NoelC

Today I decided to format a spare 1 TB electromechanical drive that I just use for file backups with the ReFS file system. I figure through experimentation with non-critical data I can get to know the implementation. Lo and behold Windows 8.1 won't let you select ReFS at the normal Format prompt in DiskMgmt.msc, but there is a way to do it through the recovery console. I managed it... For those of you unfamiliar with it, there's more on ReFS here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831724.aspx Anyway, I copied about 850 GB of data to the drive (XCOPY)(, then read it back without error in comparison. ReFS seems to have a general tendency to prioritize writes over reads, so while I was copying data to it, the comparison program read back the data fairly slowly. It was about 8 MB/sec read speed while maintaining 80 MB/sec writes. There was a significant lack of "frantic seeking". I could barely hear the drive at all. But once the writes completed the reads cooked with gas - as fast as I've seen this drive go: 120 MB/sec. I suspect the case of copying literally hundreds of gigabytes from a faster source while simultaneously trying to read is probably not common, and that it will work well in normal operation. I'll certainly be continuing to experiment with it. Here are some interesting screen grabs (hope these come through okay): The RAM cache seems to work particularly well with this file system. Note this uncached vs. cached performance difference with a benchmark that simulates multiple processes reading and writing... -Noel

Not sure it's helpful, but I noticed in my Security log that it happened at exactly 10:19:22 pm (as indicated by a logoff and back on of the DWM-2 account), which doesn't coincide with anything else I have scheduled to run, nor any other events, as far as I can see. That was about an hour and a half after I had left and let the system go into screen save mode (monitors powered-down). -Noel

Manually added time stamp: November 19, 2013, 18:57:02[0x4B18] Message 0xC464, wparam = 2, lparam = 0[0x4B18] Message 0xC464, wparam = 2, lparam = 0[0x4B18] Message 0xC464, wparam = 2, lparam = 0[0x4B18] Message 0xC464, wparam = 2, lparam = 0[0x5CEC] Hook (USER32.dll!CreateWindowExW from shell32.dll) installed[0x5CEC] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x5CEC] Hook (dwmapi.dll!DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow from explorer.exe) installed[0x5CEC] Hook (USER32.dll!LoadImageW from themecpl.dll) installed[0x3080] Hook (USER32.dll!CreateWindowExW from shell32.dll) installed[0x3080] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x3080] Hook (dwmapi.dll!DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow from explorer.exe) installed[0x3080] Hook (USER32.dll!LoadImageW from themecpl.dll) installed[0x5CEC] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x4B18] Message 0xC2BC, wparam = 0, lparam = 0[0x4B18] Message 0x1A, wparam = 75, lparam = 785359239816[0x5CE0] Hook (USER32.dll!CreateWindowExW from shell32.dll) installed[0x5CE0] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x5CE0] Hook (dwmapi.dll!DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow from explorer.exe) installed[0x5CE0] Hook (USER32.dll!LoadImageW from themecpl.dll) installed[0x4088] Hook (USER32.dll!CreateWindowExW from shell32.dll) installed[0x4088] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x4088] Hook (dwmapi.dll!DwmEnableBlurBehindWindow from explorer.exe) installed[0x4088] Hook (USER32.dll!LoadImageW from themecpl.dll) installed[0x5CE0] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x4B18] Message 0xC2BC, wparam = 0, lparam = 0[0x4088] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x3080] Hook (USER32.dll!SetWindowCompositionAttribute from explorer.exe) installed[0x4CDC] Uninstalling...[0x3314] License file loaded[0x3314] Machine ID: PHHPCCL3FHOH5LOSDCDNL7MCGVTLO335ITLDP2PQ4LOGYZUQ[0x3314] Hook (USER32.dll!CreateWindowExW from dwm.exe) installed[0x3314] Hook (GDI32.dll!CreateRoundRectRgn from udwm.dll) installed[0x3314] Hook (USER32.dll!DrawTextW from udwm.dll) installed[0x3314] Hook (GDI32.dll!CreateBitmap from udwm.dll) installed[0x3314] Delayed hook (UxTheme.dll!GetThemeStream from udwm.dll) installed[0x3314] Aero Glass for Win8.1 Beta 4 correctly loaded.[0x6274] DBGHELP: Symbol Search Path: .;SRV*C:\BIN\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\dwmcore.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\dll\dwmcore.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\symbols\dll\dwmcore.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: dwmcore - private symbols C:\BIN\symbols\dwmcore.pdb\E04DB7BFF9E14B679ADE43E9B784F48B2\dwmcore.pdb[0x6274] Symbols loaded for dwmcore.dll as 3 (#0)[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\uDWM.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\dll\uDWM.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\symbols\dll\uDWM.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: udwm - public symbols C:\BIN\symbols\uDWM.pdb\30C7272ED65C4EE6A9778128E65E70642\uDWM.pdb[0x6274] Symbols loaded for udwm.dll as 3 (#0)[0x3314] Message 0x404, wparam = 0, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x320, wparam = 1157627904, lparam = 1[0x3314] Loading settings: NULL[0x3314] Message 0x31E, wparam = 0, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x218, wparam = 32787, lparam = 441519568240[0x3314] Message 0x218, wparam = 32787, lparam = 441547145488[0x3314] Message 0x320, wparam = 3759095155, lparam = 1[0x3314] Loading settings: NULL[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\dwm.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\exe\dwm.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: .\symbols\exe\dwm.pdb - file not found[0x6274] DBGHELP: dwm - public symbols C:\BIN\symbols\dwm.pdb\34BE7E5FC12E4A8BB5DFBAC3D915A6872\dwm.pdb[0x6274] Symbols loaded for dwm.exe as 3 (#0)[0x6274] Loading settings: 0x00007FF75AB941D0 (0x0000000000000338)[0x6274] Atlas resource loading (custom: C:\BIN\themeatlas.png)[0x3314] Message 0x320, wparam = 3759095155, lparam = 1[0x60A0] Failed to load reflection file (0)[0x3314] Message 0x320, wparam = 3759095155, lparam = 1[0x3314] Loading settings: 0x00007FF75AB941D0 (0x0000000000000338)[0x3314] Message 0x320, wparam = 3759095155, lparam = 1[0x3314] Message 0x1E, wparam = 0, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x219, wparam = 7, lparam = 0[0x3314] Message 0x7E, wparam = 32, lparam = 78644800[0x3314] Message 0xC257, wparam = 269484032, lparam = 1[0x3314] Message 0xC257, wparam = 269484032, lparam = 22:44 am woke the displays, found DWM window openBigMuscle, I caught it. Looks like DWM is shutting down and restarting on its own... Note the manually added timestamps. System was left logged-on, almost no applications were left running. Only thing major that happened was my shadow copy integrated backup started at 1:00 am by the Task Scheduler (and whatever else automatically runs at night per MIcrosoft's doing). -Noel

Hey BigMuscle, just a curiosity... I've had a Windows 8.1 system running with AGFW81 for 4 days straight now, and a few times the dwm.exe window has popped-up (i.e., it self-restored from normally being minimized). When I've seen it is upon moving the mouse after having been away from the system and it's there upon waking up the monitors. I haven't seen it pop up spontaneously while I'm using the system, though. Is this to be expected? Without timestamps in the log I'm not really able to correlate the occurrences, and I didn't think to look in the log the last couple of times it happened. I've just put some text in the log just now manually to help see when things are happening. This is no bother at all, and nothing is disrupted, but if it implies there's some kind of problem I certainly want you to know about it. I'll capture the log the next time it happens. -Noel

What's odd is that I don't have that update and Windows Update isn't reporting any pending updates. Could it be language-specific? -Noel

What you're seeing is normal. We all see it. Minimize that window and enjoy Aero Glass. -Noel

DOS Probie, it seems to me there's a direct way through ClassicShell's config menu to change the button graphic... I've changed mine so that I don't confuse my host system Start button with those in my virtual machines. -Noel

FYI, I've discovered that the current version of ShadowExplorer can return corrupted files. I've submitted a problem report to the author. There's another program out there to access Shadow Copies: Z-VSScopy I'm evaluating it now. -Noel

Okay, in a VM I've managed to capture it by opening IE windows to MSFN and Microsoft. And it even flickers just when I hover over the Microsoft page thumbnail. I made an upsized animation to show it clearly. -Noel

I can't reproduce anything out of the ordinary, and tried quite a few times per shelter's instructions. Maybe it's display driver-specific or something. There's supposed to be an outline on those Live Preview thumbnails, and it changes a bit in lightness depending on which window has the current focus AND which thumbnail you hover your cursor over. Are you saying it's outside of that? Does it remain there after you've hovered over it? Or does it spontaneously appear? If so, is it specific to a particular application? As far as "dealing with it", LOL. You really do need to do a better job of showing and describing the problem before someone can act on your problem report. FYI, I've found that while some of the artifacts Aero Glass for Win 8 has produced in the past have been impossible to capture from inside the system under test, it's been possible to capture them by screen-grabbing the display of a virtual machine using software on the host. I guess that's more like having a really accurate camera. -Noel

P.S., on our largest systems I actually do have some electromechanical internal drives in addition to the drive C: array - for when 2 TB just isn't enough. -Noel

Of course we make backups to external storage. We use Western Digital MyBook USB drives on every system, actually, and do system image backups every night. When I swapped drive arrays I was able to restore the system overnight - via USB2. With USB3, which modern external USB drives support, it's just a few hours. A disaster recovery restoral shouldn't need to happen very often! Never, ideally - I can't understand why people try to save money on disk drives. The cost in lost time and potentially lost data can be ridiculous. The advantages to building an SSD drive array from multiple physical drives and running everything from it are numerous. The speed truly adds together, and of course everything on the volume the system thinks is critical is equally well protected. Once upon a time, with electromechanical disk drives you could save a bunch of seeking and thrashing by having different applications use different drives, but those days are kind of past... Now with big RAM caches and SSDs that truly have zero seek time, the thinking on best practices needs to change. This is not theory, it all comes from observation of real results; I've been running Windows systems since Windows existed (and real computers before that). -Noel

You can't be serious. Please do a better job of capturing your screenshot, because there's no way anyone could possibly see anything in that blurry shot. -Noel

See post 514. -Noel

Yes. Ribbon-enabled windows don't go to the theme resource atlas to get the glow effect. I believe it's either coded into the theme code or it gets it from somewhere else (I'm not expert in themes). The good news is that with Explorer windows you have the address bar right there, so you can train yourself to look inside the Explorer window for that. Like you, I prefer a dark background. -Noel

That's not a bug. That DWM window is expected and necessary for gathering debugging info and for restarting Aero Glass as needed. I believe BigMuscle will eliminate it when the software is released. Minimize it and ignore it for now. -Noel

This is a hugely fast system running from an SSD array. Plus I've used netplwiz to set up auto-logon, so it's logging-on faster than is humanly possible. -Noel

Sorry, I should have thought of that. I had my hands full setting everything up, so I kind of needed to employ the workaround right away. I still, of course, have the debug.log file, which appears to be cumulative. If you had put time stamps in it, it could be more useful. Maybe it is anyway. Here it is: http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/temp/debug.log -Noel

That may be true, and we've kept our main development workstations on Windows 7 up to now, but there is a very real - if intangible - benefit to keeping current. As time goes on more and more software is written for and tested most on the latest version, drivers aren't developed as vigorously for the old OS, the security environment grows out of date... The list goes on. Windows 7 is by no means obsolete today. On the other hand, take it to its extended conclusion... Decide to never upgrade from Windows 7. Do that and in another big part of a decade you'll be sitting where people today trying to run XP are at. It's obsolete, some applications no longer work with it, and by comparison to modern systems it's unstable. Better to make the newest OS work really well and have the best of both worlds. I've done it. -Noel

It's a bit beyond the scope of this forum to list my entire book of tips, tricks, tweaks, and 3rd party software (yes, I have written a how-to book called Configure the Windows 8 "To Work" Options). Here's a super-abbreviated executive summary overview with lots skipped... Keep in mind this is for a system optimized for desktop, serious use, not playing with toys from the App Store. Do a clean install from a disc into a blank partition if at all possible, and don't partition.Plan to have everything on C: because it just works better.How to install with a local account.Install the ClassicShell 3rd party Start Menu replacement.Turn off UAC (really off, as in EnableLUA == 0) as mentioned above.Disable HomeGroup networking, just use workgroup networking.Tweak File Explorer in several ways, including hiding Favorites and setting Folder Options for reliability and better usability.Set up Windows Update to ask you before installing updates, and install a 3rd party update notifier that works more like the one in Win 7.Tips on setting up your desktop, such as putting Explorer.exe before UNC names, to improve efficiency/reliability.Minimize chrome around windows to maximize working space, along with registry settings to go beyond what the control panel of Windows 8 provides.Setup of various taskbar properties, such as auto-hide, enabling the Desktop toolbar, etc.Registry tweaks to speed up a lot of the animated UI elements to make the system snappier to use.Set up a C:\TEMP path with proper permissions and point TEMP and TMP variables to it.Set Windows disk caching settings for best performance.Setup so the Advanced Boot Options screen always shows during bootup for a few seconds.How to set up IE for best security, and installation of a custom "hosts" file to block parasite web sites, ads, tracking, etc.Good practices for setting up drive letters and naming.Configuring power settings (not necessarily very green, but better for the computer)Use netplwiz to automatically log your system on at bootup (if you have good physical security).Configure the items in the system tray.Configure to prevent password expiry.Advice on selecting Avast! alternate anti-malware software.Configure System Restore storage to be deeper, to enhance the chances of it working when you need it.Our favorite list of 3rd party applications tested to work together well, including Aero Glass for Win 8, Shortcut Overlay Manager, Send To Toys, WizMouse, ShellFolderFix, grepWin, Scanner, HWMonitor, 7-Zip, Windows Update Notification Tool, Folder Options X, and more.Add the Quero toolbar to IE to give it back a search box, and what setting to change to keep it from causing problems.Really disable the ridiculous indexing feature of Windows (not trivial, but doable).Get a better calculator application from an XP system.Advice on creating system and password recovery media.Things to disable to get back gigabytes on your disk.Set up to see more detailed status messages so you can see what Windows is doing.A complete description of how to use Windows Backup integrated with Shadow Copies by scheduling wbadmin commands.Good practices for ongoing stability and keeping the system light and fast, including using Autoruns and Shell Extensions Viewer.Advice to avoid registry cleaners. Just don't use 'em.I've been developing this for a long time, since well before Windows 8 actually. I also have a book for tweaking Windows 7. I've been running Windows 8 in virtual machines since the first day of the first pre-release. The list of things you can do to Windows to make it a lot more useful is big and growing. Since Windows 8 / 8.1 are moving toward powering toys (tablets and the App Store) it's harder than ever to make it useful, and ever more 3rd party developers (like this forum's own BigMuscle) are swinging into action to make it work better, or restore lost functionality. Thing is, we've tested a whole set of configuration changes and 3rd party software together and can say that not only have we made a more useful system, but it's reliable and sustainable. Hope this helps! -Noel P.S., I wanted to paste in URLs, but this forum still won't accept pastes from IE11 and it's too tedious to type them in. You folks ought to fix that.

By the way, the HKEY_CURRENT_USER method of specifying the Theme Atlas file still seems to be a bit iffy in beta 4. I've been through about a dozen reboots getting things installed over the past day and I've had my themeatlas.png file ignored twice or three times (restarting DWM fixed it). This has worked every time for me, though I hesitate to say "every time" definitively yet since I have only had it in place a little while... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM] "CustomThemeAtlas"="C:\\BIN\\themeatlas.png" -Noel

You're saying that the removal of the option of having a Start Menu is a "feature"? Or that removal of theming and Aero Glass is somehow a "feature"? The removal of the GUI for setting up a regular Windows Backup? And yes, I know well that 3rd party tools have been around to do most everything (I had Alex Feinman's ISO Recorder on Windows 7, for example). But more of them than ever are required now to make Windows 8 functional. And besides, I wanted to list at least something that the new OS does that we needed. Couldn't think of anything substantial. ALL we got by upgrading is the security of knowledge that we're no longer using an arbitrarily obsolete OS. -Noel

At my company I've just completed a thorough evaluation of WIndows 8 / 8.1, and have decided to roll-out Windows 8.1 with local accounts and UAC disabled. This will give us the benefit of using an up-to-date Windows OS which provides virtually all the desktop functionality of its predecessor, Windows 7. This was not a decision taken lightly, and frankly it seems a bit weird to just turn off an entire subsystem (Metro/Modern apps are completely unavailable with UAC fully disabled), but it works. It's compatible with all our tools and processes, and there are even a (very) few things it can do, like mount an ISO file for direct access, that Windows 7 couldn't. You might ask the question, "if it's not really any better than Windows 7, why bother?", and that's a fair question. In the end it comes down to it being impractical to remain on an old operating system forever, as keeping current does have intangible advantages. Just think about the folks still trying to run XP or earlier in this day and age... Sure, for a while that was viable - and in fact, we've run Windows 7 quite successfully up to now - but it just grows out of date and the support costs go up. New applications are released that don't support it. Driver writers no longer care about it. So here we sit, essentially running Windows 8.1 setups you could say are more like Windows "7.0.1", employing an unprecedented amount of 3rd party software to restore functionality that Microsoft has just chosen to abandon (thank you to the 3rd party developers who have taken it upon themselves to correct that). I guess we're good to go for another year or two. -Noel

Just want to say that ClassicShell was instrumental in our decision to move our development workstations up to Windows 8.1. The advice to install it is actually one of the first pages in my Windows 8 book. No lie - if ClassicShell hadn't been made available, we'd have stayed with Windows 7 (though we had adopted ClassicShell on that OS too; thing is, if it hadn't been there we'd have been able to use the Windows 7 Start Menu). -Noel

After much planning, I've just completed installing Windows 8.1 on my main workstation. Aero Glass for Win 8.1 beta 4 tests beautifully on my hardware (ATI 7850). Seems very polished. -Noel