Okay, so the last three on my list are electronics related and have been rolled together at some point in time, but they are still being updated as specialized Win32 programs. As for CorelDraw! it's still one of my favourites that might qualify as a current Win32 program.
Here's some of the major (payware) software I regularly use:
Adobe Audition 3 (started using it back in the Cool Edit Pro days some 11 years ago, and have liked it all the way up to version 3, but now hate the stupid changes made in CC).
MakeMusic Finale 2014 (been using over 13 years in some form or another, and it continues getting better each version. Thank you!).
Microsoft Visual Basic 6 (been using it for over 12 years, and would gladly pay $$$ for an update that would give me 64-bit and multi-thread support, but it has been discontinued and I hate the .NET crap with a passion).
Nero 8 (been using it for many years now to author audio CDs; I would drop this buggy piece of junk in a heartbeat if I could find a cheap, decent program that can take a single, authored WAV file and automatically put the track markers seamlessly onto a CD from the WAV file. Haven't upgraded because the later versions are even more bloated and expensive).
Sony MovieStudio 12 (been using since the Vegas days some 8 years ago; I like up to version 12, not so keen on the silly changes made in 13).
Last Edit: Dec 12, 2015 0:15:26 GMT -6 by Techie007
Microsoft, is Windows 10 the best you could do? Really? After promising to listen to our feedback, what a letdown!
I think the real problem is Microsoft keeps changing how Windows works thus breaking software compatibility. A program called WinFAX is a good example. It was a great faxing program until Microsoft changed the inner workings of Windows XP with the introduction of IE7. Symantec wasn't interested in rewriting the code they had acquired from the original developer, Delrina, to make it compatible again. I think the same sort of thing happened again with many other great software packages with the introduction of Windows Vista and later where suddenly one had to find work arounds to make the programs work again. I know Windows XP mode was introduced into windows 7 to help alleviate that problem. With Windows 8.x and 10, it seems like Microsoft does not seem to care about providing software compatibility anymore as it's all about making apps now.
Sorry, but I'm going to break the mold a bit and be somewhat positive here...
Sure, there's a lot of mediocrity out there, but there's never been a time like the present where so much is available to us, and frankly, if you're selective you can find some very good stuff indeed. Sometimes you have to avoid the "very latest" things that aren't good, and just selectively pick out the slightly older stuff that really works. Then weather the storm.
Never forget: There has never been a time when ANYTHING was bug-free. That's the nature of any beast as complex and multi-dimensional as software.
And though we have to deal with some mediocrity today, there's actually a lot of good in the new software that's been made in the past few years. Here you'll find a partial listing of software I use and like.
The problems of the very latest Win 10 notwithstanding, I've run my personally tweaked and augmented Windows 8.1 for more than 40 days straight on one bootup with intensive daily use for all kinds of things and had NOT EVEN ONE glitch. IMO, there's never been a better, more stable version of Windows than the Windows 8.1 setup I'm using right now. I installed it fresh over 2 years ago in 2013 and have been productive with it every day since.
I just got Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition - free - earlier this year. They were kind enough to make it legal for me to use it in my small business. And hey, it's not bad at all! It makes better executables than ever from my C/C++ sources, and the tools it makes available to me during development are pretty darned good (hover over a variable or function and get important info and argument lists, etc.). Visual Studio can be a very productive tool for individual or small group development.
That reminds me, CollabNet's Subversion Edge (free) SVN server, Tortoise SVN and Ankh SVN for client systems. These are awesome tools. Also Scooter Software's Beyond Compare is an excellent file/folder comparison and merge tool.
Axialis Icon Workshop, which came free with Visual Studio 2005, still works fine for manipulating complex icon files.
Stefan's grepWin is a geek's dream as a search tool. Mmmm, the power of regular expressions, or finding Unicode text in binary files. And not to mention his quick text editor BowPad is a decent tool for quickly viewing log files, etc.
The Gnu Toolkit for Windows has some really great stuff in it. Want to get a file from the web using a batch file? Wget. Want Unix-like command line power to do pipelining of commands like grep and sed? Just put the GnuWin32\bin folder in your path.
VMware Workstation really works and facilitates development and testing in Virtual Machines like never before. I've yet to get their very latest release (I'm still on 11, they've recently released 12), but I'm considering it now since it's getting to where I could use better OpenGL in a VM.
I regularly use Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.1 and its Camera Raw component to develop my old camera's raw files, and I've honestly never been able to make better images from them (and certainly not with as much ease) as right now. Photoshop isn't bug-free but it's still good and I do what I can to help make it better.
Helping integrate image manipulation into the desktop environment is the FastPictureViewerCodec Pack, which makes thumbnails and previews of virtually any type of image file available to Explorer. And who could be without the freeware image viewer / format converter IrfanView.
Early this year I bought a new-old-stock Microsoft Office 2010 (Outlook, Word, Excel are all I really need) and guess what? It actually works well. It even has 64 bit executables. I tried Office 365 for a while then DITCHED IT as it is the essence of mediocrity and backsliding. The older version license cost me about a hundred bucks.
Skype for Desktop actually works, though it may have its quirks (for example, it's not as good for transferring files as it used to be). Sometimes I collaborate with a voice Skype call all day.
If you're really bent on running the "latest and greatest" operating system, Aero Glass for Win 8+ is high quality software. Plus there are free themes you can use to do things like bring a full Aero Glass usability experience to newer systems. It's what I do, and it really turns things around. I actually love using Windows 8.1 the way I have it set up.
Care about security? Privacy? Sphinx Windows 10 Firewall (which works on 7 and 8.1 as well) is good stuff. It manages the Windows Base Filtering Engine, and actually provides you enough information to easily manage a restrictive deny-by-default firewall configuration over the long-haul. I've been helping the author, who's been VERY responsive, to work out the kinks in their latest version 7 releases, and I'm very glad I have it. Now, for me Windows does NOT contact anyone without my knowledge and approval (and I approve very little!).
Little, free desktop tweaking/augmenting tools like WizMouse, ShellFolderFix, Folder Options X, Vista Shortcut Manager.
NirSoft's Shell Extensions Viewer and SysInternals' Autoruns, Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and a few others. Wen Jia Liu's Process Hacker. ShoXDK's Svchost Viewer. Things you'd never want to be without if you're serious about managing Windows systems.
PassMark's PerformanceTest benchmark program for tracking performance trends and detecting problems.
MalwareBytes AntiMalware free edition for occasionally scanning your system for anything that's gotten around your defenses. I've never had it find anything, but it feels good to run it.
CPU-Z and GPU-Z for status and monitoring, not to mention HWMonitor for temperature checks.
Radmin Server / Viewer for screen sharing and remote control.
Igor Pavlov's 7-Zip for compressed file access.
Gabriele Ponti's Send To Toys for some nice augments to the Send To context menu.
I could keep going, but I think the point is made: Never have we had SO MUCH good software available to us, which works fine right now, today. It's no wonder those of us in-the-know cry a bit when we think about Microsoft trying to throw away the desktop.
And let's not forget the incredible hardware we now have available to us...
I have a 12 core Dell workstation that boots and runs everything from a RAID 0 SSD array. I wait for NOTHING. It's design is now 5 years old but it's still world class, and I have augmented it with top of the line hardware. This is more machine than I ever dreamed of using in all my 39 year software engineering career. I can do more with it now than I have ever been able to do with any computer before - even the corporate or government monster machines in my past that cost fortunes. I have worked in corporations where it took an hour to build software not half as complex as the software I work with today, which I can build in a minute (incremental builds take just a few seconds, literally just enough time to Alt-Tab and test). It's incredibly enabling to be able to make changes, recompile, and test all while coffee is still steaming in the cup. For all that, which I do over and over again all day and well into the night, Windows 8.1 doesn't fault.
For the first time in my life I've just got 100+ megabit internet access as of this past October. The things you can do with that are actually enabling. I can, for example, participate in a number of beta programs and download big software drops in seconds or minutes. Then I can provide feedback to make that software better for what I need. I am involved with beta testing software for a number of companies, and I can tell you that my feedback has been productive. With this kind of network access I can (and do) collaborate at will, audio/video/desktop sharing, with people all over the world.
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As an adept (as many here are) at reconfiguring and tweaking and augmenting, maybe I find ways to use things that are beyond the norm, but frankly as long as you're selective about what you run, and take the time to learn to run it best, what you can do with your desktop computer RIGHT NOW TODAY is hands down the best ever.
Don't settle. Avoid mediocrity and seek better. Reconfigure. Augment. Read. Contribute. It works.
re: AA3 I use it, however, I have noted at least one spy thing that needs attention on every system it's installed on if you use "extract audio from CD" check your primary / secondary temp locations for a hidden directory called AudCDs this directory should be replaced with a [hidden, read only, system] empty 0 byte file delete the directory right click new > text document > name the empty text document AudCDs with no file extension next visit the location in cmd as an administrator and use the following command attrib +r +h +s AudCDs this will prevent AA3 from "tracking" the CDs you've extracted
I find the lack of configuration options disturbing !
I felt a great disturbance in the force.. as if millions of win 7 systems suddenly cried out in terror.
<Rick> Good video. It's almost hard to believe that at one time Windows 98 was the resource hog, but even then, it still ran circles around what Windows 10 can do on today's modern hardware and look a heck of alot better doing it.
May 25, 2021 22:55:12 GMT -6
<Rick> As stated elsewhere, So much for the launch of Windows 11, "The Great Crash." Myself, I had a hard time getting into the site listed above, when I did get in, the video was partly done and then it crashed. There has been many other reports of crashing.
Jun 24, 2021 9:52:33 GMT -6
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<Rick> I see Microsoft has been very quick to pull down reports of site crashing regarding the Launch of Windows 11 on the Microsoft Insiders forum.
Jun 24, 2021 9:57:31 GMT -6
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<Rick> The rebroadcast is working okay.
Jun 24, 2021 11:00:25 GMT -6
<Rick> With reports of people being able to install the dev-edition of Windows 11 on machines not meeting spec, I thought I would give it a what-the-heck try. Lucky me, I'm caught in the downloading, doesn't meet spec, clearing, re-downloading loop on my machine!
Jul 2, 2021 7:08:46 GMT -6
<Rick> I've recently purchased a license for ArcaOS from www.arcanoae.com/ to play with. First impressions, it's still OS/2, but it now has a Linux twist to it.
Jul 2, 2021 7:32:53 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> laptop shit out and am stuck buying a new one. os win11 as fucked as win10 was?
Oct 2, 2021 12:56:10 GMT -6
<Rick> Let's see ..., my impression of Windows 11 is that it is a spruced up version of Windows 10 requiring a 64-bit processor plus a piece of security hardware that is less than 4 years old in order for it to run.
Oct 4, 2021 18:25:49 GMT -6
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<Rick> On the plus side, Microsoft is supposed to be supporting Windows 10 for some time to come for those of us still using systems with I7 or older processors.
Oct 4, 2021 18:44:35 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> i tried installing win10 om the 'shitout' pc this morning usung media creation. EPIC FAIL! went into an endless bootloop. win7 reinstalled just fine
Oct 21, 2021 11:23:38 GMT -6
<dozrguy> STILL so much bullshit and so little time for the kiddie ideas from the hill. My new laptop (MSI GE 11-UH461) would be an awesome "10" machine but because of Winblows I can only give it a "2"......wasted $3500
Oct 27, 2021 9:36:47 GMT -6
<Rick> Hello. Just checking in.
Mar 17, 2022 10:46:54 GMT -6
<isidroco> Each new w10 update adds >100000 useless files to \Windows\Servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix... folders. Even in a SSD takes time to delete that stuff. In each version they manage to worsen stuff.
Mar 27, 2022 16:14:51 GMT -6
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<dozerguy> still traffic here?
Oct 9, 2022 17:32:44 GMT -6
<Rick> No, there does not seem to be very much traffic these days. I still check in from time to time.
Oct 9, 2022 20:08:58 GMT -6