NoelC

On a tangent subject... Those of you reinstalling Windows because of "wearing it out" - e.g., making it less than perfect by testing, or installing bunches of software for evaluation... I'm sure many of you already know this, but for those of you who don't: You might want to consider using a virtualization package, and do your testing/evaluation in a virtual machine to help maintain the integrity of your host system. One thing the VMware package provides is the concept of "snapshots". You can save the state of a machine, and within seconds restore a corrupted machine to a saved snapshot. Or even to a snapshot saved right after a fresh installation. You can maintain multiple snapshots as long as you have the disk space. Darned handy! I've been doing this for a long time (I have all the systems going back to XP in VMs I can boot up in seconds), and my main desktop system just runs and runs forever without flaw. It's quite nice never to have to redo all the tweaks and installs on your main working system. As far as licensing cost, if you can't justify buying separate licenses to run in the VMs, consider... Even though Microsoft does not allow the installation of a Windows 8.1 VM from the same license as you have on the desktop, there's always the Windows 8.1 Enterprise Evaluation, downloadable for free from Microsoft and which will run for 90 days (and can be rearmed for another 90). Just my 0.00000002 cents worth of handy advice for today. -Noel

That's the fault of Explorer itself, and all the applications that have "tabbed" view (another is WordPad). They use a different scheme for compositing elements than typical applications. As I use dark backgrounds, I see it too. I've just learned to live with it, because Explorer can be convinced (e.g., by Classic Shell) to put the path in its address bar. So the path is not far from the top when you glance at the window. I have heard that with certain non-Microsoft themes the glow can be restored in Explorer windows, though I'm not keen on replacing the theme programming myself so have little experience. For me Aero Glass plus my own graphic theme atlas do as much as I need. The biggest things I like about Aero Glass for Win 8 is that it helps make the client area of windows I'm working with easier to focus on (in that it helps make the too-bright chrome around every Windows 8 desktop window less intrusive), and it facilitates a theme atlas graphic library replacement, which can, among other things, be used to restore the drop shadows around desktop windows. Lastly, it plays well with other tweaks available from 3rd party developers, e.g., Classic Shell, OldNewExplorer, Folder Options X, and bunches of others. Oh, and I find it to be genuinely rock solid stable software. A big THANK YOU to Big Muscle for hunting down all the bugs! -Noel

MrMaguire, I have a Dell Precision T5500. It's a simply awesome machine. The Xeons are Westmeres, which are getting a bit old by Intel's Tick/Tock standards, but they're the top-of-the-line Westmeres so they're as powerful as all but the near top of the line newest chips. The RAM is ECC. This is rock solid hardware, and it complements the solid OS reliability nicely. My point of view regarding running programs on your registry are as follows: 1. It's not a regular maintenance task that Windows provides - even today. 2. Something that reorganizes a database is arguably more likely to corrupt the database than not doing it at all. If you find that defragging your registry is helpful, and you've developed practices that include doing so, more power to you. I have never defragged a registry and my systems simply do not slow down over time. I've never sensed a need, and I'd argue that I do as much with Windows as anyone - though clearly different stuff. I don't make a practice of installing and uninstalling stuff on my main workstation - I do that kind of work in VMs, though to be honest I have test VMs that are 5+ years old and which I HAVE installed tons of stuff in the process of testing that haven't shown any signs of loading up either. -Noel

Heh heh heh, nope. Haven't had a floppy drive - even a 3-1/2 incher, since 2006. I take that back... One day maybe I'll dig my old Sol 20 (8080 system) I built in the '70s out of the closet and see if it still runs. I have a couple of 8 inch floppies for that to boot CP/M. I certainly won't need any more though. Ran Visual Studio 2013 with Update 2 all day today, collaborating with a colleague long distance via Skype and RAdmin, and we blazed through a few thousand lines of C code (including some slick shader code; it's fun to make a GPU sing). Everything's running great. Not a glitch, not a lost data byte. When I needed the computer to work, it worked. I don't worry whether something's going to go wrong. It's nice to be able to really rely on a system like this. Oh, and a note to MikeRL: You do NOT need to (nor should you) manipulate your registry via a "defragger" application. -Noel

Why do you think you need a "cleaner" application? What problem are you trying to solve? Who has convinced you your computer's gotten "dirty"? My advice: Learn how to delete the old files from your TEMP area, monitor what's set up to start and run via Task Manager or Autoruns from time to time, and never run a "cleaner" application. ESPECIALLY NEVER RUN A REGISTRY CLEANER. It's simply not needed. They cause FAR more problems than they solve. People may chime in and say "CCleaner is not like the others", and to that I'll respond in advance: A glass hammer is not like the others either. It doesn't mean you need one. You don't know me from Adam, but I have run Windows systems since there have been WIndows systems, and I only ever install them once. Let's see, I installed XP x64 in 2005 and ran that very same install until 2006 when I put in Vista x64, then installed Win 7 x64 in 2009, and now I'm on Windows 8.1 which went in last fall and is running as or more smoothly than the day it went in. I don't even reinstall Windows when I get a new system. For all the new workstations I've gotten I just restored a System Image backup from the old one and kept on working. I've been a software engineer for 4 decades. -Noel

Epic, that you feel you have a memory problem implies that you simply don't have enough RAM to meet your computing needs. I can assure you that there is a number that is "enough" memory for pretty much anyone. What is the monetary difference between what you have and what would be "enough". Can you work for a few extra hours to make the extra money to buy it? Problem solved. You'll thank yourself for it forever more, every time you try to use your system and it responds smoothly. -Noel

Just send him 10 or 20 Euros and get a key already. You wasted more than that in time to write your complaint. It's truly professional quality software, without having an expensive professional marketing and legal department to spoon feed it to dummies. -Noel

Most of our users didn't see failures either. I was always the one who had to label entire baselines of files, or build entire systems from hundreds of thousands of source files, or copy monstrous databases across the country. I tended (and still tend) to demand more of my systems than most. I just finished another 14 hour day madly coding graphics software, including GPU shader programming, SSE2 optimizations (it's fun to make something run 50% faster), and good ol' C language (also still fun), and my Win 8.1 system just did everything I wanted. This is the best OS setup I've had bar none. I even noticed my I/O subsystem got faster with one of the latest updates. It's back to being about to what it was with Win 7 after having lost 10% or so of its speed in Win 8.1. And thanks, Andre - I've been putting off installing the update owing to not having a spare moment. Maybe I can get it done tonight... -Noel

Let me start by acknowledging your good experience, Jaclaz, and to say that I generally agree with your viewpoints. And we have to recognize that different people do different things with Windows. The same people do different things with Windows than they did back in the past. And different computers have different levels of quality. I've been striving to create the "perfect engineering workstation" since the 1970s. At the engineering offices in which I've worked (think "Dilbert"), we never had a Windows OS before XP that would run a long time under heavy interactive use, no matter how well set up or tweaked. No need to even mention pre-NT systems, which often needed multiple reboots a day, though we did find ways to use them effectively. Our collective experience was that, though MUCH better designed, NT and then Windows 2000 would simply corrupt themselves within hours under heavy use and either crash or need a reboot after some resource became exhausted and things would just stop working right. By contrast, our servers, running Server or NT or 2000 would actually run and run for months reliably. Why? Because hardly anyone ever logged into them interactively, and they were really expensive hardware. But our workstations, quite high quality Windows $5K to $10K machines, when used to do serious engineering and pushed hard would inevitably fail and need a fresh boot in as little as a few hours. One could barely do really big operations with them without some kind of glitch(e.g., processing or transferring hundreds of megabytes of data, which was a big amount back then). We had to invent incremental file copy programs with read-back verification just so big multidirectory copies could be retried and retried until the sets of data were copied without error. Bad old days indeed by comparison today. And yes, we always used NTFS since it came out. Sure, XP came along and made that light years better - systems used to be able to go days without a reboot, and sure enough you could often process hundreds of megabytes of data without problems, BUT... Inevitably a reboot was still needed when resource leaks led it to failure. And occasionally it would just blue screen. XP was simply not a system with which to reliably work for days and process gigabytes of data. Even XP x64, though much better (I used it for years), was limited. But with later Vista, then Windows 7 and newer and the advent of 64 bit processing, one can just work, and crunch through terabytes of data without any trouble. The newest systems have fundamentally more reliability. It's a simple truth. It's inevitable that stuff nowadays has to become better programmed and tested - machines are simply so much faster and capable of storing so much more data than their predecessors the same software from yesteryear that ran for days would run into the ground in minutes on a modern computer. It's saying a lot when a machine runs for weeks or months now. And I'm still talking about under hard use - not just sitting there. Oh, and I still do run XP almost daily, in virtual machines. I regularly test software in that environment. Even well tweaked and kept fully updated to the point of Microsoft's abandonment, it's simply not as stable a system as Win 7 and 8. People often dis the most recent Windows versions, and with a lot of good reasons - Microsoft has made many blunders with the UI and with their choices of what to package into it, all in pursuit of our wallets. They seem to want it to be a toy. But one thing they've done is make the kernel stable. Perhaps it's just because they haven't really changed the NT core all that much in recent times. If set up well, Windows 8.1 can be super stable - a base for a quite useful workstation. -Noel

My workstation stays on 24/7, so as to do backups and other maintenance at night, and I use hell out of it during the day. For much of today I had probably 50 applications open, including heavyweights such as Visual Studio, Photoshop, VMware workstation, and bunches of others. I got to thinking, and I honestly can't remember the last system crash I had. I think it may have been last year some time or maybe in 2012 when I got a bad display driver update from ATI. They've gotten a lot better about releasing higher quality drivers in the past year. At this point my system just runs and runs - most days I don't even log it off; I just the screens power down when I leave it alone for 10 minutes (which isn't often). At the moment it's been running flawlessly 10 days 5 hours since the last Windows Updates, per Task Manager. I expect it will continue to run fine until the next set comes from Microsoft and Windows Update requires another reboot. I have to say, it's nice to have gotten to a state where Windows is stable enough to do everything I need without question, and just keep on ticking. I had this situation with Windows 7, and now with Windows 8.1. I sure can't complain. Remember the bad ol' days a decade or two ago, when the OS was designed to need periodic reboots? I'm curious - do you leave your Windows 8 system on and do find it to be stable long term? -Noel

I had considered the possibility that I was somehow causing the problem by some tweak I've done, but I have actually reproduced it on a fresh install on a VM, and others are reporting it as well, though not at a high level. I have come to believe it has to do with the subtleties of how different folks do things. I tend to open two Explorer windows and drag things between them. By contrast, I almost never do copy/paste. I also have an extremely responsive I/O subsystem with over one and a half gigabytes/second throughput capability, so it's possible that in my case something in Explorer is getting out of order from what most folks see. There have been so many glitches over the years where Windows doesn't get something quite right, and 3rd party developers come along and add tweaks to make it more right... I just think this is one of those cases. Like you, I don't have many problems. This particular issue is (scratching my head) just about the only thing my system doesn't do quite right at this point. I really have a stable, usable system. That's when the last little things like this "pop-behind" issue get irritating. My computing experience is quite smooth otherwise. Anyway, thanks for your input. -Noel

I am not doing anything wrong to cause the "pop-behind" window. I can start a copy by dragging a file from one File Explorer window to another with nothing other than the two Explorer windows on the desktop and the notification that the destination file already exists sometimes just pops behind one or the other Explorer windows. The "pop-behind" window will have the focus - in the worst cases it's just not visible. A button will appear and glow yellow on the Taskbar. It's an intermittent bug, plain and simple, that's either been introduced or greatly exaggerated by Windows 8. I've even tweaked the ForegroundLockTimeout and while this helps some there's no getting around this bad behavior in any solid way. See also: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/b3814b2c-9f35-431d-a8ae-7492857e1f5a/file-operation-process-at-the-background?forum=w8itprogeneral -Noel

Um, RAM access is still light years faster than I/O, even with things like SSD. A good system will access RAM at 50 gigabytes per second. An SSD array can sustain speeds like 1 or 2 gigabytes per second. Both are fast, but one is blindingly faster. People in the know use RAM caches all the time to speed operations up. I'd say you're worrying about what you're seeing in Task Manager et. al. a bit too much. It's not a lame excuse - Windows really does try to use the RAM for useful things like speeding up the file system instead of letting it just sit there waiting for you to use it, and the processes to release it and make it available for application use are not expensive. It's no longer simple, and it really does work. Perhaps rather than insulting people who try to explain things, you might want to describe what it is that's going slowly for you or that you can't do given the mix of operations you're performing and hardware you have. Perhaps someone can offer an innovative suggestion. I believe that's what Andre is trying to help you with. I can't think of anyone better to help you lower your RAM footprint with SPECIFIC suggestions than Andre. Don't get me wrong, I try to run as lean a system as I can, though some things - such as speeding up I/O access - I'm willing to optimize with bunches of RAM. There's nothing like a system that just responds instantly and doesn't bog down no matter how much stuff you start. I have such a system. Your best bet is to watch Autoruns like a hawk and can anything that you don't need running. Last but not least, computer hardware really is cheaper than ever. Anyone trying to do serious work on a computer and finding themselves short of RAM resources is a bit short-sighted. More powerful hardware costs more, sure, but nowadays you can get more of that hardware than ever for pennies. RAM has not been "I can't afford it" expensive for a long time. It's still less than $10 a gigabyte! Yes, I realize some systems can't be easily upgraded. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and modernize the whole computer. -Noel

I thought of something that would be absolutely AWESOME to be able to accomplish, and I don't know whether it might be something this application could do, but... What if pop-ups (like "The destination already has a file named 'blahblah', Replace the file in the destination, Skip this file, Compare info for both files") actually would consistently pop IN FRONT of the other windows (including the File Explorer window that popped it up)? Tihiy, given the parts of Explorer you hook, can you do something to detect such dialogs and change them from being "pop behind" windows to actual "pop up" windows? -Noel

Quero Toolbar for adding a dedicated Search box back into the top chrome of IE11. You can turn off everything it does and still have the search box, and it interacts just the way I expect it to. I put it on the same line as my menus. http://www.quero.at/ -Noel

Okay, if I wildly resize my Explorer window I can get an effect where the stuff in the Classic Shell status bar seems to be slightly behind the resizing of the border. It's kind of too fast to be distracting though. Regarding resizing... For what it's worth I use a neat little tool called ShellFolderFix by Georg Fischer that positions my Explorer windows to the last place I left them. It's nice for example to be able to open windows to C: and D: and have them not overlap, to facilitate moving things between them. -Noel

Not seeing that at all here. Resizing is smooth on all windows. I don't think I've seen any dialog flicker on resizing in a very long time. Perhaps it's because of the particular video card or something. -Noel

We're not against it. In fact, Aero Glass for Win 8 had it in early testing versions. But it was a hack. Big Muscle finally decided that only windows where the OS or application has enabled the "glass" accent, which it still does for Title Bars for example, would get his effects, rather than forcing them. He has to hook something totally different to force Taskbar blur, and he had a few problems over time trying to do that, so he finally decided it was the responsibility of a different product to do that. No doubt he has the skills to implement a Taskbar blur enhancement tool that adds on to his product, but either he doesn't want to or just hasn't gotten around to it yet. Folks here are simply advising how to get the blur (at least mostly) back by using other tools, such as Start Is Back or Classic Shell, which DO manipulate the Taskbar directly as a part of their normal functionality. The authors of those tools have added specific code to do so, so we would not all be out in the cold with Taskbars with no blur at all. Frankly I'm quite happy with the blur I'm seeing there. I was using Classic Shell anyway. It was a matter of asking the author of Classic Shell nicely to work with Big Muscle to get the combination of the two products to look good. -Noel

Yeah if you deconfigure just about everything relatively new and do an unprecedented amount of tweaking it's possible to make WIndows 8 work nearly as well as a well-tuned Windows 7 did. But quite clearly nothing is advancing. I'm guessing someone inside Microsoft must actually USE Windows 8 and he raises hell when the near infinite number of monkeys with a near infinite number of keyboards are about to screw up its core functionality. When he retires we're screwed. -Noel

Now now, some of the most intelligent people I know use a start menu replacement. Don't let Microsoft herd you into a thought corral where fashion is more important than function. I will NOT be assimilated. -Noel

By the way, Aero Glass for Win 8.1 seems to work okay with the May Windows Update set. -Noel

Gontie, just so it's clear, it's expected that one will use a tool to alter the Taskbar transparency AND Big Muscle's Aero Glass for Win 8.1 tool. It sounds odd, but here's the lowdown: If Windows itself makes the Taskbar partially transparent, it's not suitable for blur by the Aero Glass software. The transparency has to be DISabled by a Taskbar management tool, such as Start Is Back or Classic Shell (the one I use), and it also has to set a relatively unknown "accent" attribute to enable Aero Glass blur. With the right combination - which in Classic Shell is actually called Disable taskbar transparency - your Taskbar blur should be about the same as what you see in a title bar. That said, I've done what you said - put my clock behind my Taskbar and behind a window title bar... Here's a comparison. The blur seems the same but the Taskbar definitely is a little darker. I'm guessing that's just how Windows chooses to color the Taskbar. -Noel

My opinion: It represents a very decisive and obvious step by Microsoft away from "make something that facilitates users' work" and toward "make something that manipulates users into spending more money at the App Store". Despite all the feeble and lame excuses Microsoft Marketing has tried to make ("power consumption" this and "digitally authentic" that), it simply cannot be said that making the desktop harder to use benefits users. Make no mistake, by deleting functionality and hobbling Aero Microsoft IS making it harder to use, no matter how much hype they shovel. Traditional thinking is that people and culture to be swayed toward things that are truly better (e.g., "better mousetrap"), and we all implicitly expect technology improvement to actually make things truly better for us, not increase the sophistication with which we can be fleeced. But making good things better is actually hard to do, once those good things become very good. It's far, far easier to make "legacy" things worse. Thank God we have 3rd party developers like Big Muscle to restore some of the deleted functionality, this time around. Next time... Sigh. -Noel

Seems to me you can get it pretty close to what an older system used to look like through tweaking of the Color Intensity, etc. in Windows and also the various parameters in the registry that Big Muscle provides support for... What about it, specifically, do you find troublesome to look at? Keep in mind the implementation of the theme may have more to do with the differences you're sensing than the actual blur. Could you be missing the border, or maybe the different, more "glossy" style on buttons, etc? Of course I don't know what your Win 8 system used to look like. Examples: Windows 7 standard Aero Glass theme: Windows 8.1 with Aero Glass for Win 8.1 with similar color choices to the above: -Noel

Interesting... I ran some RDP connections FROM my workstation to other systems today, something I have not done in a long time. The borders and title bar of the Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe) window on the system I'm connecting from composite okay, but the drop shadow elements from the themeatlas file are simply missing. Everything else you'd expect is there - the buttons, the glow behind the title, the glass effect... The Aero Glass effects are passed through from the controlled Windows 8.1 system just fine, courtesy of RemoteFX. What I'm talking about is the borders of the mstsc.exe windows on the controlling system. This is likely not an issue with Aero Glass for Win 8.1 at all, but probably a quirk having to do with the implementation of mstsc itself. I hadn't noticed it before because I simply hadn't been using my workststion to make RDP connections to other systems before now. It's not a big deal, but most likely just another side effect of Microsoft eliminating Aero Glass, then their own programmers taking shortcuts since they no longer have to normally do drop shadows anyway. Other windows I've noticed without drop shadows include Outlook 365 and the Avast UI. Sigh, I guess we have seen the golden age of UI style come and go. :-( -Noel