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sudalz

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About sudalz

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    Windows 8 x64

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  1. Skylake and newer processors will only run Win 10. http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-windows-support-policy-new-processors-skylake
  2. That's a very apt way to look at it. A related analogy would be to walking down a city street late at night. You need to be on the lookout for muggers and other unsavory characters jumping out in front of you from behind every corner. --JorgeA “Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.” The experience of Windows 10 users. Windows update is the "frightful fiend".
  3. THAT is the right question indeed! It used to be the answer was "whatever would facilitate professional users' work". Now it's "whatever will reap the greatest profits from consumers". This single fundamental shift is what has got us all SO upset with Microsoft's change in direction. I honestly don't know what really SHOULD be in there. Certainly Windows accumulated a lot of stuff over time. I'm sure I never used 80% of it, but it's nice to discover, say, just the right NET STOP command or Remove-AppXPackage when you finally do learn enough to want it. -Noel Until Windows XP, the user could tick/untick the features he wants, during installation. I wish they offered that option these days - that way people who want all that metro stuff and cortana can keep those, while others can have a slimmer system. (Believe it or not, there are people who actually like Cortana!) OK, but then MS wants some things to be installed forcefully, so they can make money by spying. Even in such a scenario, they could offer a choice of drivers and accessories that one can choose during installation. Why install so many drivers and languages and accessories unnecessarily? The OS setup environment could scan the system before installation, and automatically check only the drivers required for the hardware. That's a few Gb we are talking about.
  4. All of you are ranting against MS, and it is perfectly understandable why, but everybody seems to be missing one point - we are only a tiny fraction of their customer base. By "we", I mean those of us who are interested in the OS and its appearance and functionality. Most others (all my family and most friends, for instance) use their computers only for checking their emails, browsing the web, and making spreadsheets or word documents. The OS could be Win 95 or XP or 10, for all they care. (Win 8 was a shock for them too.) I'm pretty sure that your experience with your peers would be similar - do most people you know care about Aeroglass, or even know the term? Do they care that their OS silently updates itself? (Put that way, they might even think that's a great thing.) The spying issue is one that should trouble a larger number of people, not just us geeks. But then again, how many people have bothered to learn all about it? Most people would simply shrug and say that they don't really have any secrets, and do not do anything illegal on their computers, so they don't need to care. While I am as disgusted as you about the way the desktop experience is going, I think many of you are way off the mark when you say that MS is giving its customers a raw deal, and that it would hurt them to ignore user feedback and wishes. The vast majority of users, as I said before, do not give two hoots. They have figured out the way to make money in future, and that is by data mining and selling info about people, rather than selling a great product to those very people. I think, and the future will reveal whether I am right, that MS made a brilliant business decision in making Win 8 and 10, and unifying the OS to work on all platforms. It erodes our desktop experience, but most people don't really care, and moreover, it gives them a path to enter the handheld device market, where they had no presence before. We can rant all day, while MS laughs all the way to the bank. The only place where innovation in OSes is still happening is in the Linux/GNU/open source front. In the past, every time MS released a new OS, I would eagerly install it, and tinker and play with it, to discover all the new features, and to experience a different computing platform. Since Vista, there has been no such joy - there is nothing drastically new, and plenty to rue. If I migrate from 8.1 to 10, I know that I wouldn't see or feel any difference, except of course the knowledge that somebody in Sacramento knows me better than my closest friends, and they will share that info with ad companies and the govt and anybody else who pays.
  5. I haven't tried it myself, but from the opinion of the community, it is doable, but a bit of a hassle. However, as with most proprietary program suites, there are exact equivalents available for free and as open source on linux. Many popular Linux distros come bundled with Mono - a cross platform implementation of the .net framework. There are other alternatives as well, especially if your intention is to write .net applications. I don't have much knowledge of that particular program, but as reported on the net, people have had varying success with using it through WINE. By the way, VS 2015 can apparently be downloaded for Linux, so you won't need WINE at all. At least, that's what I understand: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingNET2015NETAsOpenSourceNETOnMacAndLinuxAndVisualStudioCommunity.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/11/12/opening-up-visual-studio-and-net-to-every-developer-any-application-net-server-core-open-source-and-cross-platform-visual-studio-community-2013-and-preview-of-visual-studio-2015-and-net-2015.aspx From Nadella: On the MS page for VS, there is a link to download the source code. They have a github page too. So I'm guessing that it can be compiled on Linux. Linux is the future of serious computing, even the MS CEO knows that!
  6. Not in the explorer shell, but replacement existed, JFYI: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/174201-windows-10-first-impressions/page-3#entry1088850 As a side note, you really should not use "nice" and "Unity" in a same sentence , and even using "Gnome" is debatable . jaclaz I wouldn't know, I haven't used either. I've only used KDE, and I love it so far. My point is that there are lots of choices, everything from appearance settings to the desktop environment itself can be changed. Heck, even the kernel can be changed. It's difficult to enjoy Windows or OSX after using Linux for a while, at least from the perspective of appearance and customizations. Also regarding the issue of choice - what should be installed on my system, whether I should update something, and so on. It's definitely a better computing experience, given that MS has continuously taken away user's choice over the past few years.
  7. That sounds very appealing. I've been experimenting off and on (mostly off lately) with Netrunner, which uses the KDE desktop. Is there a tutorial somewhere to customize that desktop to look like Aero Glass, or is the process fairly self-evident in the customization settings? --JorgeA On KDE, you can select the desktop theme "diamond" (control panel...desktop settings, or something similar depending on your OS). You get it by clicking "get more themes", and typing "diamond" in the search box. Then go to the setting "Window decoration", and do the same - click get more decorations, and type in "diamond". This gives you a beautiful theme, with transparency and blur, both of which are adjustable to boot! In "desktop effects", there are settings provided by KDE itself that you can use to change transparency and blur. Adjust both to your liking. In short, it is as good as BM's aeroglass, but you can actually change these settings from your OS' control panel itself. (Note that you need OpenGL for blur. That shouldn't be an issue for anything but very old machines. On some OSes, openGL may not be the default renderer, but you can make it so.) Like "diamond", there are many other beautiful themes that give transparency. Just type "glass" or "trans" to search by keyword for translucency or transparency. With the available themes, there are plenty of options for you to play with. If you don't like any of them, you could create your own! Or at least, there are many, many "fine tune" settings that you can manually adjust. The power in the hands of the user is staggering, especially for people like me who are used to Windows. And in the rare event that you still don't like what it looks like, you can ditch KDE altogeether and go for any of the other fine workspaces out there - Gnome, Unity etc.
  8. In my opinion, and it is simply an opinion, multiple desktops is a solution searching for a problem. I played with it on Linux, to see what it's like, and whether it is beneficial. It helps to remove clutter on one desktop, but then populating two desktops, and being able to use only one at a time, doesn't really feel like a solution to me. I suppose it is useful for people who use their computers for completely different purposes at different times - like say, only for their work applications and work related desktop files during their working hours, entertainment related applications and desktop files during their leisure time, game related files during gaming time and so on. I do not really have these strict compartmentalizations, so I don't see the appeal of multiple desktops. But many people seem to love it, so... Besides, I do not like my desktop to be fully cluttered with disorganized files anyway. There is a simple solution to reduce clutter - it's called folders. One can make a folder on desktop for work, put all work stuff in there and so on. Having more desktops doesn't really sound any better. BTW, isn't multiple/virtual desktops also a feature that existed in Windows some time back? Isn't it yet another "new feature" that was already present, and removed, like the start menu?
  9. Just because it's free doesn't necessarily make it a reason to use it. Falling down the stairs is "free", but you wouldn't want to do it, would you? I cannot tweak Win 10 as much as I'd like to. Data mining is an issue, not matter how much you tweak. Aeroglass simply won't happen, no matter how much you tweak Win 10. If you think you can tweak Win 10 to your liking, you should try Linuxes some time - then you'll know what exactly it means to be able to tweak an OS to your liking. Correct, nobody is forcing us to use it. The thread title is whether one should use it or not - so clearly the thread starter and others who responded already knew that. The discussion is whether to use it or not, NOT about how to avoid being forced to use it. I find it amusing that you have fallen for MS' "free offer". It would have been true, that it's a free OS they are gifting you out of the generosity of their hearts, if the OS actually brought something new to the table. If MS offered XP free to users of Win 98, or Windows 7 to users of XP, that can be called a free gift, because these products were radically new from the products they replaced. In this case, they are giving us the same Windows 8.1 with a few small changes, and a ton of data mining tools. You would not have expressed this joy of receivnig something free, if MS had advertised it as what it is. Imagine, if they told you that there is a "free" update to Windows 7 and 8, which would help them track you a lot better and collect your personal info a lot better. Would you have jumped in joy about that update, or would you say "No thanks" and hide that update? That's what is happening - it's Windows 8.1 plus spyware, "altruistically" offered to you for free. It is free for you, because you are signing away your right to privacy. You are offering to let them monitor you and make money by selling info about you, and that is what they are offering you this "free gift" for. That is all you are doing - not getting a better product than what you already had. "Thank you MS" indeed.
  10. Correct, DX12 is the one and only good reason I have found so far. Otherwise, it seems like a PITA, to install a new OS and then do a lot of customizations to improve functionality and to solve privacy issues, only to end up with nothing better than the previous OS. For the first time, I have not installed the latest Windows OS so many weeks/months after it was released. For the simple reason, I see no point. It used to be, once upon a time, that each new OS from MS would bring something new, with a lot more functionality, and a much improved user interface. Windows XP was a lot more functional and better looking than 98, Windows Vista was a big improvement (at least, after all the bugs were fixed - after SP2) over XP. But now? What did Win 8 have for the desktop/laptop user (have no idea about the metro stuff) that wasn't present in Win 7? I can only think of the ability to natively mount an ISO - again, something that many 3rd party tools had been doing for ages. To add disappointment to the sense of underwhelming, they also removed the beautiful aero. Windows 10 is Windows 8.1 + (inbuilt, native) spyware. There is no improvement, no new feature, nothing endearing. Except DX12 - and that does sound to be great, but only affects gamers, and that too when playing games that use DX12. That could take a while. Personally, this situation did me some good - I started to learn Linux based OSes, and now have enough proficiency in them to make one of them my main OS. There was a learning curve, but it was well worth it. I can customize it and tailor it exactly the way I want - I have already implemented "Aeroglass" in a KDE workspace. It looks better than BM's aeroglass does on Windows. That's the beauty of modern Linux based distros - you can change just about anything. I have Win 8.1 on another partition, only because there is this one game I play occasionally, that hasn't been ported to Linux. (It is playable using WINE.) Otherwise, now I can do on Linux everything I can do on Windows and then some more, and then some more.
  11. The only thing that's really not an incremental improvement would probably be the apparent ability to stack VRAM. Example: You have GTX 980 Ti's in SLI. Normally the machine only sees 6 GB of VRAM because each card is using its own VRAM. However, with DX12 this would become 12 GB of VRAM... apparently. DX12 definitely has the potential to make gaming on PC better, because of the ability to use two different GPUs. Most PCs/laptops have an integrated GPU that remains unused during gaming, if a discrete video card (Nvidia/ATI etc) is present. With DX12, some of the rendering, post processing etc can be offloaded to the integrated (Intel/AMD) GPU. That not only means slightly better video processing power, but also more video RAM, since the integrated GPU can use a lot of system RAM for video. So even if the integrated GPU is only 10% as powerful as the dedicated one, there would still be a significant improvement. BTW, integrated GPUs are getting really good these days, especially on Haswell and above.
  12. I just installed AG on a hybrid tablet-laptop, and I am pleased to say that it works on the machine in both modes. ie, when it is in laptop mode, or when it is folded into a tablet.
  13. @dhjohns : I think that's the intended behaviour. BM has stated that machine code is calculated from the hard drive and motherboard (or processor?) ids. As long as you don't change the hard drive or motherboard, the key would work. In other words, the key is for one physical machine. ie, one laptop or desktop or whatever. You can install as many Windows operating systems on it as you want, on as many partitions you want, and the key will work on all of them. But the key will not work on another machine, or another hard drive. At least, that's my understanding, and I think that's a good policy.
  14. I can confirm this too. The console window comes up saying that it is downloading symbols, but the download breaks before reaching 100%. In short, the symbols are not being downloaded correctly/fully. As @noelc states above, this could be a temporary issue with MS' servers.
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