NoelC

The statcounter site metrics, which now show Windows 10 adoption leveling off, shows Win 8 and 8.1 - regarded by most as a failure - still installed on at least 2x as many computers as WIn 10, and Win 7 on 6x as many. Think about that. People have had to take exceptional measures (or exhibit exceptional patience) to avoid having GWX install Windows 10 on them (or to go back to what they had before). There will always be a slow rate of adoption based on the burnout and replacement of computer systems, but frankly the fact that the Win 10 system adoption rate is still curving toward level says that the public is not stupid, nor frivolous about letting Microsoft do whatever they want when they want. That seems a hopeful sign to me. You really DO have to build a better mousetrap, not just give away a cheap lookalike mousetrap. -Noel

If I ever generate one, I'll let you know how it goes. -Noel

I'm fond of this philosophy: If you see something you'd like to be better in the world, help make it better. -Noel

Hypothetically speaking... Consider that the author might run afoul of Microsoft legally if he tried to directly monetize the product. Or there might be local laws he must abide by. It's possible he knows the morality and capability of those in the "file sharing" world better than others. I only mention these things to illustrate that there could be influences that people here haven't thought of. Or it could just be arbitrary choice. In any case, it is what it is. Personally I'm very happy Big Muscle has put his talents into this software. Aero Glass for Win 8+ is what has allowed me to have a functional, stable, and great looking Win 8.1 desktop that suits my needs very well every day. I donated and I helped with the testing and feel proud to have been a small part of its success. He's done it as well for Windows 10, and my test system desktop looks great for it, but I can't see myself adopting Windows 10 any time soon for other reasons. Maybe after we see what Microsoft does with the November release... -Noel

Sure, there are richer icons, but with Orthographic Projection it always just looks a little "off", as opposed to items drawn with true perspective. That's clearly intentional. They're screwing with peoples' perceptions. -Noel

Why would anyone expect that? Oh wait, it's called Windows. -Noel

Perhaps the joke just left everyone flat. In all seriousness, that people write crap like "flat is better" is so disappointing and disturbing that it's hard to joke about it. Who would, without a nefarious motive, write that a button that doesn't even look like a button would be somehow easier to use than one that does? Paid shilling that is made to sound like scientific research does no one any good. Skeuomorphism is not a bad thing. Even the most egregious "bookshelf" made out of faux wood is fine. It gets the job done and it gives the App character. Anyone who can't stand looking at faux wood in a computer image is driven by an ulterior motive - or mentally disturbed. Unfortunately we don't have direct mind input to computers yet. As such, we're still poking at things with mice or fingers. The things that we need to poke at need to be recognizable as things to poke at. It's so damned obvious that it's hard to describe without going circular! What's a REAL SHAME is that if one makes a software product, it risks being perceived by the masses as "not modern" if it doesn't embrace the "new and improved" design concepts. I've been working on my own software products lately to try to find some compromise that makes them no less usable yet makes them seem "flatter". Frankly it's a waste of my time. I'd really rather concentrate on the substance of the product, not the look and feel. Just as an example: vs. -Noel

Yes, I have a big workstation. I purposefully overprovisioned it so it would serve all my needs for years to come (and in fact that's turning out to be the case, as it's now 2-1/2 years old and I haven't craved more yet). I believe I've only ever seen a "low on memory" message maybe once in several years of hard use. As one who has achieved reasonably good performance, should I not involve myself in discussions regarding system performance? I hope I'm not coming across as confrontational here - that is NOT my intent (and I'm sorry to anyone whose viewpoints I've challenged if they feel I have offended). I am actually trying to spark real discussion on this subject. Practical Windows performance interests me greatly. My pagefile, on the 48 GB system, by the way is 16 GB. Seemed like pushing the virtual address space up to a nice round number was a good idea at the time. How much it gets used is a mystery to me, and that Pagefile Usage Monitor you've posted, TELVM, seems interesting. I also ran across this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/archive/2013/10/16/tracking-page-file-reads-and-writes.aspx It seems to me that getting the setup right when the pagefile actually WILL need to be used will be even more important than on a machine with big RAM. I'm going to leave a Performance Monitor running and try some stuff, such as running Photoshop on big datasets. Here's what it shows with nothing much happening: Note that this is from Win 8.1. I don't think there will be a fundamental difference between 8.1 and 10, though it would be interesting to gather stats from both and compare. -Noel

Think of the $200 you saved on the Windows license. Seriously, I understand. -Noel

Another suggestion... Rather than reuse an old HDD, consider buying a nice (e.g., 512 GB or even 1 TB) SSD. If you're going to do a whole new install anyway, maybe this is a good time to start with better hardware. If you're not running Windows from an SSD (or even an array of them) you haven't lived. -Noel

For what it's worth, with a VM in a window sized at 1920 x 1200 I can see up to 200% on the slider. If I expand the window to 2560 x 1600 the maximum number expands to 250%. I agree that a slider that snaps in general is rather silly, especially since there is an advanced dialog elsewhere that lets you set it to any number you want. It's got to be hyper-simple so they can reach complete idiots. If, once they make it hyper-simple only complete idiots find use in it, well, then it sucks to be us. -Noel

I'm not sure everyone here would agree with that. Better in what way? Details matter. And I SURE would not try to upgrade a Win 7 system in place. That's just silly. If you MUST have Windows 10 for goodness sakes do whatever it takes to do a full, fresh install on a clean disk. -Noel

You sure it was stuck? I only mention that because from what I recall it normally sticks at certain percentage points rather than counting up continuously. Granted, if the data is all on your drive it shouldn't stall waiting for the network. Having less than 50 GB of free space could be a problem. I'd suggest making as much as possible available. At this point why not do a fresh, clean install from a disk or ISO? Back up all your data and format the drive during install. -Noel

I'm not having any problems with Photoshop, even when working with multiple gigapixel images. I don't see how faking a pagefile on a RAM partition could help that be any better. It's already perfectly responsive. A virtual memory type operating system requires sufficient resources to run. Those resources include both RAM and disk. Anecdotally on a 48 GB system that's settled into a long-term groove, after a week or two of run time (heavy daily use, plus nightly backups) I only see about 10% of the RAM used at any given time when no applications are running. The important parts of the file system are cached, things that need to be loaded are loaded, and it just hums along, responsive to my needs. I couldn't care less whether it writes to the pagefile as long as it's reliable, and I honestly don't see how it could perform any more smoothly. That made me think... Goals should figure into this discussion... For me, priorities are: Reliability - MUST not crash, MUST not lose data. Performance - must provide a highly interactive experience. Multitasking - must have the reserve capacity to run things in whatever combination needs demand. Low maintenance - must allow me to concentrate on what I'm using it for with minimal maintenance. I can imagine others might alter the order of the top few items, and spread or narrow the relative importance levels. -Noel

Based on disparities between the various stats gathering services, I wouldn't look very far past the first digit. Plus, don't I recall that various browsers now lie and give whatever client ID string is likely to make the web site deliver good data? -Noel

Some random thoughts: 1. I hope so. The more that's collected, the more the pile will grow and the more effort it will take to slog through the sludge to mine anything at all that's harmful to us. I hope it utterly clogs up all the servers with Tweets about what self-important people had for dinner and "social" networking BS spelled with "u" and "ur" for the words "you" and "your / you're".. 2. Computers and networks are getting faster to counteract the clog, and with no end in sight. The $200 Haswell-based small business server I purchased this year is phenomenally powerful. Just with residential Internet service I can download 14 megabytes per second now. Big Data processing capacity is already here. 3. The more that individuals with skills work to block data gathering, the more we will stand out because of the absence of data in our online portfolio. We will be flagged and targeted on the premise that those who block collection must have something valuable to hide. We might even be prosecuted for "theft of service". -Noel

You heard it here first, folks. Looking forward... Has anyone found anything redeeming in the pre-release code re: what's being changed for the first "service pack"? If Microsoft were still a viable software company, shouldn't we be hearing about fantastic new features about now? Surely thousands of software engineers ought to be able to code more than just additional privacy intrusions. -Noel

Thanks. Those seem reasonable, but the concept still bothers me. What happens when the RAMDISK isn't big enough? There WILL be times. Bear in mind that if you set up something like Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology) to drive the disk subsystem, you DO have write-back RAM cache between the low-level I/O and the actual disk. So essentially you have an on-demand RAMDISK. That's why well-configured systems using RST can achieve near 1 GB/second I/O transfer rates with 4K byte operations. Also, are RAMDISK drivers 100% reliable? I'm assuming they must be pretty good, but that would inject another variable into the system that's not normally there, and could cause a system to be less stable than one with a sufficiently large pagefile.sys in its default location. The virtual memory OS design is originally by the guy who did it for Digital Equipment Corp. before doing it for Microsoft. Dave Cutler possessed True Genius (he may still), and I would think twice (or maybe 256 times) before trying to second-guess his design decisions. I think it's also somewhat irresponsible even to try to even outguess the design goals of "some stupid program". While theoretically your RAMDISK should just be a faster version of a drive, it seems to me "some stupid program" would just use the RAM if it could. It's awfully easy to allocate RAM (PointerToBuffer = malloc(SizeNeeded)) as compared to writing to the pagefile. But I'm glad it works for you. Please don't take the above as a criticism. I'm really striving to learn here and very much appreciate hearing about how alternate configuration choices operate in the real world. I'd be interested in hearing specifics... Do you know of a particular implementation of "some stupid program" that writes to the pagefile? I can tell you this: With a LOT of RAM and very high speed SSD-based storage, I HAVE pushed my system (e.g., when working with huge Photoshop files) into virtual memory, where both Photoshop and the system are writing HUNDREDS of gigabytes to scratch and page files. It's actually somewhat difficult to tell when the point is reached where the system goes virtual, and I consider that a success. -Noel

What version of Windows 10 are you talking about? What error message? I don't get any pop-up at all from Aero Glass with Win 10 build 10240. And the product works perfectly. If you're expecting it to work perfectly with the very latest pre-release build, well that's a bit optimistic. See this page for info on that: http://www.glass8.eu/win_future.html -Noel

My opinion: Unix and its derivatives (one of which is OS X) will persist. Apple will continue to hold a minority market share, though will advance slowly. Microsoft will recede, while Google - for some reason - will advance with products that are no better than any others and deliver just as much adware. Those with skills seeking to do serious computing will struggle for a while but probably adopt a Unix derivative system in the end and be mostly irrelevant. They'll deplete their retirement funds faster than usual and may end up destitute or wards of the state. Those of us who still remember the legacy of will just fade away -Noel

Sad but true, Techie007. That little clock icon really implies "it's urgent" doesn't it? If they're Win 7 users they may even still trust Microsoft to "do the right thing" regarding engineering their OS, even in light of what's happened with Win 8 (not everyone has had the need or opportunity to skip Win 8 on purpose). I don't know how many folks I've met over the past year or so that said, "we've been through a bad OS, good OS, bad OS, so now it's clearly time for a good OS again". People are optimistic in general, and they've enjoyed very inexpensive software that's given them good value from Microsoft in the past. It's not unreasonable for naïve folks to continue to expect that. -Noel

Yeah, sure, but (assuming you're not living in a cave) what's the temperature out there? You COULD go walk outside (not a bad idea)... Here's my view outside my window right now... Can you see that it's 91F? What does that sky tell me about the hurricane that's just 150 miles away, and what it's going to do, which will affect my life over the next few days? -Noel

I don't happen to agree that running without a page file is a good idea (or that assigning it to a RAMDISK is reasonable). Of course, everyone has different experience. It's that experience I'd like to know more about. I suggest we talk about specific performance and specific system behavior observations to compare configurations. For those suggesting alternate configurations (other than just setting up a fixed page file on the system drive and forgetting it), what exactly is it you feel works better as a result? I've personally run NT in all versions, going all the way back, with a fixed page file created at the time of installation that's fairly large. I've never seen a downside to doing that. Don't worry about SSD wear-out. With modern SSDs it's simply not something you need to waste your time doing, assuming you don't have a tiny one (which would be silly nowadays, since big ones no longer cost big bucks). Frankly it seems a bit silly to me to put your page file on a slow drive, when there's a fast one available. That makes no sense. With the page file on fast storage the transition into using virtual memory - when that happens - won't seem so abrupt. With a lot of RAM your file system is well-cached. 16 GB used to be a lot of RAM. It's not really any more. It's the minimum I'd suggest having if you want to run any Adobe products. If you do professional work with Adobe software and/or expect to do multitasking, I'd suggest 48 GB or 64 GB - or even more. With Win 10 I'd suggest leaving it as Microsoft sets it during installation, and focus on optimizing other things. -Noel

As far as I know, there's been a clause in there that says they're allowed to change the agreement at will. I'm no lawyer, and I'm CERTAINLY not reading it again to see if it's really there, but I have a recollection that it basically says they're allowed to do whatever the hell they want. But I agree - it's beyond the expectation of virtually all Win 7 users that Microsoft should drop-load junkware into our older installations via Windows Update. Back when we all bought Windows 7 Windows Update was considered the way to fix bugs - that's all. We wouldn't have accepted the quality of the OS without their promise to keep fixing bugs! Now it's a malware foot in the door. WAY different than original expectation. What is the single biggest reason for taking in a Windows Update? Because if one doesn't then the OS will likely be compromised by nefarious actors owing to security vulnerabilities that have been in there all along. So on the one hand we have Windows Update to save our butts from Microsoft's errors, and on the other hand we have Windows Update to force us to swallow junkware we don't want. It's like a freaking chess game where we're each just a lone King, systematically being boxed in for the Checkmate. Someone recently posted this graphic, which is worth reposting: -Noel

A visit to weather.com seems to do it for me. -Noel