NoelC

And this time, per reports I'm reading, if you DO let it run, it presents a dialog with no obvious "opt out" choices. The ONLY thing you can do is close the **** window. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/15/microsoft_sneaky_about_pushing_windows_10/ -Noel

Malwary Being mindful of the ever-present possibility of being infected by malware and taking steps to prevent the installation of Windows 10. -Noel

For now. -Noel

No crime, and it's good that you took the time to report what you felt was a bug. It's just that you didn't take quite enough time on the details... And now several of us have wasted time... (emphasis mine) If you're going to try to revise history, you should at least consider changing the evidence. Not judging leads to lower stress levels for other readers. -Noel

I think the problem was that you didn't clearly identify that it's a game or anything other than a desktop background you're showing. A quick glance through this thread shows others reporting the watermark text on things other than just the desktop, so it might be a bit redundant at this point. Regarding your rather belligerent statement above... You act as though someone has wronged you, and that you have something to complain about - when in fact you have complete control over what to do about the watermark. If the watermark really bothers you in your game, either just stop Aero Glass while playing (disable Aero Host and close the DWM window) or remove the beta Aero Glass for Win 8+ entirely until such time as a Windows 10-compatible version is fully released. You clearly feel you get value from the software, since you're trying to use even the pre-release version. So once it's released consider donating the price of a good beer or a lunch to the developer; he deserves our support for making our desktops more tolerable each and every time we use them. Try to understand that nothing is certain in this world, and that not everything is going to be stated just the way you like it. If you'd rather not donate, which is entirely your prerogative, and the watermark/reminders bother you that much, just leave the Aero Glass for Win 8+ software off your system and use the UI that Microsoft has provided out of the box. Your stress level might be lowered. -Noel

For what it's worth, testing shows that disabling Aero Glass and composition in Win 7 (e.g., by switching to the Classic "theme", which is actually a lack of theme) reduces performance fairly significantly. It's because the GPU is no longer used and the CPU has to do more of the busy work of pushing pixel data around. It's a misnomer than GPU-accelerated desktop composition (and Aero Glass) negatively affects performance. It's one of those odd things in life that "sounds plausible" but is in fact exactly wrong. And thus Microsoft uses it to spread FUD. -Noel

Any chance you've configured the 3 month delay? My advice: Don't look forward to the 10586 in-place upgrade with eager anticipation. It basically does nothing new, except to make you revisit all your tweaks and settings (privacy included).. -Noel

But not impossible. Microsoft seeks to improve the odds with every move they make. -Noel

Sorry, I should have actually tried it beforehand. On my system DISM reports 10.0.10586.0 as well. I guess they forgot about the servicing database. Not exactly mature, maintainable OS software, eh? Microsoft: Putting the Epic in Fail since 2015 -Noel

Sure, but let's not confuse cause and effect, the "unfortunate" OSes *need* tweaking exactly because they are "unfortunate", we could use "malformed at birth", but "unfortunate" conveys (at least to me) the right amount of pity and sorrow for the poor, little OS. All operating systems have always needed tweaking to be the best they can be. You seem to be implying there was a fundamental threshold somewhere (XP?) before which it wasn't needed. It's all just a matter of degrees. Simpler operating systems needed simpler tweaks in simpler times. We're not there any more. But I understand what you're saying, and agree that it's getting worse as time goes on. Plastic surgery works wonders, but it only goes so far. It can't make an infant into a supermodel. The frame just isn't there and a functional, elegant exoskeleton is actually quite difficult to engineer. Win 8 preserved enough of Windows' innards to recover functionality. Unfortunately, with Win 10 Microsoft appears to have moved from the soft tissue to chopping away at the bones. I have not found it possible through tweaking to make Windows 10 as powerful as the best tweaked Windows 8.1 system. They need to keep the robust inner skeleton of Windows intact - that infrastructure is required to build a robust App environment, and is the same one tweakers/augmenters rely upon to turn the system into something better. Trouble is, they don't seem to have the talent any longer to even recognize what that infrastructure is to maintain it, let alone (gasp) improve it! And so we backslide. When a building is to be replaced the architects don't try to build a whole new one starting on the 45th floor. They have crews demolish it and dig out the foundation. The point is that building something for the future requires architecture and adept implementation. -Noel

Hm, so your system thinks it's on 10586.0 still - implying you haven't succeeded at even one of the cumulative updates. Seems to me that's starting to look like Microsoft's fault; a failure of the "cumulative" part of the cumulative update strategy. Perhaps they're not testing with a system that hasn't been kept up to date with every intermediate revision (seems like they do less and less testing any more). I suppose there's the possibility the next cumulative update might just work. For what it's worth, the current version is still 10586.29 (as of last night), which of course is what KB3116900 is supposed to bring to you. Unfortunately I don't know what else to suggest to help you get through getting it updated, save for radical things like trying a complete Refresh (reinstallation of the OS as an in-place upgrade over itself) and seeing if that helps. That stands to cause you to lose a whole bunch of configuration changes of course, just like the initial installation. [editorial] Now you have me thanking my lucky stars that I have managed to keep my system up to date successfully. Every time Microsoft chooses to make big changes and ignore the past, they essentially choose to throw out the work their predecessors have done to smooth over wrinkles and provide an actual working, recoverable OS environment. That they insist on forging ahead anyway, changing ever more parts without first working any of these kinks out is the real problem. It's like building a house on a crumbling foundation. Sooner or later the walls simply can't be built any higher. Clearly the idea of a cumulative update is that they can cover up their screw-ups (implying that screw-ups are then more tolerable, which they seem to want to take advantage of), but the update process itself has to work! Near as I can tell NOTHING in Windows 10 works flawlessly or robustly. That's because good network-integrated software is actually difficult to write, and it has to be more robust and fault-tolerant than most programmers think. Indeed an OS itself has to be more fault-tolerant and defensive than run-of-the-mill software. It requires actual engineering, SERIOUS engineering, not just hacking. [/editorial] -Noel

Literally, "immersive" has always made me envision that scene in "Rambo" where they were torturing our hero by hanging him in the cesspool. -Noel

Actually, I may be wrong; didn't they have a pre-Edge App incarnation of Internet Explorer. I've never ever used Apps in Win 8.x except WAY back in the pre-release days, so I guess I forgot. Never mind my earlier comment. -Noel

OK, I can confirm that this service was the sole source of connection attempts to 131.253.61.x, which is apparently a bank of Microsoft logon servers. Privacy aficionados note: It was attempting contacts with the above mentioned servers even though I exclusively log in with a local account, and don't even use a Microsoft ID to log onto things on that test system with a web browser. Even better news: I've found and disabled the equivalent service in Windows 8.1: Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant Enables user sign-in through Microsoft account identity services. If this service is stopped, users will not be able to logon to the computer with their Microsoft account. -Noel

I couldn't use it to remove the "Store" entry on Win 8.1 though. Maybe in the next release. And for some reason Internet Explorer shows up under Start > Programs > Apps. It's not an App. -Noel

Been there, watched that. SystemSettings.exe and its App support cronies just start. Good point, though... I should be able to tell if taskeng.exe starts. I'll have to stage that and watch. It's kind of a pain waiting 5 minutes, though. Edit: Left the system idle 5 minutes. The process taskeng.exe did NOT start. So now I know where I no longer have to look. -Noel

I don't have any idea about what might be considered evil about it, but I can relate this one piece of wisdom: For graphics type operations, where things aren't approaching the 4 gigabyte address space limitations of 32 bit software, the EM64T instruction set (Intel's name for AMD64) gets things done in x64 software about 10% to 15% more quickly than 32 bit software. I wonder if anyone's compared the performance of Itanium instructions with x64, given the same source code. -Noel

Thanks for the ideas, but... Yeah, I even tried starting Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) that way, but the real issue is that in order to identify whatever job is running it I really need to see the last run time, and none of these approaches reveal the hidden Task Scheduler entries - assuming it even IS done through the Task Scheduler. Perhaps Microsoft builds their own special version to access those, or maybe it's just a special command line option I don't know of yet... -Noel

Though tweaked, they're somewhat less "unfortunate" and can actually be very nice. Except Windows 10. Drop the "very nice" for that one. -Noel

After a fair bit of testing on Windows 10 10586.x, I can report these things: 1.4.2.506 DEBUG Beta Test Report Test Platform: Windows 10 version 10586.various VMware Workstation 11 Virtual Machine Run at various times in a VMware window and full-screen on one to three monitors 1. I have seen no instability whatsoever. It works solidly well. 2. The code is efficient. Benchmark testing without and with Aero Glass for Win 8+ installed (in Win 10) shows that desktop operations actually seem to pick up a tiny bit of speed (less than 1%). It might be just lucky variations between runs, but I've done it several times and in every case with Aero Glass for Win 8+ installed the numbers are slightly higher. 3. So far I have seen no trouble after each of the cumulative (and numerous) Windows post-10586 Updates. It seems either Microsoft isn't changing important things in DWM much or the code to compensate in Aero Glass for Win 8+ has gotten pretty seamless. 4. On (rare) occasion after bootup/logon I have seen Aero Glass working but somehow fail to load my C:\AeroGlass\SquareCorners10586.png theme atlas file. The controls just look plain - Win 10 standard, but with translucency. A quick visit to the Aero Glass for Win 8.x GUI and typing a space after the theme atlas image file name, then deleting it again causes the successful load of the theme atlas resources. I am using Current User Settings, not System-wide Settings, so maybe there is a tiny window there reading user settings. I'm going to try switching to system-wide settings and see if this changes. 5. For higher display size levels (e.g., 125% or higher) the ModernFrame caption button controls don't fill the title bar vertically (and the title is offset upward as well). For me this is a non-problem, as I use a size-reduced title bar at 100% anyway, but for those using high DPI displays this could be disconcerting. I have not yet tested it on my Windows 8.1 workstation, as Aero Glass for Win8.1+ 1.4.1.240 x64 works absolutely perfectly for me and I have little desire to change that. -Noel

Though I haven't seen it personally, there is some evidence online that error code 0x80240009 can come from there being another, conflicting operation in progress. Have you tried installing it *right* after rebooting? Also, does your system pass an SFC /SCANNOW check/repair? -Noel

That's not terribly different than the differences between the systems that I saw and documented. It's pretty clear that - other than image rendering, which does matter - the Win 7 Aero Glass UI is generally quicker, which is surprising. Did you find, as I did, that Win 10 is overall a bit slower than Win 7 with regard to file access as well? Arguably, if you're trying to work with the system, that will matter more than UI responsiveness. By the way, one thing that's often influencing anecdotal reports in all this is that the UI (of all Windows systems) has many places where there are built-in delays - for example there's a delay that kicks in when you hover over a menu or Taskbar button. The thing is, those delays can be shortened to make any system feel more responsive. The important factor is that once those delays are tweaked, Win 7 seems (to me at least) to feel a little more responsive than a similarly tweaked Win 10. Once you move the arbitrary delays out of the way, then you're relying on actual performance. There's no end to the trickery coming from Microsoft, designed to influence people's tastes. That's easy: You have a graphics card, I don't. My Haswell system is running its display from the on-board GPU in the processor - which is a low-end Intel Pentium G3220 with Intel® HD Graphics. That BOTH our systems, with entirely different display drivers, are more 2D display-efficient overall in Win 7 says something about Win 10, and especially that the removal of Aero Glass has nothing to do with performance. -Noel

Thought I did, but had 13.4 and see a 13.5 has been released in October. Thanks for the tip. Not sure what else to look for in there, though. Hm, 13.5 locks up sometimes on using a mouse wheel to scroll. Over the past months I have disabled a helluva lot of scheduled items, but whatever starts Settings must be scheduled - possibly with a hidden entry - or be built-in to the code itself somewhere. It starts on a system being left alone after some minutes (maybe 5 minutes) of being booting/logging in. I just did a little test - it looks as thought it might be triggered by an "idle computer" condition, since I moved the mouse around occasionally after startup/logon for a few minutes and didn't see the issue. Only after having left it completely alone for about 5 minutes did I see a number of things start, including the Settings App. Maybe it's a side effect of one of those - e.g. the .NET Framework recompilations. Edit: Nope, not .NET since disabling it does not prevent Settings from starting. I noticed that there's an entry logged in the Applications and Service Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Apps >Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational log stating: The app windows.immersivecontrolpanel_cw5n1h2txyewy!microsoft.windows.immersivecontrolpanel was activated for the Windows.Launch contract successfully. I guess I'll look again carefully through the Task Scheduler specifically for things set to trigger on idle. Autoruns seems to show all the entries, including hidden ones, but (unless I'm missing something) it doesn't show things like trigger conditions or last run times. Note to self: Need to find or invent an "unhide all Task Scheduler entries" tool so ALL of them can be seen and manipulated through the normal Task Scheduler interface. -Noel

I have Big Muscle's Aero Glass beta, which pops open a debug window for ApplicationFrameHost.exe. This happens a few minutes after I log on. I figured out that the Settings App is being started, then left to run in the background, Suspended. I believe others have reported this happening too. I might not have noticed it save for the debug window. What I can't figure is why the Settings App needs to be auto-started at all. My system is plenty fast enough to start it manually in an eyeblink when and if I need it, and frankly I don't like things running that don't need to be running. Certainly not bloated, ridiculous App software. It's bad enough to have to run it at all, but once configured the system doesn't need to be reconfigured very often. I already have a LOT of stuff disabled in the Task Scheduler, and I've not been able to find any reason for Settings to be started. Ideas? -Noel

Heh, seems to me to be more evidence that Microsoft is trying to morph older systems into becoming Windows 10. Probably they saw that the usage rate of Windows 8.1 has been flat for something like 2 months now. That would be cool except that Windows 10 is nothing special, technically. A lot of folks, me included, regard the things it does as no better and in some cases worse than what's already been available. The Start Menu is a good example - when compared to 3rd party tools like Classic Shell, for example. In any case, this change seems irrelevant to me - Classic Shell does everything I need in a Start Menu, and has since wayyy back. -Noel