All posts by Ed Tittel

Full-time freelance writer, researcher and occasional expert witness, I specialize in Windows operating systems, information security, markup languages, and Web development tools and environments. I blog for numerous Websites, still write (or revise) the occasional book, and write lots of articles, white papers, tech briefs, and so forth.

Hardware Reviews, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

P1 Mobile Workstation Uptake & Intake

September 5, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK then: the day before we left on vacation, the Boss looked out the door and asked me: “Are you expecting something?” I hadn’t been exactly, but Jeff Witt from Lenovo had indeed promised to ship me another business laptop. So here ’tis: a ThinkPad P1 Gen 6. Its Lenovo Commercial Vantage info serves as the lead-in graphic. I’ll now share some details from the P1 Mobile Workstation uptake & intake here at Chez Tittel.

More About P1 Mobile Workstation Uptake & Intake

When you fire a review unit up from Lenovo, it goes automatically into a predefined account. So usually, the first thing I do is to check for OS and Vantage updates. Next, I add my MSA as a second, password-protected admin account. Then, I set up Remote Access. That lets me use my dual-monitor production desktop PC for some serious rooting around.

I find myself occasionally re-learning how to set up Remote Access on the LAN. To begin, enable Remote Desktop. I also have to make sure the LAN is designated a private network. Next — at least temporarily — Discovery for Public Networks and All Networks gets turned on. Otherwise, the first remote desktop connection attempt just doesn’t work. Go figure!

Other Set-up and Configuration Tasks

It always comes as a shock to me on a new install that I have to download and install the latest PowerShell version (7.3.6 as I write this). Then I have to change the default profile to that version in PowerShell Settings/Startup. Finally, leading-edge PS comes up instead of the built-in version (5.1.22621.1778). No thanks!

Next, I install Winfetch, OhMyPosh, import nerd fonts, edit my OMP profile and get PowerShell where I want it to be. The new approach to ZIP files in Windows 11 hides their true nature, so I also had to remember to unblock the ZIP file, extract its contents, and then copy the nerd font files into C:\Windows\Fonts. Sigh: it’s always the little things… That will get corrected in the next phase (see below) when I actually install 7Zip and let its default behaviors take over…

After that, I download PatchMyPC Home Updater to grab all the apps and tools I like to have installed on my PCs. That list of 12 items appears in this next screencap, following installation (takes about 3 minutes altogether, much faster than I could do on a one-off basis). Notice it comes from SUMo (Software Update Monitor) and shows 18 items (OneDrive, Edge, GeForce, and X-Rite came pre-installed; CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark get counted for 32- and 64-bit versions separately: go figure!)

4 items pre-installed, and CrystalDisk stuff counts double, for 12 actual items added.

Initial Observations

This is my first exposure to Gen13 (Alder Lake) Intel CPUs. This CPU is a smoker with 14 physical cores, of which 10 run dual threads (i7-13800H). The 2800MHz DDR5 RAM (32 GB, single module) ain’t bad, either. I’m not familiar with Raptor Lake-P/PX Integrated graphics (Raptor Lake-P GT2) but it seems pretty snappy as well. This laptop even comes equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTC 4060 GPU which is likewise robust when run locally. The KXG8AZNV1T02 LA KIOXIA 1TB PCIe x4 NVMe SSD speeds along quite handily, too. All in all, it specs out — and acts — like a pretty formidable laptop.

I’m going to have to spend more time with this system but I’ve liked everything it’s shown me about itself so far. As equipped, this unit lists for around US$2,750 on the Lenovo website. All I can say for now is: So far, so good — I like it! Stay tuned, I’ll report back with more info later this week.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

UUPDump.Net Is MIA

August 24, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Well, well, well. I just learned some interesting and useful stuff. But alas, one of my favorite Windows image resource websites is down. That’s right: UUPDump.Net is MIA. According to a handy website I discovered “Is It Down or Just Me?” — the source of the foregoing lead-in graphic — it’s experienced 2 outages that lasted at least 4 hours each in the last 24-hour period. Indeed, it’s currently unavailable. Sigh.

Why UUPDump.Net is MIA Matters…

UUPDump.Net represents a very slick bit of reverse engineering. Essentially, it captures and replays all of the traffic between the WU servers and a client seeking to download some specific Windows image (10 or 11, Home or Pro …, and language). It’s even smart enough to run DISM on a base OS image to add-package in updates and so forth so you can get to specific Build numbers higher than the OS baseline itself (e.g. 22621.2215 on Windows 11 production, or 25831.1010 on Windows 11 Canary Channel Insider Preview). And because it grabs all of its files from Microsoft servers, it’s as safe as they are.

Long story short: I use UUPDump.net when I want to match a Windows image to a specific (and usually pretty recent) Windows 10 or 11 Build on a specific PC or VM. It’s incredibly handy, and serves equally well for in-place upgrade repair installs or clean installs. So when it goes missing, that’s a problem — hopefully, a temporary one.

More Web Status Checks

I also found ip-lookup.org to be helpful in checking on UUPDump.net. As the next screencap shows, it provides an IP address for the website. I can also confirm for myself that the address is not working by typing an “IP URL” into Chrome — namely https://135.181.139.104. This confirms the site is unavailable with a “This site can’t be reached” error message.

Gosh! I hope UUPDump.net comes back up soon. I’ll struggle along without it for now. But I’ll be glad when it comes back to life.

One More Thing: I went to the wayback machine to see if a recent snapshot of the site would work in lieu of the actual site itself. It might! I’m grabbing the stuff for the latest Canary build right now as an experiment. It’s quite a bit slower, and it falls over just after the language selection phase. Doesn’t look like this works. Again: too bad!

Note Added 8/24 ~3PM Central Daylight Time

UUPDump.net is back up. The outage graph at IsItDownOrJustMe says there have been four outages in the last 24 hours, each of 4 hours’ duration. Zounds!

Backup/Restore, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog, Windows 10

Post-Update Reboot Restores Snappy Response

August 23, 2023 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

Hah! I should’ve known. I downloaded and installed KB5029331 on my production Windows 10 PC yesterday. When I sat down and started working this morning, I noticed two things. First, a notification popped up to remind I had to reboot. Second, this PC was running much slower than usual with lots of screen stuttering (jerky video updates). I’m happy to report, however, that a post-update reboot restores snappy response.

Why Post-Update Reboot Restores Snappy Response

The install process can’t really complete until the system can work on itself, so to speak. That is best accomplished using the Windows Pre-installation Environment (WinPE) to — as this MS Learn article puts it — “Modify the Windows operating system while it’s not running.” In the meantime, until you reboot, there’s a bunch of dangling stuff left hanging that will only be resolved the next time Windows gets to take a timeout to finish the update job that installing a cumulative update (CU) sets in motion.

And indeed there are some pretty significant changes in this update to Windows 10. Among other things, I see that the new Windows Backup shows up as “Recently added” (see lead-in graphic above, top left). I’m a little disappointed that this new facility lacks an image backup capability, though. As far as I can tell it backs up Settings, Preferences and User files only. Looks like it’s not about to replace my daily full image backups using Macrium Reflect 8. Too bad!

Side note: the new Backup takes a while to complete, too, I fired it up when I started this blog post. As I publish and promote it, it’s still doing its thing . I can’t readily tie it to a process in Task Manager, Details view, either — hmmm. This will require further investigation!

Back to Work!

The good news is that my aging but still capable i7-6700 Skylake PC (32 GB DDR4, 0.5TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD) immediately returned to its usual snappy performance after the reboot was concluded. No more lagging or jerky video. As I said at the outset, I should’ve known this could happen and rebooted before I quit for the night last night. Luckily for me, the update process took less than 8 minutes to complete, all told. And now, I’m returning to my usually scheduled activities..

Cool Tools, PowerShell, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog, Windows 11

Extra C++ Redistributable Must Go

August 22, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s an interesting winget puzzle. Over the past couple of days, I noticed winget was reporting success in upgrading a Visual C++ Redistributable from version 14.36.32532 to 14.38.31919.0. Yet, each time I ran winget after that the same thing would reappear. Good thing I know what’s up with that: it means the new install doesn’t remove the old, now obsolete version. Thus, that extra C++ Redistributable must go.

Accomplishing Extra C++ Redistributable Must Go

In the lead-in graphic I show the two versions side by side inside Revo (bottom of image). I used that same tool to uninstall the other one manually. If you look at the sequence of commands therein, you’ll see I check upgrades. It shows me a new Visual C++ version to install. I install it, and check again: oops! Same old version of the redistributable still needs an update.

Or does it? Actually, it needs to be uninstalled. I could’ve done it with the winget syntax:

winget uninstall Microsoft.VCRedist.2015+.x86 -v 14.36.32532.0

But instead because I had Revo already open I simply right clicked the old version, chose uninstall, and let it do its thing. Gone!

What Happened Next?

As expected, the next time I ran winget upgrade to see if any updates remained pending I got back this mysterious but welcome message. “No installed package found matching input criteria.” In winget-speak, that means it didn’t find anything that needed an update. In other words: removing the obsolete Visual C++ Redistributable took care of my previously persistent version 14.36.32532.0.

Good-oh! Glad I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It told me that I probably had to kill the old version manually, to keep it from provoking a reminder to upgrade to the new. Even though it was present already…

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, WED Blog, Windows 11

Beta Build 22631 Loses Update Button

August 21, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

It’s not the first change I encountered in this new release. But as soon as I visited the Windows Update page in settings (see lead-in graphic) I couldn’t help but notice that Beta Build 22631 loses Update button. It’s not just gone either — it’s also resistant to restoration according to all known fixes. I felt a little better when I tuned into the ElevenForum discussion for the release and learned that my problem was pretty common. So now, I just chuckle when I think about things.

One of the recommended fixes was to pause (then unpause) updates. As you can see from the lead-in graphic as well, I did that. But there’s no button to turn the updates back on, either. So while I’m chuckling again, I’m down another button. Sigh.

Getting Updates, When Beta Build 22631 Loses Update Button

Even as the obvious approach to updating goes MIA, there are ways to make Windows 11 check for and install updates. I found two pretty good methods that do the trick.

The Windows command USOClient StartInteractiveScreen will actually run WU just as if you’d clicked that missing button. Indeed, if you open WU and watch the top of the screen after you fire off this account you’ll see the panning progress bar as it performs its check.

Even though WU is paused, running the USOClient command as shown above still runs the update check anyway.

There’s also a PowerShell Module named PSWindowsUpdate you can install from the PowerShell Gallery (a favorite or at least recurring haunt of mine lately). To add it to your PowerShell environment run this command string:

Install-Module -name PSWindowsUpdate -force

This provides access to the Get-WindowsUpdate and Install-WindowsUpdate cmdlets. As the names suggest, the former shows you what updates are available, while the latter provides a variety of means to install updates by KB ID or name (both values appear in the Get-… output which is handy).

Where There’s a Will…

While we’re waiting for MS to fix this odd little deficit in this Beta release, there are workarounds available to keep things going. It gave me a chance to learn a few new tricks while working around the missing button. And that’s just the way things go sometimes, here in Windows-World.

Note Added September 7: It’s Baaaaaaack!!

OK then: I’m back from a 10-day hiatus for some cool weather in Maine and getting son Gregory moved into his Boston-based college dorm. I just checked WU and the “Check for updates” button is not only back — it also works as expected. Knew this couldn’t last long. Cheers!

Cool Tools, Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

Occam’s Razor Cuts My Intel PROset Problem

August 18, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, then: let’s take a short trip back to medieval England (14th century) and drop in on philosopher William of Ockham. His original Latin epigram is “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.” That’s often translated as “Don’t add more factors to an explanation than are strictly necessary.” Many people take it to mean “The simplest explanation is usually the best (or correct) one.” From a troubleshooting standpoint, I take a different lesson. Eliminate the obvious causes before looking for more exotic ones. And indeed, yesterday Occam’s Razor cuts my Intel PROset problem. I discover it’s the software itself that prevents its installation on Windows 10.

Why Say Occam’s Razor Cuts My Intel PROset Problem?

You can see why I had to haul this old blade out of storage by examining the lead-in graphic. It’s from the Release Notes for the latest version of the Intel PROset and driver software for its wired Ethernet adapters, including for Windows Client OSes. Take a close look at that list. Then consider the version of Windows 10 for which I sought to install this latest 28.2 version — namely Windows 10 22H2.

The installer fired up just fine, but then it took quite a while to do anything. Instead of asking my persmission to commence installation, I got this error message instead:

Despite repeated efforts, I got only this when attempting an install on Windows 10 22H2.

After a couple of failed tries, I figured I’d better check the release notes. And sure enough, I saw what’s missing in the lead-in graphic. This release does NOT support Windows 10 22H2. And that, of course, is why I get that error message. Given that 22H2 is the current Windows 10 version and that 21H2 hit its EOL date on June 13 (a couple of months ago), I have to believe this was a mistake on Intel’s part. But it is what it is, and I have to wait for them to fix it. Until then, I’ll keep running the preceding driver version. Sigh.

FWIW, I just summarized this info in a post to the Intel online forums for their Ethernet adapters and software. I’ll be interested to see what kind of response it evokes, if any. Stay tuned!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, Windows 11

Inconsequential Windows Errors: Remove or Ignore?

August 17, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In refreshing my recollection of what I thought was called “Berkeley’s paradox” — but isn’t — I have to raise the question: If a Windows PC throws an Xbox error and you don’t use an Xbox, does it really matter? In my case, the answer is a resounding “No!” Thus when handling inconsequential Windows errors: remove or ignore are my primary strategies. Let me explain…

Handling Inconsequential Windows Errors: Remove or Ignore?

I repeat: I don’t use an Xbox, so I don’t call on the associated complex of Store apps that offer Xbox connections, controls and capabilities. Interestingly, the Store Library shows only Xbox Game Bar. But if you search Apps on the Store Home page, you’ll find dozens of qualifying hits. Interestingly Xbox Identity Provider isn’t among them.

With a little research, I found a website named “Best Gaming Tips” that directly addresses my issue: Xbox Identity Provider Not Working. It includes a helpful PowerShell command sequence to nix this stubbornly uncooperative beast:

Get-appxpackage Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider | Remove-AppxPackage

It now seems to be gone, too. If I use winget to search for that package name, it finds nothing. And yet, the entry still shows up in Store. I’m restarting and will try again after that… And indeed, that took care of things. Looks like if you change the underlying app structure (or the packages in which they live) you need to stop/restart the Store to let it continue to reflect current reality correctly. Go figure!

For the nonce, the problem is gone. Should I ever have need of the Xbox Identity Provider, I’ll figure out how to re-install it. That’s a bridge to burn some other day. Here in Windows-World, there are always plenty of such opportunities.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Sideload Brings Windows 10 New Photos App

August 16, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s something interesting. Thanks to eagle-eyed software maker and reporter Sergey Tkachenko, I’ve just learned you can grab the new Windows 11 version of the Photos app and install it on Windows 10. On 11, it comes from the Windows Store; if you’re left out, a sideload brings Window 10 new Photos app. See the WinAero story Windows 11 Photos app now supports Windows 10 for pointers and such.

How Sideload Brings Windows 10 New Photos App

If you examine the lead-in graphic closely you’ll see the About info for the Windows 11 version of Photos (lower left). Once you download and install that version, the Store offers a renamed version of its predecessor as “Photos Legacy” (right, with about information at bottom). I installed that also to keep my existing (and enormous) trove of meta-data and image info available. Just for grins, I superimposed winver.exe at right center to show it was all indeed running on Windows 10. Good stuff!

One thing: you will visit the mirror of the Microsoft Store downloads to grab the Windows 11 version of Photos for Windows 10. When you do, scroll down to the first Microsoft.Windows.Photos entry that ends with the extension .msixbundle. That’s the one you need to actually perform the install.

It will ask you if you want to update Microsoft Photos? Click the Update button.

Then it will go through the update process and actually install the Windows 11 version on your Windows 10 PC. As soon as it’s done the Store will offer you the Photos Legacy app as well.

So now, I have both the old version (Photos Legacy) and the new version (Photos) running on my Windows 10 PC. As I watch what happens with this new addition to my app stable, I’ll report further if I see anything noteworthy. So far, it all seems pretty routine.

Backup/Restore, Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

Backing Up P16

August 15, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ve recently swapped out the Lenovo loaner unit for the ThinkPad P16 Mobile workstation here at Chez Tittel. In the same recent period, I’ve written stories for AskWoody about using USB and Thunderbolt versions 3 and 4 for a variety of purposes. When it comes to using any of those technologies with USB-C attached NVMe drives, backup looms large. And boy, are the results for faster storage hookups compelling when it comes to backing up P16. Let me explain…

TB4 Shines When Backing Up P16

The lead-in graphic shows a 1:03 completion time for an image backup on that device inside Macrium Reflect. That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen a full image backup complete on that (or any other) PC, whether to an internal or an external drive. Why doesn’t everybody do it that way?

Let me count the reasons:

Not all PCs or Laptops have fast Thunderbolt4 ports.
TB4 NVMe enclosures are expensive: US$130 and up. Count on spending at least another US$70 or so for a 1 TB NVMe to put inside same. In contrast, you can buy a portable 1 TB NVMe right now for about US$70 (but it’s not TB4, nor even TB3).
One *MUST* use TB4 cables to get those results. Nothing else will do.
USB-C ports can be scarce, so it may be necessary to acquire a TB4 dock. That’ll set you back another US$200-400 depending on ports and features.

But Hey! Look at Them Snappers…

All those caveats said and understood, 1:03 remains a remarkable timeframe for a full image backup. WizTree reports that the P16’s C: drive currently stores 82.8 GB’s worth of stuff. If I’m doing the math correctly that’s 10.48 Gbps as a backup speed. I’ll take it!

I spent over US$200 to put the NVMe enclosure to work, and another US$25 for a year’s worth of access to Macrium Reflect. Is is worth it? IMO, it is. IYO perhaps not…

Cool Tools, PowerShell, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Using Get-WUHistory Requires Finesse

August 14, 2023 Ed Tittel 5 Comments

I’m a big fan of PowerShell. That’s why I was excited to learn about a collection of cmdlets from the PowerShell Gallery named PSWindowsUpdate. Chief among its constituents is a cmdlet named Get-WUHistory that I’ve been finding both helpful and vexing. I say that using Get-WUHistory requires finesse because it works well on Windows 10, but hangs on PCs with longer “history trails” in Windows 11. Let me explain and illustrate what that means…

Why Using Get-WUHistory Requires Finesse

I’m only running Windows 10 on one actual PC (not counting VMs). By chance, that’s where I started working with the PSWindowsUpdate cmdlets. To begin with, you’ll need to install this collection, using this command:

Install-Module -Name PSWindowsUpdate -Force

If you haven’t visited the PowerShell Gallery before, you’ll be asked to grant various permissions so your PC (or VM) can access and use its contents. If necessary, please do so. Then, your installation will complete. After it’s done, you can use the Get-WUHistory command (among others — see a complete list of all 25 cmdlets from this package).

There’s something going on in Windows 11 that will sometimes cause Get-WUHistory to “hang.” How can you tell? The output won’t complete, you won’t get a prompt back, and the cursor keeps blinking. Indeed, it doesn’t even respond to CTRL-C to terminate the command. You must close the open PowerShell window (or tab) to regain control over Windows Terminal.

What’s the Trick to Make Things Work?

For some odd reason limiting the scope of output keeps the Get-WUHistory cmdlet working. Thus, in Windows 11 instead of simply entering Get-WUHistory at the command line, try this version instead:

Get-WUHistory -last 1000

This tells the cmdlet to limit its output to only the first 1000 entries it finds in the update history. Notice that on one of my test PCs, the actual number of entries in the update history is only 157 items, yet the command hangs anyway — except when it’s scoped. Go figure!

Unless scoped [-last 1000] Get-WUHistory hangs on Windows 11.

The lead-in graphic shows the first screen of output from a scoped version of the Get-WUHistory cmdlet. Notice that most of the updates relate to Windows Security (Windows Defender intelligence updates, antimalware platform updates, and so forth). Too much chaff, not enough wheat, IMO. Here’s a way to turn down the volume…

Reducing Get-WUHistory Output Volume

One can, of course, filter Get-WUHistory Output — in addition to limiting its scope — to reduce the output volume. Here’s a command string I found to be incredibly helpful in seeing what’s there, sans security-related stuff:

Get-WUHistory -last 1000 | Where-Object {$_.Title -notlike "*Security*"}

What you see broken across two lines (or more) in the preceding is actually a single (if complex) PowerShell command string. Be sure to remove or ignore any internal line breaks when running this inside Windows Terminal. You’ll get back a mercifully much shorter list of items, mostly cumulative updates (CUs), MSRTs, Update Stack Packages, and the odd antimalware platform update. As you can see, this cuts 157 items down to a more manageable 12. Good stuff!

Eliminating the word security in the “Title” field filters out most of the dross. [Click image for full-sized view.]