NoelC

Wow, so the world really does have more intelligence than a potato. The peaks and valleys are also telling. It seems that operating systems people NEED dip on the weekends and operating systems that offer frivolity peak on the weekend. Note that despite two "in-place upgrades" Windows 10 weekend peaks haven't changed, and if anything have gotten higher. -Noel

Perhaps they (the upgraders) have not yet been able to coerce Windows 10 into allowing them to surf the Internet, which presumably is where the above figures come from. Maybe they just love Apps so much that they just don't surf any more. Or more likely there is no "they" upgrading at all, and ALL the "adoptions" of Windows 10 are coming from new device sales. -Noel

But they would likely count you as a user anyway, since you mentioned Windows 10 on a forum at some time in your life. -Noel

Feedback: Build #668 runs OK for me, with DWM averaging something like 0.16% (not 16 percent, but a small fraction of 1 percent) CPU usage. -Noel

Heh heh heh, what would happen (and I'm not saying this is what's happening, just what if) Microsoft rolled out an IE update that occasionally would report that it's running on Windows 10 even though it's not, and further, that the definition of "occasionally" was changed so that the frequency would increase linearly as time goes on. -Noel

Thanks for posting that chart. The straightness of the Win 10 line seems almost unnatural, doesn't it? -Noel

Tells you how bad my memory is getting (wetware, not hardware). -Noel

Folks concerned with privacy might want to think about disabling SmartScreen. Just sayin'. The fundamental assumption that ignorant people will just run anything and everything, and that the operating system needs to throw up roadblocks is a ridiculous place we find ourselves at. It's like having a hammer that refuses to hit certain things. Sure, you might want to avoid hitting your thumb, but maybe a better way to go about that is to learn to start the nail with a small tap, and not to aim the hammer at your thumb - not try to circumvent the strike once the hammer is in mid swing. Allowing ignorant people to make mistakes and learn from them is the way to educate them. Where does this go? Will there be people who will consider a lawsuit against Microsoft for allowing them to run something they shouldn't have tried to run in the first place, and which destroyed their data? Guard rails don't belong in operating systems. -Noel

Good point... Anyone here running VMware on a Win 10 host? I've only run Win 10 as a guest. I suspect it must work but I have no experience... Speaking of which, I skipped version 12. I suppose VMware version 13, er, 12.5 ought to be out soon. -Noel

I don't know of any differences in hardware requirements between 8 and 8.1 myself, which is why I posted the link to the Win 8 requirements page. I've been monitoring this thread in the hopes of learning the difference. -Noel

Might be just the filename. That's the same kind of "incompatibility" one used to see with the Classic Shell installer until renaming it. But even more fundamentally... What business does an operating system have in refusing to try to run something? The gear needs to obey the human. Unconditionally. Imagine you're in your car, in the middle of passing someone on a 2 lane road, and need to mash the accelerator pedal and go a bit faster in order to complete the pass and get back into your lane safely before a collision... Then your car just out of the blue reports "Going faster is incompatible at this time". -Noel

Stop uTorrent and see what the DWM activity goes to. Screen updates are what the Desktop Window Manager manages. Do the uTorrent updates look different when Aero Glass for Win 8+ isn't enabled? -Noel

That's fashion for you. I'm betting there are regular meetings at Microsoft where they discuss "what can we do to make using the legacy desktop a little bit less pleasant to use". Once they get past all the awful stick-in-the-mud users who remember how good it was in the past, they can continue without complaint on their mission to improve the Metro/Modern/Universal/Apps environment. Because everyone knows that's the way to monetize Windows for the future. Building a better mousetrap to get people to want the product is SO last century. Now it's about "rope 'em in and hold onto 'em". I don't know about you, but the weight I felt lifted off my shoulders when I decided to stop trying to keep up with every pre-release and Windows Update they put out was not insignificant! I now have a lot more time to think about other things - like improving my own products. -Noel

An "excess tech" anecdote that loosely applies, as it is about the perils of having a not-quite-perfect fully electronic control system (but not about Windows as a control system specifically - yet): Back 10 or 15 years ago we had a travel trailer we used to pull with a van. We used it for vacation getaways. Since space is always at a premium and things left on the counter tend to get thrown around while on the road, we would keep things like cups, coffee filters and other dry supplies in the microwave oven when actually traveling. After all, the door had a good latch. This microwave was just an inexpensive small consumer unit that had been built into the kitchen cabinetry. Importantly, it had NO physical ON/OFF switch, just an electronic touch panel. One time when we returned from a camping trip I put the trailer into the driveway so we could clean it out, then I connected a power cord (basically, plugging a big plug into a big extension cord). When I opened the trailer door, fortunately just a few moments after having plugged-in the power, I found the trailer filled with smoke and the Microwave on and running! Some paper that was inside had been brought to the point of combustion. I pulled the power, and fortunately found that the fire had extinguished itself and had been completely contained inside the Microwave. The key here is that with a fully electronic control system, an appliance had behaved in a way that you would not anticipate: When line power was applied, it came ON unexpectedly and nearly caused a disaster. The take-away for me was that if I'm going to have an appliance that deals with real power - e.g., the ability to heat things to combustion levels - I need to PHYSICALLY manage the power, not just trust some commercial electronic control system. It turned out we were able to replace that microwave oven with one that had a physical switch. If we had not been able to do so, I would have implemented a convenient switch in the power circuit. It's actually quite difficult to find a microwave oven with a physical switch any more. Now we are talking about putting cloud-integrated Windows 10 in charge of such things. Have people thoroughly considered: Failures leading to destruction of property or injury? What happens when Windows takes an update and reboots while the oven is on? Hacking? We have already heard of web-integrated cars being hacked and stalled (or worse) while being driven. Somewhere along the way, the headlong rush into high tech changed from "do what people need" to exclusively "do what makes money for the manufacturer". And at the same time we have pushed past the question "can we control appliances with software" without fully evaluating whether we should control appliances with software that isn't even fit to run a desktop computer for playing games! (I feel a bit like Dr. Malcolm in "Jurassic Park" here) When will we hear of the first case of people being burned alive in their home because an operating system constructed in haste (and tested solely by other customers) mismanaged its appliance? -Noel

Not sure what, but SOMETHING in Win 8.1's Explorer implementation slowed down a lot. Select all the files at the root of drive C:, right-click, and choose properties. Windows 8 will enumerate them much more quickly than 8.1. I imagine that on a marginal system that could make the difference between Explorer seeming seriously sluggish or just mildly so. In my case, with a modern system and high performance I/O subsystem, the problem isn't really noticeable, so it didn't hold me back from moving to 8.1. But it really is there. As far as I can remember there has never been an "everything's better" release. It has always required a measured decision. Imagine if we could have an OS that has the best attributes of all the versions ever built. Think how far that fantasy is from the reality of "what have they done to me lately?" -Noel

IMO the "flat, lifeless" desktop stuff is all about needing to thoroughly flush the pipeline with something that, well, sucks so bad that they can then begin to improve it, doing basically the same things they did before. ANYTHING will improve it. Think of Windows Metro/Modern/Universal as just Windows 1.0 again and it all makes more sense. It's kind of a "set up to assure Microsoft another 30 years of success" kind of thing. In 2046, when computers are another 1000 times more powerful than they are now, Apps might even run well. Think about it; hardly anyone besides we geeks here ever thinks about how horribly inefficient and poorly structured the software today is any more. Yet it's certainly no more efficient than what was so painfully obvious "back in the day" when computers were so slow as to struggle even to composite graphics on the desktop. And you might notice that Microsoft even is trying to slow progress toward achieving that "1000 times more powerful" goal. It doesn't do them any good to have the tech change so fast that they can't rest on their laurels and rake in the subscription fees at all. -Noel

No, not that I can see. It only seems to affect Apps. -Noel

No. But I have a possible idea... A coincidence I've seen is that when I first turned off SmartScreen, the stock firewall, and several other unwanted security features, as I recall some time after bootup I saw a number of "security" issues appear in the Notification panel. I don't see those any more because I chose "turn off messages about..." in the Security and Maintenance panel, but maybe whatever process runs that would normally report them may be getting as far as starting up the App environment before determining I've asked it not to complain. The other thing I've noticed is that the SystemSettings App opens and just becomes Suspended at about that time. I imagine my Win 10 setup runs differently than most as it's optimized to be local account-only, with all Apps removed (including Cortana, OneDrive, and every pre-installed App BUT SystemSettings), all privacy selections jammed to max, and with UAC disabled. I'm sure that's not a config/combo that Microsoft supports. -Noel

It's normal, Jorge. As mentioned above, one window is the debug for DWMGlass and the other is for ModernFrame. Those will be removed when Big Muscle releases the software. But there are still a few bugs, so I'm imagining we'll see at least one more prototype version. Interestingly, if I do nothing after startup/logon, in about 5 minutes the ModernFrame debug window opens all by itself with the title C:\WINDOWS\system32\ApplicationFrameHost.exe, implying Windows starts up the App environment even though no one asks for it (or wants it). Probably there's something in the system that, if its network probing parts aren't cut off, would try to download ads. There's way too much... -Noel

Did you install the latest release? I don't recall that installer behaving that way. For me it went right in and, like you, my Classic Shell configuration was maintained. And of course it works perfectly in Windows 10 - not incompatible in any way (except incompatible with Microsoft's idiotic dumbing-down of everything in order to herd sheep). There's a setting that can turn the App universe black. I find it preferable for Settings, which is the only App I run. -Noel

+1. What My1 said. In summary: I have applied every bit of my knowledge and expertise to trying to bend Win 10 into becoming a workhorse, and I have achieved a measure of success, but once all of Microsoft's current screw-ups have been removed you find that everything they've done since Win 8 has been removed, and then you find some other things (like desktop usability) have simply been degraded - thus there is really no good reason to use Win 10 as opposed to a well tweaked Win 8.1. If somehow Win 8.1 weren't available to me (e.g., I buy a brand new system) I could probably settle for an App-culled, no-Metro/Modern/Universal Win 10 that needs reconfiguration after many of Microsoft's updates and still be able to get my work done. But then I would fondly remember Windows 8.1 and pine for the golden days of computing. And I would worry that I would lose even more functionality with each and every new Microsoft update. -Noel

Additional info: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn482072.aspx These hardware features have been built into processors since about 15 years ago. And I agree - Win 8.1, well tweaked, is IMO the best modern Windows system you can run - assuming you have, as I have, given up on the travesty that Microsoft is creating with Windows 10. It's what I've chosen to have on my workstation to run my software engineering business. -Noel

What topic? That Windows 10 provides the exact same indexing, without improvement, as prior versions that leaves Windows Search even more inexact and hardly faster than not having indexing? That's kind of the point. No improvements means Microsoft has abandoned trying to make the software we use better. -Noel

Uh oh, I feel a pet peeve coming on... I've always regarded any form of indexing as rather silly, myself. One of the first things I do on any Windows system is turn Microsoft's indexing completely off. Regarding filename searches... Just as an exercise I just searched my 2 TB C: volume on my Win 8.1 workstation, which has about 1.2 million files holding a total of bit over a terabyte of data on it, for *srgb*.*. DIR C:\*srgb*.* /s /b finished in 12 seconds. Using *srgb*.*, the freeware GUI tool grepWin (which I like) found all the files with srgb in the name in 22 seconds, with an advantage being that the results were put in a nice table that could then be sorted, used to open the files, etc. Also, grepWin can do regular expression based searches, exclusions, etc. Windows Explorer, with search term filename:*srgb*.*, took 3 minutes and 10 seconds. Granted, 22 seconds for grepWin is not "instantaneous", but for filename searches is there a real need for indexing to speed that up further? Granted, this kind of search is likely to be slower on a non-SSD-equipped system, but the file system cache does make up for that in large part. And I can't remember the last time I had to search my entire volume for something. Generally speaking I know what subfolder a file is going to be in and a search is instantaneous. As an example, searching my C:\Astronomy folder tree (3,959 files in 335 folders taking up 266 GB) takes less than 1 second no matter which tool I choose. Even Explorer does the job in a passable amount of time if you're not searching the whole volume. Protection from lost files is what backups (and good practices) are for, no? If you're concerned over the history of your files mysteriously coming and going, I imagine you could schedule a nightly job to store a full DIR of all files on the disk in a log file named with the date/time at regular intervals. That would also have the advantage of regularly loading your file system structure into the cache, which would facilitate interactive work... Regarding content searches... I don't know about you but when I search for something I expect the results to be rigorous. I'm not interested in finding something, I'm interested in finding ALL of what I'm looking for, or know the reasons why I can't. If I get no results, it has to be because there are NO files that have that data, not because "well, maybe that data wasn't indexed", or "maybe the index was out of date", or "maybe the index was corrupted", or "gee, that file couldn't be opened, so its content was not indexed". To presume that whatever indexing system in place has anticipated EVERY POSSIBLE SEARCH one could ever want to do is ridiculous, and there's NO WAY it could index everything on the disk - that would just be stupid. Even those that strive to index all possible printable words could miss something you desperately need to find that contains special characters. Maybe I'm just too geeky, but I'm as often using searches for special characters as not, and using regular expressions to find complex combinations of them. "It's fast, I don't care! It blows up in midair!!" My advice: If you're struggling so hard to find your data so often that you feel you need to index it to speed up the process of searching for it, then 1) you should consider striving to organize it better, and possibly 2) you should seek better equipment that can keep up with you. Keeping a separate index - which of course could be out of date - besides competing for disk access with your interactive work, reminds me of an old adage: "A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure." Indexing disk data for general computing use is, IMO, just a bad idea. -Noel

The workaround I've found for that is to shun Apps entirely, and set the EnableLUA registry entry to 0. After a reboot UAC is... GONE. Troubles such as you described doing what you want are... GONE. BUT... No Metro/Modern/Universal Apps will run. Depending on how you look at things, that's a bonus. But it does represent a serious roadblock because it essentially blocks the only thing Microsoft has worked on since Windows 7. As far as I can see, there is NO WAY to be completely rid of the subtle restrictions UAC places on you (such as you have described above) if you leave it enabled, even with the slider all the way to the bottom. That's the price Microsoft feels everyone should pay to be admitted to the world of Apps. This applies equally to Windows 8.x too, by the way. I have been running Windows 8.1 this way without problems since 2013. -Noel