instructions and do __vectorcall functions to pass 128 bit values by register? Do multiple floating point math operations simultaneously? I rather like being able to take advantage of new technology. __forceinline __m128 __vectorcall PreMultiplyAlpha(__m128 Pixel){ __m128 Alpha = _mm_shuffle_ps(Pixel, Pixel, _MM_SHUFFLE(3, 3, 3, 3)); __m128 ReturnPixel = _mm_mul_ps(Pixel, Alpha); ReturnPixel.m128_f32[ALPHA] = 1.0f; return(ReturnPixel);}-Noel

From the "operation was a success but the paitent died" department... How is a "projected lifespan based on never being switched off and on" in any way supportive of a policy of reducing energy use and environmental impact? I mean, no one ever turns their lights on and off, do they??? Perhaps the governments enacting the laws knew that better solid-state lighting was doable if only the industry could be given a big incentive to develop it. -Noel

No, that's exactly how I want it written. Note the quotes. I'm emphasizing that "legacy" is a label arbitrarily conjured up by Microsoft Marketing to further their nefarious goals of trying to make their new stuff fashionable and the next generation of computing, even though it isn't better than what went into Windows 1.0. Nobody in the world outside the evil empire thinks desktop (e.g., Win32) programming is outdated and should be given a "legacy" label. -Noel

Just goes to show you can only be so rich and stupid at the same time. The demise of Metro/Modern sounds like happy news, but there's a LOT of wishful thinking out there. How can they return the desktop landscape back to the level of integration it had when people followed a standard more or less? Microsoft's own applications basically break all that by having non-standard UIs. Copy/Paste, Drag/Drop, common controls... These may be "legacy" but are all actually the right idea. -Noel

Not sure how new you're considering going... I can tell you from personal experience that Office 365 (which is what, Office 2013 under the covers?) is an eye-searing experience. Microsoft has turned the UI into a non-standard arctic desert. The only good part is that when I upgraded from Office 2003 the upgrade process preserved pretty much everything from the old version. I was pleasantly surprised at how little configuration I had to do. That also says it's not functionally that much different under the covers. Oh, and it comes with a 64 bit version, though Microsoft discourages its use for some reason. A lot of folks claim dropping back to Office 2010 gets them a better user experience and not much difference in functionality. I don't know whether the upgrade process will preserve your old data. Regarding OS, I run Win 8.1 as a desktop-only setup, and while it's livable with hundreds of tweaks/3rd party add-ons, in the end it's really not any better than Win 7. Therefore based on my experience and knowledge I suggest considering Win 7 and Office 2010. -Noel

One day perhaps they'll lose a job writing software because some other entitled little $#|+ stole it, then they will discover reality... Good on you, big muscle, for making the best of it! -Noel

-Noel

In my home and office I have been replacing incandescents with CREE 5000K bulbs and I've found that I feel more fresh and alert than with incandescent bulbs. I've not tolerated fluorescents for a long time. I often work just by the light coming in the windows, and these 5000K bulbs match the color of the light coming in from outside. I think that's a factor in how it feels to live in that light. And no, jaclaz, you're not alone - CFL fluorescents often fail in MUCH less than the advertised time. And badly! When the electronics burn they let out all kinds of toxic crap! Paraphrasing Professor Malcom: "CFLs are the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas". Worse even than resurrecting a T-Rex and turning her loose. So far I haven't had one LED lamp fail in service, and all my LED flashlights still work. There is no question that LED lighting (based on high powered blue emitters) is a real and recent fundamental tech breakthrough. -Noel

We are on the same page. Yes, I have had to put an unprecedented level of effort into making Windows 8.1 "not suck". I do, however, have a pretty accurate metric of that effort. For a few versions now I've written how-to books on doing it, and I follow them religiously myself start to finish to create a well-setup development system. Of course we subsequently add things beyond what's in the book, such as particular applications, though I do try to capture new tweaks I learn about. The books started as my notes decades ago and have matured. FYI, my Win 7 book is 107 pages. For Win 8 it's 124 pages. Not a fundamental difference; 15 to 20 percent more. FYI, we did it with Vista x64 too, which actually can be settled down to be a dynamite system (on high-end hardware) - extremely reliable. That too took me a couple of YEARS to do after Vista was released. I think the bottom line - and which we may try to agree upon (noting and agreeing with your wording "already working" vs. "partially working") is that the current Windows 8 system, right out of the box, has lost public "critical mass" and actually does "suck" for the average user. -Noel

Yes, but you imply that this year, with Windows 8, is the first time anyone's had to deal with a quirky, broken, unstable, error-prone, difficult to master, unprofessional, stupid, borked user interface. News flash, I've been practicing "make the best of the situation" in computing for a long, long time. Frankly, I feel I have found a niche in Windows 8 usage that I believe forces LESS of that on us than any prior version of Windows. I remember plenty of gotchas using XP's Explorer. Different ones in Vista and still different ones in 7. And gawd, before XP... I wonder how we ever got anything done. But the NT kernel is not bad - not then and not now. Carve away many of the things wrong with Win 8.1 via a bunch of tweaking and 3rd party stuff and it's actually possible to get things done with it. To like it. A couple of years ago I'd have predicted I would not be able to say that. -Noel

Nope, no syndrome here. What I'm NOT driven by is conspiracy theory and emotion. Hard facts. How it works. Those are the things I care about. I was against Win 8 - vehemently against it - for a long time. It represents Microsoft turning away from serious computing. But I wasn't so affected by my emotions that I wouldn't allow myself to work with it. To get to know it. Even though it represented the dark side, I felt the good in it. During the public "previews" to start the sheeple manipulation process by Microsoft Marketing, and then after Win 8 was released I ran it in virtual machines, configuring it, augmenting it, and playing with it with the goal of trying to determine if a configuration could be found that was worthy of using. I did a detailed return on investment analysis, trying to account for such tenuous things as the value of "keeping current" (i.e., how much value actually IS there in an ongoing Microsoft partnership any more?). I focused on practical matters... Most important were "does it do everything its predecessor did that we need" and secondly "what can it do better than its predecessor that we need". I made a number of working configurations, wrote it all down, tweaked, and tuned - but I never did decide Windows 8 was worth adopting before Windows 8.1 was released. Thus we remained on Windows 7 here. Windows 7 was stable, functional, mature, and usable. We had Windows 7 because I'd done it all before and determined our configuration was more powerful and productive than we'd been able to develop on the Windows versions that had come before, including your beloved XP. In evaluating Windows 8, one of the things I discovered along the way were that Microsoft has done very little of substance to the kernel, instead concentrating almost exclusively on "window dressing" (e.g., this ridiculous high-school level Metro/Modern initiative). Thus it's not surprising that Windows 8 really isn't faster, more capable, or less stable than its predecessor. It's really just Windows 7.1 with different draperies. With the release of Window 8.1 I did the analysis again, and this time I found that the scales *just* tipped. But probably not for the reasons you think. It was mostly because of the leading-edge industry moving (being forced) AWAY from older versions of Windows rather than any improvements Microsoft made. New systems started to become available with Windows 8. Driver implementation started to focus on Windows 8 first, Windows 7 second. But also a number of 3rd party solutions really matured - things such as Classic Shell and Aero Glass for Win 8.1 - that solved a number of "can't get there from here" problems Microsoft had created by simply removing code. So I decided to upgrade to Windows 8.1 - which I did not on the cheap but by getting the software on disc, in a box, and doing a full, clean installation. Not surprisingly, I had a fully functional, powerful setup inside a day. At this point everything works for us here in Windows 8.1. Is it MUCH better than Windows 7 for what we need in a serious engineering envioronment? Not really - just more like what you'd expect if Microsoft had just kept putting out updates on the same code base - which is reasonable since don't use any of the new Metro/Modern BS, instead focusing only on ongoing desktop use. But Windows 8.1 IS better - if only marginally. It's stable, it's functional, and it's current. There is no feature or function we're having to do without, and what for what we need it in an Engineering software development environment and business operation environment it delivers quite nicely. I haven't had to futz around to deal with any problems in quite a while now. I have time to do my work AND have a life. In response to your suggestion that I visit a 5 cent psychiatrist I suggest that an emotional allergy to some parts of new technology shouldn't block you from taking advantage of the other, good parts. -Noel

Ooh, crystal clarity (no clouds)! We'll have to figure out how to license one seat for Enterprise Edition... Maybe a group buy? -Noel

You didn't mention the see-through borders or drop shadows. Just goes to show you CAN shun the new evil and still get Windows 8 to do reasonable things. Just for grins I pressed Control - Esc (I don't have a Win key on this old LK250 keyboard). I was surprised to see that the Start screen can actually come up (though afterward I felt strangely soiled)... Literally the first time I've seen it since some time in 2013. -Noel

Interesting. I don't work in root folders very often... I just verified that it works (er, doesn't work) just as you described - the items in a root folder remain unsorted until a refresh or one of the columns is clicked. For what it's worth, it doesn't sort the root folder even on a ReFS-formatted drive; I just checked. Possibly the most irritating part is that someone at Microsoft must think that's "good enough". I also tend to sort folders by modification date when I care to see recent work all in one place. Self-examining why I don't think things seem so bad with modern systems while others do - which seems at odds with the fact that I'm a bit of a perfectionist - I've come to the conclusion that I tend to shy away from doing things that yield inconsistent or unexpected results, and instead develop usage habits that make my work environment more consistent and enjoyable. Thus I guess there are many gotchas that I just don't fall into. -Noel

Yeah, maybe. It's probably not too terribly unreasonable to expect people to use relatively new hardware with a modern OS, though. It's a non-issue if the hardware's good. This has always been true to some extent. Hardware grows in capability to run the software of the day. You will thank your stars that you migrated to SSD, and will never be able to go back. Everything gets a lot more responsive when millisecond latency turns to microsecond latency. -Noel

You will be assimilated. -The Borg It is your destiny. -Emperor Palpatine I've got a better idea... How about I give you the finger... And you give me my phone call? -Neo Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine. -Robert C. Gallagher Nothing is certain but death and taxes (and the loss of hard drive data) -The IRS -Noel

That might be a significant point, except that every version of Windows has needed a great deal of reconfiguration and augmentation. XP was no different. I was doing a hundred things to reconfigure XP to be more functional back in the bad ol' days. Though arguably there's MORE of that reconfiguration and augmentation needed than ever before, things actually end up better now. It's my opinion that, because of the ubiquity of the Internet and the greater capacity of the modern systems, a current system (let's say Windows 7 or 8 x64) can be reconfigured and augmented to be the best OS the world has seen yet. You can do a lot to a current Windows system and still have it be 100% functional and stable. -Noel

As I recall my Win 8.1 setup blinks black briefly during login as well. Doesn't break anything as far as I can tell. Maybe it's Aero Glass for Win 8.1 doing it, or maybe it's the NSA. Even more possible, the display driver. I don't believe it's an infection. I'd suggest against using any kind of Sleep mode. Drivers do not all equally well implement power transitions. More problems seem to be reported during (or because of) transitions into / out of power saving modes than any other time. Regarding being depressed, I don't know what it is you expect of Windows, but if it's a stable, reliable desktop-centric configuration you're after that's reasonably pleasant to use and unlikely to become infected, I have written a how-to book on just how to set up such a system, called "Configure The Windows 8 'To Work' Options". So far it's 124 pages of obscure and geeky configuration and installation stuff, and I've just thought of a couple more pages to add. Once you get a Windows 8.1 system tweaked up and running reliably, it can actually be likable. But you have to get it set up to your liking and get to know it. Here's an approach that can help you keep your system from being as vulnerable to infection: Download and install the MVPS hosts file to block access to parasite web sites. This will as a bonus eliminate nearly all ads, and ads are primarily what deliver infections. Reconfigure Internet Explorer to avoid running ActiveX and severely lock down what scripts can do from web sites in the Internet Zone. You may miss out on some glitz, but I'll guarantee you'll miss out on a lot of infections. For those few you really, really need ActiveX for, make them Trusted Sites. When you just can't do without the Glitz, install another browser that can't run ActiveX, such as Safari, but use it sparingly. Practice good computing discipline. Avoid installing every handy toolbar and neat application that claims it will improve your life. If you want to try new things, set up a virtualization environment and try things out in a virtual machine. Research things before downloading them - people often post online about how well programs work for them, and whether they carry malware. Use Autoruns and Process Explorer from SysInternals to watch what gets started and runs on your system. It's not uncommon to have most of the applications that are set to start automatically disabled. Most are not needed. Use an anti-malware tool that's better than Microsoft's - I prefer Avast! myself. You don't need all the extra "tools" they offer to get good protection, just their "shields". The best part is that their free version is perfectly capable of protecting you. Note that this is a safety net - if you do everything else here it will not regularly be blocking malware because the malware won't get anywhere near your system. Just some ideas to help get you to where you like your setup. -Noel

By the way, for those of you considering flaming me for actually liking the new systems, consider this: I think the latest systems right out of the box actually DO suck. It's only after the reconfiguration of many, many things, and installation of some great and mostly free 3rd party software that Windows 7 and 8 can actually become quite likable. Consider installing these very good 3rd party applications, many of which are free, that restore functionality lost in recent versions of Windows: Classic ShellAero Glass for Win 8.1Vista Shortcut Overlay ManagerSend To ToysWizMouseShellFolderFixgrepWinScannerHWMonitor7-ZipWUNotifyFolder Options XThe XP Calc applicationAutorunsShellExViewProcExpZ-VSSCopy -Noel

Hi xpclient, I don't find it so bad that Explorer sorts while I'm working - assuming it does so consistently, which (for me at least) it seems to do. I do agree with you that having the option not to sort the list would be far better than not having the option. What I can't seem to get used to, however, is the pop-behind "Do you want to overwrite" prompts that to this day often appear behind open windows. If you don't notice the flashing yellow button in the Taskbar you might proceed with other operations without realizing you're using the old file. I've done that a few times. You'd think Microsoft could figure out how to pop a notification dialog to the top. And regarding updates... I'm not sensing the things you're saying. Updates seem quick enough (I guess I have a fairly powerful system), and of course overprovisioning storage in computer ensures a time of usage that is not burdened with constantly trying to figure out how to get more disk space. When you buy a new computer you should of course consider your future space usage, in addition to what you need right now. Don't just try to minimize cost. Example: In 2012 I bought 2TB of SSD storage, even though I only needed 700GB to restore my existing system, applications, and files. Now I've used a little over 1TB of it and there's still near a TB free. Sure, it was more expensive, but by spending extra at the time I've completely eliminated any ongoing exceptional expenditure of time and effort to "clean up". Further regarding updates... Those of you who haven't done so may want to consider disabling the automatic installation of updates and just have the system notify you (or even turn it completely off and instead get a freeware notification tool like WUNotify). Then you can do your Windows Updates when it's convenient for YOU, not for Microsoft. -Noel

Once you use a system that runs from SSD, you'll never be able to stand working on anything else. Everything is just... Instantaneous. And it's blessedly quiet. Well, okay, Photoshop still takes 3 seconds to come up. But everything else happens right now. The only wait is for the brief animation of windows bending into and out of position. And it multitasks amazingly well without loading up, because applications aren't waiting for I/Os from other applications to seek the drive. Switching to SSD may be the single most effective thing you could do to make your computer much more responsive. Even better, build an array of the little suckers. -Noel

I have to say, I FULLY agree with the statement that "Apps" have no business in a desktop OS. I haven't seen a Metro/Modern screen since just after I installed Windows 8.1, and indeed (because I've disabled UAC) I can't run such things. Windows 8.1 can be a fine desktop system when run this way. Like I said, it just takes a little setting up. By the way, if you're experiencing laggy operation on any system you really do need to consider getting some better hardware. It's not expensive nowadays to achieve instantaneous responsiveness. One of my first suggestions would be to look into something like the Crucial MX100 SSD (512 GB for 200 bucks!). Oh, that's right - XP doesn't know about SSDs. They may work, but it's because the SSD makers bent over backwards to emulate hard disks. Another suggestion is to get a happenin' video card. Anyone can afford a GPU that screams if you save your pennies for just a little while. -Noel