xpclient

This month's Windows 8.1 patches reset all my customized window metrics settings and DPI scaling. Thankfully I have a .REG file of my customized Setup so I just had to import the REG again and log out to fix it. As for Windows 7, I no longer use it since 8.1 with 3rd party apps does everything better than Windows 7 and XP *for me*. Microsoft broke the method I wrote to make Windows Update work quickly after doing a clean install with Convenience Rollup and certain KB updates slipstreamed. The updated ISO/install.wim that worked in May and June 2016 no longer works in August 2016. Windows Update on a clean install of 7 with Convenience Rollup and other essential updates integrated still keeps checking for updates for HOURS and never finishes. I've been tracking Woody Leonhard's blog but to no avail. WU on Windows 7 is just broken now (I am sure purposely by Microsoft). Windows 8.1 Update 3 (November 2014) rollup on the other hand works beautifully - WU scans are quick, it runs extremely fast in a Virtual machine compared to Windows 7, and all the deal-breaking, unacceptable aspects of 8/8.1 are fixed by third party apps which do a better job than 7's own features ever did. For example, Classic Shell, VirtualBox, Bvckup, Kodi replace the Start screen/menu, Virtual PC, Windows Backup & Previous Versions, and Media Center respectively. As for Windows 10, OMG it's so horrible!! It's so awful I don't think I am ever going to use it. The latest Anniversary Downgrade removed the ability to search network files added to Libraries which was possible in Windows 7/8/8.1. Windows 10 is Microsoft's latest car crash that third party apps can no longer fix. "FREE UPDATES" will openly reduce your PC's functionality or slyly change it in a way that doesn't allow many things - ALL FOR FREE! Update: July 2016 update rollup is now mandatory for clean installs of Windows 7 after installing Convenience Rollup if you want to have a working Windows Update.

Personally I think everyone should steer clear of RipOff 365. Just stay FOREVER with Office XP, Office 2007 (best one with the classic menus reinstated) or Office 2010. Everything after is EXTREMELY POORLY DESIGNED and INSANELY BLOATED, and licensed in the MOST HOSTILE manner possible.

Thanks Tihiy for updating this! Explorer is unusable without OldNewExplorer.

Classic Shell 4.3.0 is out with improvements for all supported Windows releases (7, 8/8.1, 10). I hope it's OK to post a link for the change log, if not I will remove it.

There's also FileLocator Lite (free) and FileSearchEX (paid). The latter is a clone of the Windows 2000/classic XP Search UI once the dawg is disabled (Shameless plug: I helped a little bit with FileSearchEX's testing and UX feedback).

The agreement is now "You pay us for the product and we will change the terms any time we want to include whatever the hell we want with the product and with your PC."

Malware alert: Bob 10 Anniversary Downgrade Pro edition is now behaving like malware and AUTO downloading and auto installing random promoted apps from the Store because they SECRETLY changed some policy settings to make them exclusive to Enterprise and Education editions: http://winaero.com/blog/microsoft-locks-some-group-policy-options-to-enterprise-editions-in-windows-10-anniversary-update/ Oh well, I only test this crap because it can be forced some day and I want to be prepared. Back to 8.1 with Classic Shell.

This is the history of Windows servicing as I eXPerienced starting from XP: (I won't go into the era of Windows 9x/Me and Windows 2000 updating) With XP, the servicing mechanism which originated in Windows 2000, based on update.exe was improved greatly over its lifetime. User was always in full control. It performed fast, had no corruption issues or disk space issues. MS debuted their cool delta update technology which reduced update size. Also started were monthly security updates, non-security updates, and service packs but they abandoned service packs after SP2 before delivering SP3 very late. Overall frequency of service packs over lifecycle TOO LESS. With Vista, MS delivered regular security updates, non-security updates and regular service packs but quickly abandoned the OS itself. The Vista servicing stack is completely screwed up badly and suffers from endless performance issues, disk space issues and corruption issues. With Win 7, MS delivered regular security updates, non-security updates, but forgot occassional rollups and service packs after SP1. Finally delivered Convenience rollup very late but have NOW started regular cumulative update rollups. Overall frequency of service packs TOO LESS. Frequency of cumulative update rollups after they changed their update policy in May 2016 - TOO FREQUENT but can be handled due to small size. They should ideally ship only non-cumulative update rollups and occasional/yearly cumulative update rollups. Win7 servicing stack has better performance than Vista, and less severe disk space consumption issues. Performs horribly on HDDs, but well on SSDs. Occassionally gets corrupted and requires downloading the CheckSUR tool to fix it. With Win 8.1, MS delivered regular security updates, non-security updates. Started regular cumulative update rollups for non-security updates. Took a break from Jan 2015 to April 2016 but have now resumed cumulative update rollups. THIS MAKES THEM TOO FREQUENT and TOO LARGE because of their cumulative nature. Should ideally only be non-cumulative update rollups and occasional/yearly cumulative update rollups. Windows 8 servicing stack is self-healing, offers even better performance than Windows 7, and lower footprint. Performs well on HDDs, excellently on SSDs. With Win 10, you lose all control over updating completely. From Windows 8.1's updates which used to be in KB, the size of monthly updates has ballooned to 400-500 MB. WTH! The "Enterprise" edition has a lame "Download" button to start the updating. But you have no idea how much is being downloaded, what is being downloaded, when it is being downloaded, detailed download progress, skipping specific updates, when it is being installed. Everything is out of your control and mandatory. Your bandwidth is abused, PC resources are abused when you need peak performance. Performance of system while installing updates is abysmal and user has no idea what's happening. After big "upgrades" which are delivered as an entire OS upgrade instead of MSU updates, all your settings and configurations get reset, unwanted crap gets reinstalled again and desired configuration is lost. So MS can shove this POS down their @#$%$ until they fix it. These are my experiences with Windows Update with each OS. Update size (especially for rollups and cumulative updates) has also ballooned tremendously starting with Windows 8. Also we now have automatic app updates to contend with from Windows 8. They are not (yet) forced.

Well, whenever I used a free app from the Store, Bob 8.1 nagged me persistently to add payment information. And when I went to add it (to suppress the nags), it wouldn't accept PayPal without entering my credit/debit card (I don't have a card). So I won't be surprised if a future update to Bob 10 forces the user to add credit/debit card info directly during first-run/first time setup.

Hey don't freak me out Sparkles! I don't want to imagine such a world where age-based discrimination is widely prevalent. Next, they'll be wanting you to also be a fashion model besides a coder. If you don't have six pack abs and a hipster functionality besides knowledge of coding, you're fired.

Hi Tihiy, I request you to release the "Terminate Metro apps with X button" as a separate DLL for 8.1 users. It's so essential in 8.1 otherwise my Alt-Tab list gets cluttered. Possible?

To be honest, I am worried that once all the stupid people "arrived" and took over the industry via Facebook, , the tech industry has fallen into a trap of mindless conformity where the most popular technology wins regardless of whether or not it is actually better. New and different equals cool and hip. Fashion and social media play a big role in what is successful. This trend is so dangerously worrying and enough to drive a sane clever engineer to insanity. The "upgrade" was supposed to do wonders for your productivity, your workflow & bring new capabilities without wasting your time and past investments and the steady evolution and progress which happened in the past. That is why those top engineers were so highly paid. But that's not what's happening today. It's extremely disturbing. Big companies do changes and manipulate people so easily. Fanboys can't set their emotions aside and realize that the ultimate goal of exploitative companies is now only to profit even if it screws all your past investment, time and effort, and takes the product in the opposite direction. There is no legal protection against being screwed. Instead we have "anything goes" mentality and customers who accept nonsensical changes without any objectivity. I am finding it extremely hard to make sense of it all, keep up with the stupid and regressive changes. Look at half the people posting here on MSFN who say "Eventually you MUST move to <latest> whatever". Who said so? Why must we move to inferior technology? Just because you were stupid enough to not see how bad it is? I feel like the top management in these big companies is so insanely greedy and driven by money-based goals that they have no love left for the technology itself and how it benefits people. They are only in love with the ideology of making money by leveraging that technology. It's scary and I am not sure I want to be part of this stupid world where I find that bad, regressive changes are being so easily accepted and good, solid technology is being discarded because it was time for another "upgrade" cycle. If technology multinational companies got so rich when their users were fully informed, now these companies have unlimited scope to get richer as ignorant people are in the majority! It will create a big economic imbalance where the most undeserving are highly paid because they're in a position of power but cannot handle the responsibility that comes with it. It has come to the point where you can't say "No thanks". They will force "innovation" on you which doesn't really add value for you. And even if you were ready to take on the challenge of adopting the new thing, that's not good enough for them. They will actively ruin and take away what you were content with to force you to accept what you don't need.

The print driver can require SP3 for any of the following components that SP3 added to XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Service_Pack_3

Except for the Windows Open With dialog which is permitted and the Default Programs Control Panel/Settings app which is also permitted, no other app is allowed to change the default file associations to another program so this ability remains crippled. Microsoft claims this restriction is to put the user in control but it only makes things more annoying by forcing him to use the slow and awful Default Programs user interface. And if some program doesn't register with Default Programs, registry edits have to be done by the user to add that program to the Default Programs Control Panel.

Here's something new I learned about Windows 10: What’s New in Audio. Good to see some effort being devoted to solid, actual improvements, similar to WDDM 2.0/DirectX12 instead of silly features like Cortana and UWP apps, and the general crippling of UI choices.

In Windows 8 and Windows 10, Microsoft removed programmatic file associations so Open With Enhanced will work but it can't change the default if there are multiple programs installed to handle a particular file type. It can work to associate a program with a file type if there is only 1 app for 1 file type. To change default after that to another program, you must use Default Programs Control Panel, Settings app or the built-in Open With dialog.

Oh yes indeed I forgot about the maximum volume size that NT-based Windows has on FAT32 volumes. Although I also forgot how I formatted my 64 GB microSDXC card from Windows 8.1. I definitely did not use the cmd line format tool nor do I have any Windows 9xs lying around except in VMs. I just don't remember now. Must have used some tool. The built-in Format GUI of Explorer definitely doesn't show me FAT32 option at all. I must have used this tool: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm

The only place where I use FAT32 still is my microSD card because some apps on my phone such as the SAMBA server which mount it won't play nice with exFAT. I've copied several huge files and large number of small files to it under Windows 8.1 and haven't noticed any problems. It was formatted under Windows 8.1 using the default allocation unit size. Maybe you could backup the data and try formatting it from the newer OS? For example, I know that Windows 7 and later systems do proper disk sector alignment when formatting drives which is important for not affecting performance of SSDs, although for hard drives which don't have 4K physical sectors I don't think it would matter so much. But it won't hurt to format it under the newer OS and then use it from older OSes.

I am using SysInternals Process Explorer although I do love Process Hacker too and have it installed.

Oh OK thank you Noel for that info. I guess I must be running the version with the handle leak. There might be under the hood improvements but I see no major differences in the user experience of Windows Firewall Control between versions 3.5, 4.1 and 7.5. The older version that meets my needs has much better performance:

So much self-torture...Whatever for? I will use 8.1 till Jan. 2023 and then download the latest build of Windows 10 whatever it is by then and then completely turn off the Windows Update service. Malware can affect an unpatched OS but it can't be worse than first party malware from Microsoft downloading something of unknown size on your PC without any progress bar. Btw, I reverted to an older version of Windows Firewall Control by Sphinx Software (version 4.1 made for Windows 7). It works perfectly fine in Windows 8.1 and consumes less memory. The open handle count is also less for its process than the same app which is now bloated at version 7.5 (had 16000 handles open).

Yes I can't stress this enough too. One person's junk can be another person's treasure but whatever junk Windows introduced over the years could be turned off without affecting performance and long term stability. Now the updates are delivering nothing that is of value to me, adding more junk at a pace that I can't keep up with. I can't even turn off or control the torture that's been unleashed on me on a regular basis via Windows Update Bandwidth Abuse Services and it's continuously disrupting my working setup. That's a deal-breaker!! I didn't think I would find anything worthwhile in Windows 8/8.1 but I did. Now I am again struggling to find anything of value in Windows 10. Meanwhile they have made it extremely hard to migrate to it by removing the things of value that were present in its predecessors.

I agree with so many things you say Noel! Windows 8.1 out of the box is worse than Windows 7 but 3rd party apps can make up for its deficiencies. I restored the classic Task Manager from WinRE/WinPE too. Windows 8 only dropped file backup to ZIP files. The block-based incremental System Image Backup still exists but is hidden. Simply run SDCLT.exe as administrator. It will start System Image Backup in 8.1. If run without elevating it, it doesn't run and gives some retarded error. Or if you have tweaked Windows 8.1 to prefer external manifests which I had to do for high DPI display scaling fixes, then you can just take the manifest embedded in SDCLT.exe, copy it to Notepad, and modify it to say <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" and save it as "SDCLT.exe.manifest" in C:\Windows\system32. Then it will always auto-elevate itself. As for Office, I use Office 2007. I cannot tolerate the fullscreen backstage view UI in Office 2010. Plus, I find the change from the Office button in 2007 to the "File" button in 2010 a step backwards because it breaks Fitt's law of usability. UI elements in a corner or on the edge of a window are easier to target. I had got used to the Office 2007 button which from a usability point of view is a splendid idea at the top left corner. Also, I cannot tolerate the Ribbon UI so I also use three add-ins with Office 2007: - Classic menu for Office by addintools which restores the classic text-based menus and toolbars - Ribbon Helper which makes the menus behave like real menus (click once to activate, hover to switch) - SearchCommands from Microsoft's Office Labs which lets you find the command by searching! I cannot use Office 2010 for another reason. The region where I live (India) has extremely limited and slow broadband internet access (1 Mbps) and Office 2010's updates are very huge in size (especially the 64-bit version) compared to Office 2007. Windows 8.1 with the dozens of app fixes applied to it to make it behave runs just as well as my beloved Windows XP Professional or my 2nd favorite Windows 7. The 2 reasons I had to move from Windows 7 to 8.1 were: Bluetooth low energy mouse which only works with 8.1 and the DPI related changes which are better in Windows 8.1. I do miss some things about Windows 7 which 8.1 removed: Previous Versions, Virtual PC 2007/Windows Virtual PC, Media Center. Windows 8/8.1/10 also removed the ability for PCs to act as a Bluetooth audio receiver/sink. Meaning you can't stream audio from your phone or a laptop to a desktop PC's speakers using Bluetooth. Fortunately, I found alternative apps for Windows and Android which use WiFi and stream using UPnP/DLNA. Oracle (formerly Sun's) VirtualBox and VMWare's virtualization apps are more than a suitable substitute for Virtual PC. Of course, there's also Hyper-V if required. Windows 8.1 also removed DirectDraw emulation for many old games that I play so I still need Windows 7 on least one PC for that, otherwise those games run extremely slow. I do miss having Media Center on 8.1 - I don't have a product key that works any more. I had those free product keys for Media Center which all expired. But my LG 32LF6300 TV has a DVR feature so it's a suitable substitute I guess.

Here is another way to prevent GWX from running even if it installs: http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-stop-the-windows-10-upgrade-app-gwx/

I haven't had to shell out money for Windows ever since I started using it and activation was introduced in XP. Mostly I got free genuine licenses during promotions but I know a trick to activate Windows and pass all genuine Windows checks without any patches or cracks. It has worked since activation was introduced. Works differently for consumer editions and Enterprise whose licensing is different.