11th February 2017, 11:31 PM
For some things I'll mention about the OS... well, I use Windows, but have never liked most of MS's default apps, apart from simple stuff like the calculator, Minesweeper and Solitaire (which they've kind of messed up in Win8+, being UWP apps with microtransactions now...), Notepad, and such. And indeed, after looking a little into the default movie viewer, image viewer, and Edge browser, I quickly installed my good old alternatives, Seamonkey for a browser (I haven't also installed Firefox yet, but I might), and VLC for video stuff and Irfanview for images.
DisplayFusion (note, this is a paid program I got on Steam, not free) is also still absolutely essential for those of us with multiple monitors so I installed that too, since MS still does not allow you to have different wallpapers on different monitors, something DisplayFusion adds, and also it has some pretty other options such as buttons you can add to move a window from one monitor to the next. And from a DisplayFusion menu, I saw a mention of something else, which I soon looked in to after realizing just how horrendously useless this disaster of a Windows 10 Start Menu is: Start Menu replacement software, which replaces it with something not busted useless junk! The DisplayFusion Settings page lists four different options for this, and I checked out the freeware one, Classic Shell... and it's great! It allows you to use Windows Vista or 7-styled Start Menus, instead of MS's probably worse than useless default thing, and is pretty customizable beyond that too. Currently I'm using the Win7 style, but I might go back to Vista, not sure; the two are pretty similar so it's not that important, what is important is not using Win10's.
So, why do I hate the Windows 10 Start Menu so much? Well, how could I not, with how dramatically it clashes with how I like to organize things? I like to sort things by category; this was how Windows always used to work, and it's a great system that I really like. I even sort my physical game collections by genre, not alphabetical order, showing how much I prefer sorting by categories, in this case genre, over the alphabet... and the Win10 Start Menu does not allow this, not really. The Win10 Start Menu applications list is an alphabetized list htat you cannot reorganize, it will always be in alphabetical order. And worse, it wastes lots of space by having a full space for each letter of the alphabet, making the stupid thing take up 26 more lines than it should... and worse than THAT, UWP apps each take up a space on this list, and they cannot be removed from the list without uninstalling the app, and their icons on the list cannot be moved around. You can choose which things appear on the selection of rectangles on the right two-thirds of the Start Menu, but that's only useful for some of your more frequently used things, not everything. You cannot move UWP apps around on the Start Menu, you cannot put them in folders, and they do not appear in the Windows folders that control what appears on the Start Menu; instead they are all there permanently. And even WORSE, while there is still folder support for regular, non-UWP Windows programs, you can only use ONE level of folders! If you create subfolders in one of the Windows Start Menu folders, in your Start Menu everything will just appear in a single alphabetized list, with the name of the top folder in the tree. This utterly unacceptable move is what convinced me that I cannot use this Start Menu. I honestly do not understand how MS took something that was outstanding and about as close to perfect as a Start Menu could be, the Windows Vista and 7 Start Menus, and utterly destroyed it like this! Yes, I know that they needed a tablet OS, and indeed on a tablet the Win8/10 Start Menu/Screens work okay (as you can see on my Windows 8 tablet I've had for a few years), but completely wrecking Windows for all desktop users isn't just some minor side effect, it's a huge, huge problem!
Now, as I said, because of that I installed Classic Shell, and it's the answer... mostly. There is one big problem still: those stupid UWP apps. You have several options for what to do with them, but you can't just mix them in with the other regular Windows applications, either they go in the main list, or they go in an Apps folder. I chose the folder, which of course you cannot put subfolders in, since it's UWP garbage, which means that all UWP apps, including browsers, settings, games, waht have you, are in one stupid mostly un-organizable list there. You CAN move things around in this list, so it's not locked to alphabetical order, but still, I really dislike this! I know that Windows Store UWP applications are not the same as real Windows programs and separating them out based on that makes some sense, but that even if I want to I can't make a single unified Start menu that puts all of my games in a sorted-by-genres Games folder tree, as I've always done before and want to do again, really is unacceptable.
Still, that's probably the best you can do given the limitations of this stupid OS, so yeah, good on people like those behind Classic Shell for figuring out how to get Windows 10 to display an actual usable Start Menu again, because it was very, VERY badly needed. Apparently, just like with applications, Win10 updates sometimes break these things because MS is annoying, but it's working now and I hope it continues to, because something better than MS's Start menu is needed for this OS to be usable.
Some good ideas there, DJ. I hadn't noticed that Background Apps page, I'll probably turn that stuff off, if just out of 'are they tracking me' paranoia, since I've got plenty of RAM to spare; perhaps over-correcting from what I had before (4GB, plus 32-bit Windows so applications had a ~1GB max memory used limitation, I got 32GBs of RAM for this new PC, which probably will be more than I'll need until I get a new computer... unless I replace this with faster RAM to get a couple of frames per second or something, since I didn't get one of the higher-speed RAMs. I didn't get the slowest speed either, but I went with a lot of not as fast RAM over less faster RAM. Not sure if it was the right choice, but most benchmarks I looked at show only a small difference between different RAM speeds, so that's what I did.
That said, looking now, with most of the UWP Background Apps not disabled, 11% of RAM is used, with Seamonkey using the biggest chunk of that of course. After opening a bunch of tabs but before remembering to switch from 'load all tabs at boot' to 'only load tabs as you click on them' Seamonkey was using 3GB of RAM with "only" ~150 tabs in two windows open, so it's easy to see why the program was running so terribly on my old PC with that annoying Win32 1-point-something-GBs-only RAM limitation... well, this machine sure fixes that issue, thankfully.
Also, as for the log-on comment, good idea there! I didn't know about the online requirement to log on thing, so I did just switch over to a local account.
DisplayFusion (note, this is a paid program I got on Steam, not free) is also still absolutely essential for those of us with multiple monitors so I installed that too, since MS still does not allow you to have different wallpapers on different monitors, something DisplayFusion adds, and also it has some pretty other options such as buttons you can add to move a window from one monitor to the next. And from a DisplayFusion menu, I saw a mention of something else, which I soon looked in to after realizing just how horrendously useless this disaster of a Windows 10 Start Menu is: Start Menu replacement software, which replaces it with something not busted useless junk! The DisplayFusion Settings page lists four different options for this, and I checked out the freeware one, Classic Shell... and it's great! It allows you to use Windows Vista or 7-styled Start Menus, instead of MS's probably worse than useless default thing, and is pretty customizable beyond that too. Currently I'm using the Win7 style, but I might go back to Vista, not sure; the two are pretty similar so it's not that important, what is important is not using Win10's.
So, why do I hate the Windows 10 Start Menu so much? Well, how could I not, with how dramatically it clashes with how I like to organize things? I like to sort things by category; this was how Windows always used to work, and it's a great system that I really like. I even sort my physical game collections by genre, not alphabetical order, showing how much I prefer sorting by categories, in this case genre, over the alphabet... and the Win10 Start Menu does not allow this, not really. The Win10 Start Menu applications list is an alphabetized list htat you cannot reorganize, it will always be in alphabetical order. And worse, it wastes lots of space by having a full space for each letter of the alphabet, making the stupid thing take up 26 more lines than it should... and worse than THAT, UWP apps each take up a space on this list, and they cannot be removed from the list without uninstalling the app, and their icons on the list cannot be moved around. You can choose which things appear on the selection of rectangles on the right two-thirds of the Start Menu, but that's only useful for some of your more frequently used things, not everything. You cannot move UWP apps around on the Start Menu, you cannot put them in folders, and they do not appear in the Windows folders that control what appears on the Start Menu; instead they are all there permanently. And even WORSE, while there is still folder support for regular, non-UWP Windows programs, you can only use ONE level of folders! If you create subfolders in one of the Windows Start Menu folders, in your Start Menu everything will just appear in a single alphabetized list, with the name of the top folder in the tree. This utterly unacceptable move is what convinced me that I cannot use this Start Menu. I honestly do not understand how MS took something that was outstanding and about as close to perfect as a Start Menu could be, the Windows Vista and 7 Start Menus, and utterly destroyed it like this! Yes, I know that they needed a tablet OS, and indeed on a tablet the Win8/10 Start Menu/Screens work okay (as you can see on my Windows 8 tablet I've had for a few years), but completely wrecking Windows for all desktop users isn't just some minor side effect, it's a huge, huge problem!
Now, as I said, because of that I installed Classic Shell, and it's the answer... mostly. There is one big problem still: those stupid UWP apps. You have several options for what to do with them, but you can't just mix them in with the other regular Windows applications, either they go in the main list, or they go in an Apps folder. I chose the folder, which of course you cannot put subfolders in, since it's UWP garbage, which means that all UWP apps, including browsers, settings, games, waht have you, are in one stupid mostly un-organizable list there. You CAN move things around in this list, so it's not locked to alphabetical order, but still, I really dislike this! I know that Windows Store UWP applications are not the same as real Windows programs and separating them out based on that makes some sense, but that even if I want to I can't make a single unified Start menu that puts all of my games in a sorted-by-genres Games folder tree, as I've always done before and want to do again, really is unacceptable.
Still, that's probably the best you can do given the limitations of this stupid OS, so yeah, good on people like those behind Classic Shell for figuring out how to get Windows 10 to display an actual usable Start Menu again, because it was very, VERY badly needed. Apparently, just like with applications, Win10 updates sometimes break these things because MS is annoying, but it's working now and I hope it continues to, because something better than MS's Start menu is needed for this OS to be usable.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:First, I'd open Settings, click Privacy, and then Background Apps. Turn off everything. This won't keep you from using any of these programs. It just keeps them from taking up memory when you aren't using them. For some reason, MS decided that programs like Calculator and Killer Instinct need to be ready and waiting at all times. As a side effect, you'll disable the constantly running advertisements for Office and whatever other "Get" programs are running there.
Some good ideas there, DJ. I hadn't noticed that Background Apps page, I'll probably turn that stuff off, if just out of 'are they tracking me' paranoia, since I've got plenty of RAM to spare; perhaps over-correcting from what I had before (4GB, plus 32-bit Windows so applications had a ~1GB max memory used limitation, I got 32GBs of RAM for this new PC, which probably will be more than I'll need until I get a new computer... unless I replace this with faster RAM to get a couple of frames per second or something, since I didn't get one of the higher-speed RAMs. I didn't get the slowest speed either, but I went with a lot of not as fast RAM over less faster RAM. Not sure if it was the right choice, but most benchmarks I looked at show only a small difference between different RAM speeds, so that's what I did.
That said, looking now, with most of the UWP Background Apps not disabled, 11% of RAM is used, with Seamonkey using the biggest chunk of that of course. After opening a bunch of tabs but before remembering to switch from 'load all tabs at boot' to 'only load tabs as you click on them' Seamonkey was using 3GB of RAM with "only" ~150 tabs in two windows open, so it's easy to see why the program was running so terribly on my old PC with that annoying Win32 1-point-something-GBs-only RAM limitation... well, this machine sure fixes that issue, thankfully.
Quote: Now click on Feedback. Set both to the lowest settings your version will allow, which should drastically reduce the amount of data MS pulls from your day to day use. Click on Speech, blah blah blah and tell the system you don't want it to get to know you to finish that off. There's other settings here you can adjust to your liking, like what programs can access what data.I'd already set the Diagnostic and usage data setting to "Basic" the lowest setting. I'm not sure about the other option on that screen though, Feedback frequency. Should I change that too?
Also, as for the log-on comment, good idea there! I didn't know about the online requirement to log on thing, so I did just switch over to a local account.
Quote:Now go back to Settings and click "Personalization" and click on "Start". Disable "Occasionally show suggestions in Start". This innocuous little setting hidden in an innocuous little menu determines if your OS has permission to download and install random programs from the Microsoft store as "demos". Besides being annoying, this particular bit of superliminal marketing means your PC is at risk every time MS accidentally promotes a virus that got past their security checks for store content (and this is pretty much sure to happen, heck it's happened to Google's app store already). Heck, you're already going to be "at risk", but at least your will is the last barrier to entry. Anyway, like I said, turn this off.On this note, Windows 10 did not come with Minesweeper installed, but did come with... Candy Crush Soda Saga and some Minecraft thing "helpfully" put onto the Start menu list? Ugh, modern Microsoft is kind of terrible... so yeah, I turned off almost everything in that Start Menu page almost immediately after getting the OS. Good advice for sure though, and yeah I guess it is a potential threat vector as well.
Quote:One last annoyance is how Windows 10's programs have a nasty habit of taking back file associations you explicitely set to their "competition". I'm not really sure why MS cares if I'm actually using their browser (I mean, I already paid for it when I bought Windows, so what difference does it make at that point?), but it has a habit of not just resetting your browser default but your PDF reader default, and wow does Edge suck as a PDF viewer. There's no quick fix for this I'm afraid. There's just altering the registry, which you can do using this quick fix! http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/wi...-associations/With how terrible Acrobat Reader always has been though, as much as I rarely use Microsoft's apps for anything, if the Win10 built in PDF reader is decent at all I'd kind of rather use it than whatever probably broken thing Adobe has made... Acrobat and Flash are both so bad... essential, but no good.
Sacred Jellybean Wrote:The strongest of us put his shoulder into the bottom and shoved it up, with the other two of us pushing/pulling wherever we could get purchase. 2 flights of stairs, which were broken up into corners halfway through. Fun night, but it was worth it to play Smash Bros: Melee on a big ol' screen.Heh... yeah, I live on the third floor here, so getting this TV up the stairs last summer was not fun... worth it though for how nice it is and how much of an improvement it is over the last one though, and you can't beat free!