Tag Archives: featured

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

Canary 26002 Gets Energy Saver

November 30, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Once upon a time, if one wanted to manage laptop batteries intelligently, one needed the OEM to provide a utility. No more. With the latest Insider Preview, Canary 26002 gets Energy Saver capability built in.

You can see this on display in the lead-in screen shot. It shows the notification area expanded to include a new “Energy Saver” entry (right). What’s more. if you right-click that item, it will open Settings for you. There you can easily get to the Power & Battery display (left) that shows Energy saver is turned on and always running.

Why Canary 26002 Gets Energy Saver Is Good News

Many, many years ago — I think it was in the early 2000s — I translated an article for Toms Hardware from German into English. It dealt with the issues involved in keeping batteries alive as long as possible. This could be a problem for units whose chargers remain plugged-in more than running off battery.

Indeed, it had long been the case that laptop makers had to furnish a special utility that would monitor battery charge levels, usage patterns, min/max for charge and discharge (and more) to keep track of things. You can see evidence of this even in my 2021 vintage Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 6 Mobile Workstation. Here are its Battery Details (from Lenovo Commercial Vantage):

Lenovo tracks all kinds of battery levels and stats.
[Click image for full-sized view.]

With this latest addition, the OS can keep track of this kind of thing for any and all battery-powered PCs. It can also manage charge levels and energy consumption to ensure long batter life while also minimizing actual energy consumption. This is a great step forward, and a good thing for laptops, users and the environment. I approve!

AI, Insider stuff, PowerShell, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog

Learning to Hurdle Terminal Chat Gotchas

November 29, 2023 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

When I was a kid we lived in Kendall Park, NJ in 1962 and 1963. The barbershop where my Mom took me for haircuts was interesting. It was long and narrow and lined with mirrors on both sides. That created what I have forever since called “the hall of mirrors” effect. There a poor man’s infinity is born as those parallel mirrors reflect each other forever and ever. I remembered that hall as I read the MS November 17 Windows Command Line blog Terminal Chat in Windows Terminal Canary. Since it came out, I’ve been figuring out how to hurdle Terminal Chat gotchas in similar wise. Let me explain…

Pre-reqs Precede Hurdle Terminal Chat Gotchas

If you look at the lead-in graphic (it comes from the afore-linked Command Line blog, a personal fave) it shows a “Welcome to Terminal Chat” message inside a PowerShell/Windows Terminal session. I’ve been trying to get to the point where I can bring that message up myself on a test or production PC, but I’ve yet to surmount the hurdles in my way. Let me enumerate them:

1. In Windows Terminal team lead Chris Nguyen’s words “Terminal Chat only supports Azure OpenAI Service for now.” That means one needs an Azure OpenAI Service endpoint and key.

2. To obtain said endpoint and key, one must create and deploy an Azure OpenAI service resource.

3. To create and deploy an Azure OpenAI service resource, one needs an Azure OPen AI Service enabled Azure account. This requires setting up monthly billling for consumption of Azure resources with an OpenAI rider added. (For pricing info, start with Plan to manage costs for Azure OpenAI Service for the OpenAI piece, then check out Understand Cost Management Data for the underlying Azure piece). It’s daunting!

Only when you have all the pieces in place, and then create and deploy a valid Azure OpenAI service resource, can you install and use Terminal Chat. I’m not there yet. In fact, I’m thinking hard whether or not minimum monthly charges of at least US$50-150 are commensurate with the joy of using Terminal Chat.

Enough … or Too Much?

This subtitle comes courtesy of William Blake’s Proverbs of Heaven and Hell. I’m inclined to bow more to the infernal side of that dichotomy when it comes to putting all the pieces in place. All I wanted to do, really, was to see what kind of advice Terminal Chat could dispense at the command line. I’ve already got Copilot ready to advise me on PowerShell and Command Prompt input with some basic ability to plop it onto a command line.

Why so many hoops and hurdles? I’m sure there’s an answer. I’m reaching out to the author of the blog post to see what I can learn. Should be interesting… Stay tuned!

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

Folding Back Windows 11 Into 10

November 28, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve been noticing lately. Seems that despite its “no new features updates” stance for Windows 10, MS has been folding back Windows 11 into 10 where some features and functions are concerned. Let’s start with the Photos app (just wrote about that for AskWoody recently, look for it on December 4). Then there has been motion on the update policies front (like the WU setting to “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available”). And of course, MS has made much of the back-port for Copilot into Windows 10 as well.

Is there a pattern emerging? Looks like it. So I have to ask: “What does this mean?” Let me speculate…

What Folding Back Windows 11 Into 10 Means

As I think back on the transitions from XP to Vista to 7 to 10, there’s a certain shape to the timeline for big-time business migrations that emerges. It seems like it takes a year or two beyond EOL before the migration hump really tilts toward the newest edition. And with EOL for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, that means there’s still some time to pass before that boundary starts to press.

Shoot! I just used a date calculator and from today (11/28/2023) it is 1 year 11 months and 4 weeks before EOL rolls around. 2 years, give or take. Indeed, the same calculator says that October 14, 2027 — two years after EOL — is still 3 years, 10 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days away. That’s pretty close to 4 years in the offing.

Methinks businesses are really just now starting to note it might be time to consider Windows migration — after New Year’s 2024, maybe. There’s still not much urgency here…

What Else Might Fold In?

This is where things get a bit hazier. For grins, I asked Copilot “What can Windows 11 do that Windows 10 cannot?” Its answers included:

The new “more modern and elegant” UI. Not much impetus for business there…
Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Snap Assist. Ho hum… Nerdophilic stuff in this category for sure!
Voice typing: this could persuade some business users to take a second look. People would rather talk than type for all kinds of content and text.
DirectStorage: Improves load time for games, and is thus something from which business will steer clear. Enough distractions already…
Android Apps “allow… you to run Android apps on your PC” courtesy of the Amazon Appstore. What did I use this for? Wordle…. ummm… yeah. Plus, it’s still in beta (and if you ask Copilot which Android apps are hot on Windows the list is not business-centric: Instagram, Disney+, TikTok, Candy Crush Saga and Kindle come out on top). Sigh.

I’m surprised they didn’t mention Phone Link, and Dev Home. But maybe this does make more sense than it has for MS than in days of yore. Still thinking about this…what’s your take? I need to do some more research, but would love some reader comments, please.

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

PowerShell Install Method Changes

November 27, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

When a new version of PowerShell comes along, it’s always interesting to see whether or not winget can field that update correctly. This time around — with version 7.4.0 — it reports a “different install technology” as you can see in the lead-in graphic. When the PowerShell install method changes, winget won’t handle the update without an uninstall/reinstall maneuver. So I CTRL-clicked the link shown above the WT pane (from the GitHub link that’s helpfully provided) and used the MSI file to update PowerShell instead.

When PowerShell Install Method Changes, Use GitHub

That Microsoft Installer File is under 65MB in size. On my test PC, that takes less than 10 seconds to download. That opens the “SuperHero” PS installer (see next screencap), after which install takes half-a-dozen mouse-clicks to configure as I like it. Another minute or so, and the job is done. MS is doing better at getting new versions of PowerShell to circulate. I like it!

The only time you actually see the PS superhero avatar is when the installer runs.

Watching Out for Certain Winget Shenanigans

So, I’m learning to be wary of three specific installs when using winget inside Windows Terminal and PowerShell — namely:

winget itself: if the tool doing the updating gets updated, interesting things can — and do — sometimes happen. This is another case when I’ve sometimes seen the “Cancelled” error message that really reports a loss of interaction with the updater (the update actually succeeds, but can’t report success).
Windows Terminal: same principal as before, write large when the entire Windows Terminal runtime has to change. When this occurs, WT usually writes a message into the active terminal window to say “Restart the window/session to run the changed version.” Good -oh!
PowerShell: and again, if PowerShell is updating itself it must be ready to handle those changes. As we see in this particular case, something has changed that requires an uninstall/reinstall. My preference: using the GitHub installer instead. Easy-peasey.

And that, dear Readers, is how I often keep myself entertained, here in Windows-World. Great fun…

Cool Tools, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog

Learning About UpdateStar

November 24, 2023 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

With the shutdown of the SUMo database on November 1, I’ve been casting about for a new update scanner that covers my bases. I had been considering UpdateHub, UCheck and UpdateStar. Based on the number of items that each program finds, and the ease of working with them (free versions only), I’ve now pretty much settled on UpdateStar freeware (make sure you can down to the button that reads “Download” under the Free of charge heading). It’s not without its foibles, though…mostly, that learning about UpdateStar involves completely do-it-yourself updates.

Learning About UpdateStar Means DIY Updates

Unless you want to pay US$34.95 (first year)/$19.95 (subsequent upgrades, with discounts for 3 PC packages), working with UpdateStar means it scans only for what’s out of date. It doesn’t help you find or install new stuff. It will, however, uninstall specific versions of software, which can be helpful when updates aren’t smart enough to uninstall their predecessors. That happens pretty regularly.

Most of the time searching for “update splat” where splat is the name of the program you wish to update will tell you what you need to do. It mostly works for me, anyway. And many of the odd and interesting tricks I’ve learned while working with SUMo transfer over to UpdateStar reasonably well, too.

The Current UpdateStar Situation

Right now, on my production Windows 10 PC (it’s the with the most apps and applications installed: 113 in all) I’m getting reasonable results from the program. It shows me 9 programs in need of updates and I was able to take care of all of them. For 8 of them, that meant finding and installing the necessary updates (2 of them left old versions behind and UpdateStart uninstalled them for me quite happily). For 1 of them, I decided an uninstall was a good idea, because I have a better tool (Micosoft Update Health Check, to which I greatly prefer Brink @ TenForums.com’s Reset_Reregister
_Windows_Update_Components.bat script).

That said, UpdateStar did produce some false positives. These were current programs that were indeed up-to-date, but for which the program incorrectly claimed newer updates were available (Revo Uninstaller and Snagit 2024). Easily checked and ignored, however.

By and large this program works pretty well. I’m still figuring things out, so will probably learn and report more over time. For the moment, I give it “one thumb up” (a positive, but not ringing, endorsement). Let’s see what happens next… I’m still on the upward slope of that learning curve!

Cool Tools, Hyper-V and VMs, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

Another Great UUPDump.Net Use Case

November 23, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Monday-Wednesday I was working on an article for the AskWoody newsletter. Among a variety of tasks, one that I found interesting hinged on working with and taking screenshots of a Windows 10 app around a certain date (late July 2022). This makes for another great UUPDump.net use case. Let me explain…

What Makes For Another Great UUPDump.Net Use Case?

It took me a while to figure out the right date before which I had to stand up Windows 10. And because a Microsoft Store app was involved, I also had make sure the VM didn’t have Internet access. Otherwise, because the Store does auto-updates it would have replaced that point in time’s version of the app with something else. Because I was interested in seeing that specific version (or something older) at work, updates were a no-no.

Another ingredient was also key to my research: An MS Support note entitled “Windows 10 update history.” This handy document lets one see all Windows 10 releases and their dates of issue. Because I knew what date I had to hit, I wanted something as close to but still prior to it to show me what I needed. Ultimately, that worked!

Getting Past a Few Little Details

Setting up the VM also posed a handful of minor challenges. Because I set up a Type 2 VM I had to use the Restart button in the Hyper-V window to forcibly get the ISO I built for my test image to boot. I also had to remember to turn off enhanced mode to login via RDP (a known issue). And finally, I had to do some creative rooting around my file system to find a usable Windows 10 key (I persevered, and succeeded). Other than that, things went off just as I’d hoped.

Using my approach, I was able to run and screencap the target app. Luckily for me the date I picked still had the right (older) version installed. Once I brought it up, it told and showed me what I was looking for.

Great fun — and like the title says — it really is a great use case for UUPDump.net, thanks to its complete historical record of Windows 10 and 11 release, including Insider Previews. Glad my heretofore unsubstantiated theory about using historical versus current Windows versions worked out.

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

Windows 11 Canary Grants Wi-Fi List Refresh

November 21, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s a good, if subtle, addition to Windows 11’s bag of networking tricks. In Build 29997, Windows11 grants Wi-Fi list refresh capabilities. Let me explain, starting in pictorial form. Take a look at the lead-in graphic. There’s a refresh button (a circular arrow) at the lower right (cursor is perforce parked on it; you’ll need to right-click the image and show it in its own tab so see what I’m talking about). But the “Refresh network list” button is the real key. That means the Wi-Fi interface is forcibly scanning its locale to rebuild a current list of available Wi-Fi resources. Very handy, to get this right from the Taskbar.

When Windows 11 Canary Grants Wi-Fi List Refresh, What Then?

This is always a good thing to do when searching for networks. MajorGeeks does a good job of explaining the “old regime” — namely: “How to Reset Network Settings In Windows 10 & 11.”

That means clicking through the following sequence: Start → Settings; → Network & Internet (Win10) or Advanced network settings (Win11) → Scroll down, then select “Network reset.” I count 5 mouse clicks required.

The new ways take 3 clicks if you’re using wired Ethernet, 2 if already using Wi-Fi. For wired Ethernet, that’s Select Network icon in taskbar → Select Caret to left of Wi-Fi “Available” button in network pop-up → Click on “Refresh list” button at lower left of network list pop-up. For those using Wi-Fi, clicking the Wi-Fi icon on the taskbar skips the first wired step. Easy-peasey.

Does This Change Matter?

To those who switch Wi-Fi networks regularly, it is a nice little touch. For everybody else, it’s mostly nugatory. But hey, improving Windows is most definitely a matter of “little by little, step by step.” FWIW, I really like this change and think it makes Wi-Fi networking more usable on Windows 11. What’s your take?

Here’s a shout-out to Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero. His November 16 story brought this nice but subtle change to my attention. Spacibo, Sergey!

Cool Tools, PowerShell, Recent Activity, WED Blog

PowerShell Update Twofer Strikes

November 17, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Whoa! No sooner had I updated PowerShell from version 7.3.9 to 7.3.10 than came the 7.4.0 in-window notification. You can see all this in the lead-in graphic, as a rare but not unheard-of PowerShell Update twofer strikes my local Windows 10 and 11 desktops.

When PowerShell Update Twofer Strikes, Keep Going

I had to chuckle after I patted myself on the back for updating PowerShell inside Command Prompt (the best way to avoid odd update behavior that can occur when PowerShell attempts to update itself). The very next thing I saw in a new PS window was the “black text against white background” notification shown in the lead-in graphic.

That notification reads:

A new PowerShell stable version is available: v7.4.0
Upgrade now, or check out the release page at
https://aka.ms/PowerShell-Release?tag-v7.4.0

That URL links to the named release page at GitHub, where one can download an installer that matches OS, architecture and so forth. I ran the file named PowerShell-7.4.0-win-x64.msi. It worked like a charm!

And unlike other, earlier attempts at running the MSI installer to move up a PowerShell version, this one successfully cleaned out the just-updated 7.3.10 version without difficulties. Looks like the PowerShell team is getting its act together…

This does raise the question: when will winget update start targeting v7.4.0 instead of v7.3.10? Looks like that’s already taken care of. Look at this output from winget upgrade from a Windows 11 test machine: it literally got fixed while I was writing this blog post. LOL!

Winget now knows it needs to target v7.4.0 as the current PS version. [Click image for full-sized view.]

As you can see, winget upgrade is not recommending 7.3.10 anymore. Now it’s aware of, and ready to upgrade to, 7.4.0. Good-oh!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

PowerToys Needs Specific .NET Runtime

November 15, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I saw with some interest that Microsoft released .NET 8.0 earlier this week. As I was running winget yesterday, I also noticed that Microsoft Windows Desktop Runtime needed an update from version 6.0.24 to 6.0.25 (see lead-in graphic, where it shows up second from the top). “Hmmm…” I thought “I wonder if something will blow up if I delete this older version.” So I did. And indeed, when I went on to update PowerToys later that afternoon, I noticed it was smart enough to install version 6.0.25 during its own install process. Hence my claim: PowerToys needs specific .NET runtime.

Why PowerToys Needs Specific .NET Runtime…

There’s obviously some dependencies in the code that link to this specific version of .NET. Even though I installed 8.0 (and you can also see a current 7.0 version in the lead-in graphic as well) there’s something in the 6.x versions that PowerToys needs to do its thing properly.

Please take this as an illlustration of why one so commonly finds multiple generations of the various .NET runtimes (Core, Desktop, SDK and Framework) running on a single Windows instance. Different apps, applications, and even OS built-ins need different ,NET runtimes and so forth to do their jobs. And that’s the way things go on desktops and servers here in Windows-World. Get used to it!

Meet the .NET uninstall tool

All this goes to explain why there’s a special tool named dotnet-core-uninstall that lets you get rid of those .NET elements for which no current dependencies exist. See this terrific MS Learn document “.NET uninstall tool” for all the gory details. It runs inside PowerShell or Command Prompt, and helps you find and remove obsolete .NET components. Good stuff!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, PowerShell, WED Blog

Happy 17th Birthday PowerShell

November 14, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In reading about the run-up to the MS Ignite conference — getting underway in Seattle — I learned this morning that November 14 is the anniversary date for PowerShell. That’s why I expressed the sentiment in the title — namely “Happy 17th Birthday PowerShell!”

Why Say: Happy 17th Birthday PowerShell?

Since its inception in 2006, PowerShell (PS) has slowly and steadily taken over the lead role at the command line for Windows admins and enthusiasts. Probably more importantly, PS became open-source and cross-platform in August 2016 with the debut of PowerShell Core. According to Wikipedia, as of Windows 10 Build 14971 (November 2016) PS took over the default role as primary command line shell for Windows.

What makes PS worth getting to know? Unlike the Command Prompt (which traces all the way back to DOS days) it’s a fully featured runtime environment. Thus it handles task automation and configuration management. And it does so in an environment that’s got most of the capabilities of a full-blown programming environment. Shoot: you can create interactive scripts using PS, and you can embed PS within other applications. Then, too, PS supports an extensive library of built-in cmdlets (“commandlets”) to support all kinds of specialized, focused operations. It also works both locally and remotely. IMO, it’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys!

The Journey to PS Nerdvana

I’ve been working with PS increasingly since it initially became available around the same time that Windows Vista appeared. But it’s only in the last 3-4 years I’ve really started working with it more extensively. It is very much the case that the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve come to like PowerShell.

Indeed, I’ve got a TekkiGurus story coming sometime soon that provides a PS script to show how I customize Windows Terminal and PS on my PCs. (I’ll link to it when it goes live.) It includes:

Download, installing and configuring OhMyPosh, along with a Nerd Font is uses for prompt customization in PowerShell
Download, install, and add a ColorTool to the PS environment
Install and use Winfetch to show off current WT/PS look and feel

So again: happy birthday, PowerShell. You’ve made my job in setting up and taking care of Windows images and installations much, much easier. Thanks a bunch!