I’m a big fan of the long-deprecated Windows Gadgets, which date back to the Vista era. Thanks to excellent work from Helmut Buhler (@8GadgetPack on Twitter) you can download his 8GadgetPack quickly and easily. This morning, however, I noticed that the Network Meter gadget was not reporting on network activity. Closer inspection showed two different network adapters queued up: one for outbound traffic, one for inbound. I knew this had to be wrong, because I’ve got an RJ-45 cable plugged into only one of the two GbE interfaces on my production PC. “But which one is active?” I asked myself. And that’s how I needed to identify active Win10 network adapter on my PC, to put the gadget back to work. Here’s what I saw in Network Monitor, to begin with:

With no traces to indicate network activity, despite an assigned IP address, I knew Network Meter was checking the wrong NIC.

Which Tools Identify Active Win10 Network Adapter?

Turns out you have a lot of choices to identify the active network adapter on a Windows 10 PC. I found 4 methods very quickly, and all agreed that the Intel I211 adapter was handling my active Ethernet connection. Here’s a snippet of what I saw in Settings → Network & Internet → View your network properties. Or, you can right-click the network icon in the notification bar, and select Open Network & Internet settings as an alternate entry point.

Alas, one must scan to the bottom of this verbose collection of info to see “Connected to Internet,” which is what I was looking for.

This showed me that of the two NICs present on this motherboard — an Intel I211 GbE and an Intel I219V — the I211 was the active interface. But plenty of other method presented to me to provide this information, including:
1. NirSoft’s AdapterWatch tool, which presents the data in a horizontal table, and makes status obvious with an Operational Status value of “Operational” for the I211 and “Non Operational” for the I219V (not to mention the presence of IPv4 addresses for the active one, and none for the other).
2. The PowerShell cmdlet get-NetAdapter showed me everything I needed to know in compact, easy-to-read form.
3. Gabe Topala’s SIW Home (a subscription favorite for which I’ve been paying $49 a year for 10 instances for over a decade now) shows the I211 as “Connected” and the I219V as “Disconnected.”

Of these other methods, I’ll probably use the PowerShell get-NetAdapter method going forward should I find myself in this boat again. I can launch PS7 using the Winkey-X key sequence, and type the cmdlet name lickety-split. Here’s what it shows me:

Quick to run, easy to read, immediate access to the relevant status (“Up”). Works for me!
[Click image for full-sized view.]

Acting on the Information in Network Monitor

With the information that the I211 was connected to the Internet, I jumped into the Network Monitor’s controls and made sure it was selected under the “For Speed” and “For Internal IP Address” fields. I also turned off auto-detect and selected “Wired Network” as my Network Type. Immediately afterward, the gadget started working again, like so:

OK then: that’s what I’m after. Active download (yellow) and upload (green) traces on the timeline, and count values below.

Fixed!

Here’s another factoid that falls under the heading of “I didn’t know Windows 10 could do that.” In this case, the particular widget in question is Power Options (Control Panel). The right PowerShell command or its equivalent Registry tweak makes an NVMe item appear. Actually, this item occurs under the Hard Disk entry. Its full name is Primary NVMe Idle Timeout (see below). In fact, it defines an idle timeout value for an NVMe SSD in the boot/system role.  Hence my post title: Windows 10 Power Options Include NVMe Idle Timeout. Here’s how it looks:

Until you enable this attribute (PowerShell) or set the right RegKey value, you won’t see this in Power Options.

In case you didn’t already know, NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express. Usually, it’s a kind of flash memory that might be a solid state disk (SSD), a PCIe add-in card, an M.2 card, or something similar. NMVe is incredibly popular because it’s fast and increasingly affordable. Nearly all of my newer systems boot from an NVMe drive. Lots of vendors make NVMe drives. Right now, my systems include such drives from Samsung, LiteOn and Toshiba.

Make Windows 10 Power Options Include NVMe Idle Timeout

In fact, to see this entry in Power Options, you must reverse Windows 10’s default setting. Thus, the operative part of the command string reads -ATTRIB-HIDE. The minus sign does the magic that makes the entry appear. You can cut and paste the whole string (shown below)  into PowerShell. For illlustration, it’s also shown in the screencap that follows the command-line text input.

powercfg -attributes SUB_DISK D639518A-E56D-4345-8AF2-B9F32FB26109 -ATTRIB_HIDE

Entering the command gives zero feedback, but the change shows up immediately in Power Options.
[Click image for full-sized view.]

 The following command string makes this NVMe entry invisible in Power Options:

powercfg -attributes SUB_DISK D639518A-E56D-4345-8AF2-B9F32FB26109 +ATTRIB_HIDE

Of course, the only difference is the plus sign in the final command element. The preceding value is a GUID for this particular Power Options setting.

Do It in the Registry, If You Prefer

The name of the corresponding registry key is, in fact, the afore-cited GUID. The highlighted Attributes value controls if the NVMe item is visible in Power Options. Here again, a value of 0 makes the option visible; 1 makes it disappear. String alert! The fully-qualified registry key name is:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442\d639518a-e56d-4345-8af2-b9f32fb26109

Just for the record, HKLM is a common abbreviation for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. For better visualization, here’s a screencap of all that good stuff:

The complete registry location occurs just below the command menu line, and includes two (2) GUIDs in its path.
[Click image for full-sized view.]

Once again, a value of zero (0) for Attributes means the NVME timeout item shows up in Power Options. A value of one (1) means it’s hidden.

Does NVMe Idle Timeout Really Matter?

Looking at the default value (200 ms), I’m inclined to think not. That’s so fast that altering the value won’t affect the PC much (or at all). But it’s always interesting to learn something new about Windows 10. There’s a lot more going on in general, and in Power Options, than one might think. And who knows? Someday, this tidbit may come in handy.

[Note] Thanks, Sergey Tkachenko/WinAero.com for covering this topic. He posted on this topic sometime in the last 24 hours. (Alas, his posts aren’t dated.) Check it out: it’s entitled Add Primary NVME Idle Timeout to Power Options in Windows 10. Bolshaya spaciba, Sergey!