NoelC

I thought you chose to stop using it. There ARE many of us who get a lot of value out of our desktops being easier to use. As an entrepreneur/engineer I spend probably 12 hours a day in front of my desktop. You'd better believe something that makes it easier to use has value to me. Like DosProbie above, I have supported development through both testing and financial donations as well, and I couldn't be happier about the way the product has turned out. Big Muscle cares about quality, and I'm more than happy to support someone who still does that in this day and age. So... If you like the product and can donate a meaningful amount, by all means do so. If you don't find it provides value, by all means move along and try to contribute positively to something that you DO like. -Noel

Yep. Rubycon 6.3v 2200 uF and 1500 uF with the "K" scoring on the can end. -Noel

Funny you should mention electrolytic caps... My son and I took apart our recently non-functional Precision 470 workstation this evening and wouldn't you know; 3 of them have let out the magic stuff from inside. Parts on order... -Noel

Google "Euro exchange rate". Just funnin wif ya. It's a buck thirty six right now. -Noel

More than 1€ from the sound of it. What would it cost to buy Big Muscle a beer (and not the cheapest swill but something you'd be proud to buy a friend in person)? Only you can decide how much a product like this is worth to you. I'd suggest it gives more than 1€ in value, though. It's good software. -Noel

Try running the laptop on mains power. By default the Aero Glass effect is disabled on battery. There's a registry entry that changes that - check the guide on BigMuscle's new web site. -Noel

Summarizing the discussion on fans and grilles, I think it's safe to say that a system with excellent cooling capacity is likely to be more stable than one that experiences wide ranges of temperature fluctuations. Heating and cooling cycles are hard on electronic hardware. Good point, TELVM, thanks for bringing it up. This is another good reason to use SSDs... They don't make nearly as much heat as HDDs. One of the things I'm fond of in Dell's Precision T5500 workstation is that it was built with a bunch of excess cooling capacity. I can start a 3D render, and it's actually a good part of a minute before the fans even pick up speed off their idle levels, since the heat from momentary power increases is easily absorbed into the cooling towers, etc. It's a nice, quiet system for normal use. -Noel

Tony, though I am not the author I took a quick glance through your debug.log... I don't see anything obvious wrong. Looks like it's working. What is the symptom you're seeing that makes you feel it's not working? If you're not seeing translucency, have you checked to see if your Color Intensity setting is not maxed? Right-click your desktop, choose Personalize, then click on the Color link near the bottom. -Noel

Out of curiosity, what is the grill supposed to keep from traversing the case barrier? Keep bugs out of the system? Keep explosion fragments contained? My systems and fans run 24/7 anyway, and my office isn't terribly infested so I doubt many bugs are going to make it in the back. Plus I get everything out again occasionally. Ever blow accumulated dust out of your system with a leaf blower? -Noel

Re-reading your comments, jaclaz, I came to realize all the issues you've mentioned are important to me as well, but I've solved the need for a Really Useful CMD window via a more conventional approach (a CMD.exe shortcut on the desktop). Opens in a predictable place. Believe me, I do know why this is important. I'm a very positional thinker. In my case the icon is always in the same place, down near my recycle bin at the bottom-right of the center monitor - a place that's almost always visible. And it's the same exact icon I've used since it really WAS an MS-DOS command window. The CMD window opens in the same place on the screen every time owing to settings made through the window's system menu (basically, unchecking "[ ] Let system position window"). Useful when you simply *need* to run a quick command. I mentioned that the icon is virtually always visible down there, because I never do anything full-screen or maximized. In my case, probably owing to the fact that I'm running my entire system from SSD, a fresh CMD window opens up instantly. Really, the only delay whatsoever is in the Aero animation, which literally takes a small fraction of a second. I know that can be disabled to gain that 0.3 second, but I happen to like the animation. Transparency that is less "impacting" visually than other solutions. I'm not personally fond of trying to do actual work on semi-transparent surfaces, but to each his own. In my case, I prefer dark astronomical backgrounds, so the CMD window (which I run with bright green text on a black background) isn't intrusive at all. Not anything like the eye-searing Office 365, which gives you a tan when you use it. I use the 10x18 font, which is very readable, for my CMD window. I'm glad they've never deprecated it since way back. Normally my CMD windows open up at 144 columns by 25 rows and don't have the scroll bar at the bottom; this one's been downsized for the screen grab so that everyone doesn't need to look at a huge blank space. -Noel

Looks great from here. As I have a blurb about your product in one of my books, complete with a web link, can I assume this will be the permanent URL going forward (for the foreseeable future at least)? -Noel

Not sure what your goals are, but for pure monitoring try out HWMonitor... -Noel

Funny thing, but right now, today, with Windows Backup (wbadmin) and a basic USB2 external drive, my nightly backups complete in an hour or two. Most importantly, when I do end up working late, I really can't tell that a backup is going, save for a flashing light on the external drive and maybe some sub-audible seeking sounds from it. It's truly "set it and forget it" technology already. I looked earlier today: I have 54 system images on the drive available to choose from should I need to restore something. About 2 months worth of daily backups. If I did the same backup twice daily, say at 12 hour intervals, would there be the problem? No. Since fewer blocks of data will be changed in 12 hours the backups would complete more quickly. And given that VSS-integrated System Image backups only store differences, I imagine the number of available backups from which a restoral could be done would still be in the 1 to 2 month range. I'm not likely to change my system image backup to twice daily, personally, since I have other data backups that run at various times (I back critical data up 4 different ways automatically). I suspect that a great deal of the reason that people don't do backups is 1. psychological and 1a. resistance to getting geeky enough to understand it thoroughly and take the time to set up a good backup strategy, which not only involves setting things up, but also testing to ensure one understands what would be needed when restoring data, and to see that the backed-up data really is sound. Again, VMs make a great test environment for this. -Noel

Where the data is stored inside the SSD really has no bearing on whether the file system is fragmented, except that an SSD's I/O accesses vary between blindingly fast (e.g., when blocks are contiguous and the OS can ask for more of them sequentially in one I/O request), and blazingly fast (when blocks have to be requested from disparate addresses with separate "random" I/O operations). In short, it's a little slower to do things via random small I/O requests vs. bigger sequential requests. Wasn't it you who was concerned about the best speed of 4K random I/Os being only in the 40 MB/second range, TELVM? Consider that 100% fragmented file system on an SSD would be using all random I/O operations. Practically speaking a file system doesn't tend to get to 100% fragmented, and there's always a mix of small and large operations. But for a given I/O load, a greater percentage large operations does yield better performance. Keep in mind that since some time in Windows 7's lifetime Microsoft's Disk Optimizer software won't "defrag" an SSD in the traditional sense (of placing logical blocks in order) anyway. It' "optimizes" the disk by sending TRIM commands for all blocks that are not in use, thus ensuring it has given all the proper indications to the SSD controller about what's in use and what's not. This is actually a Good Thing, though not actually necessary. Modern SSDs manage their free space autonomously, without direct input from the OS, though can do so more effectively when it does give that input. Again, it's not something the average joe needs to worry about. The OS has already got SSD management covered. Without a complete understanding of how things work at multiple levels, a lot of people screw things up more than they help things. I'm sensitive to this because I see a lot of folks (not specifically here, but in general) who think they know how things work but really don't and tend to mess things up or get duped into thinking they need useless "cleaner" applications. To use Marketing-speak, the "system maintenance / cleaner" genre has made its own market by making people believe they need/want it. -Noel

"Rules of Thumb" change over time. Technology changes. SSDs don't "wear out" anywhere nearly as fast as they used to. The difference came about when wear-leveling flash controller logic was introduced. Plus they're quite often larger today than they were just a few years ago (i.e., you might buy a 512 GB disk instead of a 128 GB disk, which will give you 4x the lifespan on the same write load). And practical best practices are usually not extreme. Thus "never" do this or "always" do that aren't usually as good advice as "do this or that in moderation" or "when it makes sense". To this day SSDs perform sequential reads and writes (I.e., reads/writes of multiple contiguous logical blocks of data) more efficiently than random reads of single blocks - just because there's overhead in the process of preparing the commands and awaiting the responses. Fewer commands is better. You could make the point that hypothetically a defragged database or file system will perform better. That being said, practically speaking one simply does not have to worry about defragging anything on a modern Windows system. It WILL work fine for years without doing so, and it will retain substantially all of its performance. What you save is the risk of corrupting something by monkeying with data that the system doesn't expect you to monkey with. Plus Windows DOES do a fair bit of self-maintenance - arguably all that it needs. I'm always surprised at how focused people can be (and how much effort they'll spend) in eking some hypothetical little bit of performance out of their registry accesses, yet the same folks may be completely oblivious to the fact that Windows 8.1 is actually a good bit slower - measurably slower across multiple systems - at doing most operations in the file system than all of its predecessors (including Windows 8). It seems a bit penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me. But people have to feel good about their computers, and there's certainly a "feel good" factor in doing system maintenance. -Noel P.S., For what it's worth, Windows 8.1 file system access appears to be about 5% faster after the June Windows Updates as compared to a fully updated system with the May updates - no defragging required. I've measured this on multiple systems.

27 days uptime since the May Windows Updates, zero glitches. But it won't see 28 - the June Windows Updates are here and a reboot will be required. -Noel

I used to sell these at a computer store in about 1978 or 1979... Too bad I wasn't working on commission. http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/corvus_apple_large.jpg The ones I sold looked like the one in the image but were 5 MB and commanded a bit over $5,000.00. And it was bigger than the Apple II base unit itself. Remember when the Disk Operating System on an Apple II used the same RAM as the graphics memory? You could either have disk access or graphics. Just not at the same time. But alas, that was amazing small consumer technology... I worked with mainframes when rooms full of washing machine-sized disk drives running from 480V 3-phase power were needed to do REAL data processing. Now we have: -Noel

I've found a "Regular Maintenance" task in the "\Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler" section which has a "Custom Handler" as an action that can't actually be seen / edited in the Task Scheduler. Lovely. This one may be the parent of many of the others. It's set to run every night at 11pm. -Noel

To expand on the above a bit... There are things that are scheduled and are getting run from time to time that aren't specifically set to run on a given time. Example: In the "\Microsoft\Windows\Diagnosis" section, there's a task called "Scheduled" that really isn't (scheduled). It ran for me on the 5th successfully at 11:41:31 pm, but isn't set to run again on a time schedule. And there's a "Data Integrity Scan" in the "\Microsoft\Windows\Data Integrity Scan" section that's scheduled to run on 6/17/2014 at 10:32:58 AM and it's Disabled. I didn't disable it, and somehow I expect it will actually run. There's altogether too much magic and hidden crap shipped in these systems any more. -Noel

Don't go to the effort on my account now, but I will be more interested when you do the run-time hook work. I don't know offhand about automatic SFC restorals any more. I've been involved with so many versions of Windows and seen stuff just revert by itself that I became allergic to things that cause SFC to report integrity violations. Looking through the Task Scheduler I don't see anything obvious, but there are quite a number of subheadings that could harbor an auto-restoral process. I know that there is an "Automatic Maintenance" heading in the Action Center, and it shows "Run maintenance tasks daily at 11:00 PM" on my system. Without spending more time reading through all those Task Scheduler headings, I haven't yet spotted something started at 11:00 pm. I'll let you know if I find it. -Noel

If anyone could do it, the one guy in the world with the programming prowess to resurrect Aero Glass effect ought to be able to do it, eh? -Noel

Thanks for the video. I now see that it's another way to manage a CMD prompt. Cute. I prefer to keep my Taskbar at the top, so a "pop down" application could be a conflict of interest. Also I often run more than one CMD window at once. Probably not something I want, but I'm sure others will find it interesting. Quake... Wow, that takes me back a few decades. -Noel

The readme.htm instructions page - nice touch. From an objective testing perspective, when I double-clicked setup.wsf the first time it popped this up. Some folks may not know to choose the first item at this point. It might be something to mention in the instructions... That "dismembered duck head popping out of a jack-in-the-box" or whatever it is icon is pretty weird (I know that's not your doing). After installing it, it asked if I wanted to restart Explorer, I chose to do so, saw a couple of dialogs. Notably one time out of 4 test installs it mentioned that Explorer had restarted elevated (which is to be expected as I have UAC completely disabled). I was not able to reproduce the message, nor did I think to get a screen grab. Now CleanAltTab works just as advertised: I ran an SFC /VERIFYONLY on the system after installing the above. Unfortunately, it emitted this result: I believe the above implies that Windows will revert the DLL to the standard, protected version upon the automatic runs of SFC /SCANNOW that it does during regular maintenance, though I haven't seen it happen with CleanAltTab specifically. After removal of CleanAltTab it showed this: Out of curiosity, are you anticipating adding an option (e.g., a command line switch, registry entry, etc.) that will have CleanAltTab remove the Desktop item but retain the graphic icons? That would make it useful for me. -Noel

What does that do? Is it just a graphic to show in the back of your CMD window instead of the black background? I'm not being critical, and I haven't reached a "love" or "hate" level because I simply don't know what it does yet, but (in the spirit of this thread)... How would it increase the usefulness of the desktop? -Noel

You're right. Thinking back, we ran DOS on it at first; it was a good while later that we put Windows on it. I'd remembered only the later years. I do remember configuring SMARTDRV to kick performance up. And we moved up to DecNET networking back then with a blazing fast 10 megabit coax. It was often better than using sneakernet and diskettes. Good times. -Noel