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Post subject: SSMS-I Productivity in a Smaller Package - for us Beta Folks
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 5:33 pm 
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I'm selling another house. The HVAC system is all but crashed - two weeks prior to closing - so I'm having to spend time on the job site, removing the last of possessions and waiting for repair people, etc.

I've avoided Win8.1 up until now (except Win8 phone) but finally gave in last week. I obtained the unit pictured below, an ASUS Transformer Book. Slowly, I've been hitting the learning curve,
experimenting with software and peripherals, and the like. I'm happy to discover that I can run EditPro with Japanese support, the old ZSNESV151, and map buttons on a Win7-compatible Buffalo
gamepad from Japan (or Red China?). With a freebie FTP program I'm set to be productive on the fly - sans an easy solution to missing POP server support for e-mail.

Win8.1 is just plain stupid about providing resident support for obvious features that legions rely upon daily! The file search system is really snaky compared to the easily-navigated architecture in XP.
This turn and spin and wave and swipe and flip nonsense is driving me batty! I can be working on a file search; all of a sudden I'm looking at the blue Start "Page" and idiotic APPS Store icon, giving
a new meaning to the "blue page of death"! Seems the desktop is an afterthought.

No Avast! antivirus support, no Thunderbird support, not even Firefox - just bludgeoned with Bing, gagged with a gob of Google garbage, and bloated with ASUS junkware. I did find a buried menu to
turn off that airplane propeller LCD screen! Maybe these hyperactive jumpin'-around-like-frogs-all-the-time modern kids like all of this flashy, spinning, swirling, cycling pages for their twiddle-de-tweeter
yap-at-the-world 'bout nuthin' APPS (reminds me of MIRC in the old days), but for a REAL man's work (and computer-savvy, result-oriented ladies in the IT age), an old warrior such as moi needs a
stable platform that will stay put where I set it and do what I expect it to do in a cost-effective timeline! Regardless, I may adapt to some of these touch screen functions - eventually.

On the good side, I can say that the bare minimum of what I need to do to make progress on a translation project is working in my new Win8.1 system. And I can pick this thing up, run anywhere,
and get a few tasks done (pay bills, work on taxes, add data to a mortgage application, or translate an RPG) while on the move. I can even yank out the tablet-screen and take off somewhere for
hours, longer if I have the charger in my pocket. I can do work on the tablet and even play the game on Snes8x with virtual buttons, but I can't use the gamepad with the tablet because the USB3
port is on the keyboard docking module. I will eventually try to see if I can convert the gamepad connector through the mini-USB port on the tablet. If it works, I won't be able to use the gamepad
and charge the tablet at the same time.

I know some of you testers are working demanding jobs, attending college (some working at the same time, and are busy as all get-out. Maybe you are already using Win8.1 and know all these facts
I've just discovered. If you haven't, and you're testing in Win7 or earlier, and you own second platforms that run Win8.1, maybe this information will open the door to more convenient access to the
game in the time slots you have available. We're in no rush here. I will choose quality over hurrying every time, and I do appreciate having all of you on board.

As for me, I need a bit more sophisticated support at my end. With the setup pictured below, you can see the gamepad that's plugged in. My writing program is on the right. When you send me a
needed correction, I click the Windows Explorer icon in the taskbar, pull up a search of the text or misc file, find the needed block where the fix is needed (out of over a hundred sub-directories!), pull
it up in the writing program, make the change, save it, go to the bottom left just above the "ASUS" logo and click the insertion program icon, recompile, restart ZSNES, reload the game, hit F-4, pick
up the gamepad, hit the A button, and advance to check and make sure the correction is now displayed in the game.

So, back to work now. I'm not making any game progress while I'm posting on this board! Once again, I appreciate all the fine inputs you testers are sending. I've probably changed 200 screens since
we went into beta - many that I've identified myself. I'm playing two games simultaneously now. #4 on the PC, #5 on my telephone after I go to bed. Sometimes I find something to fix on my phone
game. I will run up to my loft study and do what all I just described - on a desktop - rather than setup the ASUS at bedside. THAT would be overkill of a good thing, hee-hee...!! And, whenever I
travel anywhere, a backup of the game is always around my neck, on a red 64GB Verbatim flash drive.

If anything bad happens to me, have them search my body for the latest copy of SSMS-I. I would hate for all this progress to be lost!

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Post subject: Re: SSMS-I Productivity in a Smaller Package - for us Beta F
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 8:18 pm 
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Oh boy... win 8.1... scary stuff. I took forever to migrate to Win7 and for good reason, I wanted to make sure it was decently usable and as bug free as possible. I had trouble for a few days, but 7 is actually pretty solid and I like it enough to keep it around. As for win 8 however... well, I'm not so keen on migrating and will probably keep 7 around until the very end of its support cycle, exactly as I did with XP.

If I had to swallow win 8, I'd probably go an extra mile and try to virtualize a different environment for me to work on.


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Post subject: Re: SSMS-I Productivity in a Smaller Package - for us Beta F
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 9:56 pm 
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Get yourself a copy of classic shell. Never deal with that @#$% touch interface again. You'll thank yourself. I have win 8.1 on the tablet and I still hate it. But it does work with classicshell close enough to make do. And no I don't care that 8 is supposedly a lot faster. if 8 is faster than 7, you just don't know how to streamline a windows setup for speed. It is not 7's fault. They made the simpliest of things impossible on 8. Like customizing things to look how you want. Which has been easily done since the Windows 3 days. Not on 8. No they removed most of the theme options and you can't theme for crap on it. And that was just for starters. Yes, though, Windiows 8 CAN run Firefox and Thunderbird if you run classicshell and avoid that touchscreen crap. Do not worry. Just expect more crashes out of things like Editpadpro. It doesn't like WIn 8 as much.

One final tip, dump that windows search crap. Go get Windows Grep. Trust me, you will not touch windows search again for text stuff.


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Post subject: Re: SSMS-I Productivity in a Smaller Package - for us Beta F
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 9:59 pm 
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From what I read from several sources in side by side comparisons, Win 8 isn't even all that much faster than 7 where it counts (application efficiency and responsiveness). It has a sort of boot up cache that may make startup faster, but that's a negligible improvement over all the usability woes it introduces, haha.


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Post subject: Re: SSMS-I Productivity in a Smaller Package - for us Beta F
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:05 pm 
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Yeah, bootup is about the only place it really is faster. Big whoop, I rarely shut my PC down, so I don't give 2 hoots about bootup to begin with.

And for those that think Windows can't run for days without rebooting. My record uptime is like 3 months (on both windows 7 and back on XP too when I used it.) It can be done :)


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Post subject: Re: SSMS-I Productivity in a Smaller Package - for us Beta F
PostPosted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:08 pm 
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Definitely. I also leave my PC running 24/7 without issues (sometimes I kill and re-start the explorer.exe process when the desktop gets slow, but that's the only real problem). About the only time I reboot is when I'm forced to (updates).


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