Notes on Windows 7, Win7 compatible software and hardware, reviews, tips and more.
I’m still breaking in — or rather, getting to know in depth — my latest Windows 8.1 tablet. Somewhat annoyingly, the Fujitsu Q704 stops “seeing” a USB flash drive (UFD for short) plugged into the keyboard dock once the machine has been idle for half an hour or longer. Continue reading Interesting USB Access Issue on Fujitsu Q704 Worked Around
Having secured permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka, “The Boss” — namely, my wife Dina) I recently purchased a new Fujitsu Windows tablet convertible, model Stylistic Q704 Hybrid Tablet PC with the keyboard dock/extra battery option. The price came in at over $2K, which is kinda painful for a 12.5″ tablet, but when the Boss said I could go for it, go for it I did. Now I’m learning to live with it. Here’s a snazzy publicity still:
Continue reading Interesting Adventures with New Fujitsu Q704 Tablet/Convertible
I’ve got 4 laptops, 1 all-in-one, and three desktop computers on the roster at home, and another couple of laptops, a mini-ITX desktop, and a Chromebook on my “school loan” program right now. At this point, all but one of those machines — the Chromebook — is running Windows 8.1. I have added either Classic Shell or Start8 to all of the Windows machines, to make using and working from the desktop easier and faster, but otherwise I haven’t really mucked with the OS itself all that much. Many of those machines boast a “perfect score” in DriverAgent (no drivers out of date, that is) with the “worst score” on any machine showing three drivers outdated (two of which are bogus in each case, the other sufficiently mysterious and apocryphal to resist my occasional efforts at update/repair).
In short, everything is humming along nicely and all but one of the machines is rock-solid stable with a perfect 10 score in the Windows Reliability Monitor (and even the odd PC out — my production desktop, ironically enough — is sufficiently stable in day-to-day working practice that I don’t worry about losing work or productivity on that machine). All of this adds up to an interesting observation or realization on my part — namely, that the OS running on those machines doesn’t really matter all that much any more. By hook or by crook, I’m able to keep things working, and I’m not being stymied or feeling overly frustrated about maintaining my computers, and keeping them working properly over time.
Windows 7 was (and remains) great, but Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have also done right by me, too. Does this mean I’ve been lucky? Perhaps so, as I read about and hear from others who’ve run into snags with Windows 8, or the 8.1 update/upgrade, or who are struggling with hardware and driver issues. But I’m also inclined to observe that both hardware and software seem exceptionally stable and troublefree of late, and to have experienced fewer Windows headaches in the past four years or so, starting with the release of Windows 7 in October 2009. I’m not even terribly inclined to knock on wood so as not to tempt fate overmuch with my words, though that thought immediately crossed my mind as soon as I wrote them!
Here’s hoping that 2014 will continue humming along, as 2013 did for me, to my great surprise and delight. May your experiences be the same, too, if not better than that!
Here’s a list of instructions that I had to follow on my Lenovo X200 Tablet, to remove an issue with the WAN miniport (#2 and #3) drivers on that machine, whose failure to load up and register properly also rendered Bluetooth inoperable on that machine when running Windows 8 (or 8.1, as you might expect; this material is fully documented in KB article 2871372):
Who came up with this mysterious fix, and how they did figure this out? Wowie-zowie!
- Open Device Manager.
- Right-click the WAN miniport (Network monitor) device, and then click Update Driver Software.
- Click Browse my computer for driver software.
- Click Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
- Clear the Show compatible hardware check box.
- In the column on the left side, select Microsoft, and in the column on the right side, select Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter.
- In the Update Driver Warning dialog box, click Yes to continue installing this driver.
- After the driver is installed, right-click the device, and then click Uninstall.
- After the device is uninstalled, right-click the computer name in Device Manager, and then click Scan for hardware changes.
- On the View menu, click Show hidden devices.
The WAN Miniport (Network monitor) device should now be started and no longer have a yellow exclamation mark next to it.
For reasons that go way beyond my ken but that I find egregiously irritating, this bit of mumbo-jumbo actually worked! To me, it seems almost like turning widdershins thrice, hopping on one foot, while making an incantation, to try to make something happen. Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and I’m damned if I can really tell what’s up here, other than the bizarre reality that installing and then uninstalling a nugatory driver actually results in proper recognition of the underlying hardware, and automatic installation of the correct driver when the next hardware rescan occurs.
There is just a glimmer of a suggestion of what’s really going on here in the “Resolution” section of the related KB article. It says that MS Update 2822241 must be “integrated with” (which I believe means slipstreamed into) the installation image (WIM file, probably) used during setup of Windows 8 for target hardware to avoid these contortions. That tells me that the update rollup in that particular update file somehow fixes the issues discussed in 2871372, even though it’s not specifically called out in the “Issues that this update fixes” in its supporting documentation.
What galls me about this fix (which I’m very grateful to have found, and am now able to use Bluetooth devices on the X220 Tablet) is that it’s so very arcane and non-intuitive. I’m able to address most driver issues in Windows on my own, with a bit of elbow grease, and lots of odd and interesting techniques for extracting driver files from installers for software that won’t run on my systems. I’m OK with that, and have learned how to cope. But installing a loopback driver, and then removing it, to provoke a proper hardware scan for device recognition? The mind reels…
I’ve got numerous PCs around here and there — I can see two desktops and two laptops as I sit here in my office, and there are two more laptops and one SFF desktop elsewhere in our domicile at this moment; I’ve also got four laptops out on loan right now to various friends and relations. My wife and I both use iPhones (both are 4S models), and we’ve got a family iPad, plus a 32 GB iPod that Gregory used to play on a lot before he got a Nook for his birthday earlier this month. That means we have no shortage of machines into which we might plug one of these iDevices, but there’s an issue in working with them that I wanted to avoid on those machines where I don’t usually play iTunes music or watch much video.
The conundrum pretty much boils down to this: the iPhone driver that Windows loads on its own is pretty ancient, but unless you want to install iTunes, it’s a tricky business to get a more up-to-date driver without carrying all the extra iTunes baggage along with it. Believing there had to be a way to get the drivers without the full-blown package, I searched Google using this string “install iPhone drivers without installing iTunes.” And sure enough, up pops a free utility named CopyTrans Drivers Installer that will do the job for you (here’s a C|Net download link for the 3.35 MB utility in ZIP form, just like the afore-linked product page itself proffers). Download the file, unzip to a directory, then run CopyTransDriversInstaller.exe (version 1.024 as I write this post), and you’re done. Not much to it, really.
There is one catch, however: the program will download iTunes in its entirety, then extract the drivers from that download and install them for you. That’s what the Automatic install option at the lower right of the installer window above is about: it’s well worth using, because it does all the grunt work for you. It also works with the latest and greatest iTunes download available from the Apple site on your behalf — that was version 11.0.2.26 as I wrote this post — so you don’t have to check or worry about version numbers, either. The iTunes download (it’s nearly 86 MB in size) took far longer than any other parts of the installation activity. Though the whole operation took about 8 minutes or so on my Lenovo T520 laptop, more than half that time was devoted to downloading iTunes so the program could extract the drivers contained therein for installation (which took well under a minute, when it finally got underway).
If you want to dock your iDevice to a Windows PC without installing iTunes, it’s probably worth grabbing a copy of the CopyTrans Drivers Installer. Put it through its paces, and you’ll have the latest and greatest iDevice drivers at your disposal without having to shoulder the burden of iTunes (and the Bonjour protocol, iTunesHelper.exe, and anything else Apple decides to throw into the iTunes mix — see this fascinating and horrifying list of background processes that can show up when you use iTunes on a Windows PC, straight from Apple Support).
[Querelous and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, with apologies to Kierkegaard: I’d love to know what tool or technique the CopyTrans Drivers Installer uses to access the contents of the 32- or 64-bit iTunes installer files. I attacked them with both 7Zip (which is suprisingly capable at taking .exe files apart) and Legroom Software’s Universal Extractor (which is a good tool, but hit or miss, and crashed when trying to unpack this file’s contents) without any luck. Knowing how they did their thing would help me do it with other installers, which is sometimes the only way to get access to Windows drivers that may not otherwise be accessible on some PCs, particularly when, for example, trying to snag a Dell driver for use on an HP machine, or vice-versa.]
I’m in a bit of a quandary on an interesting subject. I just purchased a 128 GB USB 2.0 Flash drive — a Centon DataStick Sport — that I picked up on special from TigerDirect for about $65 (as I write this blog, you can pick them up at Amazon for about $80). It seemed like a very good deal when I bought the unit, but I was quickly disabused of my enthusiasm when I plugged it into my desktop PC to copy all 29 GB of music I keep on that machine to see how it performed doing large bulk file transfers. The entire transfer took almost three hours to complete (I can do it in under 40 minutes from one direct-attached disk to another), after which I understood that while I might have purchased plenty of capacity, I didn’t get the kind of performance one might wish to have, to keep the time required for big file transfers more manageable — but then I didn’t pay for that privilege, either.
At least, I now understand why USB 3.0 or eSATA makes more sense for big flash drives, or other forms of external storage, especially if you need to move large amounts of data on a regular basis. But if you go shopping for USB 3.0 flash drives (probably the most practical form of higher-speed flash storage available at the moment) you’ll find prices running from $1-2 GB for such storage, depending on how fast you want that storage to be. In particular, the bigger and faster such drives get, the more they cost. In particular, this $290 Super Talent 100GB USB3.0 Express RC8 Flash Drive (model ST3U100R8S) stuck me as amazingly extravagant, even if it is “Windows To Go certified” for Windows 8 Enterprise.
On the other hand, you can jump over to Newegg and purchase a Vantec NexStar 3 USB 3.0/eSATA 2.5″ drive enclosure for $30, and a very fast Samsung 830 128GB SSD for $105. Add $20 for shipping and handling, and you’ve spent $155 for more storage capacity (119 GB actual storage in Windows Explorer vs. 93 GB likewise) and similar or better speed (depending on whether or not your notebook has an eSATA port or “only USB 3.0″). Given those economics, I have trouble understanding why anybody would buy the higher-dollar UFD, except that the form factor is significantly smaller. But my Vantec drive measures out at about 5.5 x 3.5 x 0.7” and weighs under 250 grams, so it will fit into a laptop bag with no stress or strain at all. And it only takes 5 minutes and a Philips-head screwdriver to put all the pieces together.
But there must be a market, because there are lots of 64 GB and higher-capacity USB 3.0 UFDs available. Go figure!
This year, school is getting serious for my 8-year-old son, Gregory: he’s in the third grade. For the first time, he’s having to deal with real grades for his homework, plus regular quizzes and tests. And later on this year, he’ll face his first standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS) as well. He shares a classroom at Cactus Ranch Elementary with 18 other kids, but they have only one general use laptop for the whole group there (the kids do have more general access to computers in the library, and some classes issue laptops to students from cart set-ups for their use as well). His classroom PC is an elderly Dell D630 Latitude that’s on the last phases of its lifecycle — I volunteer in the library once a week, and the school IT guy also works there; he tells me they’re getting ready to upgrade to Vostro models running Windows 7 in 2013.
So I’m loaning my son’s teacher a couple of additional laptops for the kids to share in his classroom. One is my old and trusty Dell D620 Latitude that’s been upgraded with an OCZ Agility 3 SSD, 4 GB RAM, and a T7200 CPU (which puts it on par for processing with the D630, but where its SSD blows the doors off that unit). The other is my equally old and sometimes not-so-trusty HP HDX9203, aka “The Dragon.” I decided to roll the Dragon back to Vista SP2 and it’s been running like a champ ever since. However, Vista’s odd and seemingly random Windows Update behavior hasn’t let me believe I’ve finally caught up with all the updates: with 148 of them installed over the past two days, it’s been a dizzying sequence of download-install-reboot the entire time. Even so, Windows Update now claims I’m completely caught up. We’ll see.
I’m still debating as to whether or not I should install Paragon’s terrific $20 Migrate OS to SSD utility on the Dragon, and then use it to move the OS over to the spare OCZ Vertex 2 nominal 120 GB (actual 111 GB in Windows Explorer) drive I’ve got lying around. There’s no doubt this would speed things up significantly on the Dragon, just like the Agility 3 did for the aging D620, which laughably melds a processor rated at 5.1 in Windows Experience with a drive rated at 7.8! But there are few things you can do to an older laptop to keep it usable that are better than this, so my real question is: do I want to let the Vertex 2 walk out the door, or do I have something better I can do with it? Right now all of my laptops and desktops boot from SSDs already, so perhaps not…
Since the introduction of Windows Vista in 2006, Windows Gadgets have made colorful and useful additions to Windows desktops everywhere. At this moment, Windows Gadgets work on Windows 8 as well as on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. But a planned discussion of profound security vulnerabilities in the Gadget architecture at the upcoming Black Hat DEFCON Conference(July 21-26, Caesars Palace) appears to spell doom for these desktop denizens.
What you see in the screen capture to the left comes from one of my Windows 8 test machines running the Release Preview: my Lenovo X220 Tablet with touchscreen. I’ve found the CPU Usage and Network Meter gadgets from AddGadgets.com to be particularly useful over the years. I also use the analog clock that’s built into the Windows base gadget set, and a handy little gadget called Shutdown as well. That last item is useful because I tend to remote into my test (and other family member) PCs over the network, and it gives me the ability to shut down or restart those machines quickly and easily through a remote desktop session.
But as security researchers Mickey Shkatov and Toby Kohlenberg have discovered (as reported by Ryan Naraine “Security flaws signal early death of Windows Gadgets,” ZDNet), the gadget interface is rife with points of vulnerability that could lead to attack. Hackers could, in fact, take over a system through a malicious gadget foisted on unsuspecting users, or by direct attack on gadgets already running on a Windows desktop. From there, a successful exploit could lead to the attacker obtaining the same level of system privileges and access that attaches to the current logged-in user account. Because so many users routinely log in with system admin privileges, this effectively transfers complete system control to the attacker.
The details aren’t completely clear yet — I guess we’ll have to wait for the presentation and demonstration at DEFCON — but Microsoft has already issued a security advisory (Vulnerabilities in Gadgets could allow remote code execution). This web page includes two “Fix It” tools numbered 50906 and 50907. Because MS fails to describe what these tools do, I learned by experimentation that 50906 disables gadgets (and the Windows Sidebar in Vista), while 50907 turns them back on again.
It might be simpler for users with admin privileges who manage their own systems to simply remove all gadgets from their desktops, and not to add any new ones. I’m not sure it’s necessary to disable underlying support for gadgets if none are running. Apocalyptic warnings aside, I’m going to leave my gadgets up and running until more information emerges from the upcoming DEFCON conference. I need to better my understanding of the nature of the vulnerabilities that already-installed gadgets can pose before I do anything more. Frankly, I’m not sure that a gadget I’ve been using for years actually poses a security risk on my heavily firewalled home network, so I’m willing to wait and learn more about the potential risks of ongoing exposure before I wipe my desktops clean of these helpful bits of software.
It is interesting to understand that Microsoft will do away with the gadget interface, rather than attempting to repair its security issues. The company had already indicated it was deprecating gadgets in Windows 8 (though I discovered to my relief that they still worked on the Developer Preview release late last year, and have continued to use them anyway). However, it now seems likely that they will disable the Gadget interface in the upcoming RTM and GA releases for Windows 8. Thus, production versions of the new OS cannot fall prey to whatever security vulnerabilities gadgets might pose. It should be interesting to mull over what these researchers have learned, and what they’ll reveal, to decide if even trusted gadgets must go on Windows Vista and 7.
I am sorry to see this happen to gadgets. If it turns out they must be removed from my desktops, I’ll also be sorry to see them go. I’ll report back again later this month after the word on gadget vulnerabilities comes out in more detail.
[Note added on 11/18/2013: Thanks to an article I read recently by Deb Shinder, as recounted in a recent post to my Windows Enterprise Desktop blog entitled “Say! You CAN user Gadgets in Windows 8…” I’m very pleased to report that, thanks to 8GadgetPack, you can restore and use Gadgets in the Windows 8 and 8.1 environments. Whoopee! You may do this at your pleasure; I am doing it on several of my Windows 8 and 8.1 machines already.]
If your Windows 7 install has been around long enough, it will pick up various bits and pieces of leftover install information. The Windows Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool includes a plethora of command line options that work on a running operating system (in addition to its more common use in setting up images for automated Windows deployments). For use on an active OS, however, your best reference is to start up cmd.exe using “Run as administrator” then type dism /online /? at the command line for a complete listing of commands and options.
In particular the command DISM /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded is a handy one to know, because it gets rid of superseded install packages left in the wake of a service pack or other major update. It was designed as a post-SP-install cleanup tool, but I’ve run it on several systems that were built from the Windows SP1 slipstream install media, and it still found elements to remove from the installed image, as shown in this screen capture:
This recovered about 3 GB of disk space on my primary production machine — a welcome capability on the 120 GB SSD drive that I’m watching carefully to make sure it maintains at least 25% free disk space, to give the OS and applications room to breathe. On the other hand, if you run it on some systems, you’re more likely to see a result like this one, when DISM finds nothing to clean up on your behalf:
Still, it’s a useful post-SP-install trick to keep up your sleeve. Another SP for Windows 7 is pretty likely to appear around the same time that Microsoft ships Windows 8 (late October is when that should happen, say most pundits). If this doesn’t do your system any good now, it will surely come in handy after you install the next SP!
Anybody who’s followed my Windows experiences and commentary already knows I think the Sysinternals guys (Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, primarily, but also a host of others over the years) hung the moon when it comes to great tools and utilities. I was recently pondering how to get over the “What did I forget?” hump in finally upgrading my primary desktop from 4 to 12 GB of RAM, and thus also from Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit to its 64-bit counterpart, when my research led me to their free tool named Disk2VHD.
Continue reading Disk2VHD Is Just What the Doctor Ordered for Machine Upgrades and Migrations
