NoelC

Nope, I don't have Search or Cortana at all. I watched carefully. It's the Settings App starting in the background with the command line: "C:\WINDOWS\ImmersiveControlPanel\SystemSettings.exe" -ServerName:microsoft.windows.immersivecontrolpanel I'll figure out whether that's a scheduled task or what. It causes the Settings App to remain running, though Suspended. I don't want it running at all unless I ask for it. -Noel

No, the moment was not special, or even all that surprising for me. I've never migrated ANY of my production systems to Win 10. Just a test VM. I installed 10 temporarily on hardware once just to verify that my VM-based comparative testing was true to testing on real hardware, and it was. That machine is now permanently running 7. But really, people, 100+ million have succumbed to the "upgrade". Granted, out-of-the-box 8 wasn't really any better, but Microsoft trying to redefine "the new normal" to include what they want to do TO users (opposed to FOR) is simply going too far. 100+ million people need to demand their downgrade rights! -Noel

I need my boots for this... ****, that smells bad. So being called out on reverting peoples' settings resulted in their blocking an update then re-issuing it with a promise to restore settings real soon now... That implies they HAVE a copy of the previous settings somewhere. And really? Only THOSE four settings? Puhleeease, there were more than that. There's not even a mention of the fact that all removed Apps are reinstalled, disabled services are re-enabled, disabled scheduled tasks are re-enabled, System Restore is turned off, or any of the other things people have seen and documented. Everything any more seems like just a test to see how much people will put up with. Only when lawyers hit them do they bend, and even then, just as little as possible. We need to stop putting up with their crap, even a little bit of it! If you're on Win 10, it's time to seriously consider reverting back to your prior OS and sending Microsoft the message that this s*** won't fly! -Noel

Round and round the discussion goes. Bottom line: Big muscle is the only one with the skills and motivation to bring Aero Glass back to Windows, and his policies on using his software are his alone to set. We should all just be happy he's made this software available to us at all. Without it, I honestly wouldn't have given Win 8 or 10 a second look. Now, to keep this on topic... I've been testing a few days with 10586 (as of yesterday 10586.14), doing light work in Win 10, and I have to say I haven't seen even one problem with the experimental 1.4.2.506 version of Aero Glass for Win 8.1+. I'm using my theme atlas and also your ModernFrame and UxThemeSignatureBypass dlls. It all seems to look nicely integrated and it runs pretty solid here. Even though it's a debug version it actually improves desktop performance a tiny bit to have it in place, believe it or not. The only thing that has caught my eye - and it's most likely Windows' doing, not yours bigmuscle - is that after a few minutes of leaving Windows 10 just sitting idle after booting/logging-in, the C:\Windows\system32\ApplicationFrameHost.exe window pops open all by itself. Perhaps some App is causing ApplicationFrameHost.exe to run autonomously. If that's the case I have no other Apps remaining besides the Settings App. I have yet to be able to figure out why it's being run. -Noel

For what it's worth, I've measured both on hardware and virtually. The numbers are consistent either way. The OS efficiency is what governs the results. -Noel

I use Catalyst to load proper monitor calibration, so I need it running, but otherwise we're on the same wavelength. Happy Thanksgiving! -Noel

I'm sorry to hear you had to go through the disappointment that so many of us have felt. -Noel

PrEzi, thank you for your report! What graphics card do you have, and what new features have you discovered in AMD Crimson 15.11? I have a Radeon HD 7850 and Catalyst 15.9.1 (beta) and it's been flawless. To be honest I'm not sure I want to upgrade, since stability is of prime importance to me. I've always secretly hoped ATI would make 30 bit color available via "gamer" cards, but so far they have not, even though they offer a 10 bpp setting in the Catalyst Control Panel. Maybe this time? -Noel

They're clearly trying to write to young-uns with skills - yet who somehow never figured out that putting a really great Start Menu on the "family PC" running Win 8 is possible for free, and takes all of about 3 minutes to do. Yeah, skills. By the way, have a glance at gs.statcounter.com and note that Windows 8.1 usage has been holding pretty much steady for 6 weeks now. -Noel

SCHTASKS /query Note that I have manually disabled quite a few. -Noel

I made my own ISO from the ESD, which I happened to get, but it really sucks that Microsoft isn't providing the ISO image to users directly. It leaves folks who have had a failure of 10586 out in the cold for sure. You're not missing much. Excluding the Apps, which I will have nothing to do with, it's just like 10240 but broken in a few ways. -Noel

On my functional WIn 10 system (with which I log in with a local account and I eschew everything Metro) I've found that Microsoft.AccountsControl isn't needed either, and I have removed it. PS C:\TEMP> Get-AppxPackage -allusers | Select NameName----Microsoft.Windows.ShellExperienceHostwindows.immersivecontrolpaneland I have the following from the original list in this thread still running right now: RuntimeBroker.exe - Manages permissions / trust for Modern AppsShellExperienceHost.exe - Unversal App integration in the shell.sihost.exe - Shell Infrastructure Host.taskhostw.exe - running {222A245B-E637-4AE9-A93F-A59CA119A75E}. Most recently I have disabled (via registry edit) the Time Broker service without apparent ill effect - at least so far. I have also disabled Network Connection Broker via the Services snap-in. Task Scheduler still works fine, Windows Defender updates itself fine, and (when I configure the firewall to allow it) Windows Update works fine. I'm able to run the desktop applications I require to do software development work, and it even looks pretty darned good with Aero Glass for Win 8+ on the job. -Noel

There's always 8.1. I have a nice config for that. -Noel

Comparative Passmark PerformanceTest 2D Graphics Mark results follow. Make sure to look at the numbers as the bar graphs can be misleading (they re-scale): Win 7 Windows Classic Theme (No Aero Glass) With Aero Glass Win 8 Without Aero Glass for Win 8+ add-on With Aero Glass for Win 8+ add-on Win 10 Without Aero Glass for Win 8+ add-on With Aero Glass for Win 8+ add-on Win 7 with Aero Glass beats the pants off all the others.Win 10 is not faster at doing desktop stuff.Adding Aero Glass for Win 8+ seems to add a little performance.-Noel

The most interesting part of that is that almost no one is now questioning the fact that Microsoft is releasing in-place upgrades as Windows Updates - which is the REAL reason installed things are "becoming incompatible". Those "incompatible" things exist, of course, because Microsoft isn't providing what people want, but that's apparently water long under the bridge. It's the redefinition of "normal" that's the big story here. -Noel

It's now gone for me too. TimeBroker and Network Connection Broker have been disabled for over a day as well without apparent ill effect. I noticed Win 10 went all day without trying to make even one unwanted connection online. -Noel

As TELVM said, hope is fading (and the more we learn, the more it seems to fade), but as long as the lights are still on in Redmond they could possibly change direction. -Noel

Accolades notwithstanding , I just went off to do some more testing, this time with a fully updated Win 7 system vs. a Win 8.1 system, and a Win 10 build 10586 system - all with identical provisioning (SSD, 8 GB RAM, 8 cores), because I like to back up my claims with solid info, based on current releases. I set out to measure networking and disk performance, as well as raw data crunching power, so I retrieved the same rather large (~20 GB) software development baseline on both Win 7 and 10 systems from a local, subversion server with no other user activity. Here's an overview of all the times I just measured in this "practical usage" software development test. Times in Minutes:Seconds.fraction: Win 7: 12:50.0 Retrieve 52,814 trunk files / folders from SVN 10.77, 2.50, 0.94, 0.90 Batch build projects in GLEW solution 2.97, 2.66, 2.27, 2.27 Batch build projects in LittleCMS solution 1:47.54, 1:39.60, 1:40.93 Batch build projects within the main application 50.0 Delete 19.5 gigabytes of files / folders Win 8.1: 13:45.0 Retrieve 52,814 trunk files / folders from SVN 11.60, 2.73, 1.01, 1.01 Batch build projects in GLEW solution 3.64, 2.43, 2.14, 2.12 Batch build projects in LittleCMS solution 1:47.56, 1:36.70, 1:38.21 Batch rebuild StarFilter Pro 4 30.0 Delete 19.5 gigabytes of files / folders Win 10 build 10586: 15:31.0 Retrieve 52,814 trunk files / folders from SVN 10.79, 2.71, 1.04, 0.98 Batch build projects in GLEW solution 3.29, 2.54, 2.28, 2.23 Batch build projects in LittleCMS solution 2:30.78, 1:34.65, 1:35.34 Batch build projects within the main application 47.0 Delete 19.5 gigabytes of files / folders Notably Windows 10 DID slightly outpace Windows 7 in a couple of areas, and in DELETING the whole file/folder structure in the end. BUT... Windows 7 did the whole job, soup to nuts, in about 3 minutes less time overall. Honestly, I believe based on what I'm seeing above, that this represents a performance improvement in Win 10 build 10586 over what I have measured before in 10240. Reflecting on the above test, and in all fairness and openness, there's a factor out of my control that could contribute to small variances in the individual product build times: There are code signing steps, which require confirmation from an online time server. Based on what I saw going by the differences would have been only fractions of a second - I didn't notice the process stall, BUT... One of the projects in the main application DID take a LOT longer for Windows 10 than 7. This is actually encouraging for Windows 10's disk I/O performance, because it implies Microsoft may have optimized the file system some in 10586, though it implies that at least some parts of Windows networking are still slower in Windows 10. I will definitely do more testing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edit: More testing. Up above I mentioned: Same identically provisioned systems as above, freshly booted and allowed to settle for a few minutes, then Explorer instructed to count up all files on the SSD. Windows 7: 243,214 files in 67,780 folders 17.6 seconds First time (13,819 files per second straight off the SSD) 4.4 seconds Second time (55,276 files per second cached) Windows 8.1: 263,458 files in 44,584 folders 41.2 seconds First time (6,395 files per second straight off the SSD) 19.6 seconds second time (13,442 files per second cached) Windows 10: 214,567 files in 44,784 folders 47.4 seconds First time (4,527 files per second straight off the SSD) 28.0 seconds Second time (7,663 files per second cached) Since the amount of time needed to count up files in a Properties dialog isn't all that important, and I don't want to hinge on just a single Explorer deficiency, I decided to do a different operation that traverses the file system. I searched the entire file system for a wildcard file path () from the root using: DIR C:\*srgb*.* /S /B Windows 7: 243,214 files in 67,780 folders 25 seconds first time (9,700 files per second straight off the SSD) 8 seconds second time (30,000 files per second cached) Windows 8.1: 263,458 files in 44,584 folders 16 seconds First time (16,000 files per second straight off the SSD) 5 seconds second time (50,000 files per second cached) Windows 10: 214,567 files in 44,784 folders 26 seconds First time (8,300 files per second straight off the SSD) 10 seconds Second time (21,000 files per second cached) File system operations are at the core of everything, and they're clearly slower on Windows 10. The faster they go, the faster the system seems to respond. And I don't know about you, but I use Explorer a lot. Hence my skepticism at claims that Windows 10 "is faster". It strikes me that one reason so many people haven't flocked to Windows 10 yet is that not everyone blindly believes the hype that it's faster. I AM intrigued that Win 10 build 10586 seems to be the fastest Win 10 yet. Perhaps all my complaints to Microsoft that they're making false claims about performance haven't fallen on deaf ears after all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edit 2: Some network performance testing I have a tool called filecrc I wrote a long while back that just enumerates files and folders and "adds up" all the bytes using a CRC-32 algorithm. Since the computing isn't very complex, this is good for measuring raw I/O speed. If I use it to read nearly a gigabyte of data from a machine across the LAN (running Win 7), I'm thinking it'll give us an idea of how efficient Windows Networking is. Though many folks may not use a LAN, this will be important to folks who do. Since I saw a surprising reversal of performance figures (and yes, I repeated the test several times with the same results) I decided to test on Windows 8.1 as well. Win 7: 23 seconds Win 8.1: 14 seconds Win 10: 16 seconds Surprisingly, Windows 10 outpaced Windows 7 by a good bit here, but doesn't quite match Win 8.1. Since the discussion is about Win 10 vs. predecessors (plural), I'll go back and repeated the above tests for Windows 8.1 as well and fill in the above parts of this post with more results. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edit 3: Filled in file system enumeration numbers for Win 8.1 above. Saw that the DIR command in Win 8.1 outpaces both Win 7 and 10, and 10 is slowest. -Noel

Thanks. For my test system at least I'm not really that interested in having a long-term servicing branch, since I'd like to see what's coming. If I ever did put my workstation on 10 I might go that way, except that it's what I've already accomplished with the more functional Win 8.1. Rather, my goal is a minimalist desktop-only, up-to-date system. Given that Microsoft isn't really advancing the desktop, maybe these are closer together than it sounds. -Noel

Uh oh, a "my friends are better than your knowledge" post. You know I can't let that go. Windows 8.1 - e.g., file system access - is a good bit slower than Windows 7, so try to resist the urge to lump them together. It has crossed my mind that Microsoft may have reduced the performance of 8.1 so 10 would look better. Also, for certain other operations, such as a few things that happen with games, newer systems might be equally fast or even a little faster. We need not even talk about boot time, because Microsoft introduced "fake booting" with their new hybrid/fast bootup that's just stupid. If you're using that then you're not accomplishing the same thing as a real boot - not to mention being irresponsible with your system stability. As far a responsiveness in using the OS, consider that folks generally do not do objective performance measurements, but just state their feelings. I don't give a rat's a** about their feelings. I care about reality. Humans absolutely suck at gauging performance subjectively. Plus I think folks are often optimistic to find some good - some justification - in having upgraded. Let's not forget that most folks, in sharing their feelings, compare a used, loaded-up older Windows installation with a new, fresh installation that's not had all the baggage added - maybe even on a different computer. How many have installed systems afresh on the very same hardware just for the purposes of testing? Beyond that, most folks don't know enough to have tuned up the performance of their Windows 7 or 8 system to be as good as it could have been, either. Whether the out-of-box tuning of a Win 10 system is better I can't say. It probably is. I have not tested that, because it's irrelevant to me. What I've tested is the best performance that could be obtained from any given system. Ask your enthusiast friends some time if they regularly scour the list that Autoruns puts up for them and actually have disabled all the "handy" things their application software has installed but which they don't need. If they don't they're not qualified to comment on the subject of performance, since they don't even know how to maintain a Windows system. Ask them if they've timed real, equivalent I/O operations on their file systems on new Windows installations on the same hardware. Ask anyone who thinks Win 10 is faster than Win 7 to select all files in the root folder of C:\ and do Properties, timing how long it takes Explorer to enumerate them all. Ask them to do it twice, to test performance when the disk is involved vs. when the data is all cached in RAM. OVERALL, weighing file system operations heavily as they influence virtually everything to do with operating system responsiveness, and having tuned up each system, *I* found - through objective measurements - Windows 7 fastest, 8.0 is almost as fast, 8.1 a fair bit slower, and Windows 10 may be a little faster than 8.1, but still slower than 7 or 8.0. I crave a conversation above the BS level of "Ford is faster than Chevy", because performance matters and frankly hearing fanboys claim things are better that are actually worse gets under my skin. I accept that some may like Win 10 better and I applaud your flexibility, but don't try to tell me it's faster, because it ain't, and that's measurable. -Noel

Ah, so you don't actually need Microsoft.AccountsControl to log in? That's a net reduction of one package over what I ended up with. Bravo! -Noel

Likewise. And for me my older systems are perfectly stable (note the uptimes). My Win 8.1 system at the moment: My Win 7 system: -Noel

Yes, thanks mikedigitize. That was a brain fart. I have corrected the post. -Noel

ModernFrame.dll is not in the current .7z beta distribution. I see it's in the 491-64.7z file I downloaded on the 15th for build 491 but it's not in 506.7z. The ModernFrame.dll I am running successfully with Win 10 build 10586.11 is dated November 13 and is 1,776,640 bytes. I guess you have to keep up with downloading the various files provided by bigmuscle all during the ongoing beta testing to have a complete beta setup at this point. If you don't already have that ModernFrame.dll file, I don't see a place to get it (and my sincere apologies if I'm missing something obvious). I even tried piecing together a URL for 491 following the form for the 506 download (http://www.glass8.eu/out/491.7z or http://www.glass8.eu/out/491-64.7z) and there are no files there. -Noel

As much as I have learned about Windows, I can't answer your question about logs. I so rarely boot, and even so much more rarely have any bootup problems (can't remember when...) I haven't really looked at the bootup process in decades. I know Magic Andre (Ziegler) has a thread somewhere around these parts about diagnosing bootup problems - specifically having to do with slowness, but maybe it would yield some insight as to how to diagnose a failure. Maybe someone else can chime in and assist... -Noel