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I read with interest about growing hoopla about MS Office Progressive Web Apps showing up uninvited on Insider Preview PCs. Then I find it on my production Version 2004 PC, too. Interest changes to “WTF?” pretty quickly, and leads me to spread the news. It’s easily uninstalled, though, if you decide you don’t want it on your PC(s).
It’s true one has to wait a while for OEMs to obtain, test and sometimes tweak device drivers, firmware, and BIOS/UEFI updates before making them available to users of their laptops and PCs. But some such offerings go on for a surprisingly long time, and are of exceptionally good quality. Read the deets…
Microsoft creates a new, regular and predictable URL structure to let admins and users jump straight to any Knowledge Base (KB) item online. Here are the details…
For the past six months, each new Dev Channel release has me asking “Will RDP work for this release on my Lenovo X220 Tablet?” Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Let me explain (and share a quick fix)…
Patch Tuesday comes and goes without a generally available 20H2 upgrade. This raises the questions: Where is it? When will it drop? Only time will tell, because Microsoft isn’t saying…
Weird! Though Reliability Monitor tells me my first two update attempts with KB4586238 succeeded, the minor build number fails to increment. Only after running the Update Troubleshooter and trying again, does the build increase to 20231.1005. Truly, third time’s the charm!
When PCs and other computer components and gear comes to the end of its useful or working life, it’s important to dispose of such electronic waste (eWaste) responsibly. Don’t add to the toxic burden in conventional landfills, please!
MS published a timeline announcing a gradual phaseout for Internet Explorer starting in November 2020, with EOL scheduled for August 2021. A German source reports that the degradation of the IE experience promised for November may be more faqr-reaching than expected.
If I had only read the Dev Channel Build 20231 release notes more carefully, I would have already known that this latest release sometimes sports spurious warnings that MS Office is not compatible with this OS and has been removed. I got bitten twice by this, in fact. Sigh.
The excellent GitHub project Driver Store Explorer gets an update to version V.0.11.42. If you have it installed, get current; if you don’t have it installed, it’s worth getting to know (and using occasionally, to keep the Driver Store slimmed down).
When it comes to swapping an older (usually smaller) NVMe boot/system drive for a newer (usually bigger and faster) one, you can either clone the old drive, or restore an image backup from the old drive to the new one. Deets on pros and cons and choices in this story.
Three different PowerToys stories pop at around the same time: a new release, a user input survey on upcoming tools, and a “functional spec” for Video/Image capture. Good stuff!
This Admin Toolkit item is named Wifinian. It’s a Github open source project, costs nothing, and provides useful immediate control over Windows 10 Wi-Fi networking.
After a family member reminds me that my account/password security needs attention, I spend the better part of a day on cleanup and remediation. Please think about doing likewise yourself.
One day after I caution against installer Optional driver updates that WU may offer, I learn that other optional updates cannot be reasonably disregarded. These “other updates” are worth watching, and at least some are worth installing, too.
When I learn that Windows 10 Dev Channel Insider Preview Build 20226 includes an NVMe SSD “Drive Health” indicator I get curious. When I realize it’s embedded in “Manage Disks and Volumes,” I wonder if it will work at all on my test PCs. To my great delight: it does!
Quoting from the Microsoft Docs, the Windows Preinstallatation Environment, aka WinPE for short, is “a small operating system used to install, deploy, and repair Windows 10 for desktop editions (Home, Pro, Enterprise, and Education), Windows Server, and other Windows operating systems.” Yesterday (September 29, 2020), I wrote about a WinPE based Windows installation / deployment
When Windows Update offers Optional updates, those are most often categorized as “Driver updates.” Unless a related device isn’t working well or has a definite problem, the proper response to such offers is to ignore them.
When mysterious command windows appearing at startup tie into repeated failures to upgrade Thunderbolt firmware for bogus reasons, I start looking for answers. When I find them, they fit nicely my usual strategy for misbehaving exe files: delete them!
I have written quite a lot about customizing Windows and automating its deployment. This time something different: A customized WinPE ISO for you to download, for all those users who just want to automatize installing plain vanilla, default Windows 10 or Insider Preview. Copy the ISO to a USB Flash Drive, boot from it, get a soda, come back to see Windows sign-in screen.
With my Sabrent USB-C NVMe drive enclosure now housing an ADATA XPG 256 GiB SSD, I put my big Ventoy USB drive strategy to work. In moving about 95 GB of ISO files to “Big Ventoy” I also recover around 250 GB of disk space on other drives. Woo hoo!
Good news! While the “Reset this PC” option in Windows 10 version 2004 was broken for some time after its May 27 release, on or after September 8 it’s working properly once again. Glad to see it’s been fixed.
On my physical devices, I only use Windows 10 Pro edition as the primary, physical OS. All other secondary operating systems will then be installed on a native boot VHD instead, for that I have nice PowerShell scripts. I needed USB install media to first wipe and then partition a physical GPT disk, either the
When I fire up the Intel Driver & Support Assistant on my production PC this morning, I get an “Oops!” message. Easily fixed, and I’m happy to report that my other Intel PCs seem unaffected in such wise. Just another random glitch, perhaps?
My Windows 10 backup regime includes elements of both belt and suspenders in that I back up frequently, and keep multiple copies around, some in the cloud. What’s your approach?
I have written earlier about this topic, but as I feel it is absolutely the worst decision Windows 10 developers have made, I need to write about it again: Microsoft, why did you enable Store and Store apps for built-in administrator account in version 1709? A bad decision, still causing major issues, especially when trying to generalize an image with Sysprep in Audit Mode.
I examine my spares, test/replacement gear, and tools, then report on what I find. You might put yourself a similar collection together, to keep ahead of Windows gotchas.
At Ignite 2020, Microsoft expands the Microsoft Defender charter as it organizes products/brands into Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender, and Azure Sentinel portfolios. This is going to take a while to sink completely in . . .
The one and only purpose for the Windows.old folder is to allow users to revert to the previous Windows version. This folder will be automatically deleted if the user does not revert within 10-day period following either a public release version upgrade, or an Insider build upgrade. Personally, I have never understood its raison d’etre,
After updating one of my Release Preview test PCs to KB4571756 my Lenovo GbE dongle quits working. Quick testing confirms a driver problem, and reverting to the previous driver version quickly fixes things.
Allrighty, then. As per Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blog on September 18, Build 19042.508 (KB4571756) likely represents the Version 20H2 final build. He puts it this way “We believe that Build 19042.508 is the final build and still plan on continuing to improve the overall experience of the October 2020 Update on customers’ PCs
Bo Elam
Ed Tittel
Kari Finn
Toni Fasth