NoelC

That's my point - everyone liked (likes) big screens, and every geek thinks more pixels would be better, but the technology WAS out of reach of the masses. I was wishing for a 24" 1920 x 1200 LCD PC monitor back then. Good luck even trying to justify such a thing even in a professional environment. Pointy Haired Bosses would claim "if we get you that expensive thing, we'll have to buy one for all the software people." Now 30" with 2560 x 1600 is old news and 32" 4K monitors are even becoming affordable. Right when our eyes are going bad. -Noel

Thanks guys. Great info! Work intrudes right now so it may be up to a day before I can go further with trying things. -Noel

By the way, I believe the above may implicitly link to the recovery partition that's on the SSD. For some reason the option is disabled for me to copy the recovery partition to the USB stick. I'm looking into that. Edit: That seems to be a feature where the recovery partition placed on the disk by an OEM can be copied. I don't have one of those as I installed the OS myself. -Noel

Thanks. It's not really even a long enough listing to worry about putting the contents in a zip file/attachment... C:\TEMP>dir i:\ /s Volume in drive I is RECOVERY Volume Serial Number is CEFB-0076 Directory of i:\06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> efi04/26/2014 04:21 PM 404,132 bootmgr06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> boot04/26/2014 06:07 PM 1,613,656 bootmgr.efi06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> sources 2 File(s) 2,017,788 bytes Directory of i:\efi06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> boot06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> microsoft 0 File(s) 0 bytes Directory of i:\efi\boot06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..04/26/2014 06:07 PM 1,617,240 bootx64.efi 1 File(s) 1,617,240 bytes Directory of i:\efi\microsoft06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> boot 0 File(s) 0 bytes Directory of i:\efi\microsoft\boot06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..06/18/2013 10:48 AM 262,144 BCD06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> fonts06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> resources 1 File(s) 262,144 bytes Directory of i:\efi\microsoft\boot\fonts06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..06/18/2013 10:42 AM 3,694,080 chs_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 3,876,772 cht_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 1,984,228 jpn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 2,371,360 kor_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 165,764 malgunn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 168,212 malgun_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 132,888 meiryon_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 134,508 meiryo_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 152,892 msjhn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 154,896 msjh_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 142,124 msyhn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 146,228 msyh_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 36,020 segmono_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 77,088 segoen_slboot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 77,404 segoe_slboot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 47,452 wgl4_boot.ttf 16 File(s) 13,361,916 bytes Directory of i:\efi\microsoft\boot\resources06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..08/22/2013 08:39 AM 18,272 bootres.dll 1 File(s) 18,272 bytes Directory of i:\boot06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..06/18/2013 10:48 AM 262,144 BCD06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> resources06/18/2013 11:08 AM 3,170,304 boot.sdi06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> fonts 2 File(s) 3,432,448 bytes Directory of i:\boot\resources06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..08/22/2013 08:39 AM 18,272 bootres.dll 1 File(s) 18,272 bytes Directory of i:\boot\fonts06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> ..06/18/2013 10:42 AM 3,694,080 chs_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 3,876,772 cht_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 1,984,228 jpn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 2,371,360 kor_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 165,764 malgunn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 168,212 malgun_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 132,888 meiryon_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 134,508 meiryo_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 152,892 msjhn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 154,896 msjh_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 142,124 msyhn_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 146,228 msyh_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 36,020 segmono_boot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 77,088 segoen_slboot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 77,404 segoe_slboot.ttf06/18/2013 10:42 AM 47,452 wgl4_boot.ttf 16 File(s) 13,361,916 bytes Directory of i:\sources06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .06/22/2014 01:18 PM <DIR> .. 0 File(s) 0 bytes Total Files Listed: 40 File(s) 34,089,996 bytes 30 Dir(s) 7,530,098,688 bytes freeC:\TEMP>dir i:\ /s /ah Volume in drive I is RECOVERY Volume Serial Number is CEFB-0076 Directory of i:\sources08/22/2013 10:10 AM 220,338,425 boot.wim 1 File(s) 220,338,425 bytes Total Files Listed: 1 File(s) 220,338,425 bytes 0 Dir(s) 7,530,098,688 bytes free -Noel

Open the Task Scheduler, Disable the run of Aero Glass. Reboot. All gone. Navigate to the folder into which you installed it and delete the files from there if you like. The files are: aerohost.exe DWMGlass.dll dbghelp.dll symsrv.dll symsrv.yes. -Noel

It can be set to be on all the time. Please look in the guide provided on the site from which you downloaded the software. Look specifically for "battery" on that page. You might also be interested in the beta configuration program provided in post 1656 of this thread. -Noel

More of what's already there can yield fundamentally better ways of working. Now pretty much anyone can afford multiple monitors with a high pixel count connected to a video card, enabling simultaneous display of much more information - vs. Alt-Tabbing from one to another. A bit over 10 years ago as a high level designer in a well-funded engineering firm I requested and got two 20 inch CRTs, and they filled the corner of my cubicle. Later I got one big 24" Sony CRT monitor at 1920 x 1200 pixels (an awesome beast). Where were 30 inch monitors 15 years ago? Now having a few and/or big LCDs is nothing. I sense that people may want to see "flying cars" before they feel technology is improving life any more. -Noel

Complication isn't my goal. Given that a ) Windows no longer makes a System Repair Disc, and b ) it still DOES make a System Recovery Drive, I was just wondering whether there might be a more or less direct way to go about making one from the other. The kind of thing you could tell someone else in, say, a page of instructions. -Noel

Interesting approach; thanks for the thought. I just figured since I got a system-blessed bootable USB image already out of the "Create Recovery Drive" process I'd just port it over to a disc and see what happens when I boot it. For that I need an ISO image of the flash drive. Software to do that seems a bit rare. (You may have guessed by now that I'm not up on the details of how bootable media work) -Noel

I just made a Recovery Drive on a USB memory stick for my system, and pondered for a moment the fact that Microsoft has removed the ability to make a Recovery Disc (er, System Repair Disc)... That got me to thinking... Have you run across a way to make a bootable CD from a bootable USB? I've seen some software packages that claim to do it, but it might be there's functionality right in Windows to do it that I haven't yet discovered. Might be interesting to make a Recovery Disc just to spite Microsoft. -Noel

Right, interesting to play around with. I figure I'll have more to go on should a future version of Windows offer the ability to format the boot volume ReFS and I am faced with the choice. Seems odd that Microsoft has been shying away from the use of ReFS on just plain disks, as you say jaclaz, by touting it as for use with Storage Spaces only. I would not venture anywhere close to Storage Spaces, frankly, but that's another subject. I have been pleasantly surprised that the implementation of ReFS in Windows 8.1 has not been quirky at all. -Noel

At this point I have both internal and external drives formatted ReFS, and I've seen no problems. That said, I've really seen no advantages, in a practical sense... I haven't had any failures that required resiliency so it's hard to say I've gotten any advantage out of using the newer system. Mostly I'm just experimenting to get to know the new system. The one takeaway I've had from doing these experiments is that, while getting a drive formatted is a bit funky (Microsoft specifically made it difficult), using drives formatted with ReFS has been completely trouble-free. -Noel

Fascinating! Our realities clearly differ. It's possible the old phrase "perception is reality" may apply. My time scope in starting this thread was rather longer, but even when thinking of the last 10 years and how it affects everyday life I think of things like the gargantuan leaps in GPU and CPU performance, the advent of huge yet affordable SSD storage, full graphics internet access in the pocket of everyone walking around, tablets, and many other things. Sure, a lot of it is evolution of things we had already conceived of, but... How fast does evolution have to go before it's revolutionary? Before technological whims become enabling technology. t's hard to deny that digital images from a 24 megapixel camera carry more detail than those with 6 and are really useful for practical photographers, or that the blood spatter in video games at high resolution AND 60+ FPS is all the more real. The most interesting takeaway I have so far, in a "big picture" sense, is that some folks can have a view that things are stagnating/regressing while others feel technology is blazing nicely along into the future. Thank you for your viewpoints! -Noel

Follow up: Make SURE to remove the MiniNT key after having formatted the drive. The WinAero site does not specifically suggest doing that, but it's necessary... Upon a reboot after updating some other software, the system did not come back up right with the "MiniNT" registry setting still in place. Some problems noted: 1. Drive letter H: ended up assigned to my System Reserved partition instead of the USB drive, which could not be seen. 2. Some applications failed to start with messages like "The procedure entry point _ftol2 could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\comdlg32.dll". 3. The system had trouble accessing the event logs with error -50. 4. CHKDSK showed some problems on drive C:, but could not correct them. Removal of the MiniNT key restored proper operation, and the ReFS formatted external drive is still accessible. -Noel

I've used Classic Shell since Vista. I don't anticipate using anything else, even if Microsoft does bring back theirs. My user experience has been consistent, and Microsoft's software isn't actually as good as 3rd party implementations anyway. -Noel

800 GB copied and no problems whatsoever. -Noel

The normal Windows desktop Personalize - Color dialog is the best way. -Noel

Right here in this very thread (post 1656). It's Big Muscle's own beta version of his GUI configurator tool. -Noel

I had a spare Western Digital MyBook drive, a model WD 10EACS with 1 TB of space, so rather than have it sit around and gather dust I decided to set up some additional file backup operations. I initially tried formatting it to NTFS and plugging it into my Cisco/Linksys E4200 router (a couple of years old), which claims to support serving a USB drive in that format - but as is all too common it doesn't actually work right when it comes to the nitty gritty. I got it to serve the drive and I was able to copy some tens of gigabytes of data to it but then it would just lock up after a few hours of use. Additionally, the copied data had permissions problems - I could write new files, but not overwrite existing files. Several attempts to update the router firmware resulted in a bricked router, which (fortunately) responded to the secret "hold it in 10 seconds" recessed reset switch, which restored the prior firmware. My conclusion: The Cisco/Linksys implementation is rinkydink (I smell undisciplined Unix under the covers), and so a selling-point feature printed on the box to sell the product doesn't actually work. At least it works okay as a router. I decided to plug the drive into a Windows 8.1 Pro system instead, and serve it from there. It occurred to me that ReFS is supposed to deliver great data integrity, so I figured "why not?" What better to use ReFS on than an external drive? I've been running ReFS on an internal backup drive for months with great results. Initially, indications were that Windows 8 can't format an external drive with ReFS, but it turns out (as with so many things) that it actually IS possible with a registry tweak (seems like Win 8 is substantially just Windows Server with much of the functionality dormant). Specifically, this page over on WinAero describes how: http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-format-any-drive-in-windows-8-1-with-refs/ Here it is, all formatted up: Of course I have to use it for a while to ensure the promise of integrity behind this is solid... Anyway, so far so good. I've copied hundreds of gigabytes to it and so far it works fine. The data rate for writing averages something over 50 MB/sec with peaks to over 70 MB/sec - which isn't bad for a USB 2 drive that's not exactly new. Most importantly, I don't feel any stress on the system at all while it's copying data. The mouse and UI are smooth, music plays without dropouts, and Task Manager shows nothing out of the ordinary for resource usage (CPU sits at 0% most of the time). Save for the quiet seeking sounds from the drive you wouldn't know any data is being copied at all. I'd call that good. -Noel

Clock speeds may not be shooting through the roof any longer, but don't forget that modern CPU cores are doing more than ever per clock cycle now too. Newer instructions (thinking, e.g., SSE...) also do more per instruction. Four concurrent floating point operations at once, for example, in an __m128 suits pixel manipulation quite nicely. -Noel

So? It's the way of the world - NOBODY can have technology that isn't available. But once it's invented, NOT EVERYBODY can have the technology right away. But some can. More and more can as it becomes refined and prices fall. I've not been talking about technology that's unavailable to you. Hell, most of the rest of the world has better internet access than we yanks. I posted up above a link to a presentation done in 1968 that employed real-time video conferencing, overlaid image and computer graphics, and featured a demo using a mouse, copy/paste, and other things we didn't start taking for granted for another 20 years. My point is simply that I'm doing telecommunications and conferencing, today with real folks, with software and devices easily available to any consumer, not just well-funded government research agencies. You're typing a forum post on some kind of high tech device. That's not something you could have done a few decades ago. Where is the problem acknowledging that technology is marching on? I kind of intended this thread as a light-hearted look at tech evolution, not some kind of confrontational debate. -Noel

Just a reminder: If you upgrade your OS in such a way that the installer makes a Windows.Old folder, beware: Microsoft will schedule a task that will delete some or all of the data in Windows.Old after a certain time (most report it happens in a few days). If you've done an upgrade where you end up with a Windows.Old, you need to IMMEDIATELY take steps to preserve your data. In fact, you should have already taken such steps, in the form of backups, BEFORE doing the upgrade. But if you haven't, and Microsoft has "preserved" your data in Windows.Old, just bear in mind that they're going to come along and delete it soon. Count on it. How many, I wonder, have read the following: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/restore-files-upgrade-windows-old -Noel

While I understand what you've written, Formfiller, it's kind of an antithesis to what's being shown in this thread. I'm afraid I can't accept all of it. I personally don't find much utility at all in running a circa 2005 computer today. Compared to the workstation I had in 2005, the workstation I'm using now has 6 times the cores (12 vs. 2) each of which is executing instructions something like 3 times as fast. It has 6x more RAM and 5x more disk storage capacity. The disks are SSD vs. old spinning electromechanical drives, delivering 10x more throughput, and the video card is 35x more powerful at 1/5 the price. I could not crunch through the work I do today on my old workstation. Today it's literally seconds where it was minutes just 10 years ago. In 2005 I had cable TV internet access - a whole 5 megabits downlink and 750 kbits uplink. Today I have fiber optics to the house and enjoy a 40 megabit uplink. I collaborate in real time with people across the world with real time desktop sharing, high quality audio, and file transfer all at once. And if we're comparing operating systems, in 2005 I was running XP x64 (I didn't move to Vista until 2006). While that was a decent system, it was unreliable by today's standards, and still very limited by its 32 bit heritage. That said, Windows itself HAS stagnated in the last few years (I agree that 8.1 doesn't do anything useful better than 7), but I think it's a specific thing - Microsoft, for whatever reasons, decided to try to become a (mediocre) hardware company rather than continue their core business as a software company powering enterprise. However, this is still a fine time for high tech advancement. Just 10 years ago what did your top of the line smart phone look like? How good was internet access? Could you talk to it and have it answer? What was the battery life? -Noel Edit: Tidied up some technical details

What level of the SSE instruction set does your CPU support? Perhaps you might be able to kick your system performance overall up with an SSD upgrade. In another thread we've been discussing the Crucial (Micron) MX100 SSD - you can actually get 512GB of SSD for about US $200 now. Not bad. Beyond that, one need only glance at the Adobe Premiere forums. People doing heavy duty video processing are now using multi-CPU systems with lots of cores, as much RAM as they can pack in, arrays upon arrays of disks, and especially high-end nVidia video cards. I happen to be more fond of ATI myself, but I don't personally do video processing. The next thing I'd consider doing if I were in your shoes is getting a relatively high end nVidia card. Then more RAM. Regarding Windows 8.1 being slower... It's true. I have personally measured the performance degradations myself, across multiple systems. Unfortunately, with greater and greater hardware capabilities coming down the pike, I don't think software systems are going to be getting smaller or more efficient in the near future. Basically, new features, extra robustness, and quite possibly just plain inefficiency because of lack of necessity to optimize, are going to remain the norm - no matter WHAT Microsoft marketing says. -Noel

In all seriousness, I look most at the relatively small I/O performance at higher queue depths. And at the small but not tiny sequential operations. These are the things that affect day to day desktop life the most. How fast you can open your application (such as Photoshop, and to subsequently open an image that's a few megabytes), how quickly you can compile your Visual Studio project, how quickly you can display your menus. You have a basic minimum latency time with a modern computer, measured in the microseconds, to access the I/O subsystem because it's just that - a subsystem that is not closely integrated with the CPU. That's really not going to change fundamentally until such time as the chipset manufacturer (Intel) starts building terabytes of permanent storage into the processor's address space. Not too awful long ago SSDs came along and reduced that latency from milliseconds to microseconds, and they did cause a fundamental change in responsiveness. Have you worked with SSDs for long? With arrays of them? In my experience having BOTH decent 4K response (which any SSD gives) AND gargantuan sequential speed is important for all around performance, and having a bunch of cores to generate separate I/O streams doesn't hurt either. For me Photoshop starts cold in 3 seconds and opens gigabyte sized files in just a few more. IE and Word and Explorer all come up instantly. My Visual Studio products (with hundreds of thousands of NCLOC) compile in 10 seconds. With a system this responsive a new kind of fatigue can set in - one tends to multitask even more and there's never a time for a coffee break! That said, I wouldn't mind testing an array of 4 x 512 GB MX100s, if someone would send me a set... -Noel