Category Archives: Cool Tools

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

WinGet High Water Mark 14

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Holy mackerel. It’s not so much that I’ve been ungodly busy lately. It’s more like my ongoing visual impairment (I’ve had one lens replacement done, and go back in next Monday for the second) is limiting my activity to only what’s essential. Thus, while I’ve been distracted from my usual routine. WinGet’s been piling up updates. Today, I hit a WinGet high water mark: 14 updates pending, as you see in the lead-in graphic. Wow!

When WinGet High Water Mark (14) Hits, Then What?

Wait. Wait. And wait some more. The whole process took about 18 minutes to complete, much of which went to a Visual Studio update. Interestingly Windows Terminal did NOT come in at the end of the batting order, as it normally does. Why? Because WT needs restarting when it’s updated. But this time, Teams snuck in at the end, so it got updated before I could get WT restarted. Go figure!

As usual, my hat’s off to Demitrius Nelon (@denelon) and his WinGet team, for their stellar work in making updates safe, easy and routine. I’m a rabid partisan on their behalf, and recommend this tool unreservedly to all charged with keeping Windows PCs current and correct.

Best of all I got a clean bill of health from WinGet after a single run: “No installed package found matching input criteria.” That’s WinGet speak for “everything is up to date.” Good-oh!

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

WinGet Discord Update End-Around

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I absolutely love Microsoft’s built-in package manager WinGet. But occasionally things happen when updating application that it can’t (or won’t) handle. As you can see in the lead-in graphic, it cheerfully discloses in red that Discord “…cannot be upgraded using winget.” Indeed, its own built-in update facility did nothing to get me to version 1.0.9165. Thus, my only shot at a WinGet Discord update end-around was the tried-and-true uninstall-reinstall maneuver. That worked, as you can see…

Why Use a WinGet Discord Update End-Around?

Short answer: because it worked. Apparently, it’s uninstaller is smart enough to leave user account information alone. Even though I uninstalled the old version and then installed the new one, it carried over anyway. I’d been worried I’d have to set accounts back up, but no. Everything came up as it should’ve even after an “out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new” operation had completed.

I’m counting myself lucky in this case. There are plenty of other applications that don’t ask if you want to keep personal, account and config info. Then they cheerfully wipe all that stuff out as part of the uninstall process. That makes getting back to where one started a little more time-consuming, especially when a reinstall requires account, password, and possibly even other information to complete.

What’s with Discord’s Pinned Status Anyway?

Notice my attempts to unpin Discord reported “There is no pin for package Discord” (line 7 in the intro graphic). In the past, WinGet has often reported it can’t update Discord because the app is pinned. That’s an experimental feature in WinGet that prevents ordinary syntax for updates from working on certain apps.

Contrary to expectations, though, Discord wasn’t pinned. Yet WinGet couldn’t update it, either. Because the built-in updater didn’t do anything when I tried it (right-click on the notification area icon, then select “Check for updates…” in the resulting pop-up menu), I didn’t have a lot of other options. Thus, I’m grateful that the remove-replace approach did the trick. As you can see from the name of the package downloaded, I did wind up with version 1.0.9165. That’s just what I wanted.

Good thing one can sometimes get lucky here in Windows-World. Glad to have this behind me with no apparent ill effects.

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

Outlook Search String Magic

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This is an IDKYCDT item. I work with Outlook every day, and have done so since the 1980s. You’d think I’d have learned a long time ago about how to make Outlook search string magic stand up and bark. Not so: in trolling the Internet today I learned about the “isread:no” string in Outlook search, which shows you all unread messages for the current search focus. Indeed, it’s the bomb when applied to my inbox, where things can sometimes pile up alarmingly.

You can see a sample search string of this type in the lead-in graphic. It reads the sender field (from:) in messages, and shows those that match what’s on the other side of the colon. In this case, recent stuff from one of my main project editors at Actual Tech Media.

Exploring Outlook Search String Magic

By itself, this isread:no string is a big boon to my productivity. But naturally, I’d like to find a compendium of all such strings. The closest I could come as an MS Support note entitled “How to search in Outlook.” It lists a pretty good number of such strings. But it isn’t really structured, appropriately organized, or complete in that specific area . Ditto for another support note “Use Outlook’s built-in search filters.”

In fact, the more I look around, the less I’m able to find a useful resource. I’m thinking I should reach out to the father of the AskWoody newsletter — Woody Leonhard himself, author of many books on Word and Office — and see if he can point me in the right direction. Who know where this may lead? Can’t wait to find out.

Stay tuned!

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

Fast UFDs Need Fast USB Ports

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I just learned something amazing. I’ve long known that performance depends greatly on USB port selection. Indeed I posted about this nearly two years ago to the day: USB-C Port Choice Really Matters. Amusingly, it wasn’t until this morning that I figured out this caution applies to USB-A ports as well. Indeed, fast UFDs need fast USB ports for them to deliver their fullest capabilities. The speed difference is shocking, too: more than 20X faster for large read/writes; 2-10X faster for small ones. Let me show you…

CDM Shows That Fast UFDs Need Fast USB Ports

Check out the lead-in graphic at right. It shows CystalDiskMark (CDM) results for the same Kingston Data Traveler Max 256GB UFD I just had delivered from Amazon yesterday. It’s rated at 1,000 MB/s read, and 900 MB/s write on that purchase page. As you can see, CDM reports better numbers than those for queue depth of 8 on a 1 GiB object, and somewhat less for a queue depth of 1.

What’s fascinating, however, is the results shown on the left. These popped up in a pretty new ThinkPad T14s Gen6 Copilot+ PC I received from Lenovo last month. As the user manual confirms, both of its USB-A connectors top out at 5 Gbps, which makes them plain-vanilla USB 3.0 (aka USB 3.2 Gen1). As you can see given that I’m testing the same device in two different USB-A ports, the difference is down to the port. And that difference is MAJOR!

Here’s a Potential Workaround

You can purchase a dongle/adapter that is female USB-A on one side, and male USB-C on the other. It will let you plug a fast USB-A UFD into a presumably faster USB-C port. I bought a 2-pack of these from Amazon back in 2021. You can see there’s some pass-through loss (compare upper right results, and you’ll see what I mean) when taking this approach. But gosh! It’s still MUCH faster than a 5Gpbs connection. ‘Nuff said.

If you buy a fast UFD and your laptop or PC has only 5 Gbps USB-A ports, spend the extra $5-6 that a USB-A to USB-C adapter will cost. You’ll get a major performance boost as a result, even if it’s not as good as a native 10 Gbps USB-A port. Cheers!

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WinGet Skips Edge Update

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Just last week, I blogged about a Clean Chrome Winget Update. I just observed something in the same vein for Edge. Check out the lead-in graphic: you can see that WinGet finds 3 items in need of update, but only handles two of them. The third item is Edge which WinGet omits because that browser was open on that PC. Hence my assertion that WinGet skips Edge update, — at least, when Edge is open at the time.

What to Do When WinGet Skips Edge Update

You can do one of two things:
1. Close Edge and run WinGet upgrade again.
2. Navigate into Help and feedback > About and run the built-in Edge updater.
Either one works. As you can see in the next screencap, I did the latter and it worked like a charm (it shows the update complete, just prior to clicking the Restart button that puts the new version to work).

Edge uses “Restart” to preserve existing open tabs and contents.

As always, WinGet proceeds with caution doing updates (or making changes of any kind) when targeted apps or applications are running. This prevents possible loss of user data, including unsaved input or work. In general, I take this as an untarnished positive, because it shows how WinGet bends over backwards to invoke and follow a kind of digital Hippocratic oath. First and foremost, that involves taking no action that might result in data loss (“do no harm”). Good stuff!

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Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Updates, WED Blog

Clean Chrome Winget Update

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I see it all the time: Winget tells me there’s an update for Chrome availalbe. You can see that too, in the lead-in screencap. It shows that the target PC needs an update to version 128.0.6613.114. A quick peek into Chrome > Help > About shows it’s on …113 right now. On one PC, the winget command showed success but a dive into Chrome ran the update anyway. On the test PC from which the screencap came (includes the post-upgrade About Chrome info at right), I conducted an experiment. It produced a clean Chrome Winget update. Let me explain how that happened…

Ensuring a Clean Chrome Winget Update

For a long time, I’ve wondered if an active Chrome process running might stymie Winget’s updates for that browser. I think I’ve pretty much now proved that to myself. On a PC with one or more active Chrome processes running — and BTW, some persist even if you close Chrome after it’s been opened — the small Chrome updater window may or may not appear. If it doesn’t show up, the upgrade doesn’t happen. If it does show up, you may still have to visit Help > About to hit the “Relaunch” button to finish that job.

But if there are NO (zero) Chrome processes running on the PC when Winget tries to update that program, everything completes properly. It’s always been Winget’s practice to err on the side of caution and prevent updates from possibly affecting, damaging or losing user data inside a running app or application. I’m pretty sure that’s what drives this behavior here.

Reboot Before Winget Upgrade?

I’m tempted to recommend rebooting a PC before running  winget upgrade. But because plenty of apps and applications can (and sometimes do) run as startup tasks, this might not result in a pristine runtime that will ensure everything updates “just so.”

About the best one can do — including your humble author — is to close open processes related to targeted winget updates before turning its upgrade functions loose. And boy howdy, isn’t some kind of caveat like this the hallmark of a real-live Windows-World adventure? Hint: rhetorical question…

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Visual Studio Subscription Shenanigans

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I’m happy to admit it: one of my fave bennies for the Microsoft MVP program is another year’s worth of Visual Studio Subscriptions, with access to downloads and keys. The downloads include any major version of Windows 10 or 11 you might care to name, plus the full line-up of MS 365 and related products and platforms. That said, finding my way into the walled garden sometimes leads to various Visual Studio Susbscription shenanigans. Let me explain…

Detailing Visual Studio Subscription Shenanigans

I started out with this program back in days of yore, when it was called MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network). That said, it’s been some time since the VS Subscriptions switchover occurred. Indeed, Copilot just told me it happened in 2015. Ever since that switchover, I’ve had to learn to navigate inside the massive collection of pages under the visualstudio.com umbrella. It’s been an ongoing learning experience, in fact.

A couple of years back, I switched the MSA that’s associated with my MVP identity from one email address to another. It took months for that change to fully percolate into all modes of access. That made VS Subscriptions a little too interesting. Then, Microsoft rolled its Windows Insider MVP program — which had been separate since starting up in 2016 or thereabouts (I got elected in 2018) — into its general MVP program as of January 1, 2024.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

I’ll crib from Tom Petty to reveal that my old VS Subscription timed out with the end of the Windows Insider MVP program. I didn’t get inducted into Microsoft MVP (Windows) status until May, 2024. Thus I was on the sidelines for access from January through much of May this year. Now, I’ve been back in for the past month to 6 weeks. I’m finally able to access all aspects of the subscription, and delighted to be where I am. These days a VS Professional single-user subscription costs around  US$1,200 per year: it’s very nice to have.

Lately, I’ve been using VS Subscriptions to grab various Windows 10 ISOs. I’m down to one physical PC running that older OS, so I’m building some VMs to participate in its newly-reactivated beta program. The downloads and keys are ultra handy for standing up (and blowing away) temporary OS instances. I just use a MAK (multiple activation key) and keep on trucking. Good stuff!

If you’re a developer or just need access to “a little bit of everything” inside Windows-World, Visual Studio Subscriptions is worth buying. How do I know? I paid for it from the early 2000s until I made it into the MVP program. There used to be a 3-year-at-a-time discount available for subscriptions, but you had to go through a reseller to get that. Copilot says there’s a good chance you can still do this now.

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

Start11 v2 App Launch Fails

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Here’s something interesting to ponder. I’m running Stardock’s mostly excellent Start11 v2 start menu replacement on a couple of Windows 11 PCs. One them runs Insider Preview on Canary Channel build 27686.1000. When I upgraded version 2.0 to 2.1 this morning, I couldn’t get the Start11 app itself to open from the Start menu. Click the icon, and nothing happens. Right-click the icon and select “Run as administrator…”: likewise nothing. Gosh, that looks like Start11 v2 app launch fails completely, doesn’t it? Not exactly, as it turns out…

Poking Around the UI When Start11 v2 App Launch Fails

Then I right-clicked the name underneath my avatar image on the right-side of the Start menu (which comes from Start 11 v2). Notice that the highlighted option at bottom reads “Configure Start11.” That’s the secret to launching the Start11 app itself, even though its app entry is currently unresponsive.

I found a Stardock webpage entitled Start11 Changelog. It shows the latest version of Start 11 v2 is 2.1 which dropped earlier this week on 8/20/2024. It’s a long one! Reading it over just now, it says “ARM support is now in all versions” (good to know). But I see nothing that indicates the Start11 app won’t launch when called explicitly. In fact, I see nothing that says this reading back into the changelog as far as I’d care to go (half-a-dozen screenfulls).

What About V1?

This is what makes things interesting. If you click on Start11 in the app list on the Start menu, it launched that app immediately. I’m a little non-plussed that a right-click manuever is needed on v2 to launch the app, but not in V1.

So I installed v2 on another test PC — the brand-new Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra that showed up here last week. Guess what? Opening the app works fine on that machine (as does the right-click trick as well. Something is wrong with the install on my Canary channel test PC, it seems. I’ll report into the Stardock Forums and see what they say. Stay tuned…things might get stranger still. We’ll see!

One More Thing…

On the P3 Ultra I noticed that Start11 shows up in WinGet. So I updated all outstanding items on the Lenovo ThinkPad X380 (my other Start11 v2 test PC). Then I tried the old uninstall/reinstall maneuver on that PC. WinGet happily uninstalled the program, but I had to redownload and re-key the new instance from the Stardock website. But when I was done, the app once again worked as it was supposed to. Looks like the first upgrade broke something. Solved!

 

 

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