Microsoft Windows 10 thread

[dslater]

That is something entirely different, Frank. While the 'feature' works, it is pretty much useless in practice.

On all earlier Windows version, the active window was clearly indicated by the changed colour of its *title* bar. Plus the appearance of the title text changed to indicate it was active.

You can turn this back on. Right-click on desktop, choose "Personalize". In the Personalization window, choose Colors. Scroll down and you will see a button labeled "Show color on Start, taskbar, action center, and title bar" Turn this on, and your active window title bar will be colored again. Unfortunately, so will the other components mentioned which you may not like, but at least you have some kind of option. You'll have to decide if indicating the active window is worth changing the color of these other components as well. Personally, I find the result ugly and I hadn't noticed the change to the active window title bar behavior until I read this thread, so I'll probably leave it turned off.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

The "improvement" doesn't work very well as in practice, one gets the same appearance of [nearly] all title bars, only with the title text being faded out as the window is inactivated.

The range of colours to be assigned is very limited as well and there is no gradient fill (although the support variables are found in the Registry ...). Also not mentioned is that if you try to tweak the title bar settings following the advices floating around on web sites, every time you toggle the  "Show color on Start, taskbar, action center, and title bar" option, ALL your modifications are lost.

However, the nasty "all white" title bars have gone. A relief. But wait, no, hey, still are there for programs doing their own colour management of the title bars. Ouch.

Some existing programs might be removed from your machine silently and without any prior warning. As most of these can be re-installed later, I fail to understand the rationale, must be an internal Redmont joke brought to bear on a wider audience.

For this "improvement" one has to download 3 GB. Really is the equivalent of a full-sized service pack, only that Microsoft now stopped calling this what it really is. They ought to admit that Win10 is a half-hearted, half-finished product.

[dslater]

The "improvement" doesn't work very well as in practice, one gets the same appearance of [nearly] all title bars, only with the title text being faded out as the window is inactivated.

Not sure what you mean by this or how it is different from previous versions. As far as I know, windows has always grayed out the title text of inactive windows. I've attached a piece of a screen shot from my machine. Are you seeing something different from this?

The range of colours to be assigned is very limited as well and there is no gradient fill (although the support variables are found in the Registry ...). Also not mentioned is that if you try to tweak the title bar settings following the advices floating around on web sites, every time you toggle the  "Show color on Start, taskbar, action center, and title bar" option, ALL your modifications are lost.

Not surprising as the tweaks and the toggle are editing the same registry entries. Lack of gradient fill option is probably due a lack of use by most windows users.

However, the nasty "all white" title bars have gone. A relief. But wait, no, hey, still are there for programs doing their own colour management of the title bars. Ouch.

Again, not surprising. However, this is a issue with the application manufacturer, not Windows. As a software developer, Microsoft gives you the ability to take complete control of all aspects of a window - both the client and non-client areas. However, if you choose to control the appearance of the non-client areas, then you are also responsible for responding correctly when the user changes color settings. Whenever the user changes something like this, there is a system message sent to every running application on the system, so correct response is quite possible.

Some existing programs might be removed from your machine silently and without any prior warning. As most of these can be re-installed later, I fail to understand the rationale, must be an internal Redmont joke brought to bear on a wider audience.

For this "improvement" one has to download 3 GB. Really is the equivalent of a full-sized service pack, only that Microsoft now stopped calling this what it really is. They ought to admit that Win10 is a half-hearted, half-finished product.

Very surprising. Since my machine came with Windows 10 pre-installed, I can't really comment on this other than to say I've never seen Windows upgrade from one version to another without issues. The more existing software you have installed, the more likely an upgrade will have problems.

Strange,

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Like this, after much fiddling around before I admitted defeat and let Win10 use its default settings. The "all-white" title bars gone together with a couple of my own programs (re-installed later).

[dslater]

I turned off the transparent titlebars on my system, although I can't remember how I did it now. And what's up with that FileMgr in the background?? That dates back to Windows 3.1. Not surprised it doesn't play well on the new system. You are of course correct that customizing Windows has become more and more difficult with each release. I believe this is largely due to the fact that most Windows customers don't care about these things and don't want to learn how to change things. It's probably just not worth Microsoft's effort to continue to maintain the advanced options while still providing a simplified interface as there are too few people who use the advanced features.
  Unfortunately, every feature has a cost and must be justified by revenue.

[dslater]

Here's another little tidbit just in case you haven't found it yet. If you right-click on the start menu, you get a context menu with picks that bring up many of the familiar Windows 7 items, such as the old control panel, device manager, etc..
  Not very discoverable and a poor UI choice IMO.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

File Manager is the best and most straight-forward tool for the job Microsoft ever produced and it runs perfectly on all Windows, no problem at all. You just have to use the correct installation package, which easily is found on the 'net. It runs rings around any Explorer in terms of sheer speed, too.

I dislike all the enforced silly "My xxxx" and Library structures Microsoft tries to push us into as my ideas of disk management are strongly at variance with this.

I'm familiar with the right-clicked Start Menu. Some parts of Windows always have existed silently, like the double-click on the window icon to close it (a substitute for Alt+F4 in fact). This has existed since the early '90s at least. In fact, that feature is older than the Start Menu itself.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Same scenario as the screen dump from my win10 machine, but this time from one of the win7 work stations. One sees at a quick glance immediately what is going on. I do move from one work station to another throughout the day and really appreciate the clarity of the UI win7 provides. Very intuitive and helpful.

[dslater]

File Manager is the best and most straight-forward tool for the job Microsoft ever produced and it runs perfectly on all Windows, no problem at all. You just have to use the correct installation package, which easily is found on the 'net. It runs rings around any Explorer in terms of sheer speed, too.

I dislike all the enforced silly "My xxxx" and Library structures Microsoft tries to push us into as my ideas of disk management are strongly at variance with this.

I'm familiar with the right-clicked Start Menu. Some parts of Windows always have existed silently, like the double-click on the window icon to close it (a substitute for Alt+F4 in fact). This has existed since the early '90s at least. In fact, that feature is older than the Start Menu.

Yes, the double-click on the window icon dates from Windows 1.0.
  Explorer can be slow due to the inclusion of so much stuff in there that's not on your file system. I find that setting it to run each explorer window in its own process helps as this prevents a frozen explorer window from interfering with other explorer windows. The other problem with explorer is the fact that it allows 3'rd parties to install hooks in it. There are a large number of these 3'rd party addons that can greatly slow explorer down, especially the right-click menu. Truthfully, I'm a command line guy at heart, so I rarely navigate my file system with explorer. I use the command line instead. I also use a much better shell than cmd.exe called "Hamilton C-Shell". This is a unix csh-like implementation that rather than being a port, was written from the ground up for Windows by a former Microsoft developer. I bought it back in the early 90's and have been getting free updates ever since. If you're a command line person, its well worth checking out. It's expensive to buy, but has a free trial version.

[dslater]

Same scenario as the screen dump from my win10 machine, but this time from one of the win7 work stations. One sees at a quick glance immediately what is going on. I do move from one work station to another throughout the day and really appreciate the clarity of the UI win7 provides. Very intuitive and helpful.

Truthfully, I haven't liked the customization options since Microsoft introduced themes. I liked the old customization UI much better where you could control all aspects of your window decorations.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

I'm first and foremost a "visual clues"  guy. That is why I dislike the idea of having a standardised UI enforced upon me.

My Linux boxes provide all the pleasures of commando line operation I can wish for.

[dslater]

Overall, I find I like Windows 10. Compared to Windows 7, some things are better, some are worse, and many are indifferent.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

When Windows 10, eventually, is a finished product, I will consider it.

[dslater]

My biggest beef with Windows 10 is the removal of the XP-Mode license. I have an XP-mode virtual machine that runs under VMWare that I can no longer run. I can understand Microsoft removing XP-mode from Windows 10, but they should have left the license there so an existing XP-mode VM can still run.