Windows 11 - Full production release - Easy upgrade, no problems - and no thrills.

[anmpr1]

Dude. Careful what you wish for!

Knowing MS I more or less expect them to get the user stuff correct in 12. They have a history of doing that. Skipping versions to get it right. Don't ask me why.

I had to laugh when I came across this work around for the taskbar, from a PC World article. Actually there's a free app on Git Hub (Explorer Patcher) that does it with a click. But real PC men, those who live inside the command line, want to deep dive. Like Austin told Vince right before he smashed a Steveweiser over his head, "We can do it the easy way, or the hard way!"

And let's face it, if you live inside a terminal shell, who needs to see icons?
_______________
If you don’t want to pay money to change your taskbar’s position, you’ll once again have to dive into the Registry Editor. This time, you need to navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects3. In this key, you’ll find a Settings binary file. Double click on it to edit, and locate the fifth value on the second line—it should read “03” before you edit anything. Changing this number to 01 and hitting Ok will move to taskbar to the top of the screen on your next restart. Meanwhile, replacing it with 00 will move it to the left, and 02 will put it on the right.

You have to open this key every time you want to move the bar, unfortunately. If you’re a left taskbar person, prepare for disappointment. While you can move the bar to that side, current builds of Windows 11 don’t render it correctly—you may not be able to see your icons.

 

[mhardy6647]

They have a history of doing that. Skipping versions to get it right. Don't ask me why.

This is absolutely true, back (as I am sure you know) to the days of MS-DOS (4/5/6, if memory serves)!

 

[anmpr1]

This is absolutely true, back (as I am sure you know) to the days of MS-DOS (4/5/6, if memory serves)!

I thought 5 was pretty friendly. Definitely a step up from 4x. Six was a total mess for the company. Some due to questionable IP shenanigans, rushing it out before its time, in an attempt to both stifle and play catch up with Digital Research's DR-DOS. At least that's how I remember it. In their attempt to get it straight MS released at least four versions of 6x in quick succession.

Some of that was due to their muscling in on Stac's IP (remember them?). Back then, hard drive's were usually small and always expensive. Mine came with a 40 MB drive which, if you think about it, was practical. Just running DOS, along with a few non graphical user programs. I used MS Works, which had a word processor, spreadsheet and simple database. It might have come with the PC. I think it did. None of that monthly 'pay to play' stuff you find today. If you wanted a game, you had text based adventure, like Zork. For the kids there was Commander Keen. You could fit all that and a lot more on forty megabytes of hard disk. Win 3x required some rethinking.

In order to help Win 3 out, I actually bought a retail copy of Stacker (remember retail boxes?). It promised to 'double your HD'. The most I ever got with it was about twenty megabytes of additional compressed space. On an already slow 386-16 it was twice as slow. Got me dreaming of a 386-33. Or a mind-blowing 486-66 DX2.

I see that even now, Windows has an option for drive compression, but I have no idea if anyone uses that feature.

 

[mhardy6647]

I honestly don't remember anymore which DOSs were good and which were... not so good. I remember there were some duds mixed in there.
I think there's still a machine or two tucked away here that's loaded with MS-DOS 6.22 or thereabouts(?). I am not going spelunking just to fact-check!

 

[anmpr1]

I honestly don't remember anymore which DOSs were good and which were... not so good. I remember there were some duds mixed in there.
I think there's still a machine or two tucked away here that's loaded with MS-DOS 6.22 or thereabouts(?). I am not going spelunking just to fact-check!

The big news in 5 was that you could load stuff in high memory. 4.x didn't have that.

In 5 you had to enter the commands manually in your config file, but you could free up some of your 640K for applications. Things like loading the mouse driver high. With 6.x, MS included a command that automatically loaded stuff in high memory. So that was beneficial.

Another thing in 5 was the 'undelete' command. If you accidentally 'erased' a file, you could undelete it. This sometimes came in handy. Before I got my PC, I had a C-64. Once I was playing a text based space exploration game. The game would ask you what you wanted to do as you were walking around the space ship. I accidentally entered a system command (don't recall what it was), but whatever it was I entered activated the floppy drive and erased the disk. LOL

 

[pseudoid]

I am about to get ptsd, hearing you two (@mhardy6647 + @anmpr1) talk about dem DOS dayz!

 

[anmpr1]

I am about to get ptsd, hearing you two (@mhardy6647 + @anmpr1) talk about dem DOS dayz!

Did I ever tell you about the time I dropped all my IBM punch cards, while standing in queue waiting for the tech to insert them into the card reader?

 

[pseudoid]

Did I ever tell you about the time I dropped all my IBM punch cards, while standing in queue waiting for the tech to insert them into the card reader?

Did I tell you that I used work in the 'punch card lab' in college?
More than once, I was offered 'favors' if I was to change/replace/modify or otherwise correct wrong homework assignments submitted to the lab.
Tempting as some of these favors were, I was even able to refuse the offer of some primo panama red...
In my 3rd year and due to my punch card tech experience, I was able to land a metrology lab (dream) job at ClevelandClinic.
Unfortunately my badge was yanked on the first day @CC, for failing their drug test.
I contested the false positive but took a job in the my college's EE lab for free credits instead!

 

[mhardy6647]

I did some time with FORTRAN and punch cards very early in my grad school days.

 

[anmpr1]

Did I tell you that I used work in the 'punch card lab' in college?

It's like Deckard told Tyrell: ...you're talking about memories!

Yeah. That was my first experience with computers.

Stat class assignment was manipulating some canned data from an SPSS database. The idea was to punch your cards in whatever way you wanted, in order to achieve your desired results. At our school we used a Harris mainframe--at least that was the one I was told to use. It ran 24/7. The best time was after hours, when everyone else was away at the Rathskeller, arguing Marxism, or the war, or what the girl two tables over was wearing.

Clueless students, handing project cards to Mainframe Jockey, who then walked away indifferently, but whose job it was to start the hidden 'behind the scenes' magic. It might have been you, for all I know. If so, thanks for that.

Several hours later, if hapless student was lucky, he or she could come back and rifle through a disorganized stack of wide-lined green and white fan fold print outs strewn willy-nilly on a fold up table, fighting other students for position, a scene not dissimilar to the Blue Light Special at K-Mart.

And after all that, in just a few short years the average cat at home could experience the wholesome goodness of Microsoft Works for DOS, version 3.0, creating 8 bit color graphs in a spreadsheet, and seamlessly embedding those into a word processed document. Feeling a satisfaction, knowing that there had been honest improvements in user-land software.

Not like today, where the chief idea seems to be to make things more frustrating for the guy at the keyboard, and then make him pay for those frustrations on a monthly contract! Who was the important guy that said?, "You'll own nothing, you'll pay for it forever, and you'll never be happy. At least until you die." Or something like that.

 

[Offler]

I see that even now, Windows has an option for drive compression, but I have no idea if anyone uses that feature.

View attachment 223517

AFAIK, no. People nowadays opt to buy more physical storage, but since I work a lot with RAW photos, it might give me quite a lot of storage. Speaking of a 1TB SSD with this feature, it could be between 90-95 percent compression ratio, which is really interesting.

 

[pseudoid]

Yeah. That was my first experience with computers.

You are wayyyyyyy ageing yourself but do so proudly because you remember more than I have forgotten.
Obviously, while we (bsee) were still learning FORTRAN (or LaPlace xfrms), liberal o' farts majors were

arguing Marxism, or the war, or what the girl two tables over was wearing.

BUT that last one is going bit too far...
----------------------------------------

...opt to buy more physical storage, but since I work a lot with RAW photos...

Wouldn't "compressing" RAW image data be counter to the reasons for the RAW format? Probably similar to taking FLAC data files and compressing them to [ummmm....] mp3s. RAW, after all, is as archive-quality as you are going to get: Do you really want to date-rape it, even if using prophylactics (lossless compression)?
The added-insult would be to then apply drive encryption to that data.
It definitely is a dilemma and I would also consider using RAID techniques to span data to multiple drives (SSD or HDD) for retentivity if you value your RAW files.
I have a two 8TB HDDs (NOT SSDs) in a NAS box for safe keeping of ALL my music (FLAC + mp3 mixture) and ALL my photos (RAW +jpg). << Intentionally NOT compressed and NOT encrypted but most definitely RAID10'd. But RAID is NO substitute for 'back-ups'!
I was not impressed while trialing "jpeg2000" for my needs and openJPEG (based on jp2) is too cumbersome and lacks full WinOS support....

 

[Offler]

Wouldn't "compressing" RAW image data be counter to the reasons for the RAW format? Probably similar to taking FLAC data files and compressing them to [ummmm....] mp3s. RAW, after all, is as archive-quality as you are going to get: Do you really want to date-rape it, even if using prophylactics (lossless compression)?
The added-insult would be to then apply drive encryption to that data.
It definitely is a dilemma and I would also consider using RAID techniques to span data to multiple drives (SSD or HDD) for retentivity if you value your RAW files.
I have a two 8TB HDDs (NOT SSDs) in a NAS box for safe keeping of ALL my music (FLAC + mp3 mixture) and ALL my photos (RAW +jpg). << Intentionally NOT compressed and NOT encrypted but most definitely RAID10'd. But RAID is NO substitute for 'back-ups'!
I was not impressed while trialing "jpeg2000" for my needs and openJPEG (based on jp2) is too cumbersome and lacks full WinOS support....

Disk compression is more like compressing files into ZIP/RAR archive. Lossless form of compression, just to save space on drive but the original data remain the same.

And if applied to a 1TB drive it can provide between 50 to 100GB of additional space, if it will store just my photos in raw. Of course it will increase chance of data corruption. Zip archive with a recovery data can be more flexible in this.

 

[pseudoid]

I see that even now, Windows has an option for drive compression, but I have no idea if anyone uses that feature.

Do you mean "compression" or "encryption"??
After OpenSource TrueCrypt morphed into VeraCrypt (system/partition encryption), I was forced to change my security/privacy regimen w/o relying on system-level encryption or the cloud.
16 years since release, WindowsOS BitLocker (Full-Volume Encryption) is really a FREE yet very strong security, which integrates with its OS very well. The HOME version of Windows10 strangely had not included BitLocker.
Particular combination of hardware (e.g. TPM, fast CPUs, faster drives, etc.) and software are prerequisites for BitLocker usage.
If you are planning to offload all your family jewels (=private data) onto the cloud; you are putting your 'trust' on the server owners.
Some like the simplicity of this BitLocker option. But security and convenience need to be a careful balancing act.
An overview of Bitlocker (released 2022/07/12) from Microsoft site is a long read but RTFM is truly applicable for BitLocker usage.

There are many other alternative encyption PAYware but "friends don't recommend friends PAYware!"

 

[anmpr1]

Do you mean "compression" or "encryption"??

The tool says compression. I've not used it as I've never run out of disk space in the last twenty or thirty years. So I presume it is some kind of legacy feature. As someone mentioned, maybe a lot of multimedia files might exhaust a hard drive.

 

[pseudoid]

The tool says compression....

OIC, compression of data to mitigate running out of disk space.
That's a last-resort act for a cheapskate…
First, you ask Windows to show you the S.M.A.R.T. data for the drive in question.
If report indicates a 'healthy' drive, just use it as is, as any cheapskate would rightfully do.
Next, you set Windows (via a Registry (admin) edit) to warn you of "Low Disk Space" @20% of drive capacity.
When those LowDiskSpace prompts start annoying you; you do a clean-up of the cache, updates, temps, lint and cling-ons.
IF the annoying prompt rears its ugly head again; AND IF you want to continue being a cheapskate; THEN-and-ONLY-then, you can activate file-compression (~15% savings).
Windows Disk Management Tool can also "extend partition size" and no viagra is required.

 

[Chromatischism]

I agree it's a last resort. Performance will suffer if compressed files need to be accessed regularly. Ok if they are not.

 

[pseudoid]

This dude Bob Rankin has been doing a newsletter (ol'skool type) for decades about things related to PCs.
I don't know if 'partitioning' drives is still a thing for some but I prefer to stuff my DIY computers with multiple drives (HDD/SSD/NAS) for specific purposes.
His recent article "Hard Drive Partitioning Myths, Mistakes, and My Advice..." is simple and relevant but a bit Off-Topic here.

 

[pseudoid]

I agree it's a last resort.

I was trying to convince him to perish the compression thought.
Attempt #2:
The Windows' compression algorithm used by the NTFS file system is Lempel-Ziv compression. This algorithm converts variable-length strings into fixed-length codes that supposed consume less space than the original strings (unlike Huffman encoding or the RunLengthEncoding).
LZ77 compression (as used in Windows NTFS drives) is simple and easy on CPUs but some say otherwise. It has issues with *drives that are formatted in large 'allocation unit sizes' (Default=4KiB). *I think there is a 30GB cap on size of file (and *possibly a 16TB max drive size cap) to be compressed. Some say this compression *chews up MTBF twice as fast because of the need to multi-R/W (w/ + w/o LZ77) and to small block (4KiB) sizes. *There used to be a move-afoot to use RAM/cache [?] to prevent such multi-writes for SSDs [?].
BTW >> NTFS has a fragmentation limit, and larger cluster sizes can help reduce the likelihood of reaching this limit, especially if you know all your files are quite large…

*LZ77 Compression Algorithm​

 

[Chromatischism]

Indeed, for my 8TB drive, I used the largest available block size. The drive is used for compressed Acronis backups of my system.