Category Archives: Insider stuff

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

Checking Wi-Fi Signal Strength

March 12, 2024 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

Here at Chez Tittel, most PCs use wired Ethernet for their network connections. That is: of the 10 PCs on various LAN segments here, 7 use GbE connections; the other 3 use Wi-Fi. But our cellphones, iPad, and other devices — including 3 thermostats — are all on Wi-Fi. It’s a mixed bag. I like to check Wi-Fi quality from time to time, so I have to thank Mauro Huculak at Windows Central. He just reminded me about what’s up with checking Wi-Fi signal strength. See his story “How to check Wi-Fi signal strength…” for a raft of potential ways in Windows 11.

Checking Wi-Fi Signal Strength: Command Line

I’m a command line junkie, so I’ll skip the various UI-based methods he describes. There’s a single command in the network shell (netsh) that will tell you what you (or I, in this case) want to know:

netsh wlan show interfaces

Mr. Huculak also provides a tasty one-liner version in his article that’s worth sharing and keeping around (cut’n’paste into a text editor like Notepad, and remove all but one space between the text on the 1st & 2nd lines, please, so it will run in Command Prompt or PowerShell):

(netsh wlan show interfaces)
-Match '^\s+Signal' -Replace '^\s+Signal\s+:\s+',''

You can see both of these at work in PowerShell on one of my Windows 11 test PCs in the lead-in graphic above. The short version produces all of the interface info for the one and only Wi-Fi interface on that machine; the long version simply shows the signal strength as a percentage (i.e. the “99%” at lower left above). You can go either way. Works the same on Windows 10, too. Very handy!

Thanks again, Mauro. Made my morning…

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, WED Glog

Office Update Hiccup Is Easily Fixed

March 11, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Last Friday, WingetUI informed me that Microsoft Office needed an update on my production PC. When I tried to update it, however, it failed inside the tool and running winget inside PowerShell. Then, it did nothing inside Outlook when I clicked Files > Account > Update Options > Update Now. Obviously, something was hinky about Office itself, or perhaps the update package. I got an error message that read “Installer failed with exit code: 4294967295.” Fortunately, this Office update hiccup is easily fixed.

How Office Update Hiccup Is Easily Fixed

As it happens, I wrote a story for ComputerWorld back in April 2021. It’s entitled “4 steps to repair Microsoft Office.” I only had to go to Step 1 “Run the Office Quick Repair tool.” You can see the steps to get there, and the Repair button to run it, in the following screencap:

Here’s how to get to the embedded repair info: Settings > Apps > Apps & features > click on Microsoft 365 Apps (for enterprise in my case, YMMV by version). If you click Quick Repair it uses local windows files from your PC. If that doesn’t work, you can try Online Repair and use files from the MS Office download page instead.

I didn’t have to, because the first try did the trick. After the repair completed the update ran without further difficulties. Darn! It’s nice when an easy repair succeeds. Read the rest of the CW story to see what other steps might be required if the Repair tools shown above don’t work. Things can get interesting in a hurry, so I’m just as glad they did not. As Sinatra famously sang “…nice and easy does it every time!”

Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows Update

KB50001716 Is Puzzling

March 7, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, then. I was reading Martin Brinkmann’s post to gHacks this morning. It’s entitled “Microsoft’s sneaky KB5001716 Windows 10 update pushes Windows 11.” I don’t think my production PC qualifies, because its Intel SkyLake i7-6700 falls outside the range of supported CPUs. So I went looking for it, and learned some useful things. Let me share them with you…

Why KB50001716 Is Puzzling

First off I went to look at WU Update History to see if KB5001716 was present (or absent). I quickly realized that reading the whole WU history was more than a little taxing on a machine that’s been running Windows 10 since 2016.

So I turned to PowerShell where some operating on the Get-WUHistory command seemed like a good idea. When I figured out my Update History had 528 entries, that idea seemed even better. You can view the update history by creating a variable named $history, like so

$history = Get-WUHistory -last 1000

This grabs up to the last 1000 entries in the history records and assigns them to the variable $history. If you look at that output it’s kind of hard to ingest from Windows Terminal. It makes more visual sense if you look at it this way:

$history | sort date -desc | Format-Table Date,KB,@{l=’Category’;e={[string]$_.Categories[0].Name}},Title

[Note the preceding lines are a single PowerShell command string. If you want to try it, cut’n’paste into a text editor and make sure it’s a “one liner” before pasting into PowerShell. This produces output that looks like this:

Table format is more readable, but still too much to take in.
[Click image for full-size view.]

So I changed up the command string to write it to a file. That required appending the following string:

> i7wuhist.txt

The > symbol redirects the output, and the filename resides in folder context in which PS runs. Working with a file I was able to figure out the following:

1. I had no instances of KB5001716 in there anywhere
2. There were a total of 528 entries in that file.

I also concluded that my PC’s failure to meet Windows 11 hardware requirements probably meant that the upgrade offer (and indeed KB5001716 itself) were not forthcoming. Good to know, and I learned some interesting stuff along the way.

Hyper-V and VMs, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

Creating New Windows 11 VM Gotchas

March 6, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Whoa! I hit a couple of interesting snags when setting up a new Hyper-V VM, late yesterday and this morning. Indeed I came across a couple of interesting gotchas that I want to document — if only to help me to remember what to do the next I have to do this. These creating new Windows 11 VM gotchas include getting the ISO-based install to run, and then being able to log into that VM. Pretty basic but vital stuff, in other words…

Creating New Windows 11 VM Gotchas Recited & Explained

Gotcha #1: Getting the installer to run from an ISO. Turns out you can’t do this from an RDP session. I had to do this from the physical desktop, probably because of too many levels of indirection from keyboard stuff in the input path. I also had to set up the VMs with TPM to get Windows 11 install to complete (otherwise, I would get the “doesn’t meet hardware requirements” error message). This turned out to be fairly easy, if vexing from the standpoint of “Why doesn’t Hyper-V do this by default?”

Gotcha #2: Logging into the new VM, once installed. One must log into the VM with “Enhanced session mode” disabled, then go to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options > Additional settings, then turn off “…allow only Windows Hello sign-in…” toggle. Turns out, this doesn’t work with RDP either, as explained at MS Answers. Boy, won’t it be nice when Copilot gets smart enough to do this with a single prompt (no luck right now).

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

Hotpatching Windows 11 24H2?

March 5, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

If Zac Bowden at WindowsCentral is right — and he often is — there’s something unusual coming in the next feature update for Windows 11 (24H2). When it emerges later this year, it may include something called hotpatching. In an October 2023 Learn Story, MS defines hotpatching. It is “…a way to install OS security updates … that doesn’t require a reboot after installation.” Basically, it means that PCs can defer the mandatory reboot that follows certain monthly cumulative updates. But there’s more…

Beyond Hotpatching Windows 11 24H2

Right now, hotpatching only applies to WindowsServer VMs inside the Microsoft Azure umbrella. Bowden also asserts it’s used on Xbox systems. According to his unnamed sources they’re already experimenting with hotpatching 24H2 images in Redmond. Same sources say MS plans to push them out into the Dev and Canary channels in coming months.

Because MS has been doing this for a while (with Windows Server VMs and Xbox) this is less startling than it might otherwise be. The MS Learn item is particularly worth reading for the section entitled “How Hotpatch works.” It explains this technique relies on patching “the in-memory code of running processes without the need to restart the process” so that “applications are unaffected.” Good to know!

A quarterly reboot is still required to make sure that an actual CU acts as the baseline for the current running Windows image (say in January). Then, February and March can be hotpatches, with another CU to follow in April, and so on, as shown in the lead-in graphic.

Presumably, full update integration would occur on the “next reboot” for hotpatched PCs. I’ve never had a Windows desktop run for 3 months without a single reboot myself. Thus, I’m pretty sure I’ll be finding out when and as hotpatches show up inside Windows 11 Insider Preview releases — hopefully, soon!

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

Windows 11 Nears Built-in IPRI Facility

March 1, 2024 Ed Tittel 1 Comment

Here’s a nice Windows 11 milestone to ponder. Those who opted for KB5034848 (released 2/29/2024) already have it. Those who wait for the March Patch Tuesday release will get it. What is it: an IPRI, or in-place repair install capability, as depicted in the lead-in graphic from my Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Mobile Workstation. That’s the basis for the title (also above) that reads “Windows 11 nears built-in IPRI facility.” Let me explain what makes this cool…

Sussing Out Windows 11 Nears Built-in IPRI Facility

I’ve been hip to the IPRI technique — which basically involves launching setup.exe from an installer image that matches whatever version of Windows is currently running — since I joined up at TenForums.com back in November 2014. It’s my favorite technique to restore Windows to stable, normal operations when things start getting weird and normal troubleshooting techniques shed no light on things. IPRI works by re-installing all the OS files but leaving apps, applications, and the registry alone.

And now in the CU Preview for March (and thus presumably also in the March update), Windows 11 users running the latest version will get the “Reinstall now” button that lets them attempt to “Fix problems using Windows update.” While this will reduce my level of need for UUPdump.net to built an ISO for IPRI from time to time, it is incredibly convenient and generally helpful. Good stuff.

One word of warning: Having tried this tool out on a Beta release a couple of months back, I can observe it takes quite a while to do its thing. It took me 55 minutes to get through the process on that Beta image, and I assume it will do something similar with this Preview CU image should I put it to the test again. I’m pretty sure that’s because it has to build a custom image (just like the UUPdump.net batch file does) before it can start doing its repairs.

And so it often goes, here in Windows-World, where spending more time for improved convenience is a common trade-off. Cheers!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

Winget Solves Self-Update Issue

February 29, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Winget would hiccup when updating itself. No longer. The latest leap to 1.7.10582 solves that, and adds a bunch of cool new functionality as well (e.g. repair command, enable Windows Features as dependency, access URL instead of local file, and more). As Winget solves self-update issue, it’s becoming even more of a go-to tool for admins and power users.

How Winget Solves Self-Update Issue

It’s taking the same approach that Windows Terminal has for a while now: it’s maintaining the existing process, and instructing users to “Restart the application to complete the upgrade.” Closing, then re-opening Windows Terminal does the trick nicely. Glad to see it.

Indeed, this is by any metrics a “big update” for Winget. Take a look at the release page and you’ll see 6 entries under the “Features” heading, with dozens more under “What’s Changed.” Good stuff!

Here’s the complete –info block for this latest incarnation, for the record:

Winget –info for v1.7.10582
[Click image for full-size view.]

These days, I’m about as big a fan of this tool as you can find. I highly recommend it for updating apps and applications in Windows. I also recommend that you send feedback to developers whose apps and applications you use, but who don’t yet submit package manifests to make their updates installable via winget. The winget Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator toolset also got a recent and major set of enhancements designed to persuade those not already using this tool to jump on board. Let them know!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog

Exploring New NVIDIA Beta App

February 28, 2024 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

OK, then. Through what I can only describe as a bitter irony, the only desktop that I own with enough space in the case for a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is my aging i7-6700 Skylake build. It’s too old to meet Windows 11 system requirements so it’s running Windows 10. Even so, I put it through its paces just now, while exploring new NVIDIA beta app (NVIDIA App.exe). Its home page, with the exe file properties page overlaid, provides the lead-in graphic above.

What Exploring New NVIDIA Beta App Tells Me

If you visit NVIDIA’s “Test Drive” page for this beta software you’ll find a concise summary right next to the download link for same. It reads:

The NVIDIA app beta is a first step in our journey to modernize and unify the NVIDIA Control Panel, GeForce Experience, and RTX Experience apps.

Indeed, the driver update and subsequent desktop behavior is unchanged. I used the beta sofware to update my RTX 3070 Ti to version 551.61 (Rls 2/21/24). Just like GeForce Experience did, it changed all RDP windows from maximized to “fill entire pane.” It also moved all open windows from my (secondary) left-hand screen to the (primary) right-hand screen. Easily cleaned-up but I wish they’d change the code to capture home screen info and restore it at or near the conclusion of the driver install.

The NVIDIA Control Panel is indeed gone from Control Panel, though. Its functions are now integrated into the Beta app. I believe that’s a positive step. NVIDIA also mentions

a redesigned in-game overlay for convenient access to powerful gameplay recording tools, performance monitoring overlays, and game enhancing filters, including innovative new AI-powered filters for GeForce RTX users.”

I’ll have to turn this rig over to my gamer son when he’s home for Spring Break next week and see what he thinks of the gaming stuff. I’m no gamer myself (except for card and board games which exercise none of these advanced capabilities).

What About That New Software?

The beta software kicks off with a new version number of 10.0.0.499/p. So far it seems mostly like a stitched-together version of GeForce Experience and the Control Panel Item. But then, I can’t appreciate the game stuff. We’ll see how it all plays out. It’s undoubtedly more convenient to find everything together, though, so I’ll give NVIDIA brownie points for consolidation. The rest is still TBD. Stay tuned…

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

SearchApp.Exe Sets Windows 10 Crash Record

February 27, 2024 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

It took me a while to count them up, but my Windows 10 production PC hit some rocks yesterday. As SearchApp.exe sets Windows 10 crash record on that PC — 49 Critical “Stopped working” events in one day — I find myself wondering if it’s time to move onto a new production PC here in the office. As you can see in the lead-in graphic, the reliability index dropped like a stone!

Cringing As SearchApp.Exe Sets Windows 10 Crash Record

Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of this. As I dig into similar reports online — as in this TenForums.com thread — I see my problem is neither unique nor necessarily pathological. But gosh! It sure it disconcerting to see so many crashes in a single day.

I know why it happened, too: my Start menu stopped working properly about mid-day yesterday. Thus, I found myself using the Windows Search box a LOT more than usual. Then I figured out I could scroll through “All apps” and get to what I needed alphabetically. Eventually, I went into Task Manager and clicked the “Restart” option in the right-click menu for File Explorer. That restored Start to normal behavior and stopped the weird search bomb from going off, apparently.

Another Brick in the Wall?

I keep thinking that the time is coming ever closer when I’m going to have to switch my production work over to a new desktop. I built one last year (an AMD 5800x, B550 mobo, 64 GB RAM, etc. etc.). Could this be Windows’ way of telling me “time to go!” Perhaps… Let me procrastinate a bit longer, please?

But as Pink Floyd put it “You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat…” So I’d best get moving in the next month or two. The beast must be fed!

Device drivers, Insider stuff, Networking, Recent Activity, USB devices, WED Blog

Windows 11 Wi-Fi 7 & USB4v2: What’s Up?

February 26, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

On January 8, 2024 Wi-Fi 7 went public. That’s the same day the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced its Wi-Fi Certified 7 program. USB4 version 2.0 goes all the way back to October 18, 2022. But only with the release of Insider Preview Canary Channel Build 26063 in February 2022 did MS start testing support for related Wi-Fi 7 drivers. (USB4 version 2.0 has been baked in since Build 23615 in the Dev Channel, released January 11, 2024.) Neither has appeared in a production version of the OS. Thus, a valid question for Windows 11 Wi-Fi 7 & USB4v2 has to be: What’s going on? TLDR answer right now is “Not much just yet.” There are lots of good reasons why so please let me explain…

What’s Afoot with Windows 11 Wi-Fi 7 & USB4v2?

One way to look at this is from a market availability standpoint. Precious few devices for sale right now support either or both of these standards. As I write this item, I see exactly 2 network adapters (one USB, the other PCIe x4) that support Wi-Fi 7.Ditto for Wi-Fi 7 routers. I can’t find any laptops that offer built-in support for either standard just yet. Many new models are promised later in 2024, and could change that.

Though it’s being proclaimed as something of an oversight it’s really just a function of supply and demand. (See this Tom’s Hardware news item by way of illustration.) Basic economics and recent history with Wi-Fi 6 and USB4 version 1.0 show that it takes about two years for these new standards to make their way from introduction and into more general adoption. I don’t see this latest iteration as terribly different.

Shoot! I didn’t lay hands on my first PC with built-in USB4 capability until the Panasonic Toughbook FZ-55 showed up here at Chez Tittel late last year. Just before Christmas, in fact. If it takes that long to hit my hot little hands again, I’m looking into late 2025 before a personal encounter might happen.