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.
Insider stuff, Networking, Recent Activity, WED Blog

CATegorizing Ethernet LAN Cables

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I was flipping through X this morning, and came across a mind-boggling reminder that Ethernet networking has come a long way. You can see the chart from Dan Nanni (@xmodulo) as the lead-in graphic here. We’ve been planning our next move recently, and visiting a lot of new homes, so I can attest most builders are laying CAT 7 cable in such dwellings. But we’ve gone past 7 in categorizing Ethernet LAN cables, as a quick look at the chart will reveal. In fact, CAT 8.2 catches up with current top speeds for USB4 (but 80 Gbps is coming, probably next year).

Categorizing Ethernet LAN Cables Is Only Part

…of a more complicated picture. As I look around at PCs, switches, and so forth, I’m seeing a long tail of networking capabilities. When I see new PCs with RJ-45 ports, for example, I seldom see more than 2.5 Gbps interfaces. 10 Gbps is common on servers, but not on end-user gear.

We’re planning to move in 2026 or 2027, once son Gregory puts his university days behind him (planning on a 2-year Master’s to follow his BA). When we do that I’ll upgrade the infrastructure to support 2.5 Gbps. I see that 8-port 2.5 Gbps switches cost from US$60-100 nowadays. I’ll need to buy a bunch of CAT 7 cables, though: the higest-rated ones I see around here are CAT 6 (though it’s possible I’ve got some 6A shorties here or there).

Copilot puts the CAT timeline out as follows:

  • CAT 6: early 2000s [max: 1 Gbps]
  • CAT 6a: 2008 [max: 10 Gbps]
  • CAT 7 & 7a: 2010 [max: 10/40 Gbps]
  • CAT 8.1 & 8.2: 2016 [max: 25/40 Gbps]

Methinks there may some some limited need for 10 Gbps home networking, but not much above that speed. Speeds over 10 Gbps are generally limited to 30 m runs on TP cable, so they’re of limited utility in home spaces as well. Wonder how long it will take for these limits to evaporate? I hope to live long enough to find out.

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Cool Tools, Hyper-V and VMs, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

Accessing Hyper-V VM WinRE

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Talk about deja vuI! I was trying to access the Windows Recovery Environment inside a VM today. I needed to make some screenshots for a TechTarget story. Turns out the only way to do that is at the command line, using shutdown /r /o /f /t 00. But there’s a problem: this command doesn’t work inside RDP, nor when running an “Enhanced mode” session. Thus, accessing Hyper-V VM WinRE is a little trickier than it could — or should — be. Sigh.

Tricks to Accessing Hyper-V VM WinRE

Turns out, turning off “Enhanced mode” is key in this case. After I did that, not only did the shutdown command work as advertised from a local session, it also worked through RDP, too. Go figure!

I’m used to working on test and road machines via RDP from my production desktop, so this kind of thing comes as no surprise to me. But each time I find one of these bumps in the road to Windows success, I seem compelled to find said bump with my nether regions.

But at least I now know how to get right to WinRE inside a VM. All the other tips I found online — such as extending the timeout interval to give time to hit the F8 key, for example — required too much time and effort (and happy chance) to work. I like doing things through the command line because it’s straightforward and direct, and does not require getting lucky to achieve success.

And boy, howdy, isn’t that just the way things go here in Windows-World sometimes? I’ll take the command line every time, especially if chance (happy or not) must otherwise be involved. You should do likewise…

 

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Copilot+ PCs, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

ARM 24H2 Shows Spurious Reclaimables

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When I laid hands on my first Copilot+ PC — the inestimable Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x in late June — I checked DISM /analyzecomponentstore on that machine right away. Unlike other versions of Windows 11, the ARM version of 24H2 showed no such anomalies. But last week, while running a routine cleanup on the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 that represents my current Copilot+ PC capability, there they were. 14 of ’em, as you can see in the lead-in graphic in which ARM 24H2 shows spurious reclaimables. Notice the successful clean-up ahead of that report, which is what lets me label them spurious.

What ARM 24H2 Shows Spurious Reclaimables Means

There’s something odd that happens with certain Windows Updates. It causes dism /analyzecomponentstore to report some number of apparently bogus reclaimable packages as you can see in the graphic above. For x64 PCs that number is usually 13; ARM goes one better, and takes that total to 14.

So far, I’ve seen no actual pathology in Windows 11 related to this odd report. One can make this report go away by performing an in place upgrade repair install (Start > Settings > System > Recovery, then clicking “Reinstall now” under the “Fix problems using Windows Update” heading. But those spurious updates have a way of reappearing after the next CU, so I’ve let go of my OCD on that front and learned to live with this oddity.

It’s been that way for x64 versions of 24H2 pretty much since it first appeared, and even shows up on some of my 23H2 PCs as well (both test and production instances). For a while, I thought the ARM version was exempt. But the lead-in graphic argues otherwise. This comes as no great surprise to me, but I’d hoped that the ARM version of Windows 11 might avoid this phenomenon.

Isn’t that just the way things often work, here in Windows-World? You betcha!

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

Canary Gets New Clock-based Widgets

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With the arrival of Build 27695, Windows 11 Canary gets new Clock-based widgets. One is named Countdown, the other Timer, so their clock affiliation should be obvious. One or both may be pinned quite easily into the Widgets column at the left-hand edge of the pop-up Widgets panel. Hint: Launch this by entering WinKey+W at some keyboard.

When Canary Gets New Clock-based Widgets, Then What?

You can see what these simple-seeming widgets look like by default in the lead-in graphic (Countdown left, Timer right). Inside the Widget Panel, you must click the top-line “+” (Plus sign) to open the Add a widget display. Then, you can pin either or both widgets, and they’ll start showing up in the Widgets Panel.

It’s always nice when MS starts adding functionality to its facilities. For a long time, that collection was pretty limited. Right now the count is up to 14: Counddown, Dev Home, Family Safety, Focus session, GitHub, Instant Play, Phone Link, Photos, Sports, Timer, Tips, Traffic, Watchlist, and Weather.

And if you click the “Find more widgets” option at the end of the Pin widgets list, you’ll be wafted off to an MS Store page named “Find your next widget.” Highly recommended: it offers better — and more nicely organized — widget listings than a simple search inside Store on “Widgets” offers.

Good stuff: too bad I can’t figure out a URL for that access. You’ll just have to follow the button inside the Widget panel as I did to get there. Enjoy!

AFD  until Tuesday, September 24

Later today, I’m going in for cataract surgery on my left eye. If all goes well — and they tell me this routine procedure has a 95-99% success rate — I’ll be back at the keyboard next Tuesday. Wish me luck!

BTW, AFD means “Away from My Desk.” I’m not sure if it’s a legit acronym, but I used it to shorten that heading length. Hopefully, it at least makes sense. Happy trails…

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Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

Morning Black Screen Recalls Pending Reboot

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On September 10, NVIDIA release its Game-Ready driver, version 561.09. At its conclusion it asked for a reboot. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “I’ll do that later.” It’s happening a LOT later than I planned, nearly 8 days on. If you look at the uptime info in the lead-in graphic you’ll see I’ve somehow managed no reboots since then. But, for the last two days this PC’s monitors have stayed dark when I’ve tried to wake it up first thing in the morning. Alas, that morning black screen recalls pending reboot, which I apparently MUST do (soon).

Note: I’ve been able to bring the desktop back from the black screen state on each of the past two days by striking CTRL-ALT-DEL at the keyboard, then canceling out of the Security Options screen that pops up. Good thing to know, in case this ever happens to you.

How Morning Black Screen Recalls Pending Reboot

Normally, when I click a mouse button or hit a keyboard key when my PC is sleeping, it starts right up. Both yesterday and today, though, I get black screens on both monitors with no cursor. Experience informs me that this is 95+% likely caused by a graphics driver issue. And as I think about it, I dimly recall installing 561.09 last week, then never following up with a reboot. If you do the math on the uptime field from WinFetch in the lead-in graphic, it was last updated on September 9,  around 3:09 PM (thanks timeanddate). Thus, it hasn’t been updated since the GPU driver got updated.

I’ve also noticed graphics running a bit slower and jerkier lately, too. It all adds up: I should’ve remembered to reboot the same day I updated NVIDIA graphics driver. But it may be too late to go back, but it’s not too late to reboot right now. And sure enough, when I do, no more black screens on startup, nor after waking from sleep (which I forced from Power > Shutdown > Sleep through the Start Menu to check).

Go figure. I should know better. This not-so-gentle reminder does the trick to help me remember this time. Isn’t that just the way things sometimes go in Windows-World?

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Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

Choosing USB Power Ports Properly

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I should have known. I put the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Gen 1 hybrid tablet back into service yesterday. Indeed, I had a ThinkPad Universal Thunderbolt 4 Dock sitting right next to  the device. “No problem,” I thought to myself “I’ll hook up to one of these USB-C ports and I won’t need to rustle up its 65W brick.” Wrong! Just as it’s essential to choose USB-C ports for their bandwidth ratings when attaching storage devices, ditto for choosing USB power ports properly when seeking a charge. Let me explain…

Why Choosing USB Power Ports Properly Matters

I show the rear view of the TB4 dock in the lead-in graphic. Turns out that only the TB4-rated ports (the leftmost block of two is to the right of the DC power input connected) deliver more than 10W via USB-C. The others are rated 10 Gbps too, while TB4 gets the coveted 40 Gbps rating.

I knew things were off when the BIOS told me that the PSU wasn’t delivering an acceptable amount of power as the X12 started booting up. “Doh!” I reflected, “it’s important to read the fine print on the USB-C connectors to make sure they have the power lightning bolt and plug into those.” And sure enough,  if I zoom in on the detail on the two left-most USB-C ports on the back, the lightning bolt is pretty visible on each one.

Left: lightning bolt above; right: below. 100W available from each one, as per specs.

It pays to check before plugging into USB-C. If you can’t see or don’t know, it never hurts to RTM. As soon as I figured out what I was doing, in fact, it all made sense. Just another perfect day in Windows-World, right? Cheers!

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Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

OneNote Updates Sticky Notes

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Here’s an interesting tidbit. If you install or upgrade OneNote on a Windows PC, it will also upgrade to a new version of Sticky Notes. Check the lead-in graphic: it labels this new version as such, and the old version (lacking that same (new) label)shows up in the Start menu. Hence my assertion that OneNote updates Sticky Notes. But wait: there’s more…

Exactly How OneNote Updates Sticky Notes

This dual appearance persists even after you add the (New) version via a OneNote update (or install). If you quiz that version for its About info, you’ll get the OneNote for Microsoft 365 info . It shows up as (line broken for WordPress readability, original is a one-liner):

Microsoft® OneNote® for Microsoft 365 MSO
(Version 2408 Build 16.0.17928.20114) 64-bit

OTOH, if you quiz the older version, it calls itself a UWP app with version number 6.1.20 (and a 2020 copyright date). Go figure!

Two Versions, or One?

If you want to keep both versions, that’s fine with me. If you want to lose the old version, I’d recommend using WinGet to uninstall same. The name of this app is “Microsoft Sticky Notes” so you need to enclose it in quotes (internal spaces) to get it to work. Or, you can uninstall it using the app id, as follows:

winget uninstall --id 9NBLGGH4QGHW

instead. Your choice. I did the latter on one of my X380 test PCs and it worked correctly. Now, I see only Sticky Notes (New) in the Start menu. Just for grins, I did likewise on my Windows 10 production PC: it behaves in exactly the same way, so this works for both OSes. Cheers!

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Benchmarking, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, USB devices, WED Blog

USB Adapter Beats Down-level Port

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In seventh grade, my math teacher was named Wayne Mackey. He had an amazing way of cutting and complimenting at the same time. I vividly remember him telling me “Mr. Tittel, you have an AMAZING grasp of the obvious” and puffing up, then collapsing. In today’s blog post, I’m returning to those roots as I observe that it’s better to pay the translation penalty involved in using a Type-A female to USB-C male adapter into a 40 Gbps connection, than to plug into a 5 Gbps Type-A port directly. Duh, but that’s why I lead off with USB adapter beats down-level port.

By How Much USB Adapter Beats Down-level Port?

The throughput difference one versus the other is easily obtained, using CrystalDiskMark as a means for comparison. Plugging the Kingston Data Traveler Max into the ThinkPad T14s Copilot+ PC, I get close to typical UASP rates when I plug its USB-A end into an $8 A-to-C adapter plug. To see that difference, check my September 6 blog Fast UFDs Need Fast USB Ports.

When I plug the device into the 5 Gbps USB-A port on the other side of that selfsame laptop, I get throughput numbers that are  much lower than those values. The adapter numbers appear left, and the direct plug-in results appear right, in the lead-in graphic above.

Those results definitely help me answer this question: is it worth $6-8 to buy a USB A-to-C dongle? I can’t help but answer that one in the affirmative. Yes, I know I’m showing an amazing grasp of the obvious here, but sometimes it helps to see what that means in vivid, undeniable detail. It was true in 7th grade algebra, and it’s still true today (59 years later).

Choose Your Ports Carefully…

There’s at least one other lesson to take away from this side-by-side comparison. It’s what I said in the preceding heading. According to the user manual, the USB-A ports on the ThinkPad T14s are USB 3.1 Gen 1, rated at a speed of 5Gbps (translates to 0.625 GBps or 640 MBps, much higher than what you see in CrystalDiskMark). Sigh.

The other item I take away from this encounter is to ask Lenovo: why put only 5 Gbps USB-A ports on that PC? I’m guessing the answer may be something like “Because that’s what Qualcomm gave us in the Snapdragon X chipset environment.” Sigh again…

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Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 10

StartMenuExperienceHost.exe Knocks ReliMon Over

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When searching for Windows blog topics, I occasionally drop in on Reliability Monitor (aka ReliMon). FYI, it’s actually a special version of the more general-purpose Performance Monitor (PerfMon). This morning, I saw what I can only describe as a bad-to-worse stability index chart. See the lead-in graphic. Upon examination, I concluded that StartMenuExperienceHost.exe knocks ReliMon over with daily errors. Ouch!

Handling StartMenuExperienceHost.exe Knocks ReliMon Over

Digging into the details, I see this element present every day (multiple times on some days) for 16 of the past 17 days. That’s a new personal record for me, and it’s interesting. Why? Because this system hasn’t been giving me any obvious trouble, repeat SMEH errors notwithstanding. (Hope that abbreviation is obvious…)

So naturally I went looking for enlightenment about SMEH and the related MoBEX error that occurs for each instance in the detail page. Unsurprisingly, I found a registry hack to address the issue at TenForums.com from well-known VIP member Samuria. Apparently, it involves a well-known permissions inheritance issue for values inside the

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

key. I’ve applied the fix Samuria recommends, and will observe ReliMon over coming days to see if it helps.

The Enduring Value of Internet Community

Though one must exercise caution in picking up and running with fixes from the Internet, there are gradations of trust and merit in play, too. Because I’ve been an active member of TenForums for years and have seen many, many useful tips from Samuria over that entire interval, I’m comfortable with following his advice. That makes this a “safe fix” IMO. But if you have a recent backup handy, and know how to restore it, you can always get back to where you started. That’s my fallback position, and I’m sticking with it. Cheers!

I’ll keep you posted as I see if this helps … or not. Stay tuned!

Sept 13 follow-up #1: No dice, but…

I got a comment from fellow TenForums VIP OldNavyGuy that told me two things: he tried the reghack and it didn’t work for him. He also build a new user profile and moved over to that, then killed the old one. He reports that did away with the ongoing torrent of StartMenuExperienceHost.exe errors. I’ll try it sometime, and see.

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Backup/Restore, Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, USB devices, WED Blog

Considering USB4 External Media

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It’s a classic trade-off in more ways than one: cost versus speed. I’m prepping for an AskWoody story about external media on Windows PCs. For me, the big trade-off when considering USB4 external media is higher prices for higher performance. “How much higher?” you ask: that’s what I’m in the process of figuring out right now.

Whole Device Chain Counts When Considering USB4 External Media

Every step in the device chain counts when going for the speediest external Windows media. The starting point from the PC end is the USB port itself. Ideally, it should be USB4 or Thunderbolt 3/4, and support 40 Gbps throughput. Next comes the cable: it should be labeled USB4, Thunderbolt 3 or 4, or 40 Gbps. Next comes the storage device. For me, that mostly means an enclosure housing an NVMe SSD. That enclosure should be USB4 or Thunderbolt 3/4, and the NVMe should be Gen 3 (PCIe x3) or higher.

At every step you pay more to attain the current pinnacle of performance. (I’ve not yet seen any 80 Gbps devices, but they’re coming. Copilot tells me Intel’s 14th Gen HX-series mobile CPUs “are starting to support this technology. “) A quick search at Amazon tells me you can’t buy USB5 cables, docks, and so forth yet. My best guess: we’re looking well into 2025 before it goes mainstream.

Right now, the jump from USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to USB4 (and TB 3/4 equivalents) is getting cheaper, but still costs. You’ll pay US$46 for the cheapest USB4 M.2 enclosures right now (more like US$75 and up for other options). That’s double the cost — or more — of USB 3.2 Gen 1 devices (UASP: see below). Cables cost US$2 to $10 more for faster varieties, which isn’t too punitive. You can’t take advantage of anything faster than Gen 3 NVMes. Thus, you can buy 1 TB for US$55-80, and 2 TB for US$93-130 or so.

The “big spring” comes from the cost of either buying (for laptops and so forth) or installing (for desktops with open PCIe slots, and ASUS is the only vendor I can find who makes one for US$126) to gain a USB4 40 Gbps port to plug into. My testing so far shows this DOES make a difference, and often offers better performance than older and rarer Thunderbolt 3 or 4 capable USB-C ports.

For Me, Backup Is the Killer App

I’m always messing with PCs, so I need to back up frequently in case I shoot myself in the foot and have to replace a mangled installation. It happens to me at least 1-2 times a week in my testing and research, so this is no joke. I find the cost of USB4 external storage worthwhile because it drops the time to make a complete image backup into the 2-4 minute range. It takes anywhere from 7-24 minutes to back up to UASP-capable external storage. This equates to USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps capability. It shows up with max read/write speeds in Cystaldiskmark in a range from 1000-1100 MBps.

If you look at the lead-in graphic, which comes from NirSoft’s USBdeview, you can see it references the UASPStore.sys driver and service. I’ve actually found this to be a clearer way to recognize when a USB 3.x port can provide somewhat higher speeds. If your USB 3.x ports are older (and slower) they’ll usually show a USBstor.sys driver instead (and max speeds in CrystalDiskMark in the 400-500 MBps range).

You pays your money, and you takes your chances. That’s how things go with external USB-attached Windows storage — and much else in life!

 

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