Questions about the "end of Windows 7"

In message , Char Jackson
writes:
On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 19:30:40 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Char Jackson
writes:
[]
IV does #1, fails at #2, and I didn't get as far as checking how to do
#3 and #4. What does IV use to move through a series of photos, J and K
or some such? Is there a modifier involved? I don't remember, but I
figure if he can't get that part right, then it's not for me.

You _gotta_ be kidding! Space and backspace. Space is the easiest key to
hit!

Ugh! That's even worse than I remembered. Although I *can* physically
reach Space and Backspace at the same time, it's not at all comfortable.

Why do you _want_ to reach them at the same time? But anyway, others in
this thread have said they use the arrow keys.

Personally, I'm used to using the space bar to move on: my email and
news software uses space to move through an email or post, and to move
on to the next email or post when I reach their end.

I'll let you guys stick with IV and I'll stick with the built-in viewer
until something better comes along. It does exactly what I want, and not
a bit more.

I'll "let" you continue with that, then (-:.

I've just tried "Windows Photo Viewer" to go through a directory of
images. I grant that it _is_ a lot faster than I remember (though I did
briefly see "loading" for some of them - when I tried in IV, I didn't).
But I couldn't find the zoom keys (I acknowledge that I might just not
know them, so looked through the menus - no sign of them), and didn't
know where I was in the directory (IV shows a "24/67" window).

But we can both stick with the one we're used to. But there's no way
I'll accept any claim that IV is bloated. (I know we're not considering
..exe size, but let me just check ... i_view32.exe, 1,803 KB, no .dll
files; I can't actually find WPV's .exe, but there's a folder in Program
Files with that name, containing four .dll s totalling 4.2M. OK, _if_
that's it, smaller than I was expecting.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes

In message , Mike
writes:
[]
IIRC, Office 2000 was the last version that didn't require activation.

I'm pretty sure 2003 doesn't; I _think_ 2007 may not, but I've never
installed from the installer I have. (Wouldn't use it anyway - first
with the ribbon.)
[]
I've never had any need for anything it can't do. I've only
encountered docx a few times and there are ways to read it.

Yes - I _think_ there was a standalone viewer, while MS were still doing
those; if you had 2003 (and possibly some earlier), there was a
"compatibility pack" that let you load (just not save) .###x files. (I
_think_ I still managed to find it on Microsoft within the last year,
but it was difficult to find.)
[]
Sad to hear that. I have several copies of 2007 that I've never tried.
I thought I had a 2013, but can't find it.
And that stupid ribbon.
I thought you could eliminate the ribbon.

I _think_ you could make it not show, but various functions are only
available from it (and not just new functions - some that were available
without it in 2003 and earlier).

There are (or were) third-party patches that make 2007 at least look
superficially like 2003 (i. e. no ribbon); I found what I thought was
quite a good one - from a .ch site IIRR - that still let you access some
of the new functions as well, without a ribbon; it was free for home
use.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

They are public servants, so we will threat them rather as Flashman treats
servants. - Stephen Fry on some people's attitudo to the BBC, in Radio Times,
3-9 July 2010

"Mike" wrote

| Today, it's not at all about the speed or size or functionality
| of a program.
| It's all about CASH FLOW.
| It's about first to market, biggest lure for the clueless masses,
| shortest design cycle, lowest cost, highest profit.
|

Yes. I have a friend who does software testing
for a company that releases weekly! I asked her
what language they code in. She gave me a list.
It turned out their "software" is actually a webpage
running all kinds of script libraries like jquery, along
with all kinds of back-end scripting and tools. I
can't imagine it's anything but seat-of-the-pants
programming. JQuery, as far as I can tell, is a giant
javascript wrapper for people who don't know either
javascript or web design.

| The same reason you probably
| have 5 rusty old fans in your attic. Hopefully you don't
| buy a toboggan that you need to store.
|
| My hobby is buying stuff at garage sales, fixing it up nice and storing
| it in the attic.
| We probably wouldn't get along...

We might. At least I'd know who to ask if I
needed to replace a broken bakelite handle on a
1950 toaster.

But that's getting to be a difficult hobby. Everything
is made disposable these days. I hate to throw
out toaster ovens and DVD players, but it's more
expensive to fix them, if it's even possible. We talk
about global warming but more things are disposable
than ever before, there's more unnecessary packaging
than ever before, and the economy depends on it
more than ever before.

"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote
|
| I took a look at that start menu in your Windows 10 jpg. Is that what
you
| call a good and usable start menu?? It's just a bunch of silly tiles to
me.
| So I gather that's what Windows 10 is all about - tiles up the kazoo. Why
| would any rational person want that, over the much simpler and more
| descriptive text menu entries for their programs?
|

No, silly. It's international. Don't know what a
picture of a squirrel with tire tracks across it means?
Serves you right. Now you know how someone in
China feels trying to read "Irfan View", you
insensitive clod.

On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 12:02:51 +0000, Java Jive
wrote:

On 04/03/2019 06:03, Mike wrote:

Computers are so fast that speed ain't that much of an issue.
Back when it was runtime difference between half a minute and five minutes,
efficiency mattered a lot.

Well, you'd've thought it shouldn't be by now, but it certainly still is
here. Win10 as supplied on this second hand/used PC took several
minutes to boot, the W7 that I replaced it with comfortably less than a
minute.



My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it
takes to boot is usually unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's
speed is otherwise satisfactory, it is not generally worth worrying
about. Most people start their computers once a day or even less
frequently. In the overall scheme of things, even a few minutes to
start up isn't very important. Personally I power on my computer when
I get up in the morning, then go get my coffee. When I come back, it's
done booting. I don't know how long it took to boot and I don't care.

On 04/03/2019 15:33, Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 12:02:51 +0000, Java Jive
wrote:

On 04/03/2019 06:03, Mike wrote:

Computers are so fast that speed ain't that much of an issue.
Back when it was runtime difference between half a minute and five minutes,
efficiency mattered a lot.

Well, you'd've thought it shouldn't be by now, but it certainly still is
here. Win10 as supplied on this second hand/used PC took several
minutes to boot, the W7 that I replaced it with comfortably less than a
minute.

My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it
takes to boot is usually unwarranted.

No, not really, because it's a simple measure of how well and
responsively it can run that OS. If it takes two or minutes to even get
to the point that you can log in, then most probably it's going to be
just as slow when logged in.

Assuming that the computer's
speed is otherwise satisfactory, it is not generally worth worrying
about.

That's the flaw in your argument, it generally isn't. On this PC W7 is
usable, but perhaps a little sluggish, whereas W10 is unusable.

On 04/03/2019 13:26, Mike wrote:
On 3/4/2019 4:02 AM, Java Jive wrote:
On 04/03/2019 06:03, Mike wrote:

Computers are so fast that speed ain't that much of an issue.
Back when it was runtime difference between half a minute and five
minutes,
efficiency mattered a lot.

Well, you'd've thought it shouldn't be by now, but it certainly still
is here.Â* Win10 as supplied on this second hand/used PC took several
minutes to boot, the W7 that I replaced it with comfortably less than
a minute.

SSD will improve that significantly.

Whereas conventional HD is adequate with W7.

For what it's worth, I never had any W7 machine boot in less than a minute.

Well, I'm not going to shut this one down just to time it, because for
the timing to be meaningful I'd also have to reimage it with the
original W10, time that, and then reimage it back to W7. The fact
remains that W7 is usable on this PC, I'm using it right now, whereas
W10 was unusable.

On Sun, 3 Mar 2019 07:32:00 +0000, PeterC
wrote:

OK, I'll risk excommunication: as an interim step, how does W8 compare with
W7 and W10?


As always, such things are a matter of opinion. Here's my opinion:
from best to worst, I rank them

10
7
8.1
8


I couldn't find a news group for W8, which should tell me something.



There is. It's alt.comp.operating system.windows-8. But it gets almost
no traffic these days.


I have
wondered if W8 could be tamed to be like W7.


Both Classic Shell and, even better, Start8 get it very close.


Thing is, I've managed to get
W7 very close to looking and feeling like XP, i.e. cut all the frippery and
crap.
Given the impending 'demise' of W7 I have wondered about W8. Sorry.


I think it's a very poor choice, but there are those who disagree.

On 2019-03-04, Wolf K wrote:
I sorta agre3e. Seems to me that the problem isn't the "Linux community"
but the Lindroids that infest their newsgroups and other forums. You
know, the ones that sneer at Ubuntu/Mint and similar user-friendly
distros because they're dumbed down for ex-Windows users.

That is true. I use Ubuntu and Mint variants due to sheer laziness
on my part. I started out with Slackware, doing everything manually,
and building lots of stuff from source. These days I've gotten lazy in
my old age and find for my purposes the "user friendly" distributions
just work with a minimum of fuss so I use those on my PCs. (Though I'm
still perfectly capable of getting down and dirty with the bits if
needed.) Debian is my preferred distribution for servers, DD-WRT for
routers.

But getting back to the topic at hand, if I had a need to run Windows
then Windows 7 would be my own pick. Even when support ends as I've
said if you can run up-to-date web browser and antivirus (and of course
you other required software runs on it) I don't see a problem continuing
to use Windows 7.

Interstingly, modern Windows starting with NT is to an extent an outgrowth
of VAX/VMS. Microsoft hired DEC's chief OS architect (Dave Cutler) and quite
a few other DEC people to design it. When running the Windows debugger
I can see concepts and terminolgoy brought over from VMS. Also anyone
who has used I/O redirection at the command prompt can see that Windows
borrows concepts from Unix as well.

--
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In message , Java Jive
writes:
On 04/03/2019 15:33, Ken Blake wrote:
[]
My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long
it
takes to boot is usually unwarranted.

No, not really, because it's a simple measure of how well and
responsively it can run that OS. If it takes two or minutes to even
get to the point that you can log in, then most probably it's going to
be just as slow when logged in.

Yes, one would think that, wouldn't one! But it often isn't true with
versions of Windows; both my old XP machine and this 7 take ages to boot
(that's a subjective term, which IMO is what actually matters: I think
it's 2-3 minutes on this one). But once they had/have booted, I
found/find them quite responsive, for what I do with them. (This one's
still usable while transcoding video, though that did make the XP one
groan.) Even my old 98SElite system I found quite usable, though tedious
to boot.

Assuming that the computer's
speed is otherwise satisfactory, it is not generally worth worrying
about.

That's the flaw in your argument, it generally isn't. On this PC W7 is
usable, but perhaps a little sluggish, whereas W10 is unusable.

YM obviously Vs. I've used several Windows systems where booting varied
from tedious to painful, but were quite usable once it had; in fact I
think I'd say that IME that's the normal situation.

Of course, those with the inclination, skills, and knowledge (and
privileges, if it's an employer's machine) to tweak the boot process,
may get to a position where boot time _is_ an indication of how the
machine will perform when it's finished booting; for me at my age (and
I'm only nearly 59), I can no longer be bothered to stay on top of that
- like several others in this thread, I do something else while the
machine is booting. (Plus it's robust enough that I don't need to shut
it down, so generally don't. [The XP machine as such was, but had a
tendency to lose its wifi, so that _did_ generally need restarting about
once a day.])
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm a self-made man, thereby demonstrating once again the perils of unskilled
labor..." - Harlan Ellison

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote
|
| I took a look at that start menu in your Windows 10 jpg. Is that what
you
| call a good and usable start menu?? It's just a bunch of silly tiles to
me.
| So I gather that's what Windows 10 is all about - tiles up the kazoo. Why
| would any rational person want that, over the much simpler and more
| descriptive text menu entries for their programs?
|

No, silly. It's international. Don't know what a
picture of a squirrel with tire tracks across it means?

I think it's supposed to be a cat (and ironic; he likes cats). (And the
..exe includes several other icons if you want.)

Serves you right. Now you know how someone in
China feels trying to read "Irfan View", you
insensitive clod.

"View", OK; "Irfan" doesn't mean any more in English than it does in any
other language - it's just the creator's forename.

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm a self-made man, thereby demonstrating once again the perils of unskilled
labor..." - Harlan Ellison

On 03/03/2019 20:16, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

In IV, select by dragging with the mouse, then either Edit|Crop (mouse)
or Ctrl-Y (keyboard). Or Ctrl-Shift-J for JPEG lossless crop, if you're
working on a JPEG.

Thanks for that. The question now is, why didn't I spot that for
myself? My recollection is that previously I found a dialog that asked
me to key in the dimensions I wanted to crop to, but I can't find *that*
now!

"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote:


In my Fortran class in college, we typed up our program on those punch
cards, and had to wait a *week* to get back the results (due to
adminstrative job use of the mainframe computer for the entire campus).
Your job was just one in a batch to be run on the system mainframe. I'm
talking about the 1960's here.

I was at the U of Texas in the very late '60s. The computer science
department had their own machines (CDC 6400-6600 complex) that were
separate from the administration. We punched cards and submitted the
decks, but we didn't have to wait a week for our output. Usually an
hour or so. We primarily used FORTRAN, as I remember.

Nowadays, I see Hollerith cards as *extremely* low-density storage. I
well remember carrying a box of 2,000 cards across campus to the
computation center. That's about a foot and a half by 6 inches by 3
inches. For 2,000 lines of text! Woe to you if you dropped the box!

--
Tim Slattery
tim at risingdove dot com

On Mon, 04 Mar 2019 08:47:37 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

I have
wondered if W8 could be tamed to be like W7.

Both Classic Shell and, even better, Start8 get it very close.

I use StartMenuX. Had some problems with the usual apps - can't remember
what after 3 years but the setup is now OK.

Thing is, I've managed to get
W7 very close to looking and feeling like XP, i.e. cut all the frippery and
crap.
Given the impending 'demise' of W7 I have wondered about W8. Sorry.

I think it's a very poor choice, but there are those who disagree.

Yes, but at least it gives a few more years.
IICBA I'd try Devuan - at least it doesn't have SystemD.
--
Peter.
The gods will stay away
whilst religions hold sway

Mike wrote:
On 3/3/2019 10:29 PM, Bill in Co wrote:
Mike wrote:
On 3/3/2019 9:21 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
I agree with all of that last paragraph, and I apply it to a program
that has feature-bloat. When a program is feature-bloated, it'll have
endless menus and submenus, with tons of keyboard shortcuts that make
no sense, and a GUI that has a hard time showing me what I need to
know. There are different kinds of bloat, but that's the kind of bloat
that I object to. Not disk space.

I believe that you're technically correct.
Problem is not technical.
Developers maximize profit.
Profit may be money or street cred or whatever turns them on.
You 'profit' by being the bestest to the mostest.
If a competitor has a feature that people want, you MUST add it.
And you can't remove features that most no longer want or need.
The result it bloat.
The landscape changes FAST! Shortest development time is far more
effective than smallest code.

Be glad that computers have increased many orders of magnitude in
capability.
If you really care about it, stick with an old version you like.
I use MSOffice 2000.

Same here!! But I'm surprised, given what you've been saying.

IIRC, Office 2000 was the last version that didn't require activation.
I do a lot of hardware/OS swaps and not having to reactivate office
was a benefit. Apparently, there's some unspecified limit on how
many times you can do that before the key gets blacklisted.

I've never had any need for anything it can't do. I've only encountered
docx a few times and there are ways to read it.
Actually,
Office 2003 would have been ok, too. It went to pot with Office 2007 and
its sequels.

That's just how I feel about it, since they added that ribbon and some other
stuff. I never tried it though, and I'm just one of those Less Is More
guys. :-). I normally try to find older versions of software for just
that reason (and the concomitant bloat that inevitably gets added with each
new version).

Sad to hear that. I have several copies of 2007 that I've never tried.
I thought I had a 2013, but can't find it.
And that stupid ribbon.
I thought you could eliminate the ribbon.

IIRC, you had to buy another small "fixer" program to do that, like
ClassicMenu or UbitMenu.