NoelC

As I mentioned before, if you do add sensitivity to the theme settings, please also consider adding specific registry overrides for the glow opacity so it can be controlled separately, outside the theme implementation. I really don't want to lose visibility of the titles of inactive windows (which is where it's most useful), and I'd rather not have to use a special theme to bring it back. -Noel

Yes, I shortened the glow a little. The file is online here: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win81/themeatlas.png -Noel

For what it's worth, I really like being able to easily see the titles of my inactive windows, so if the product is changed to accept the theme settings, could you please also add registry overrides. Thanks. -Noel

You do good work, BigMuscle, after a successful test in my VM I've put it on my hardware and everything's looking great. Thank you for the new version! -Noel

Scratch the license comment I made above. I had accidentally removed the correct license.key file when removing the other Aero Glass files. -Noel

Hi BigMuscle, Installed it, and it came up okay. Differences in behavior I see: I initially installed it for testing in a VM I have been using and I see that it popped up the "This is BETA of Aero Glass for Win8.1." dialog, which I don't normally see on my licensed machines. I noticed License error: 0x80090006 in the file. A lot more stuff shows up in the dwm.exe window now. Magnifier window works, though when one magnifies the glass areas of windows they just look transparent. The bigger caption glows are nice, though now I should adjust my theme atlas just a little as the glow seems almost too tall. http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/AGW81RC1debug.log -Noel

I just want to mention, this is the wrong product/thread if you're using Windows 8.1. There isn't a released product available for 8.1, just a beta, which requires some expertise to install and manage. We are all anxiously awaiting its release, as it's already in pretty good shape. The Aero Glass for Win 8.1 beta thread is always near the top of this forum lately. -Noel

I want new theme. Include computer to run it. Send immediately. -Noel

I clicked through Advanced Options et. al. to the command line interface, then used the format /fs:refs command. Note that for experimentation you may want to do some web research and learn for example about the /i:enable flag (for this run I did not do this, as I was interested in the base performance of the ReFS implementation). I believe also that /q (quick) works, though I didn't use it because I wanted a full scan of the disk for errors. -Noel

I would like to test on SSDs, but at the moment putting more drives into this workstation isn't high on my expenditure list (I already have an array of 4 SSDs in RAID 0 that makes up drive C:). If OCZ would lend me a couple of Vectors to test with, and maybe Samsung would do the same with some Pros... Testing would be for more than just checking the speed (which, given how well ReFS uses cache with the spinning hard drive, should be phenomenal). SSDs today are brilliant devices, and they know a lot about the file system being stored on them (though they necessarily must dial that back some to participate in a RAID array). Storing an entirely different file system could yield entirely different, possibly unreliable operation. Therefore testing would also be to verify reliability. I would love to create a ReFS boot volume on the RAID array to see how the entire system would run from it, but alas that just isn't possible yet. Perhaps in Windows 9. -Noel

DWM restarted itself again at 18:42 this evening, while I was at dinner. http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/DebugRestart24Nov1842.log As far as I can tell nothing is harmed or interrupted by this; just the dwm.exe window remains visible. I have yet to see it happen while I'm actually using the computer, though. Edit: I didn't notice before - It left this minidump.dmp file behind: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/temp/minidump.zip -Noel

Hey BigMuscle, after 3 full days of perfect operation (without reboots) I had another of those "wake up the monitors and see the DWM window, after having left it minimized" occurrences this morning. The restart happened after 1:00 am, when I left the system and before 9:30 am when I moved the mouse and woke up the monitors. Judging from the log I'd say it happened between 5:00 and 6:00 am None of my scheduled jobs run at that time, save for the one that adds timestamps to your debug.log. I walked through the system jobs (wow, there are a lot of them in Windows 8.1), but I didn't see any that ran between 5:00 and 6:00. More info: According to my Security event log, DWM-3 logged off at 5:04:16 am, and logged back on again in the same second. Here's the pertinent debug.log portion, with my hourly timestamps added: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/DWMRestart.log Interesting that it doesn't look like a crash, but like it shut down and restarted gracefully. Do you have anything that runs every 3 days? If not, any chance you have some kind of resource leak? -Noel P.S., I looked through all the specific logs... One thing caught my eye, logged at 4:26:13 am: Diagnostic module {282396b2-6c46-4d66-b413-70b0445df33c} (%SystemRoot%\system32\diagperf.dll) finished troubleshooting scenario {186f47ef-626c-4670-800a-4a30756babad}, instance {c4aa6c9e-fd84-4b04-a1fb-7d1c630eedda}, original activity ID {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}. It set resolution {4d21da64-fd02-4b82-a0a5-783266e430ab} for user Everyone in session 0 with expiration date ‎2014‎-‎02‎-‎22T09:26:13.081997300Z. The resolution was queued to start later.I wonder what "later" means in this context.

A few little problems with Windows 8.1 have shown their heads... I schedule a nightly shadow copy-integrated System Image backup (wbadmin command). Apparently the backup process unmounts and remounts the backup drive in the process and leaves 4 "Drive 5 has been surprise removed" Warning messages in my System Event log. Microsoft has SO lost the plot when something as normal as a backup is now so poorly integrated with the OS that it causes warnings to run it. Another niggling detail is that for some reason, even though when I earlier mocked it up in a Windows 8.1 VM it worked properly, Word 2003 crashes when I try to paste something from a web page into it. I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that glitch. Yeah, I know, I should probably get a newer version of Office. Thing is, up to now Office 2003 has done all I need - and it will still if I can get past this Word crash problem. Outlook 2003 is working great on Windows 8.1. -Noel

Everything seems to work fine with the updated "dark scrollbar thumbs" theme, but I made one interesting observation. Outlook 2003 comes up with its own "blue" theme if the Windows 8.1 stock theme is active, but a completely different theme that seems to follow the rest of the system settings when your modified theme is active, MrGRiM. Note this over and under comparison of the top part of the application... This is not a problem at all; in fact I kind of like the more integrated look. It's just curious that it would behave so differently. It's like your theme has found a way to be compatible with this old legacy application. Anyway, thanks again, MrGRiM. -Noel

Ralcool, I'd say BigMuscle's work is already beyond the level of those "years of refined code" in Microsoft's sources. I've never felt Microsoft produced particularly refined implementations, frankly. For years their stated policy was "put together a working prototype and move on without ever optimizing it". But since Vista it's pretty much been all optimization of what was already there, and now we're seeing that only goes so far. I'm glad you like my little theme atlas contribution, but it was literally nothing by comparison to BigMuscle's project. Just a bit of Photoshop work is all. I imagine BigMuscle's next build could be good enough to be a release candidate. I'm looking forward to it, and I applaud his work (and I hope hundreds of thousands of donations are pouring in to him). Like Ralcool, I feel that Windows 8 would be a complete bust without it, and I would still be on Windows 7. Things like Aero Glass for Win 8 and ClassicShell are saving Windows' butt. It may be unpopular to be a "hater" - I've certainly been called that for pointing out the failures to improve Windows, and especially the deletions of functionality. On the other hand, I had a perfectly working backup strategy with Windows 7, all set up through Microsoft's dialogs. Now to accomplish the same thing I'm forced to schedule wbadmin commands. How's that anything but degradation? Why did I have to spend time finding out about wbadmin? Right now my system can't get through a day without errors in the System Error Log. My Windows 7 system ran on the same hardware for months without errors. Worse, I used to have confidence that such things would be fixed in Windows Updates. Now... -Noel

Awesome! I didn't expect a custom theme developed for me - thanks man! I've just put it in and had a bit of a scout around - it really does make spotting the scroll thumb easier. You've just made my desktop a little easier to use. It seems Visual Studio doesn't use the theme color, though, so I still have to figure out how to darken those scroll bar elements. Thanks again! -Noel

I don't really want to re-theme everything. The standard Aero theme plus BigMuscle's Aero Glass plus my themeatlas.png file looks pretty good. But one thing I'd like to do is to slightly darken the scrollbar thumb in most windows to make it a bit easier to spot. I found a way to darken the scroll thumbs in Internet Explorer, which apparently runs off different settings than everything else in the system (great idea, Microsoft). All you have to do to do that is create a simple CSS file with a text editor, store it on your disk, then instruct IE11 to use it via the Internet Options > General tab > [Accessibility] button, Format Documents Using My Style Sheet option. html {scrollbar-base-color: darkgray;}That yields this: I'd just like to be able to set the scroll bars on all the other windows, in general, to be a little darker as well (ideally while retaining a dark to darker animation when you hover over them). Is there a specific registry setting the stock Windows 8.1 theme implementation uses to set the color of scroll thumbs? If not, is something used out of the theme atlas that I missed? Or is it hard-coded and really does need a theme replacement to be changed? Sorry for my naivety about this, and thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge. -Noel

Unfortunately, UAC prompt disabled and UAC truly disabled are not one and the same. That tweak has EnableLUA = 1, which ENABLES UAC and defeats the entire purpose of being a full-time Administrator, where your computer just does what you tell it to. However, I'll have to experiment with those settings to see if maybe there's some kind of side effect behavior that allows the Metro/Modern apps to run even when EnableLUA = 0. UAC has a purpose: To protect unwitting computer end users from themselves. The trouble with self-protection is that it gets in the way of people who know what they're doing and don't need to be nagged by failures to access things they have every reason to access. -Noel

I applaud your efforts to bring usability back to Windows 8. It's through efforts by 3rd party developers like you and the others here that Windows 8 will actually survive, despite Microsoft's efforts to stop people from taking it seriously. Microsoft has lost the plot. A minor note: Personally I would suggest avoiding the use of Libraries, because they're not rigorously implemented (by Microsoft). People see failures to have the screen update after file moves/deletions, that sort of thing. Explorer in general always works much better if you just use real folders on the PC. And a suggestion: As long as you're augmenting File Explorer, figure out the machinations needed to get it to use the List control to display files instead of the implementation it uses by default. A tool called Folder Options X does this now, and xpclient has a set of registry tweaks that can do it as well. An advantage to doing this (among others) is that the items in Details View are closer together, so that you can get more work on screen. That can matter to power users. -Noel

FYI, after yesterday's reboot and my addition of hourly time stamps appended to the debug log, Aero Glass beta 4 has been ridiculously well-behaved. It's as polished or moreso than anything else in the system. -Noel

I'd like to know that too. According to Microsoft there is no way to run Metro/Modern apps with EnableLUA set to 0, but with products such as ModernMix out there, one is left to wonder whether there could be a hack to get it to work... -Noel

Fair enough, but why does it appear about eleventy seven times in a row sometimes (note my log file above)? That sounds like a problem. -Noel

Not that I use the magnifier much, but it's handy once in a blue moon to look at things like font smoothing, etc., and it's good to know you have a handle on the problem and we can look forward to it working in a future version. Does that issue explain the many, many "[0x43BC] Failed to load reflection file (0)" messages in a row? If not, that might be something you'll want to look into also. FYI, I don't try to load (nor do I want to load) a reflection file. I like the glass areas nice and smooth. Another bit of observation: Since the crash and reboot last night, I haven't had the DWM window pop up on its own, not even once. By the way I've scheduled a job that runs every hour and appends a timestamp to your debug.log file. -Noel

Hey BigMuscle, I had a hard crash last night when I was trying to use the Magnifier tool for the first time. I had to hard reset the system by holding in the power button in for 10 seconds. The Magnifier tool came up initially set to magnify the entire screen, since it was the first time I'd ever used it on this Windows 8.1 install, and it appeared to do that correctly. But when I changed it to "Lens" view, Aero Glass appeared to wig out (screen corruption), then restart to where I saw the DWM window come up again, then the UI was just unresponsive. The mouse was alive but nothing would work, not even Control-Alt-Delete or the Win key. Here's the log from all day yesterday, though there's probably quite a bit of normal operation messages before the failure. Looks like a previously unseen message 0x324 might have been the initial trigger. http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/DebugCrash.log The system had been running 5-1/2 days prior to this failure. Note that there are also a whole bunch of "Failed to load reflection file (0)" messages in there, though I don't know if they were part of what led to the crash or not. My suspicion is not, since there are quite a few of what look like normal messages between those and the restart. That could indicate another, different problem brewing. -Noel

Tester123456 the glow effect now comes from within the theme atlas file (that was changed in beta 3 or 4 as I recall). Look to the separate thread on same for some alternative files you can use. -Noel