Jump to content

Techie007

Member
  • Posts

    60
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Donations

    0.00 USD 
  • Country

    United States

About Techie007

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    http://techie007.3utilities.com/

Profile Information

  • OS
    Windows 10 x64

Recent Profile Visitors

2,433 profile views

Techie007's Achievements

45

Reputation

  1. You need the \Microsoft\Windows\TextServicesFramework\MsCtfMonitor task to be running for the keyboard to work in most Metro crapps.
  2. Whoa, now we're talking! You're right, the whole thing is literally a batch file that's extracted from the EXE.
  3. It is basically the combined number of "Likes" on all your posts. I've just bumped your reputation up to six by liking your post above. The more, the merrier!
  4. That's nothing new. I've had Windows Defender/SmartScreen attack Classic Shell, IrfanView and Mozilla Firefox in the past, totally blocking installation (and for Firefox, the download as well). At least they were blocked and not removed. But it was very difficult for even a person as knowledgeable as myself to get past. I actually had to copy the installer over from another machine in the case of Firefox. Thankfully it hasn't happened since, but it makes me wary of what Microsoft is capable of. This is nothing like Norton, where with a quick right-click of its tray icon, I can suspend "protection" so that blocked software can operate and install, and then create whitelist rules so that protection can be re-enabled. #WhenTheAntivirusBecomesTheVirus
  5. Interesting—guess I'm not the only one then. I have two laptops (a nice modern one, and an old Vista one) running Windows 10. Neither have received the upgrade yet. I'm holding out on manually upgrading because I want to see how well the automatic upgrade process goes. My modern desktop PC which was upgraded from Windows 8.1 and entered into the Insider Program at the beginning of July refused to get any Insider builds or the RS1 upgrade. A week after upgrading to Windows 10, I gave up waiting and manually upgraded it to the latest Insider Preview ISO. Still it wouldn't download later builds. I ended up downloading the RS1 ISO and performing the upgrade manually on August 4th because it wouldn't see that update either. But my cheap, 16GB tablet (that I almost never use) that had mere megabytes of free space got the update and immediately started nagging me to magically free up some space so that it could start downloading it. Had to completely reload it because there was no way it was going to even remotely fit. Turns out that it was out of disk space because of a huge recovery partition Windows 10 TH1 setup created. After all was said and done, it now has 7GB free—not bad at all. More than it ever had WIMbooting Windows 8.1 as configured by the OEM. So my nice laptop and modern desktop PC (which are fully capable of a flawless upgrade) don't get the update for over a week, but my puny tablet which could have been bricked by the upgrade (reading some reports of that happening on a similar modal tablet) gets the update right away. There is no rhyme or reason to the madness, is there? Too bad only us geeks can figure this crap out. The average user would have no chance, and would quickly end up on a nagging, out of date system. So much for the new Windows Update system keeping everybody protected and up to date!
  6. Haven't been paying that much attention, but I do notice that Windows 10 RS1 (1607 "Anniversary Update") now hits http://msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt instead of http://msncsi.com/ncsi.txt to test for Internet connectivity. Windows has used NCSI since Vista days to test for Internet connectivity. I wonder how many captive portals that change broke. Why change something that was well established and was working fine?
  7. Them rumor mills these days! It ain't gonna happen.
  8. Well that explains everything. No wonder Microsoft can't get the design right—the people influencing all the votes are hardly using their computers at all! I wonder how many of these "Insiders" hopped on only for the ride and free copy of Windows 10. Looking at Dona's (and Gabe's) Twitter feed, I see so many build junkies. I'd much rather wait for serious, tangible improvements to Windows, and help guide the process along with a number of truly dedicated users such as are here in this thread. Then gimme a build when you really have something new to show.
  9. No, not right away. It will enter guilt trip mode for a time before it is removed. No way (especially on those opted out with OptOut10). Hadn't thought of that. Currently, it doesn't look like it (it just says that the free upgrade offer has expired), but who knows in the next couple days. Don't give them any ideas! Nope, though I have the feeling there may still be ways to slip some in for free. There. I just made a few predictions. Now let's see what actually happens!
  10. I'm pretty sure it won't. First of all, the upgrade offer is good all day tomorrow on the user's local timezone. So the free upgrade offer actually ends as the calendar strikes July 30. At that time, GWX will switch to guilt trip mode. Given that it keeps popping up every couple of days now with the countdown, I won't be the slightest surprised if it automatically pops up again (at least once), only with the following message this time: At some point though, GWX will be retired by another Windows Update that will come though and remove it. Probably sometime in August. It will be interesting to see just how quickly they do it, though!
  11. Boy, that will sure teach them! Wait. . . you've gotta be kidding me! A mere $165,000? For a giant like Microsoft, that's just a cost of doing business. If forced to, they'll pay, and then it will be back to "business as usual". I'd be more interested to know exactly what the French researchers found being transmitted by Windows 10.
  12. Same for me. And then with Windows 7, when Microsoft removed the Classic style Start Menu, I went looking for, found, and started using Classic Shell. It was just icing on the cake that it works in Windows 8 and Windows 10 too. Funny how so many remember Classic Shell as the great Start Menu for Windows 8, when it was originally designed to replace Windows 7's downgrade! The feature I missed the most is the ability to cascade folders/folder shortcuts from the Start Menu. The fact that we can still cascade them from the Taskbar (where I resent the loss of space), indicates that the code is still present in Windows. I also didn't like the small, boxed in, click-navigation All Programs menu. If it weren't for those two shortcomings, I would have gladly used the built-in Start Menu over installing a 3rd-party replacement. I keep being reminded just how much of a compromise Windows 10's "Start Thing" is. The Classic Start Menu (with the cascading menus) is almost perfectly optimized for a mouse. If they made it detect intention and open instantly on horizontal motion instead of having a fixed delay on opening submenus, it would feel even more efficient and quick. Meanwhile, a touchscreen benefits from the user being able to arbitrarily tap anywhere, while missing the ability to point and hover. The Windows 8 Start Screen's All Apps view really took advantage of this and actually was a joy to use on a touchscreen (although I still think that having the Start Screen as a dual desktop was a horrible idea). But what do we have now? A tiny All Programs window with oversized entries that both shows a fraction of what could be displayed before (for mouse), while yet on many devices being hard for large fingers to tap accurately on. Either way, we have to endlessly scroll to see anything—much worse than the Classic Start Menu's condensed vertical menu, or the Start Screen's fullscreen expanded list of items. It's so bad that I'd rather use the Classic Start Menu on touch and the Start Screen All Apps on mouse over the newfangled "Start Thing" in Windows 10! Even with reversed roles, they are better than the compromise we have now. No wonder Cortana is so integrated—the user needs the assistant just to help them do what they used to easily be able to do on their own (like quickly finding and opening a rarely used program), before the Start Menu changes were made!
  13. Correct, 31 wasn't a typo. As I explained in my previous post, the 32nd bit is the sign-bit (minus sign) when using a signed variable to store the memory pointer. A signed Dword can express numbers from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647 (2 GiB), while an unsigned Dword can express numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (4 GiB). Memory pointers are supposed to be stored in unsigned variables, but older programs were not always written or compiled correctly because 32-bit Windows never even supported LAA (the use of the full 32-bits) per-process. For instance, Visual Basic 6 doesn't even have support for an unsigned Dword. Internally, the compiler and runtime calculate LAA memory pointers fine, but if I had to work with a memory pointer in code and offset it, it could get calculated incorrectly if LAA was manually enabled and I didn't use the 64-bit (Currency) variable in my code to handle the larger numbers expressed by the 32nd bit. This was never was an issue until 64-bit Windows came out on machines with over 4GiB of RAM and it was reasonable for Microsoft to enable use of the full 32-bit addressing range of 4 GiB of RAM on 32-bit processes. That's where the LAA flag comes in, for a 32-bit program to signal its awareness and support of the 32nd bit under 64-bit Windows. Under 32-bit Windows, using a signed Dword for memory pointers never caused any issue, because a memory address could never go beyond 2 GiB (31-bits). But by manually enabling LAA on a 32-bit process under 64-bit Windows, we are breaking that expectation. Which is fine if the program doesn't manipulate memory pointers or was coded correctly to use an unsigned Dword for memory pointers. The bigger point is that there is no performance to be gained by indiscriminately enabling LAA everywhere, and it will not make a 32-bit program to run as a 64-bit program. It will still use the 32-bit Windows libraries, still be limited to an absolute maximum of 4 GiB of RAM no matter how much is installed on the PC. Enabling LAA on programs that don't need it (programs that don't use very much RAM) won't accomplish anything, and enabling it on programs that were compiled/written incorrectly could increase the risk of a crash. The only positive usage scenario for that tweak is in the case of a correctly written and compiled program that uses a lot of RAM, but was failed to be marked as Large Address Aware at compilation time. Like VirtualDub and probably a good number of 32-bit games.
  14. Large Address Aware doesn't make 32-bit programs run 64-bit. Another simple program that can do this tweak is NTCore's 4GB Patch. Unless a 32-bit EXE has the LAA flag set, Windows will run it as 31-bit by default, limiting it to 2GiB of RAM. This was fine in 32-bit Windows because you'd never want a single process to use that much RAM anyway. But when 64-bit Windows came out, Microsoft raised that limit to include the full 32-bits. The problem is, some older programs are compiled using signed Dwords to store memory pointers. With a signed Dword, any address over 2GiB will appear negative, which can cause fatal errors in memory pointer offset calculations. Newer 32-bit programs that are compiled correctly can make full use of the 32-bits. But just like with the new DPI-aware flag, many compilers fail to set the LAA flag, and the compiled binaries are thus limited to 31-bits by Windows. That's where this tweak comes in, to modify the executable and set the LAA flag. I have personally benefited from this tweak with VirtualDub, which isn't compiled as LAA, but works perfectly when tweaked. It's a required tweak to use the Deshaker plugin on 1080p videos, as 2GiB RAM (31-bits) isn't enough. After the tweak, the limit is raised to 4GiB (32-bits). The flip side is that if you apply this tweak to an incompatible program, it will get more susceptible to crashing instead of less.
  15. Of course the average user wouldn't know to do this, but in such a situation, I would schedule the update for as late in the future as possible, and click [Confirm time and close]. Then I'd immediately run my OptOut10 program to cancel the reservation, clear the scheduled update, disable GWX and such upgrades in the future, followed by a reboot to ensure that the new settings take full effect. As of now, I am still not aware of an anti-10 solution that is as effective at bringing a system back from the brink after the upgrade is reserved.
×
×
  • Create New...