Windows 10

[ppppenguin]

I still don't understand the indirect file system of W7 and hate it when compared to XP. I certainly won't be in any hurry to adopt W10.

Peter

For those of us who are clueless in these matters could somebody please explain the difference between the W7 and XP file systems. I'm primarily an XP user but have dabbled with W7. The file systems don't look different to me.

[Nick]

Both XP and W7 (and later) support FAT16, FAT32 & NTFS.

NTFS is effectively a super-set of FAT, so is now the default on all modern Microsoft o/s.

[ppppenguin]

I'm aware that XP and later versions of Windows use NTFS. While Linux tends to use open source file systems such as ext3. The question is whether W7, W8 and W10 NTFS file systems are different to the NTFS used in XP.

[Aerodyne]

Think carefully before you change from 7 to 10. Two computers in our house, both now running Win 10, both having a range of problems. I installed the upgrade on my wife's laptop (Win 7 to Win 10). Took most of a day. Several times the whole thing crashed totally, and I had to reboot manually. Finally got it working. Last night she had more trouble with it, no internet. Sorted that out by several reboots!
This morning, my computer running Win 10 (no download problems when installing) decided not to allow me to open Windows Live Mail. Web worked OK. After searches for a solution proved useless (a hour or more wasted) I rebooted only to find that now there was no internet access either.
Opened Glary utilities and checked the register. Glary suggested about 50 register problems. I let it fix them, then rebooted. Working OK now but took an AGE to load up (a good 10 minutes). Worth noting that there's no 'recovery' as such for Win 10, unlike the facility in Win 7. Just a reinstall of Win 10, when you lose all your downloaded programme material such as Acrobat Reader.
Win 10 seems to me to be a bit flaky, to say the least, unless I've just been unlucky. I don't do anything 'special' on the computer - no downloads from dodgy sites, for example - and neither does my wife. I mainly use Acrobat, Photoshop and Word. Never a moment's trouble with Win 7, so I'm considering returning to it. I'll give 10 a few more days but if I get further problems I will get rid of it.
Tony

[Nick]

NTFS hasn't changed since XP (NTFS V3.1) - its a mature structure.

What has changed is the way its accessed - The default in W8/10 is not the explorer interface we're mostly used to.

The history of NTFS is long - it's ancestor was ODS-2 (part of Files-11) as used by OpenVMS back in the 1980s - when Dave Cutler left DEC to join MS to lead & produce the first version of NT, NTFS was also developed (though not directly by Cutler) - for those that worked in DEC's Central Engineering on OpenVMS Internals (including me), the parallels between the internal data structures of ODS-2 & NTFS and OpenVMS and all versions of NT (including Windows 7, 8 & 10) are very apparent, down to the data structures and fields in those structures having the same (or very similar) names....

[ppppenguin]

[rant]
Call me a luddite but I like the look of W2K (and W95, W98 before it) and have XP in "classic" view. No gimmicks, no slides, no fades, just everything happening as fast as possible when you ask for it. The more I hear about W8 and W10 the more I feel the pull of Linux. The question is: "Which Linux?" I think the answer for me is one that looks and feels as much like W2K as possible. I'm not scared of command line stuff - I did MSDOS back in the 1980s and still use the command prompt on occasion.

I still use Office 2000 and see no reason to move on. They seem to do everyting I need of them. Though DOCX and XLSX files are a nuisance. I've got the add-on that allows Office 2000 to view them. Otherwise it's Libreoffice which feels slow by comparison.
[/rant]

[Mark Hennessy]

I'm guessing Peter is talking about the various "abstracted" folders that sit within "Libraries", for example.

If so, I share that discomfort. I'm very happy with the file system, and I like to choose exactly where to install my programs, where to save my data, where to keep my music collection, where to keep my photographs, where to keep my archive of technical data. You get the idea. I don't want these to be hidden away on the C drive where Windows thinks is best (e.g., Music ends up being in C:\Users\Mark\My Documents\Music).

This all started with the introduction of Special Folders back in the Windows 95 days, with My Documents being the first. The concept has grown a lot since then...

For the sake of balance, there are good reasons for doing this - especially for non-expert users. But for those of us who have our own ways about managing data, it can get in the way. I avoid it by partitioning my hard discs in to multiple drive letters, and put the bulk of the data on E:

The "Libraries" in Windows 7 is something I've made no effort to use or understand, but they appear to be a new level of abstraction where multiple physical or special folders can be part of the library - the files you see within a library could therefore be a mixture of 2 or more folders. While again I can see how that could be useful to some, it doesn't sit comfortably with me.

Naturally, all these are functions of the operating system, not the file system.

Of course, there will be times when the OS breaks down and you might need to find the "MS-DOS" pathname to the physical files to recover them. Easy if you do what I do and avoid the bulk of the abstracted folders.

Last night one of my Windows 7 PCs confirmed that it has downloaded the files, and is ready to update. Unfortunately, this computer is "mission-critical" at the moment, so I won't be doing it any time soon. Sadly, my other machines are rather more "expendable" and could be rebuild in a few minutes from recover DVDs, but they haven't received the option to reserve, let alone the update itself. Hmm...

[peter scott]

I still don't understand the indirect file system of W7 and hate it when compared to XP. I certainly won't be in any hurry to adopt W10.

Peter

For those of us who are clueless in these matters could somebody please explain the difference between the W7 and XP file systems. I'm primarily an XP user but have dabbled with W7. The file systems don't look different to me.

Here's what I was refering to:
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/win...aries-suck

Another inconvenience is that W7 doesn't share files happily with XP machines on the same network. You can only access limited areas in W7 from an XP machine.

Peter

[ppppenguin]

Thanks for the explanations. Like Mark, I put my files where I want them to be, with a folder structure some of which goes back to the days of DOS.

[Nick]

The library shortcuts etc. are called symlinks - there are two types: soft & hard.

Mostly, you will only see "soft" symlinks, e.g. "My Documents" or "Downloads" - a soft link simply transparently redirectls the access to the real location of the files/directory.

This is not so important on a domestic Windows system, but on commercial systems that are organised as domains where users have "roaming profiles" where their data follows them regardless what machine in the domain they login to, symlinks are vital.

Typically, in a domain with roaming user profiles, all a user's personal data resides on a network file share that can be accessed from any machine in the domain - when a domain user logs into a host, their "My Documents", "Downloads" etc. links are set automatically to refer to the domain data (though it can also be cached on the local host too). All very cunning...

There are many features of NTFS that are rarely seen or used - alternative data streams being one of the most fun