Am I the only one that doesn't like the new UI?

The most common thing to note is that people don't like change. It happened with Vista big time, but since Vista has been out for basically 3 years now (first released in November 2006 - Vista Business, at least, then the consumer stuff 2 months later at the end of January 2007), the "switch" to Windows 7 is a lot easier to slide into, but people will still find reasons to complain.

"Just do it" is a good maxim to live by this time around. There's nothing that doesn't work well with the "new" GUI in Windows 7, especially aspects of the Taskbar and even more so the window management tools. Aero Snap rocks, it really does, especially in situations where document comparisons are necessary. No more trying to position the windows for best viewing, a simple keypress or two and 'snap snap' there ya go.

Windows 7 rocks... truly.
 
The most common thing to note is that people don't like change. It happened with Vista big time, but since Vista has been out for basically 3 years now (first released in November 2006 - Vista Business, at least, then the consumer stuff 2 months later at the end of January 2007), the "switch" to Windows 7 is a lot easier to slide into, but people will still find reasons to complain.

Not necessarily true. There are good user interfaces and bad user interfaces. Always was, always will be. Just because it's new doesn't make it better.

* Windows 3.x (Program Manager) was bad.
* Windows 95 was good - thought so the day it came out.
* Win2K and WinXP carry on that tradition.
* Vista and Win7 was a change, but I don't consider it better. It's much harder for me to get to the Network section, for instance, than 2K/XP. 'Much more convoluted.

The same is true of Office 2000 and 2003. Office 2007 blows. It is much harder to get around, and I've been using it since it came out. I hate it.

I know how software companies think - we all do. They'll change something just for the sake of changing whether it needs to be "improved" or not. They have to sell the new version after all to make money, don't they? Give Microsoft ten years and they will change it back to the "retro" theme of XP in Windows 2020. ;)
 
The same is true of Office 2000 and 2003. Office 2007 blows. It is much harder to get around, and I've been using it since it came out. I hate it.
You're in disagreement with a vast majority of users than. Give the Ribbon an actual try for a few days and see if you can ever go back. It's far more intuitive than a bunch of crazy menus with billions of options.
 
You're in disagreement with a vast majority of users than. Give the Ribbon an actual try for a few days and see if you can ever go back. It's far more intuitive than a bunch of crazy menus with billions of options.

I've been using it for over a year at work, but I also use Office 2003 and Open Office on home PC's. Side by side, I really do hate it.
 
Help, help! I'm an elitist nerd who is terrified of change and must stick to my antiquated methods and subpar performance forever, AT ALL COSTS, even though 2+ generations of operating systems have come out with better performance and ease of use, and also still allow me to use my broken methods of computing!

Embrace the future or become more elitist and irrelevant to modern computing than you already are.

And exactly what is so revolutionary in Win7 that people must upgrade to it? All I see are some fancy UI tweaks which are sometimes quite nifty, and subsystem changes which don't matter to me.
 
And exactly what is so revolutionary in Win7 that people must upgrade to it? All I see are some fancy UI tweaks which are sometimes quite nifty, and subsystem changes which don't matter to me.

Windows 7 is such a rich OS that its very possible that you and many others on XP won't appreciate it. It's just FULL of high-end features that people simply CAN'T appreciate until you use.

For instance, when hooked into Outlook, you can search ALL of your emails from the Start Menu search box. All of your documents, every freeking thing. It's absolutely a killer feature if you have a lot of code and documents like me. Cacblecard integration is another feature that's going to finally make Windows the center of my home entertainment, bye bye crappy DVRs! And when it comes to digital ink and the multi-touch stuff, it leaves XP in the dust.

So really, on the high end of the spectrum, XP and even Vista are has beens. But honestly people that don't get the power of the search in Windows 7 (yes, it was there in Vista but 7 has most of the issues smoothed) are living in the past.

A desktop OS that doesn't have search comparable to Windows 7 is just a shell.
 
With these settings for performance and my taskbar settings to make it 'nonfat' and doesn't combine windows, I'm liking the UI. Combines the familiarities of XP with the new of 7.
 
What does windows 7 offer by way of themes? I'm talking something sexy I can download from Deviant art like I have been doing in XP for years. This is my favorite feature of XP, and not a lot of people know about it. I've had people look at my laptop and say something silly like "Woah I love your ubuntu theme"... cause ubuntu is the only linux distro and XP is incapable of looking as sexy as it... </sarcasm>

So far the best offering I have seen is color schemes a la win 3.1, with is lame to say the least. The task bar at the bottom looks too large IMO, a custom theme would set this straight...

Also in vista I could shrink the window borders to 0px and made it look REAL good
 
And exactly what is so revolutionary in Win7 that people must upgrade to it? All I see are some fancy UI tweaks which are sometimes quite nifty, and subsystem changes which don't matter to me.

LOL!

Find out for your damned self. It's been how many years since XP came out? The thing is a fossil. XP will always have a special place in my heart, but dude, it's seriously time to skip the whole "Fine, explain to me how it's better" and start figuring it out for yourself.
 
What does windows 7 offer by way of themes? I'm talking something sexy I can download from Deviant art like I have been doing in XP for years. This is my favorite feature of XP, and not a lot of people know about it. I've had people look at my laptop and say something silly like "Woah I love your ubuntu theme"... cause ubuntu is the only linux distro and XP is incapable of looking as sexy as it... </sarcasm>

So far the best offering I have seen is color schemes a la win 3.1, with is lame to say the least. The task bar at the bottom looks too large IMO, a custom theme would set this straight...

Also in vista I could shrink the window borders to 0px and made it look REAL good

You can select to have a small taskbar or a large one in Windows 7, so it's a non-issue. You have to think - XP has had 10+ years of skinning, Vista has barely had 3 and Windows 7 just came out. It takes some time. There is one W7 theme I love, though:

http://ap-graphik.deviantart.com/art/Min-Max-Close-preview-for-Soft-141133330

LOVE that one.

You can skin Vista and 7 the exact same way you do with XP by patching a couple files.
 
You can skin Vista and 7 the exact same way you do with XP by patching a couple files.
This makes me very happy! I looked for something that maybe someone concocted for a 7 RC but couldn't find anything like what you linked, which is what I want!
 
And exactly what is so revolutionary in Win7 that people must upgrade to it? All I see are some fancy UI tweaks which are sometimes quite nifty, and subsystem changes which don't matter to me.

Depends what you do. If you take your laptop and use it in different places (projectors in different buildings, monitor at home, monitor at work), our feature is nifty cool. Connecting and Configuring Displays not only tries to do the "right thing" any time you plug a display in, but if you want something else it stores the change you made and remembers it, so that when you return to that connection it restores your last configuration. That's just one of a million little things, but it's one I have affinity with and thus like to point out :).
 
Windows 7 is a huge step up from XP. I would say nearly every person that does not like 7 compared to XP just doesn't like change period.
 
I think its funny how people are so used to xp, and all the shortcuts and workarounds they've developed/used over the years to make it better. What you are saying by doing that is xp didn't get it right in the first place. If you forget your hacks and start to learn again, win7 is quite nice.

I have a question though. Aero peek is pretty neat, especially with tabs in ie, but when I have ie open with tabs, I have to hover over the ie icon, get the aero peek, then click on one of the windows. I can't just click on the icon and bring up the window on whatever tab it was left on, at least it doesnt seem to work that way for me.

Another question and I hate to jump on this thread, but is there a way to download all the extra win7 features through win7, for example windows xp mode in win7 pro. I found where I can dl it online, but wondering if it can be done from within win7.

I think XP mode will pop up on Windows update at somepoint in the future.
 
With these settings for performance and my taskbar settings to make it 'nonfat' and doesn't combine windows, I'm liking the UI. Combines the familiarities of XP with the new of 7.
Did you at least try the default view first? This kneejerk of "make everything the way it's always been" is silly. At the very least, try keeping grouping on - it really makes everything cleaner and easier to work with, particularly with pinning and keeping things in a consistent place whether running or not.
 
Wow, I didn't realize me pointing out a few things I don't like about the Windows 7 UI would get some people so upset. Thanks for the majority of you being rational and offering suggestions rather than childish name calling.

You would think I just insulted someones mother by a few of the replies and childish personal attacks. I won't even waste my time replying to those, but I will suggest to them that they explore their house, open all the doors and you'll find at least one that leads to a really big room called the outside world. You should explore that room more.

I never said Win7 was inferior to XP, I even said it had a lot of things I do like. I don't like the way the menu is crammed into a little box if I want to browse it. I already said I do like that you can type and search for things from the start menu, but for things that I know where they are, it's much faster for me to just do it in two clicks in XP rather than 5+ keystrokes on a keyboard. Why does that get some people so upset?
 
Wow, I didn't realize me pointing out a few things I don't like about the Windows 7 UI would get some people so upset. Thanks for the majority of you being rational and offering suggestions rather than childish name calling.

You would think I just insulted someones mother by a few of the replies and childish personal attacks. I won't even waste my time replying to those, but I will suggest to them that they explore their house, open all the doors and you'll find at least one that leads to a really big room called the outside world. You should explore that room more.

I never said Win7 was inferior to XP, I even said it had a lot of things I do like. I don't like the way the menu is crammed into a little box if I want to browse it. I already said I do like that you can type and search for things from the start menu, but for things that I know where they are, it's much faster for me to just do it in two clicks in XP rather than 5+ keystrokes on a keyboard. Why does that get some people so upset?

I'm going to reiterate what I said 1 page ago as a reply to this post:
It's also awesome how you can pin individual documents to it's parent program icon permanently. Say you're working with a .psd for Photoshop, and it's gonna take you at least 3 days to finish the project. Instead of having to click the program, then going to file>open and searching through folders for the .psd every time you open Photoshop, you can just right click the Photoshop icon, click your pinned document, and bam, the program starts with that document open. Once you're finally done with your whole project and you're no longer needing to use that specific file on a regular basis, just unpin the document from the right click menu. So basically, it's this: in the old system you'd have 1 click to open the program, then a 2nd click on the "File" menu, then another click to select "Open", then however-many more clicks to search through folders to get to the file. So that will be 4 clicks at the least, maybe more depending on how many folders you have to go through. Or, you could click the program to open it, then click "File", go down to the recent docs option, then click your document. That's still 3 clicks. The newer method is 1 right click, then another click on the pinned document to open it and its parent program. Bam, only 2 clicks. All the while, the document remains safe in it's actual location.

Technically, and quite literally, it's faster and takes less clicks to open things in W7 when compared to past versions. :)
 
Did you at least try the default view first? This kneejerk of "make everything the way it's always been" is silly. At the very least, try keeping grouping on - it really makes everything cleaner and easier to work with, particularly with pinning and keeping things in a consistent place whether running or not.

Yeah, I really did not like the extra space that the super bar took up. Grouping up similar items is nice, but I like to have each program/operation to have its own button to click on for ease of operation. It would start to impede ease if I had more than 8 showing, but that rarely happens. I do pin my programs to my start menu though :D
 
You're in disagreement with a vast majority of users than. Give the Ribbon an actual try for a few days and see if you can ever go back. It's far more intuitive than a bunch of crazy menus with billions of options.

I honestly still don't understand why people could possibly like the ribbon UI.

It essentially boils down to simply making buttons bigger and then being forced to spread them out over different tabs because there isn't enough room anymore, resulting in extra clicks to perform basic functions. Of course the software itself has a lot of improved functionality over Office 2003, so I'm not going back, but the ribbon still annoys me.
 
Minimized applications still show the glass plate on the taskbar.

It's on the far right of the taskbar, to the right of the notification area. Hovering over it will show the desktop and clicking it is "Show desktop".
 
I honestly still don't understand why people could possibly like the ribbon UI.

It essentially boils down to simply making buttons bigger and then being forced to spread them out over different tabs because there isn't enough room anymore, resulting in extra clicks to perform basic functions. Of course the software itself has a lot of improved functionality over Office 2003, so I'm not going back, but the ribbon still annoys me.

The Ribbon makes it a TON easier to find features, and its easy to have it hide itself, no loss of screen space. In Office 2010 the Ribbon can now be customized and have custom keyboard shortcuts!:D This should once and for all end the Ribbon debate. It now has all the functionality of the old menus and then some!:cool:
 
questions: if you have a bunch of programs opened, and they're all minimized, then how do you know which programs are opened without moving your cursor over each pinned icon?
Why does it matter? You can tell which programs are running or not quite easily, but why does it matter which are minimized? For that matter, could you tell that on previous Windows versions?
is anyone missing the "show desktop" icon?
It's on the far side of the taskbar - hover over it to get a preview, click on it to have the "Show Desktop" functionality.
It essentially boils down to simply making buttons bigger and then being forced to spread them out over different tabs because there isn't enough room anymore, resulting in extra clicks to perform basic functions. Of course the software itself has a lot of improved functionality over Office 2003, so I'm not going back, but the ribbon still annoys me.
No, it boils down to having the functionality most relevant to what I'm currently doing (graph functions if I'm working with a graph, formatting if I'm working with Text, formulas if I'm working with a formula, etc., etc.) shown onscreen at any time.
 
would you want several sessions of firefox, excel, word running at the same time when you're playing left 4 dead, for example? when these apps are opened and minimized, there's no way to tell that they're opened unless you do aero peek? i haven't spent a lot of time toying with windows 7 so maybe i'm not posing the question correctly.

Do you mean to say that -

1, you can't tell what you have open in each window of firefox, etc. without hovering over?

2. You can't tell that you have the program open without hovering over?
 

Maybe this will help -

taskbart.jpg


If you can see the firefox icon that I circled.. that means that firefox is open, with 2 windows (notice the stacked effect) and is the active window (white highlight)

Contrast this to the IE icon that I put the green square around.. it has no open windows (is not running).

Make more sense now?
 
is anyone missing the "show desktop" icon?
Windows+D.

You're in disagreement with a vast majority of users than. Give the Ribbon an actual try for a few days and see if you can ever go back. It's far more intuitive than a bunch of crazy menus with billions of options.
I did give the Ribbon an actual try for a few days. And guess what...I have gone back. I prefer OOo for the simple reason that it doesn't have the Ribbon. That, and most of the shortcuts are the same as Office 03. I have no idea why Microsoft decided to have the double whammy of completely changing the UI and changing/disabling many of the shortcuts...
 
Also, for 7, the lower right hand corner does the same thing as the 'show desktop' icon.

I hated how MS redid all of the menu with the ribbon interface, but we got to evolve... no matter where it takes us. Everything previously in the menus are there... you just have to find them. For me, the ribbon is best in:

Excel, Powerpoint

Worst in:
Word, Movie Maker (no freaken' clue...)

But that's just me :).
 
Windows+D.


I did give the Ribbon an actual try for a few days. And guess what...I have gone back. I prefer OOo for the simple reason that it doesn't have the Ribbon. That, and most of the shortcuts are the same as Office 03. I have no idea why Microsoft decided to have the double whammy of completely changing the UI and changing/disabling many of the shortcuts...

There were ways to get all that back with third party tools but of course that's just something else to have to buy.

But as I said earlier, the Office 2010 interface is MUCH better and pretty much fully customizable. You can assign whatever shortcuts to whatever keystrokes that you want so it looks like Microsoft at least listened.


Office 2010 is pretty sweet thus far. The tech preview is solid, not sure why they haven't gone to a general beta. I have it running on my Eee PC netbook and it runs pretty well. It's not fast or anything but more than usable for most tasks.
 
Depends what you do. If you take your laptop and use it in different places (projectors in different buildings, monitor at home, monitor at work), our feature is nifty cool. Connecting and Configuring Displays not only tries to do the "right thing" any time you plug a display in, but if you want something else it stores the change you made and remembers it, so that when you return to that connection it restores your last configuration. That's just one of a million little things, but it's one I have affinity with and thus like to point out :).

That's a feature I would definitely appreciate if I would switch between displays/projectors all the time :)

Pinning documents to a certain application sounds kind of nifty too, but isn't that different from 'Last Used Documents' in any application and browsing to a specific folder isn't so time-intensive compared to actually editing it to warrant upgrading to a new OS for it. In a pinch I could always throw a bunch of shortcuts to those documents in a specific folder.

Integration with Outlook I couldn't give a darn about as I have never used Outlook and never will, plus I never use Search in Thunderbird either as I just so happen to know where all my mail is :p
 
I know about the keyboard shortcuts, but most of them aren't really shortcuts. The two I use the most are WIN+D and WIN+L. For everything else, it's quicker just to use the mouse. It's just much faster to launch a program with XP. I can launch any program with two clicks of the mouse. With the Win7, you have to click the start button, then start typing, then click your program when it shows up, or since the menu stays cramped in that little box, and sub-menus don't pop out, you have to make several clicks.

For example, if I want to run defrag. In XP, with one hand on the mouse, I click start, move up to All Programs, Accessories, System Tools and click Disk Defragmenter. I used TweakUI to shorten the time it takes for the sub-menus to auto open, so I only have to pause for a fraction of a second before the sub-menu opens.

With Win7, to do this I have to click start, move to the keyboard and type "def" before Disk Defragmenter shows up, then move back to the mouse and click it. Or if I just use the mouse, I have to click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, click System Tools and finally click Disk Defragmenter. That's 5 mouse clicks in Win7 to mouse 2 clicks in XP, or 2 mouse clicks and three keystrokes in Win7 vs. 2 mouse clicks in XP.

It just seems like a step backwards to me. I'd like to see keeping the ability to click Start and type to search, but let the menu expand out like it does in XP.

If you want to use the search bar to run apps from, just press your windows key, type the name and press enter.

So for defrag, hit windows key, type in "defr", press enter. It's way faster than navigating through all those menus and missing your click etc...

Especially at higher resolutions with high DPI mice, it becomes a pain.
 
But as I said earlier, the Office 2010 interface is MUCH better and pretty much fully customizable. You can assign whatever shortcuts to whatever keystrokes that you want so it looks like Microsoft at least listened.
We shall see. If it doesn't work out, OOo I'm sure is ready to welcome me back with open arms... :)

If you want to use the search bar to run apps from, just press your windows key, type the name and press enter.

So for defrag, hit windows key, type in "defr", press enter. It's way faster than navigating through all those menus and missing your click etc...

Especially at higher resolutions with high DPI mice, it becomes a pain.
Or you could do what I do and use the keyboard...

Especially since I use a crappy mouse and a really good, comfortable keyboard, it's much more convenient to use the keyboard to navigate.
 
That's a feature I would definitely appreciate if I would switch between displays/projectors all the time :)

Pinning documents to a certain application sounds kind of nifty too, but isn't that different from 'Last Used Documents' in any application and browsing to a specific folder isn't so time-intensive compared to actually editing it to warrant upgrading to a new OS for it. In a pinch I could always throw a bunch of shortcuts to those documents in a specific folder.

Integration with Outlook I couldn't give a darn about as I have never used Outlook and never will, plus I never use Search in Thunderbird either as I just so happen to know where all my mail is :p

You don't have to use Outlook, any email client that has an iFilter for Windows search will do, I believe that Thunderbird has one.

But you are joking right about never searching your email right?

When I see people talk about all these shortcuts and pinning I start thinking why? I can see the value in pinning stuff that you're working on but why are people totally ignoring the FANTASTIC search capabilities built into 7.

I've gotten to the point that I CAN'T use XP because I CAN'T find anything!:p For most these days I store documents in two to three levels deep based on broad categories. That's it. I let search handle the rest. I don't need shortcuts or even want them anymore. I just hit a few fews and BAM, there it is! No time consuming organizing, don't have to even remember a file name, just a few keywords and I have what I'm looking for. It just changes the way I look at my PC's now.

And I find myself storing more and more stuff, espcially in OneNote as its set to sync between my desktop and laptop and certain stuff to even my phone. I'll put some stuff in email that I know I'll want to keep forever if it contains no personal information.

Sometimea I wonder if I've got it all wrong as I seem to see people put a lot of thought and effort into organizing, shortcuts and whatnot. I'm just typing a few things here and there and I have access to everything I need and I just don't worrying about the how and why or even where anymore for the most part.
 
We shall see. If it doesn't work out, OOo I'm sure is ready to welcome me back with open arms... :)

OO is just getting more and more stale the more I try to use it. Sure its cool because its free but it just seems to be getting old these days.

The ENTIRE command interface is customizable across ALL the Office products, including Publisher and OneNote that didn't get the Ribbon in 2007. You can add your own tabs, move buttons around, assign ANY keystroke to ANY command as you wish in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and maybe Outlook but I don't have that setup at the moment but I think its there. And these customizations can be stored to Ribbon files now so that they are portable.

I don't think people will be complaining about the Ribbon anymore.:D
 
Or you could do what I do and use the keyboard...

Especially since I use a crappy mouse and a really good, comfortable keyboard, it's much more convenient to use the keyboard to navigate.

I was advocating using the KB.
 
But you are joking right about never searching your email right?
Nope, I organize my email in such a way that I can find the proper folder and narrow it down to the right date within seconds. Perhaps it's just me having a photographic memory but I honestly wouldn't know why I'd want to have a search function in my email client. Now searching bookmarks in Firefox, that's more useful. I absolutely do love the new smart address bar in 3.x :)

Sometimea I wonder if I've got it all wrong as I seem to see people put a lot of thought and effort into organizing, shortcuts and whatnot. I'm just typing a few things here and there and I have access to everything I need and I just don't worrying about the how and why or even where anymore for the most part.

I must admit to having used the search function in Windows a few times (mostly to locate certain DLLs) and of course I search the internet using Google a lot. In my experience, though, nothing beats knowing the location of an item of information or a document you need, even if it's via a few other sites.

Again, maybe I'm just special, but I can find no use for meta searches and such as OS X has had for a while and Windows now too.
 
I'm slowly getting used to it, it's not the size of things that is kind of annoying it's the lack of "compactness" of displayed items, there is just too much wasted space.

See my post here,
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1034051527&postcount=157




But the biggest thing that pisses me off and the most annoying is that you cannot custom soft/arrange the files in explorer, you can't move them around as you wish at all, who was the idiot that thought it was a good idea?

In XP you can move around the files in any view except in "Details" in Vista you could move files in "Details" view too, it was perfect, in 7 they took it away completely.
 
Nope, I organize my email in such a way that I can find the proper folder and narrow it down to the right date within seconds. Perhaps it's just me having a photographic memory but I honestly wouldn't know why I'd want to have a search function in my email client. Now searching bookmarks in Firefox, that's more useful. I absolutely do love the new smart address bar in 3.x :)



I must admit to having used the search function in Windows a few times (mostly to locate certain DLLs) and of course I search the internet using Google a lot. In my experience, though, nothing beats knowing the location of an item of information or a document you need, even if it's via a few other sites.

Again, maybe I'm just special, but I can find no use for meta searches and such as OS X has had for a while and Windows now too.

Since you have a photographic memory search wouldn't be that beneficial too you I would imagine. But even with a photographic memory there's a point where its still not going to replace search. Can you remember EVERY word in 500,000 documents and EVERY word in 250,000 emails? And photographic memory does do you any good for stuff that you've not read or looked at.
 
Since you have a photographic memory search wouldn't be that beneficial too you I would imagine. But even with a photographic memory there's a point where its still not going to replace search. Can you remember EVERY word in 500,000 documents and EVERY word in 250,000 emails? And photographic memory does do you any good for stuff that you've not read or looked at.

I do not work with words but with 'images' :) My type of giftedness is called 'visual-spatial' for a reason. Essentially I convert anything I read, hear or see into a kind of images (impressions) which are then heavily linked (spatial). In a sense I have a database inside my head :p So yes, I can easily find anything I am at least somewhat familiar with.

As for unknown things, there are ways to find out about them. I also make it a rule to know what I have on my HDDs in terms of documents. I don't think that some kind of search function in the OS will be very beneficial to me, at least I can not think of a time when I actively felt I could use it.
 
The Ribbon makes it a TON easier to find features, and its easy to have it hide itself, no loss of screen space. In Office 2010 the Ribbon can now be customized and have custom keyboard shortcuts!:D This should once and for all end the Ribbon debate. It now has all the functionality of the old menus and then some!:cool:

You're kind of proving my point for me. A power user shouldn't need to FIND anything, they just need to get to where it is in as few clicks as possible.

Do I really want to set up shortcuts for everything I do in Office? Unless I was performing a single repetitive task over in a cubicle all day, creating a ton of shortcuts is often not worth it. That doesn't even touch on when you're using Office on a computer that's not actually yours.

The ribbon interface wouldn't be so bad if they let you decide what you wanted shown under each tab.
 
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I personally like Vista's UI better than Windows 7. I will be keeping my main PC on Vista Ult. 64 bit and upgrading our Laptop from XP to 7. The jump from Vista to 7 is not as big in my mind as XP to 7.
 
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