Category Archives: Insider stuff

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

Skype Attains Oblivion in May 2025

February 28, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

First it was a swelling rumor, based on some eagle-eyed code scanning (reported at XDA.com on Feb 27). Today, it’s established fact, as Zac Bowden at WindowsCentral updates his story with “Microsoft has confirmed that Skype is shutting down in May, with warnings now appearing within Skype apps.” MS wants everybody to move to Teams instead, and offers tools to move chats as needed. If all goes according to plan, that means Skype attains oblivion in May 2025.

Note: I’ve morphed the screencap from the afore-cited XDA story that shows the warning “Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams.” in text form. Reading the code can occasionally provide insights (and reveal future plans, as in this case).

After Skype Attains Oblivion in May 2025, Teams Takes Over

With a much broader range of capabilities, and options to scale audiences into the thousands, Teams can do everything Skype can, and quite a lot more. The transition is already over for some — including your humble author. Hopefully, it won’t be too difficult for those hold-outs still using Skype to switch over to Teams, too.

A Skype Timeline and Some Recollections

Skype started out on the Internet back in 2003 as a standalone service. Mostly it required establishing credit to offset upcoming charges, with occasional replenishment to keep a positive balance after that. For a while, my wife used it to interact with members of her family (who live in Germany) via voice and video on her PC. Microsoft acquired the company in 2011, and made a half-hearted attempt to build it into Windows 10 in 2015.

If memory serves, we all quit using it around that time. FaceTime on the iPhone was free and easier to use. Plus phones are better suited as communications devices than bigger laptops or deskbound desktops. I’d argue that Skype’s demise has been foreshadowed for a long, long time, and that it’s planned end-of-life-and-service date is no big surprise to anyone.

So long Skype. For my purposes, Teams already works better, and does more, than you ever did.

Note Added 2 Hrs Later

See Tom Warren’s Verge story Microsoft is shutting down Skype in favor of Teams for more useful details. The drop-dead date is reported as May 5, and further info on options open to current Skype users is provided. Apparently, he got an MS spokesperson to provide additional tidbits to help prepare the userbase for this change.

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

PatchMyPC Updates 9 Apps Today

February 27, 2025 Ed Tittel 1 Comment

Gosh: I don’t see this very often. On the Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra just now, PatchMyPC Updates 9 apps today. You can see them in the lead-in graphic. The whole thing took less than 4 minutes to complete. My appreciation for this handy update tool knows no bounds!

OK PatchMyPC Updates 9 Apps Today: Next?

The full name of the tool is Patch My PC Home Updater. (I’ll call it PMPC for brevity here). With 516 apps in its library, PMPC is not as comprehensive in coverage as is WinGet or the MS Store (2,600+ packages in the former, and over 60,000 in the latter). But it’s completely automated, incredibly easy (and fun) to use, and — for some odd reason — almost always faster than running the same installers in PowerShell or the Command Prompt.

Indeed, PMPC is also less careful or respectful of running apps than WinGet. It cheerfully stops web browsers (and other apps) to update them, then restores their previous runtime context. In WinGet, you will often either be unable to update a running browser (e.g. Chrome) or you’ll have to relaunch it manually (e.g. Edge or Firefox).

It’s a handy tool, and comes in a variety of commercial forms that work with Autopilot and InTune, among other patch and update management systems. As with WinGet, you can also use it to install and uninstall the items in its library as well. Highly recommended, and a treat to use.

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

So Long, ThinkCentre M90a Gen5 AIO

February 26, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Allrighty, then: I’m packing up the Lenovo All-in-One for return to North Carolina. It’s been fun, but it’s time to say “So long, ThinkCentreM90A Gen5 AIO.” As I’m readying the unit for return, I’ll also file this blog post by way of final thoughts and farewells to this doughty device. Overall, it’s actually quite fast and capable.

Adieu & So Long, ThinkCentre M90a Gen5 AIO

Overall, I like the performance and compactness of this All-in-One. As I said before, this unit would make a great office/cubicle PC; ditto for college students looking for a dorm room desktop. It would, however, make sense, to spend ~US$500 less for 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD with no optical drive, then add more memory and a second SSD at market prices to match the pricier configuration. That’s because, as configured, this unit costs around US$2K (i7-14700, 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, Windows 11 Pro, optical drive).

I also don’t understand why Lenovo didn’t provide Thunderbolt 3 or better ports — ideally, USB4 compliant ones — in this AIO. It comes equipped with numerous USB-A ports and a single USB-C (8 in all). Alas, they top out at 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds (2 of those, plus another 6 USB 3.2 Gen 1 5Gbps ports, all of the Type A variety).

An AIO Past Its Peak?

Though the CPU is a speedy 20-core model (8 P-cores for 16 threads, 12 E-cores for a total of 28 threads altogether), no NPU means this unit is not Copilot+ capable. Those wishing to exercise Windows 11 24H2’s more advanced AI capabilities can’t do so on this PC. I’m also a bit vexed at the lack of high-speed USB as well. But if those things don’t play into your users’ computing needs, this is a solid, work-ready PC. If I were going to buy one myself, though, I’d look for refurb deals or discounts from Lenovo or other resellers.

The display is gorgeous (2880×1800) and supports refresh rates as high as 160MHz. It’s a treat to look at, and work with. I also hooked it up to a 34″ external Acer monitor, and the Intel 770HD chipset had no issues driving its built-in 24″ display at the same time. It made for some impressive and watchable screen real estate. Yes, I know: that plays against the compactness factor, but I was curious! HWiNFO output for the built-monitor serves as the lead-in graphic here.

As the unit heads back to the reviews team, I find myself wondering what Lenovo might send my way next. Stay tuned: I’ll tell you all about it. Can’t wait!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Networking, WED Blog

Right Networking Tool Delivers Visibility

February 25, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I spend at least 15 hours a week on TenForums.com and ElevenForum.com. To me both sites are invaluable sources of intelligence as well as information, fixes and tutorials. In lurking on the Eleven Forum Network and Internet threads recently, I was reminded that the right networking tool delivers visibility that File Explorer can’t match. You can see what I mean in the lead-in screencap, where File Explorer shows the network with 4 PCs, one printer and one router. To the right, the free Advanced IP Scanner (a personal fave) shows 6 computers, 2 printers, 2 TVs, an iPhone, and various other networking devices, including smart thermostats, cable TV boxes, and two routers. Big difference!

Why Stress That Right Networking Tool Delivers Visiblity

The aforementioned Eleven Forum networking threads often gripe that File Explorer fails to show all network devices. They also provide oodles of ingenious hacks and settings to force that tool to show more, more, more of what’s on the network. I simply turn to Advanced IP Scanner instead, because it not only shows me everything within a private (or public) IP address range, it also provides quick, ready access to remote access and management functions that let me reach out to them.

There is a stubborn streak in the Windows community that sometimes says: “Heck no, I won’t use 3rd-party tools. I’ll do it ONLY with native Windows facilities.” That strategy may be understandable — in theory, at least — but in practice it’s sometimes easier to achieve in some cases, and not so much in others. Getting active network nodes to show up in File Explorer is one of the latter. To me, it’s as much about tail-chasing as it is about getting stuff to show up in the UI.

I’ll skip that tail-chasing myself, and use Advanced IP Scanner instead. It does the job right away and requires no drama, nor other unseemly contortions. As I’ve said before, and will say again: In Windows-World, “Cool Tools Rule!”

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Remote Desktop (RDP), WED Blog

Recent RDP Hiccups Confirmed

February 21, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ll be darned. It isn’t often that my local minor Windows gotchas make the news. But there they were this morning on Windows Latest: Windows 11 24H2 RDP hangs on login, RDP session connecting issues reported. For at least the last month or so, I’ve had RDP sessions hang on the login screen, and stay stuck there. Now that I think upon it, the client on the “other side” must’ve been some version of 24H2 (Canary, Beta, Release Preview or Production). That’s why I say: recent RDP hiccups confirmed.

What to Do When Recent RDP Hiccups Confirmed

In my case, this turns out to be a minor enough gotcha that I’ll keep doing what I’ve already been doing. Of course, now I can start waiting — and looking — for some relief from MS. Turns out that if you close the hung RDP session and reconnect to that client, the connection works 90+% of the time. That’s good enough for Windows work here at Chez Tittel.

I have, however, noticed that the Remote Desktop app is less subect to the hiccup (though still not completely immune). I can’t function with remote access of some kind. That’s because I’ve got 6 Windows 11 PCs in my office, and 3 more upstairs. And you guessed it: all are running Windows 24H2 of some kind by now.

A Group Policy Fix May Do the Trick

WindowsLatest also reports that changing the value for a particular node in the Windows Group Policy tree can fix this issue. That node is:

Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Connections

Open Select network detection on the server. Next, make sure that value is set to Enabled, then give it a value of Turn off Connect Time Detect and Continuous Network Detect.

According to the story, that should fix things, with no reboot required. Let’s see … goes off to check … seems to work as described. At least, the half-dozen connections I just tried all came up, sans hiccups. I’ll see how things go longer term and report back here if anything fails in the interim.

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog, Windows 11

Lenovo Q3 Results Support Refresh Year Notions

February 20, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

The world’s biggest PC maker — Lenovo, that is — just reported results for the third quarter of its fiscal year (ended Dec 31). It shows approximate growth in revenues and profits over Q3 for the previous fiscal year. One phrase from the report (PDF) caught my eye: “Commercial sales benefited from the Windows 11 refresh, with premium workstation sales spearheading demand recovery…” Hmm, could it be possible that these Lenovo Q3 results support “refresh year” notions for 2025? You bet!

How Lenovo Q3 Results Support Refresh Year Notions

Back on January 6 I posted about the MS supposition that AI additions to Windows 11 plus Copilot+ PCs could turn 2025 into The Year of the Windows 11 Refresh (that’s a link to their blog on this topic as well as a good summary). As the biggest player in the PC market, Lenovo’s latest quarterly numbers certainly plays into this picture. And it does so in a way that speaks for the “refresh year” idea, rather than against it. Could MS actually have a clue?

I cribbed the lead-in graphic for this story from Paul Thurrott’s coverage of this topic: Lenovo Revenues Jump 20 Percent to $18.8 Billion. It shows how the number have fared over the past 5 quarters, with a dip from Q1 to Q2 in that series, but steady growth and recovery since then.

What Else Could Speak to Refresh?

It is interesting to see how next-ranked PC players numbers either further support this notion, or call it into possible question. Copilot says that means HP, Dell and Asus (Apple holds spot#4, but I’m pretty sure they’re not much into playing the Windows 11 refresh game).

HP’s Q4 24 results show a 1.7% jump YoY (nowhere near Lenovo’s ~20%), but they do cite “steady progress in Personal Systems and Print.” Dell’s overall revenues and earnings declined over 2024, as did the number of units it shipped that year (39.1M vs. 61.8M for Lenovo, 53M for HP, and 17.9M for Asus). Asus was up 8.8% YoY in PC sales, and their strong showing in PC sales helped contribute to their success.

Nothing Entirely Clear Yet, Yea or Nay

Lenovo’s results are the only ones that mention the refresh phenomenon explicitly. But if it pans out further, I expect we’ll hear more from other OEMs, too. Stay tuned: I’ll keep you posted.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

WinGet Installs Neofetch Directly

February 19, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK then, I’ve had a little more time to research and think about yesterday’s blog post, which seized upon the Chris Titus install/update/tweak PowerShell script as a way to get Neofetch installed on Windows. It most assuredly works, but there are easier ways to get this done. Indeed, with the right knowledge and syntax, WinGet installs Neofetch directly. Here’s the syntax:

WinGet install Neofetch

You can see that in the lead-in screengrab. It shows that WinGet knows about a package named neofetch-win with an associated ID of nepnep.neofetch-win. Indeed, that turns out to be the key to finding this project at GitHub. Turns out that nepnep39 is the developer’s handle, and neofetch-win is the name of this GitHub project.

Why WinGet Installs Neofetch Directly

TLDR answer: because the developer has created a package definition for neofetch-win that’s known to WinGet. Indeed, I got the simplest possible syntax shown in the lead graphic from the GitHub project’s README file. Who knew? A lot of people, apparently (he thanks visitors for 50K downloads in March 2024). But alas, not yours truly until yesterday. Sigh.

There’s another way to use WinGet to install Neofetch, also shown in the lead-in graphic, albeit indirectly. You can use the ID mechanism as well, to wit:

WinGet install --id nepnep.neofetch-win

This approach specifically calls out the package by its full ID string, as registered in the WinGet package database.

Even GitHub Provides More Ways

If you visit the “Latest” release page for neofetch-win at GitHub (1.2.1 as I write this), you’ll also find links to an .exe file and an MS Installer (.msi) file there. They work, too, to provide access to this nifty little tool from the UNIX/Linux world.

Where there’s a will to use WinGet, it’s often possible to find a way to exercise same. In this case, I simply needed to find the right handle. It must’ve been too obvious for me, but now I know how to get there from here. And so do you… But heck, based on nepnep39’s March 2024 thankyou, maybe you already did.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, PowerShell, WED Blog, Windows tools

Bringing Neofetch Aboard via WinGet

February 18, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I knew there had to be a way. I just couldn’t find it or figure it out on my own. The venerable old OS info command line tool Neofetch (best known to UNIX and Linux users) works at the Windows command line, too. But I struggled with Chocolatey and Scoop to get it installed without liking the results. This morning Eleven Forum user Lance1 posted a terrific WinGet-based install/update tool from Chris Titus with an understated title “You may find this handy.” Indeed I did — and I also successfully tried bringing Neofetch aboard via WinGet on my production PC. You can see it running in the lead-in screengrab.

What’s Behind Bringing Neofetch Aboard via WinGet?

Running the command from Lance1’s post — namely

iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win | iex

absolutely did the trick for me.

Here’s how Copilot breaks this command string down (all six numbered items are quoted verbatim therefrom):

iwr: This is an alias for the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet. It sends an HTTP request to a web server and retrieves the response.
-useb: This parameter tells Invoke-WebRequest to automatically unblock the downloaded file, which is useful when downloading scripts from the internet.
https://christitus.com/win: This is the URL of the file you’re downloading. In this case, it’s a script hosted on Chris Titus’s website.
|: This is the pipeline operator, which passes the output of one cmdlet to another cmdlet.
iex: This is an alias for the Invoke-Expression cmdlet. It runs a script or command that is passed to it as input.

In summary, says Copilot: “this command downloads a script from https://Christitus.com/win and then executes it immediately on your system.” It’s what pops up the partial console that includes a checkbox for Neofetch, like so:

And when I clicked on Install/upgrade selected in the console pop-up window, it showed the following output as it used WinGet to handle the Neofetch install:

I’m jazzed. I need to spend more time with this Chis Titus tool and see what ELSE it can do. Lance1 was certainly right in his low-key estimation of its utility. I’ve already found it handy, so to speak. Cheers!

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

MS Seemingly Drops Intel Gen7-10 24H2 Support

February 17, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Whoa! Maybe even “Double Whoa!!” Look closely at the recently updated Microsoft Learn Windows Hardware Developer document Windows 11 Version 24H2 supported Intel processors. Careful examination shows that MS seemingly drops Intel Gen7-10 24H2 support. That’s right: everything from Gen 7 (Kaby Lake; 2016 mobile/2017 desktop) to Gen 10 (Comet Lake; 2017 for both mobile and desktop) is absent from that list. I’m concerned, and so are lots of other industry followers and reports (e.g. WinAero, Tom’s Hardware, Eleven Forum, and so forth). Can this be true?

Really!? MS Seemingly Drops Intel Gen7-10 24H2 Support

Initially, I wondered if this could be an error or oversight. But apparently, it’s a deliberate strategy aimed at OEMs. Indeed, a Windows Latest item dated today (2/17/2025) explicitly debunks this notion: No, Microsoft is NOT dropping Windows 11 support for Intel 8th, 9th, and 10th Gen chips. Though the absence of these items prompted plenty of speculation that Gen 7-10 were falling off the 24H2 table, here’s what that item states:

…first…Microsoft has renamed the document to mention the Windows 11 24H2 release. Second, the list of supported processors does not include “8th gen, 9th gen, and 10th gen Intel” chips. This led some people to believe that older Intel chips are no longer officially supported for “Windows 11 24H2.”

In response to this belief, Windows Latest asked MS directly and got this added clarification:

In a statement to Windows Latest, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 11 hardware requirements hadn’t changed since 2021.

I’ll also observe that the first paragraph of this Learn item states “…released and future generations of processors which meet the same principles will be considered as supported, even if not explicitly listed.” Guess what? That includes the “missing” Intel Gen7-10 CPUs, dear readers.

Windows 11 for AI vs. Other Flavors

Apparently MS is steering OEMs toward Intel CPUs that provide the necessary NPU and other items necessary to qualify for Copilot+ classification. It’s another logical, if vexing, consequence of the “Year of the Refresh” that MS is promoting for OEMs that want to support 24H2 fully and completely. Go figure: it seems to be something of a tempest in a teapot!

Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog

Waiting On Next NVIDIA Studio Driver

February 14, 2025 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Oho! A new NVIDIA Game-ready driver is out. As you can see in the lead-in graphic this one’s numbered 577.42. But if you’ve been reading this blog of late, you already knew that both the January 30 Game-Ready AND Studio drivers gave my dual monitor rig fits (get the gist from this Feb 5 item). Hence, my response to the new driver is below tepid. Instead, I’m waiting on the next NVIDIA Studio Driver to come along. I hope my optimism that it might fix dual monitor gotchas is justified. We’ll see…

Why I’m Waiting On Next NVIDIA Studio Driver

The January 30 update included both Game-Ready and Studio driver version. Alas, both also exhibited the same unwanted behaviors on my dual-monitor setup. The left-hand monitor didn’t want to wake up from sleep, and I had to use a combination of two techniques to bring it back to life:

Use the WinKey-Ctrl-Shift-B key combination (shortcut) to reload the graphics driver
Use the Ctrl-Alt-Del “three-fingered-salute” to bring the desktop back to life

Shoot! I like it a lot better when I just hit a key, or click the mouse, and the PC wakes up on its own shortly thereafter. Neither of the preceding 572.16 versions were so obliging, which is why I rolled back to version 566.36. I don’t plan on updating until a new Studio version comes out (and I’ll be sure to back up 566.36 for re-use, should I need it back).