Category Archives: Insider stuff

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

After OOO Upgrade Whirl Resumes

July 31, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, then. We rolled back into the garage a little after 5 PM last night. We spent 4 glorious days in an around Marfa, TX. It’s an odd but charming hipster haven in the Big Bend region. This morning, I’m surveying the state of my slightly reduced PC fleet after my absence. I’m down to 9 machines right now, having returned a couple of loaners to Lenovo in hopes of some new review units in return. After OOO upgrade whirl resumes with a vengeance as I catch up on what I missed while gone.

Reporting on: after OOO Upgrade Whirl Resumes

Across my various PCs, I saw some auto-activity in Update history while I was gone. But as I worked with my PCs, each of them needed somewhere between half-a-dozen and ten upgrades/updates to catch up to the leading edge. In general, WinGet accounted for one to three of those items, WU for about the same, and SUMo for the rest.

Interestingly, Strawberry Perl had failed to update in WinGet and inside WingetUI just before I left town. I’d resolved to fix that this morning, but it seems to have fixed itself. WinGet did the upgrade job on its own with nary a hiccup nor error message (see lead-in graphic).

Across the fleet, here are the apps and applications I needed to update upon my return to “active duty” (in alphabetical order): Firefox, Driver Booster, Intel ARC Control, OhMyPosh, Strawberry Perl, and Zoom. Given how long I was OOO (out of the office) I’d expected more. But hey, if I can take a break from the grind, so can everybody else, Cheers: it was fun to be gone, but it’s good to be back!

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

Reboot Cures MIA USB-C Port

July 25, 2023 Ed Tittel 6 Comments

Sometimes, I just don’t get it when Windows gets weird. This time, it’s one of my two Lenovo ThinkPad X380 Yoga laptops (i7-8650U, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD; vintage 2018). I noticed my USB-C attached NVMe enclosure was MIA, Plugging and unplugging did no good, either. The drive worked fine in another, newer laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Mobile Workstation: 11th gen i7, 128GB RAM, 2×1 TB NVMe SSD). I soon figured out that a reboot cures MIA USB-C port on the X380. Bizarre!

Hold on: A Reboot Cures MIA USB-C Port

Because the drive worked right away in the other laptop, I was pretty sure the issue was with the USB-C port, not the drive. And indeed, when I rebooted the X380 Yoga the USB-C-attached NVMe enclosure once again showed up and worked at expected speeds (it only ran about half that rate when plugged into a USB 3.2 Type A port via conversion cable).

What the hey? I’m speculating, but my best guess is that when the X380 goes to sleep it loses track of — and connection with — the USB-C port. Works fine now, though… The lead-in graphic shows this as the E: drive with a 1TB SSD ensconced therein.

When in Doubt … Reboot

It never fails to amaze and amuse me that the old “three-fingered salute” (anybody else still remember CTRL-ALT-DEL?) still fixes so many Windows weirdnesses. At least, it’s just something momentary. To no surprise, the search string “X380 Yoga USB-C port disappears after sleep” auto-completes when I start typing the word “disappears.” That tells me my experience is not unique: Google knows about it, too. Go figure!

And that’s the way things go here in Windows-World. Hopefully, I’ll remember what to do the next time this happens…

Added 2Hrs Later: Confirmed!

I let the X380 go to sleep and when I woke it back up, once again the USB-C NVMe drive disappeared. After another reboot, it’s baaaack! I’d have to say this confirms my sleep-based hypothesis. OK, then…

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

Introducing Microsoft PC Manager

July 24, 2023 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

Last Friday, I learned about a new Beta Windows utility from Microsoft called “PC Manager.” It’s available for download and use right now on both Windows 10 and 11. There’s just one problem: I couldn’t get it to install from the download for either OS. But since I’m introducing Microsoft PC Manager here and now, you know I’ve figured out a workaround. Yep: there’s a Winget package for this tool, and it installs through that approach just fine.

Still Introducing Microsoft PC Manager, Despite Installer Fail

If you run the download file named MSPCManagerSetup.exe it simply hangs, even when you agree to its terms and conditions. It just sits there, doing nothing, like so:

Even after agreeing to the terms, the installer presents no option to actually install the tool. Stuck!

I figured there might be a winget package manifest for this tool, seeing as how it’s a Microsoft thing. I was right. It took a bit of poking around, but I eventually hit paydirt on the string “PCManager.” Here’s a screencap with the right install syntax (and a successful installation).

Winget install Microsoft.PCManager does the trick!

Again: Introducing MS PC Manager

Here’s what the startup window from the application looks like. It provides information into PC health, storage, processes and startup apps, as well as cleanup and security stuff.

OK then: here’s the home window for the Microsoft PC Manager (Beta) utility.

Health check takes a couple of minutes to run, and found excess files and baggage, as well as numerous startup items to cancel out. Storage Manger offers options for deep cleanup, large file management, app management and storage sense. Deep cleanup found and removed another 3.6 GB of “stuff” on my PC; large files created a single-pane display of all files over 100 MB on my system (you can set thresholds at 10, 50 and 100 MB, and 1 GB: pretty handy). Manage apps simply moves you to Settings → Apps → Apps & features, where you can review and manage what you’ve got. Storage Sense does likewise for Settings → System → Storage → Configure Storage Sense or run it now. All pretty handy, and worth fooling around with. Check it out!

In a future blog post, I’ll dig further into the Security button at the lower right. It has at least one interesting capability that I’ll also be writing about in an updated story for ComputerWorld soon (I hope).

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

Dissecting Winget Logs Shows Root Causes

July 21, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Hmmmm. I just did something risky, or perhaps dumb on my production PC. You can see the evidence in the lead-in graphic, a PowerShell session that shows an issue (in red, at bottom) with the installer hash for a Google Chrome update. What you can’t see is that I was already updating Chrome inside Chrome itself while this was happening. The installer changes when a new version is installed. Fortunately, dissecting Winget logs shows root causes, so that’s what I did next. It was more illuminating than the error message, for sure…

How Dissecting Winget Logs Shows Root Causes

First, some background on Winget logs. You can find out more about them (and related troubleshooting stuff) in the MS Learn article “Debugging and troubleshooting issues with the winget tool.” It also gives you a huge honkin path where the log files reside — namely:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.DesktopAppInstaller_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\DiagOutputDir

But, rather than grab and use this, I simply told Voidtools Everything to show me all instances of the final directory name DiagOutputDir. That got me there a whole lot faster!

Once into the logfile named WinGet-2023-07-21-10-59-05.148.log I jumped to the bottom to see how it mentioned Chrome. Here’s the tail end of that log from 11:00:09 to 11:00:14.

2023-07-21 11:00:09.043 [CLI ] Generated temp download path: C:\Users\etitt\AppData\Local\Temp\WinGet\Google.Chrome.115.0.5790.99\2c925b57d4892c4fbe177b3d7f91098a3bcdb0d95957c37872a1244bf9edae26 2023-07-21 11:00:09.043 [CORE] Downloading to path: C:\Users\etitt\AppData\Local\Temp\WinGet\Google.Chrome.115.0.5790.99\2c925b57d4892c4fbe177b3d7f91098a3bcdb0d95957c37872a1244bf9edae26 2023-07-21 11:00:09.044 [CORE] DeliveryOptimization downloading from url: https://dl.google.com/dl/chrome/install/googlechromestandaloneenterprise64.msi 2023-07-21 11:00:13.663 [CORE] Download completed. 2023-07-21 11:00:14.593 [CORE] Started applying motw to C:\Users\etitt\AppData\Local\Temp\WinGet\Google.Chrome.115.0.5790.99\2c925b57d4892c4fbe177b3d7f91098a3bcdb0d95957c37872a1244bf9edae26 with zone: 3 2023-07-21 11:00:14.602 [CORE] Finished applying motw 2023-07-21 11:00:14.603 [CLI ] Package hash verification failed. SHA256 in manifest [2c925b57d4892c4fbe177b3d7f91098a3bcdb0d95957c37872a1244bf9edae26] does not match download [aae26a4cf7d92a4c9198d8fac9534670e9fb5f8d1e38897d99b0b51e68107d2a] 2023-07-21 11:00:14.604 [CLI ] Terminating context: 0x8a150011 at D:\a\_work\1\s\external\pkg\src\AppInstallerCLICore\Workflows\DownloadFlow.cpp:15e 2023-07-21 11:00:14.604 [CLI ] Terminating context: 0x8a15002c at D:\a\_work\1\s\external\pkg\src\AppInstallerCLICore\Workflows\InstallFlow.cpp:28a

I bolded the line where things went south. Basically, the hash verification failed because I had already overwritten the old version of the installer with the new version (and the new Chrome version itself, as well). Good thing winget is smart enough to recognize the ground has shifted under its feet. If it finds things it doesn’t expect, it wisely decides to quit what it’s doing. Now I know what I had always suspected. And now, of course, you know too. Cheers!

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

Windows 11 Dev Channel Adventures Begin

July 20, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, I admit it: in the wake of the recent uplift from Dev to Canary Channels for Windows 11, I didn’t dedicate another machine or VM to the former. But with all of the recent news about cool stuff showing up there, I’ve decided it’s time that my Windows 11 Dev Channel adventures begin … again! Right now, in fact, the Lenovo Yoga is working through the post-GUI install phase for Build 23506.

When Windows 11 Dev Channel Adventures Begin, Then What?

There will be lots of exciting new stuff to investigate and learn here, if what I’m reading online is correct. The 23506 announcement is, in fact, chock full of stuff, including:

Passwordless experience with Windows Hello for Business
Unsafe password copy and paste warnings
Local file sharing improvements
Outlook for Windows becomes an inbox app
New post-Out-of-box (OOBE) experience
Expanded auto color management (ACM) capabilities
GA for Windows Copilot preview (a big draw for me)
Updated backup preferences (really curious about this, too)

And there’s quite a bit more I’m skipping, so do read the announcement for more gory details. And while I’ve been writing this, the new Build has finished installing. You can see the winver output as the lead-in graphic above. I’m there, so now I need to so some exploring and experimenting. Stay tuned: I’ll follow up!

Note: Courtesy of Bing Chat, here’s more info about MOTW:

MOTW stands for “Mark of the Web”. It is a security feature that helps prevent web-based content from accessing resources on your computer and helps prevent malicious content from running on your computer. When you download a file from the internet, it may be marked with MOTW. This mark indicates that the file came from the internet and may be potentially harmful. When you try to run a file that has been marked with MOTW, Windows will display a warning message ¹.

Backup/Restore, Hardware Reviews, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows OS Musings

Failing Backup Signals Regime Change

July 17, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, I think that’ll do it for my current production PC. I noticed this morning what when my scheduled backup started, it failed almost immediately thereafter. Further investigation into the Macrium Reflect logs shows me it has failed since last Friday. That’s because on the weekends I’m not usually at my desk at 9AM when the scheduled job runs. Upon further investigation, the N: drive where I target my backups had gone missing (it came back after a restart, though). Nevertheless, this tells me it’s time to start acquiring parts to build a replacement PC. That’s why I aver that a failing backup signals regime change. My 2016 vintage i7 Skylake needs to go.

Why Failing Backup Signals Regime Change

It’s just not right that a drive attached to one of the SATA ports on my Asrock Z170 motherboard should drop off the map over the weekend. And now, dear readers, you know why I schedule my backups to occur while I’m working at the PC: it’s the best way to get timely notification that “something aint’ right.” That’s what happened this morning, and that’s what tells me:

I’ll need to keep a close eye on this daily until I transition to a new PC, to make sure scheduled backups run to completion
It really, really is time for me to transition over to a new primary production PC

For sure, 7 years isn’t a bad lifetime for a heavily used, major storage PC. Indeed, I’ve got a nominal 17.1 GiB, or approximately 15GB of storage on this beast. Of that total, about 40% (6GB) is occupied, so I’ll throw a couple of new 8 GB SATA drives into my new BOM for the build, along with 2 2TB NVMe PCI-e x4 or x5 SSDs.

It’s Now Official: I’m Transitioning

I’ll wait until August 1 or thereabouts to start pulling parts together for the new build. I’ve already got an Nvidia 3070 Ti GPU and a Seasonic Focus PX-750 PSU I can use. I’ll need a new case, a CPU, 64 GB RAM, the aforementioned SSDs and HDDs, and a motherboard. That will give me something to think about — and report on here in my blog — as the month winds down.

I think I’ll call my old buddy Tom Soderstrom, who still reviews motherboards and CPUs for Tom’s Hardware, to ask for his recommendation on a new build. I need to decide on AMD vs. Intel, after which the rest will follow pretty naturally. Stay tuned: I’ll keep you posted.

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Glog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Windows Terminology: Enablement Package KB (eKB)

July 14, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In Microsoft’s Windows Client roadmap Update: July 2023 (published yesterday, July 13) I came across a new (to me, anyway) buzzword with associated acronym. As I add to my Windows terminology, enablement package KB (eKB) is now on the list.

Here’s the quote that got me looking around to learn more (I bolded those key words):

The upcoming Windows 11, version 23H2 shares the same servicing branch and code base as Windows 11, version 22H2. What does it mean for you? If you’re running Windows 11, version 22H2, it will be a simple update to version 23H2 via a small enablement package (eKB). Do you remember updating from Windows 10, version 1903 to 1909? Or how you’ve managed recent updates beginning with Windows 10, version 20H2 through 22H2? It will be that simple. Moreover, since both versions share the same source code, you don’t need to worry about application or device compatibility between the versions.

There’s also a Note of some interest as well. It reads:

Note: The eKB is not available on Volume Licensing Service Center. Media packages contain the complete Windows 11 operating system.

In fact, that last item is what really caught my attention and got me looking around, because eKB is an abbreviation/acronym I’d not seen before. My take: if MS thinks eKB is a thing, I’d like to know what kind of thing it is. Here goes…

Chasing Down Windows Terminology: Enablement Package KB (eKB)

A search on the acronym took me back to March 2022, to an answers.microsoft.com post. Entitled “What is Enablement Package KB (EKB)…?” it took me to an early instance of that terminology. It also references the KB5003791 announcement, which talks about enablement packages in general (though it doesn’t use the eKB term itself).

In the simplest of terms, it means that we’ll transition from 22H2 versions of Windows 11 to 23H2 versions through a small and simple Cumulative Update (CU), rather than a lengthy Windows install-based upgrade. A long story, for a short conclusion.

And if you look at the big quote above, the part that starts “Do you remember updating…?” provides some recent, notable examples of an eKB even if it doesn’t tie it directly to that term.

Now I know what an eKB is. And, if you’ve read this through, so do you. Cheers!

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

Ongoing Build 22631.1972 Oddities

July 12, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Hmmmm. Yesterday was “Update Tuesday.” As I made the update rounds on my small PC fleet, I noticed something odd as I was downloading updates for my Beta Channel test PC (a Lenovo X380 Yoga). It’s depicted in the lead-in graphic, and led to further, ongoing Build 22531.1972 oddities when all was said and done. Please, let me explain…

Working Through Ongoing Build 22631.1972 Oddities

First, take a look at the lead-in graphic. Hint: consternation hits at the bottom of the update list. Note the same update occurs twice, each with “Completed” status — namely KB5007651 (a Defender antimalware platform update). Weird!

Immediately after, it gets weirder. First, I rebooted once the updates completed (twice, just to be on the safe side). Then I ran DISM … /StartComponentCleanup. I observed the following outcome:

Error 6824 “another …pending transaction” pops up. A first!
[Click image for full-sized view: this one’s hard to read.]

As usual, I went haring off to Google to see what was recommended. Heck, I even tried it out on Bing’s ChatGPT sidebar. Here’s what came back:

Alas, a second (and even a third) reboot didn’t clear the error, either. The same condition held upon repeated retries of the afore-cited DISM command — namely:

dism /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup

I’m thinking it’s time to try an in-place upgrade to repair this Windows installation. It should rebuild the component store which is likely to fix this issue and the strange ongoing presence of 13 spurious items therein in need of (impossible cleanup). I think I’ll visit UUPDump and build an image for 22631.1972. Hopefully, that will do the trick. Stay tuned!

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

Android Subsystem Gets Easy-Peasey

July 11, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In reading over yesterday’s news, I found Paul Thurrott’s story on GA for the Amazon Appstore on Windows 11. Being both curious and adventurous, I went ahead and installed same on one of my Lenovo test PCs (a beast: the P16 Gen1 Workstation with i9-12950HX, 128 GB RAM, 1.5 TB NVMe SSDs). There’s a little more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye, but things are arranged now so that for Windows 11 Android Subsystem gets easy-peasey. Let me explain…

What Android Subsystem Gets Easy-Peasey Means

Amazon has built its Amazon Appstore as a Windows Store download. If you grab and install it, and the Windows Subsystem for Android is absent on the target PC, the installer first makes sure this underlying environment is up and running. Then it installs itself. The whole process took about 3 minutes on the admittedly over-powered P16 Workstation. But it required no extra effort on my part to get the Amazon Appstore installed and running.

Just for grins, I downloaded and installed Wordle from the Appstore to make sure things were working. It’s been a while since I ran the Android version. I’d forgotten how obnoxious and ad-laden the free version of that app really is. Suffice it to say: NOW I remember!

Android apps run in their own self-contained windows on the desktop, inside the WSA (Windows Subsytems for Android) container process as shown in Task Manager at top.

Overall, Amazon has done an excellent job of making the install-to-download-to-desktop process simple, fast and easy. Feel free to give it a try on Windows 11. As far as I can tell it runs on all current versions, production and Insider Preview releases alike. Good stuff!

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

PowerToys Team Closes WinGet Gap

July 7, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Now THAT’s what I like to see. Yesterday morning, I noticed a new version of PowerToys (v0.71.0) was out. So quite naturally, I ran WinGet to upgrade same. No dice. At 11:45 AM (Central) I tweeted about this. I observed it was “kind of surprising to see a new PowerToys release…without a matching WinGet upgrade manifest.” 8 minutes later, the team leader responded “we’re working on it.” And by that afternoon, the PowerToys team closes WinGet gap. There’s a working manifest for version 71 in place. Neat-o, and thanks, people!

PowerToys Team Closes WinGet Gap Quickly

It’s a real testment to the energy and drive of the teams involved that things were already in progress as I reported in. (In fact, I heard from the WinGet team lead, too.) This morning I installed PowerToys on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (8th-gen i9, 32 GB RAM, 1.5 TB SSD) and got the latest version. That sequence appears as the lead-in graphic above.

If you look at that graphic, you’ll see that WinGet found only a Zoom upgrade. Oops! That’s because PowerToys wasn’t installed on this PC — yet. But when I did install the .exe version (Microsoft. Powertoys) 0.71.0 (shown as v0.71.0 in the thumbnail at lower right) appears. That’s exactly what should have happened,. It also shows the WinGet manifest for that version of PowerToys is present and working properly.

Always Nice When Things Work Out…

I must say that both the WinGet and PowerToys teams have always been great to work with. They respond to input, questions, and feedback quickly. And when they have to act, they tend to do so sooner than later. Thus, my thanks to Demetrius Nelon (WinGet team lead) and his merry munchkins, as well as Clint Rutkas (PowerToys team lead) and his peppy people, too. Please: keep up the good work.