fysics

Tihiy, if you could enable blur behind the taskbar similar to windows 7 you would forever be my hero. Edit: well now it seems to have a blur so disregard this post

There is apparently an option for it now: http://winaero.com/blog/edge-button-internet-explorer-windows-10/ You can also remove the smiley button (finally): http://winaero.com/blog/smiley-button-internet-explorer-windows-10/

I'll repost this one.. It changes the behavior of a single click on stacked programs in the taskbar to open the most recent program in the stack, and subsequent clicks cycle through them. It reduces the number of clicks to switch programs from two to one. You can still hover on stacked programs to bring up their thumbnails. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00;Change the behavior of single clicks on the taskbar[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]"LastActiveClick"=dword:00000001

Anything over HTTP is cached by Cloudflare automatically when enabled. HTTPS can be cached if you pay them (since they have to do some certificate wizardry to make it work). As long as updates are served over HTTP on port 80 and not FTP, etc. Cloudflare will handle it.

This update downloaded in the background and began installing while I was out for about 45 minutes. I came back to the the windows logo and a percentage. It was jarring, to say the very least.

Removing and reinstalling the network device in device manager resets many of the settings for that device. When uninstalling the device, it will ask you if you want to uninstall the relevant driver from your PC. I always opt to not remove the driver files, for obvious reasons.

lmao. The idea is that you get SiB into the hands of students who otherwise would be uninterested in it. I am personally a student, but I also own a SiB license. I've tried other Start menu replacements, but SiB is far far superior. The cost is not prohibitive by any means. The goal would be to get SiB into the hands of corporate IT managers, using new hires from college as the vector. Tihiy could then gain licenses for deploying it across an entire IT infrastructure as it upgrades to Windows 8/8.1/9 inevitably. The current marketing strategy focuses primarily on individual consumers who are unsatisfied with Windows 8's lack of a start menu, and less on corporations who are reluctant to make the switch to Windows 8 despite its advantages. I feel like there's a lot more money available in the corporate market, due to sheer volume.

Another option could be an alternate license type for Students / Educational institutions, requiring registration with a *.edu address. The *.edu address could then be displayed prominently on the start menu to prevent abuse of the license type (such as distributing it to friends or on torrent sites). Developers of very expensive software packages often offer discounts to students or educational institutions as a marketing strategy. Students become familiar with the software while at college and promote it to friends, who then enter the workforce in many different companies and pitch it to their employers, who pay full price.

7-zip provides a public domain LZMA SDK here which would probably be helpful if someone were to implement it.

Unfortunately, all of this is way beyond my programming abilities, or I'd be doing it as we speak.

@NoelC: The only nag I was referring to with FastPictureViewer is the one you get when you don't pay for it. I don't do enough with graphics or photography to justify the expense. Likewise, i'm not too picky about my colors with SageThumbs as long as I'm not getting color banding, moire patterns, etc. (Incidentally, I was getting really bad color banding, but it was my Intel drivers doing it.) Recent versions of WinZip look better, but those improvements are simply cosmetic. If I remember right, it's implemented a ribbon interface and the icons are nice looking. I get the impression they're just milking the name recognition for all its worth, which is lessening every year. I was looking through the registry yesterday for an unrelated reason and came across the CompressedFolder hive in HKCR. (The one that describes the default "zip" implementation.) A lot of the information in there was mundane, but there was a DropHandler and a StorageHandler. I think these two, together, are the root of the deep-integration. My guess is the StorageHandler allows explorer to display and access the contents of the archive. The DropHandler either handles dropping files out of the archive, or dropping files onto the archive. (Now that I think about it, it's probably the latter, which makes it another fairly mundane key.) This proposal for deep integration is not purely cosmetic. With the built in zip handler, click-and-drag events are able to extract files from archives in a single copy. With tools like 7-zip, WinRAR, etc. they're forced to first extract the contents to a temporary folder, and then copy them to their final destination, roughly doubling the time it takes to extract files from an archive in an I/O constrained environment (as opposed to a CPU constrained environment). If I understand correctly, it is done this way to bypass certain technical limitations in the way click and drag events are handled when dragging out of an arbitrary exe and into an explorer window (or the desktop). This is especially disappointing, because the 7zip engine blows away others on benchmarks for both compression ratio and performance. (see here, for example.) If StorageHandlers function in the way I think they do, the technical limitation requiring two file copies would be nonexistant, and explorer could handle copy operations to and from archives natively. (Or third party tools like TeraCopy could probably be used.)

With so many people around this forum doing such a great job seamlessly deep-integrating features into Windows (bigmuscle, tihiy, et al.), I figured it was the best place to pose the challenge. I would imagine new file compression formats could work similarly to how codecs work for audio / video / images. Whether the underlying API calls are there to make them function as such in practice... I don't know. (@NoelC: Speaking of FastPictureViewer: I've recently started using SageThumbs, which is similar, but free and nag-free. You should check it out.)

Premise 1: Windows has built in support for zip files that's able to open them natively within explorer.exe via what appears to be a shell extension. Premise 2: Windows also has built in support (as of 8) for mounting disk images of a few different formats, also via what appears to be a shell extension in addition to a driver. It operates slightly differently, by mounting it as a virtual device, but the functionality is similar. However, all file archiving solutions I've seen which support additional archive formats (WinRAR, 7-zip, WinACE, PeaZip, etc.) operate entirely differently. They create their own GUI, a context menu entry for extracting files (which simply executes the program with the proper parameters), and so on. They offer a comparatively looser integration into the Windows GUI than what the native zip handler offers. Question: Would it be possible to add support for additional archived file formats at a lower level in the OS such that either the existing explorer/zip implementation could be used for other formats, or alternatively, archives could be mounted as disk images?

Have you installed drivers for your computer?

Have you tried running the config app as administrator?