NoelC

After 1 full day of operation (doing heavy software development all day, tons of work) without Aero Glass for Windows 8.1: No visual glitches, no lockups - not one. Painful as it is to use Windows 8.1 this way, I will continue to do so to monitor for problems. -Noel

Will do. -Noel

Sounds a bit like what I've seen, but only VERY infrequently on Win 8.1 x64. I've seen another new issue, more serious but again impossible to relate with certainty to Aero Glass for Win 8.1... Over the past two days, since the Windows Updates early this week, on two occasions I've returned to my system to find the left monitor off, the right one on but blank, and no way to recover operation without a hard power-down/reset. No errors are logged in the Aero Glass for Win 8.1 debug.log. Interestingly, there ARE some log entries coincident with the timing of the problem occurrences, which were at around 18:00 on January 15, and 12:30 today. I don't know if that's an indication of a DWM restart or what... [2014-01-15 12:27:21][0x20E0:0x16B4] Donation key loaded[2014-01-15 12:27:21][0x20E0:0x16B4] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-15 18:05:42][0x3E8:0x16F8] Donation key loaded[2014-01-15 18:05:42][0x3E8:0x16F8] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-15 18:30:26][0x1FB4:0x174C] Donation key loaded[2014-01-15 18:30:26][0x1FB4:0x174C] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-15 18:47:20][0x59C:0x5A0] Installing DWM hook...[2014-01-15 18:47:20][0x59C:0x5A0] Module: C:\BIN\dwmglass.dll[2014-01-15 18:47:21][0x280:0x1080] Donation key loaded[2014-01-15 18:47:21][0x280:0x1080] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-16 00:28:29][0x11F0:0xF84] Donation key loaded[2014-01-16 00:28:29][0x11F0:0xF84] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-16 01:19:24][0x16F8:0x1860] Donation key loaded[2014-01-16 01:19:24][0x16F8:0x1860] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-16 12:33:19][0x49C:0x156C] Donation key loaded[2014-01-16 12:33:19][0x49C:0x156C] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[2014-01-16 12:39:16][0x5E8:0x5EC] Installing DWM hook...[2014-01-16 12:39:16][0x5E8:0x5EC] Module: C:\BIN\dwmglass.dll[2014-01-16 12:39:17][0x2B8:0x1130] Donation key loaded[2014-01-16 12:39:17][0x2B8:0x1130] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ-Noel

Sorry, I guess what I meant was "no one in their right mind should be setting up Windows to use an MS account". You can access the store using an MS account while still logging into Windows using a local account. But hey, if you want to give Microsoft administrative access to everything on your computer that's up to you. -Noel

Back on Catalyst 13.7 with Windows 7 I used to see those kinds of blinks after playing videos. I haven't seen one since moving to Windows 8.1. I always assumed they were some kind of memory reorganization by the display driver. -Noel

A screen blink can be a display driver crash and recovery. Check your System event log. -Noel

Your config just sounds like it is screwed up. Perhaps you have malware or perhaps you've installed something that broke it. No one in their right mind should be creating a Microsoft account. -Noel

...And it still works great after today's Windows Updates. -Noel

A. Bah. Even low-end tablets have powerful GPUs that only a few years ago were just dreams. B. The ability to run "classic mode" was configurable in earlier OSs, it need only have been configured by default in Windows 8 for low-end machines. C. Don't kid yourself - the current Windows 8+ DWM implementation relies HEAVILY on the GPU, even without the glass effect or skeuomorphism, which Microsoft is desperately trying to paint as "unfashionable". For example note how the animation to open and close windows works. The GPU spends FAR more time animating that than it does blurring backgrounds. You seem to feel that Microsoft has honorable motives in this. I feel they do not. They are simply trying to herd sheeple into disliking the desktop so they can "move on" to selling them new systems that do things differently. I feel the directors of the company are simply not smart enough (or not able to resist greedy impulses) to understand that they should have spun off another product to pursue their goals while continuing to maintain Windows as a serious, mature business operating system. The attractiveness of being able to sell to a captive audience of a billion hapless App Store users was just too much for them. I don't believe they're going to pull it off. People are smarter than they think. -Noel

4 solid days of VERY hard desktop use running the Aero Glass private release preview (we're in crunch mode preparing our own software release here, unrelated to Aero Glass). It's stable. -Noel

Hi BigMuscle, I reported a visual glitch to you via eMail. Very occasionally some small parts of a window, often near the borders or title bars but not always, turn briefly transparent (not translucent). I see this so infrequently (e.g., once or twice a day) that it's been near impossible to tell whether it has anything to do with Aero Glass. Nothing is logged in your debug.log. My gut feeling is that this is a display driver problem that appeared when I installed ATI Catalyst 13.12. And it seems to be visual only; the system is stable. I recommend you proceed with your release. Your product is complete and working great. -Noel

That 0.0.0.0 change solves another problem as well... If you're on a system that actually has a web server running it would try to retrieve pages from the local web server. 0.0.0.0 does not. -Noel

I know of no difference between "RTM" and "final". If Windows is telling you that it's "expiring", then you likely have a pre-release preview version. What is its exact version number? -Noel

Wasn't there a time when "excellence" was considered a good thing? I shoot for ZERO bugs in my own software. It's not done until there are none. -Noel

I don't know if it's related to running the January 7 version, but my Passmark scores for display operations are up a little bit. -Noel

I suggest against trying to run Windows 8.1 as an in-place upgrade to 8, but doing a fresh install. If that means buying a disc, so be it. Windows backup can be run successfully on a schedule in Win 8.1 using a wbadmin command. -Noel

Short answer: Yes, you will want to uninstall, no you won't need a new key for the new version. I suggest you wait just a bit longer... There are indications a release is imminent. -Noel

Hancoque is right. Ribbon-enabled windows apparently get their glow information from a different place. I don't have glow behind the title of my File Explorer or WordPad windows. I rarely use the latter, and fortunately the former have the path showing up near the top anyway so I can live with it. -Noel

Or you could just use Windows Backup. It's still capable of making System Image backups in Windows 8.1. -Noel

No strong reason. I just like having them both. Just earlier today I was debugging a thrashing issue in a program under development and it was very handy to have both the CPU overview and the memory use graphs showing simultaneously. By the way, you can customize some of the panels of the new Task Manager to show a lot more information as well. -Noel

That was originally posted by MrGRiM as I recall (hope I got that right). I don't want to redistribute it without his permission. Perhaps he'll see this and provide the link, as I've lost track of where he posted it. Edit: I see that infinality attached a glass reflection file to this thread back in post 481. -Noel

Cool! Congratulations. I agree, it's a nice place to hang out with folks who like to do things better than the "Microsoft way". -Noel

Example (my files are in C:\BIN): Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM]"CustomThemeAtlas"="C:\\BIN\\themeatlas.png""ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity"=dword:00000030"CustomThemeReflection"="C:\\BIN\\AeroGlassReflectionImage.png""TextGlowMode"=dword:00000001-Noel

Yes, there are a few subtleties of WIn 8.1 that aren't too bad. Like you, I don't mind ribbons at all. I'm a positional thinker, so if it's a 2 dimensional landscape of buttons and stuff, for me that's just as easy to get used to as remembering the position in a menu. I'm not fond of the new direction in desktop UI implementation by Office or Avast, though (which look bad even on Win 7). Those applications, that have no window borders and don't conform to the system theme, are kind of out of left field. I guess the intent is to support touch operation, or maybe to look like the flat, lifeless Metro/Modern tiles, but they just come off as an eyesore. It's as though someone forgot that a lot of the utility in a UI comes from adherence to guidelines, which promotes integration - using things together. Now it seems to be more about ignoring such guidelines and each application for itself. -Noel

You're welcome. Could you share the specifics of how you got rid of Desktop, Documents, etc.? Thanks. -Noel