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

MS Intel/AMD Copilot+ PC Date Drop

July 17, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Though the details aren’t terribly specific, MS has provided an inkling of when Copilot+ PCs running Intel and AMD CPUs should ship. In an item about a new incremental update technique dated July 15, MS provides the snippet depicted in the lead-in graphic above. This states that “Windows 11, version 24H2 will be available as a traditional feature update to all devices later this year.” Thus, I call this an MS Intel/AMD Copilot+ PC date drop — of sorts, at least.

What Does This MS Intel/AMD Copilot+ PC Date Drop Mean?

I confess: I’m reading somewhat between the lines as I interpret this. But I’m not alone: you’ll find stories at WindowsLatest, TechRadar, Windows Central, and elsewhere that draw the same conclusions I do. Of course, the words “later this year” could occur any time between now and December 31, 2024, so that stipulation is far from precise or narrowly targeted.

That said, I’m in accord with most industry watchers — including the afore-linked stories — in believing that 24H2 is likely to drop some time in Q4 2024. My best guess would be “after Thanksgiving, but before Christmas” to give room to steer around major end-of-year holidays and associated time off for breaks. But it could happen earlier, to get 24H2 out of the way before the holiday season kicks off in late November. Only time will tell…

Further Points of Possible Confirmation

Intel’s May 20 press release for its Lunar Lake CPUs reads “Starting Q3 2024 in time for the holiday season, Intel’s upcoming client processors … will power more than 80 new laptop designs across more than 20 [OEMs]…” A June 2 press release from AMD steers clear of dates for its Ryzen AI 300 Series CPUs, but does mention partnerships with ” Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo and MSI” that will surely ship at or about the time time that Intel’s OEM partners offer up their competing laptops and so forth.

Could it be that interesting options for end-of-year gifting might include snazzy new technology toys? MIght you or I want one? For sure!

Backup/Restpre, Cool Tools, Insider stuff, USB devices, WED Blog, Windows 11

Channel Speed Trumps Device Speed

July 16, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I kind of knew this already, but I wanted to prove it to myself through hands-on experience. Thus, I sprung for what Tom’s Hardware calls “the fastest SSD” around right now. It’s depicted in the lead-in graphic: The Crucial T705. It’s read/write ratings range from 13,600/10,200 MB/sec for big items to 1,400K/1,750K IOPS on random 4K items. That’s fast!

Why Say: Channel Speed Trumps Device Speed?

I know this NVMe drive would scream if I mounted it in an M.2 PCIe x5 slot on a motherboard. But I wanted to see if it made any difference if plugged into the M.2 slot inside a 40Gbps USB4 NVMe enclosure. Long story short: it doesn’t. It runs more or less indistinguishably from the 2022 model WD Black SN770 I replaced in the US$53 Maiwo USB4 fan-cooled enclosure.

Although the T705 is much faster than the SN770, those speed differences only count when the bandwidth from the SSD to the CPU is fast enough to actually show off such deltas. Because Lenovo sent me the Yoga Slim 7x with a smaller, slower C: drive device, I’ll probably end up plugging into that PCIe channel to see what it does as an internal drive.

But that’s a project for another day. Today, I have two “lessons learned” to share:

1. A PCIe x3 or x4 NVMe SSD is plenty fast enough for even the fastest, most expensive USB4 drive enclosures currently available.

2. The T705 at US$165 is about twice as expensive as the SN770 (and the SN770 2TB model at US$120 is a much better deal, $/GB-wise)

What can I say? I had to know. Now I do, and I’m moving on to other, better uses for the T705. I may have to use Linux to clone the existing 0.5TB NVMe in the Slim 7X, but I’ll figure out how to make that swap work. As I said earlier: that’ll have to wait for another day.

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Copilot+ PC Backup Options Are Scarce

July 15, 2024 Ed Tittel 8 Comments

Having finally round the “round tuit” needed to check, I came to a stunning realization this weekend. As this blog post’s title reads: Copilot+ PC backup options are scarce. “How scarce?” is the next and inevitable question. Scarce enough that my fave tool — Macrium Reflect — throws an error when I attempted to install it. But it gets worse…

It’s True: Copilot+ PC Backup Options Are Scarce

Here’s a test to ponder: Tim Fisher’s November 2023 Lifewire story 32 Best Free Backup Software Tools gives us a lot of options for free Windows backup tools. Of those 32, take a guess as to how many can back up an ARM-based Copilot+ PC?

I didn’t want to guess so I asked Copilot to check for me with this query: “Of the Windows backup packages cited in this article <URL>, which ones will run on a Copilot+ PC with ARM Snapdragon X CPU?” Of all 32 items mentioned in the story, none qualified. Instead, Copilot recommended Fullback Pro and the old. long-deprecated Control Panel item: Backup and Restore (Windows 7). Indeed it cites an ElevenForum thread to explain how to do this. Approaches also include using DISM to capture (and then restore) the ARM64 Windows 11 image at the command line. Sheesh!

Google Does Better Than Copilot…

With the search string “ARM64-compatible Windows backup software” Google produces more and arguably better results than Copilot does. Most properly-endowed packages cost money. Indeed, I predict it’ll be a while before the freeware/donationware items mention in Fisher’s Lifewire story catch up. Indeed here’s further detail from the Macrium Support team about why MR8 does not support ARM systems:

ARM systems are not supported in reflect for the following reasons:

1) Can’t create snapshots
2) Can’t create a working rescue environment
3) Install CBT and your computer will BSOD on boot

With this, we have decided to block installs on ARM systems to prevent the software from bricking your machine

I suspect many other backup software vendors are up against the same kinds of things. I detect a “wait and see” stance that seeks to determine if the Snapdragon X Copilot PCs represent something real and enduring, before committing resources to supporting them.

What IS Out There?

Here’s a short list of packages that assert out-and-out ARM64 support:

Zinstall FullBack (Copilot was right about this, as it turns out, though it’s under new ownership). It’s also a monthly service that starts at US$14.90 per PC.
Veeam Agent 6.0 (backs up files on an ARM64 CPU, but only an AMD64 PC can initiate and drive a restore). Cost: ~US$130/year per deployed production agent.

At present, that’s all I can find. There’s nothing mentioned at the ver (Windows ARM Software) aggregration page. It seems pretty bleak at the moment, in fact.

But Wait: There’s More (or Less)!!

The same situation also applies to disk partition/disk management tools and for many of the same reasons: a lack of low-level drivers to interact with the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) on ARM64 systems running Windows 11 (or 10, for that matter). This is turning out to be more interesting and potentially vexing than I thought. Stay tuned! I’ll keep digging. And it looks like ComputerWorld wants a short news item about this situation as well. Stay tuned!

As of October 8, Macrium Reflect X Goes Public

My favorite imaging backup, restore and repair utility — Macrium Reflect — dropped its latest version (X, as in the Roman numeral) on October 8. Among its many new capabilities, it supports ARM CPUs (and is running on my lone Copilot+ PC with Snapdragon X processor right now). It also runs noticeably faster than version 8 and has a few other new tricks up its sleeve as well. Visit the Reflect X is here! page for all the deets…

As for myself I’ve been using the beta version since late August/early September with great enjoyment and success. Although the company has transitioned from a perpetual license plus maintenance to an annual subscription approach, I just happily paid US$200 to get onto the Reflect X bus for the period through August 2024.

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

Intermittent Mouse Needs New Battery

July 12, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with mice. Because I work on a desktop PC by choice, I’m more or less forced to use a USB-attached pointing device. I’ve switched back and forth between wired and wireless models because their weaknesses sometimes vex me. For the wired meese, the wire tends to snarl up with other cables on my desk. For wireless models, what frosts my jowls is intermittent or imprecise cursor stuttering or movement. I started to experience that on my current mouse this morning: a usually unflappable (and wireless) Microsoft Mobile Mouse 4000. Then I noticed a dimly pulsating red indicator light atop the device. Oho! This intermittent mouse needs new battery to work properly.

Why My Intermittent Mouse Needs New Battery

According this MS Community thread, the light is a battery life or status indicator. When you plug a new battery in, it shows green for 5 seconds, then turns itself off. Ditto when you power the mouse back on. When the battery is starting to fail, it shows red for the same interval upon power-up. And when battery levels are going critical — that is, it’s about to die — the dim red pulsations begin. Good to know!

We shop at Costco, so we always have lots of batteries around. As soon as I swapped out the old AA for a new one, I got the green glow for 5 seconds. Now it’s dark again. And presto! The mouse is no longer stuttering, and it’s tracking exactly where I want it to go. Yay!

The Best Issues Get Quick, Easy Fixes

Working with PCs in Windows-World means there’s always something in need of fixing or figuring out. Once you identify an issue, the troubleshooting process begins. Over my decades working with this stuff, I’ve learned to appreciate problems that are easy to recognize, diagnose and fix. Today’s successful battery swap definitely falls in that category, even if another one bits the dust as a result.

Networking, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

Pondering Post-Hurricane Internet Outages

July 11, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

The old saying in my home state of Texas is “If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes. It’ll change.” Things took a turn for the worse on Monday and Tuesday, when Hurricane Beryl tore through the Gulf cost then Houston. At one point, over 2M locations (households or businesses) had no electricity. That number is still about 1.2M as I write this screed according to PowerOutage.us. One unexpected effect caused most Internet Service in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio to fail from about noon Tuesday until after 7PM that day. As a member of an affected household, it has me pondering post-hurricane Internet outages.

Fortunately, our 5G service stayed up and continued to provide Internet access. So I was able to limp along during the outage, using my iPhone 12 as a hotspot for minimal connectivity. Failing over from a nominal GbE link to something that delivers 5 MBps if we’re lucky stings, though.

If Pondering Post-Hurricane Internet Outages, Think Failover

Until last year, I had a Inseego MiFi M2100 mobile hotspot through my Verizon account. I kept it around as a fallback when the pandemic hit, because we had to have Internet access, guaranteed, while my son was attending high school remotely. He’s off to college now, and we’re doing our best to cut recurring expenses — like most American families nowadays. So we dropped the hotspot when we switched over from Verizon to Spectrum for cellphone service last year. The iPhone isn’t quite as robust as the MiFi device, but it does the job in a pinch.

Looking at news coverage of Tuesday’s Internet outage, Spectrum is quoted as saying it arose from “a third-party infrastructure issue caused by the impact of Hurricane Beryl.” My guess is that an Internet POP/peering location got flooded, or lost power, and backup generators couldn’t or didn’t pick up the slack. The afore-linked story also tells me that the affected area also included Laredo, San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley, and Corpus Christi.

Resilience Matters

As somebody who makes his living at least partly thanks to Internet access — I use it for research and learning, for business communications, to obtain and deliver work assignments, and a whole lot more — ongoing access is essential. I’m glad I could use the iPhone as a failover device, but it definitely battered my productivity.

It’s enough to get me thinking about doubling up on fiber-optic coverage, and bringing in the AT&T Uverse fiber service alongside Spectrum’s CATV-based GbE service for redundancy’s sake. The question then becomes: it it worth the extra expense? I’ll have to think on that…

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

Notepad Gets General Spellcheck

July 10, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Since March, 2024, or thereabouts, MS has been testing spellcheck within the venerable Notepad app in Windows 11 Insider Preview versions. As of the latest Store version (11.2405.13.0) however, it is now popping up in production/stable Windows 11 builds (22631.3380, as I write this item). Hence, my proclamation that Notepad gets general spellcheck for Windows 11. The lead-in graphic shows what this looks like for a simple sentence with 2 typos.

If You Don’t See that Notepad Gets General Spellcheck

Whenever I read about new features or capabilities showing up in Windows, I like to go look for myself and confirm their presence or absence. So when I read about this yesterday in a story from Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero, I tried it out to see what was what. At first, spellcheck didn’t work.

First thing: I checked Settings to make sure it was turned on. Indeed, it was. So I toggled it off, then toggled it back on. That did the trick — and produced the spell-checked text you see in the lead-in screencap. If you find yourself facing the same circumstances, that simple operation will hopefully produce visible spellcheck output, too.

One more thing: spellcheck is sensitive to file extensions. It does spellcheck text types. But it does not check scripts, programming language source code, or log files (e.g. .ps1, .py, or .log/.evt). You’ve been warned! So far, I like I what I see when Notepad does its spellcheck thing. Check it out!

Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, WED Blog

Word Gets Seriously Weird

July 9, 2024 Ed Tittel 1 Comment

I should know better, so I have no one to blame but myself. Yesterday, I was beavering away on an MS Word project for one of my regular customers. An update notification popped up in Word and I confess: I clicked “OK” before I really thought about what that might mean. Alas, I was about to find out — the hard way. My project entailed “rolling up” three tech briefs into one single, larger document which made it mostly a cut-n-paste exercise with some minor reformatting, intro/outro content creation, and a QA pass over about 6,000 words of copy. Then, as MS Word gets seriously weird in the wake of the updates, I notice things aren’t working correctly.

When Word Gets Seriously Weird, Start Over

As somebody who’s been writing professionally in MS Word since the mid-1980s (40 years or so), I’ve seen my share of Word weirdness. Because I was heads-down, trying furiously to hit a deadline, I didn’t really notice what was going on. But slowly it dawned on me that:

cut-n-paste boundaries were off
item selection was acting strange
keyboard and mouse responses were slow and cranky
menu commands were sluggish

Finally I thought to myself “Maybe updating Word while I was working wasn’t such a good idea.” I did close and then reopen all files, but apparently that was insufficient. So I went for the first step in any real Office repair: a reboot. I closed all open apps, initiated a restart, and crossed my fingers.

Shoulda Done That in the First Place!

After the reboot, it took a while to set my content elements back up. I opened three source files, a target file, and a template/go-by file, and then started over on the target file. Everything worked just like it was supposed to. I was able to finish the second try at the project in about an hour and half, more or less in line with my original estimate.

What I hadn’t counted on — and won’t get caught on again for a while — is that permitting Office to update itself while I was trying to hit a deadline wasn’t a good idea. I ended up losing another 90 minutes to that debacle. But eventually, I figured out what was up, and responded appropriately. And isn’t that just the way things go sometimes — especially when deadline loom — here in Windows-World? You bet!

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

UUPDump Covers ARM64 ISOs

July 8, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, then: now that I’ve got a Copilot+ PC with Snapdragon X Elite CPU, I’m paying attention to backups and restores, plus repairs and rebuilds. Thus when I saw Paul Thurrott’s (Premium) post this morning The Windows 11 on ARM ISO Conundrum I immediately jumped over to UUPDump.net to check ARM64 status. To my great relief, UUPDump covers ARM64 ISOs — along with other kinds — as you can see in the lead-in graphic. This is doubly valuable, because neither the Windows 10 nor the Windows 11 download pages provide ARM64 ISO options. Thus, they can’t build ARM64 ISOs, either (10 offers x86 32- and 64-bit, 11 x86 64-bit only).

Thank Goodness: UUPDump covers ARM64

I used the search string “24H2 arm64” at UUPDump.net to produce the lead-in graphic. Checking my Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X Copilot+ PC using winver.exe, I see it’s running Build 26100.1000 right now. As you can see in the lead-in graphic, that’s the top/most recent version of Windows 11 24H2 available at present.

Just for grins, I’ll visit the site and generate myself an ISO for this version later today. Who knows? It may come in handy for repairs and/or as the basis for a bootable flash drive. Lord knows they’re handy whenever Windows gets weird as it will sometimes do on its own. And when I’m beating on a review PC I do have a tendency to break things a-purpose, just to see what happens. Repair/recovery media are always good just in case they’re needed, right?

Other News on the ARM64 Front

I’ve got some deadlines today, but I’ll be reaching out to Lenovo tomorrow. I still haven’t been able to get into a VM on the Slim 7x. I keep getting hung up at the Start screen, which goes straight to PXE boot and then gets nowhere. There’s got to be a trick I haven’t been able to figure out on my own, so I’m going to ask the real professionals for help — namely the support SMEs who try to help hapless reviewers like yours truly who dig themselves into the occasional hole.

Stay tuned: I’ll keep you posted on my ongoing adventures with limited-access Windows 11, as well as all the other versions I’m running around here.

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

Painful Tradeoff: System Update vs. Hyper-V

July 5, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I just learned something new yesterday, as I’m still breaking in my new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Copilot+ PC. It seems one can’t use the Lenovo Service Bridge and/or its System Update facility without turning off the Hyper-V feature (and support for VMs). To me, this is an extremely painful tradeoff, because System Update vs. Hyper-V means doing without one or the other. I want both!

Uncovering Painful Tradeoff: System Update vs. Hyper-V

It was actually slightly worse than simply disabling the Hyper-V feature using Control Panel item Programs and Features built-in Turn Windows features on or off option. As you can see in the next screencap, the Hyper-V feature box is unchecked (turned off).

When the Hyper-V box is unchecked, it’s not available on that host PC.

In addition, I also had to remove an exclusion on a range of dynamic (upper-address) TCP ports because Hyper-V reserves them for its exclusive use. That required the following command:

netsh int ipv4 delete excludedportrange protocol=tcp 50000 60

What this does is remove the exclusion range from TCP port number 50000 through 50059 (60 ports total, as per the final value). When I turned Hyper-V back on, I had to reboot the PC as per SOP. But I had to re-exclude that range of TCP ports to restore Hyper-V Manager’s ability to access the network. Until I did so, it showed no information when trying to access predefined MS image resources. As you see in the empty “Select an operating system” pane for Quick Create, there’s no there there…

The syntax to restore the excluded port range is:

netsh int ipv4 add excludedportrange protocol=tcp startport=50000 numberofports=60

But I couldn’t get it to work in a way that would return the Gallery files to Hyper-V Manager. Now amount of fiddling around with TCP port reservations returned those items therein. Sigh. So I elected to run a Repair install instead using Settings > System > Recovery > Fix problems using Windows Update. This took about 15 minutes to complete and it still didn’t fix my problem. I’ll try a reset next.

Terrible Trade-offs Suck!

I’m reaching out to Lenovo in hope of some additional help. I don’t like the situation of trading System Update against Hyper-V. I will keep working until I can have both. Stay tuned. This isn’t over…

Cool Tools, Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog

SDIO Replaces Studio with Game-Ready

July 4, 2024 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’m looking over what Snappy Driver Install Origin (SDIO) wrought by way of massive driver updates on a couple of Lenovo laptops. I noticed something interesting. Something perhaps even mildly disconcerting, in fact. In updating drivers, SDIO cheerfully replaces Studio with Game-Ready drivers for GeForce GPUs.

I’m not sure that’s what users would want, if informed in advance of this switcheroo. Indeed, I had earlier noticed and reported on SDIO replacing Realtek Universal Audio Driver (UAD) drivers with High Definition Audio (HDA) ones. As with the prior NVIDIA driver types UAD offers things that HDA does not. For example: UAD adds Realtek Audio Console support while HDA is a no-go. Thus, some users wouldn’t want to switch — myself included.

Why SDIO Replaces Studio with Game-Ready

Methinks SDIO’s approach to driver updates is pretty simple-minded. And indeed, the release date for the NVIDIA Game-Ready driver is newer than that for the Studio driver. A simple data comparison makes it “logical” for the younger item to prevail. But IMO that shows other considerations are needed. If you check the lead-in graphic, you’ll see that SDIO recommends Realtek HDA drivers, though I’m happily using UAD and the Realtek Audio console.

This kind of thing needs “exception handling” in SDIO. If it supported rules to over-ride strict date-based selection, it could easily work around the kinds of situations pertaining to NVIDIA graphics and Realtek audio drivers. I guess I’ll file a feature request to see what happens.

Know Your Tools; Work Around Deficits

This illustrates how important it is to observe and understand what tools are doing. When they do something unexpected or unwanted it’s often because the developer didn’t consider certain use cases. By bringing them to developers’ attention and learning how to work around them until they’re fixed, IT pros can keep on keeping on even when their tools don’t always work exactly as they want them to.

That’s life, here in Windows-World. I intend to keep watching, and keep enjoying its eddies and rhythms, for some time to come! Happy 4th of July, too, for those who celebrate this holiday.