I read a Windows Latest story yesterday with interest and bemusement. It proclaims that MS is “bringing … Vista-like gadgets to Windows 11…” Of course, these are widgets (not gadgets, per se) and I don’t see them in the same light, either. I’m still happily using Helmut Buhler’s excellent 8GadgetPack, as you can see in the lead-in graphic. For me, these old-school gadgets still rule — as they have done on my desktops since Vista appeared in early 2007 (16 years ago).

Why Old-School Gadgets Still Rule

The range of still-available gadgets is large (61 total on the “Add Gadget” display). It offers elements for time, CPU, GPU, storage, and networking status and activity. Lots of pop-ups for news, weather, games, media and other interesting services. There’s more here, in fact, than I want or need on my desktop.

Here are the four elements I use all the time on nearly all of my Windows 10 and 11 PCs and laptops (they appear in-line at the right-hand side of my left-screen’s desktop; here I stack them 2×2):

Clockwise from top left, these are:
1. Clock gadget: shows machine name and time (with seconds)
2. Control gadget: provides ready access to shutdown and restart, even in RDP sessions (very handy)
3. Network Meter: shows int/ext IP addresses, in- & out-bound network activity (on graph and numerically)
4. CPU Usage: shows overall CPU and memory consumption, along with per-core activity levels.

So far, I haven’t seen Windows 11 widgets that come close to matching this kind of capability with minimal overhead and effort required for installation and use. I’ll keep my eyes on widgets as they develop and evolve. But so far, the old-school gadget still beats the new-school widget three ways from Sunday. Stay tuned: this may change!

Here’s an interesting change in the bleeding edge versions for Windows 11. Indeed, Canary Dev gain enhanced Webp support for images of that type. It does require visiting the MS store on one of those platforms to download and install the Webp Image Extensions app shown in the lead-in screencap. After that, a number of interesting options present themselves. Let me explain … and illustrate!

What Canary Dev Gain Enhanced Webp Support Means

Thanks to Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero, I learned about this yesterday. What I didn’t realize was how widespread webp support has already become across the Windows 10 and 11 landscape. As you can see, the following image — prosaically named bunny.webp — shows up just fine inside WordPress (and by extension, most web browsers).

Say hello to bunny.webp!

Indeed, it turns out that in addition to Photos and Edge, webp also works in Corel PaintShop, Snagit Editor, Paint, IrfanView (though I did have to download and install a plug-in DLL for Webp) and more. And it worked on Windows 10 as well as 11. It’s just that the Windows Photos app (and possibly Edge for some users) couldn’t handle webp before installing the afore-mentioned Store app “Webp Image Extensions.”

What Is Webp Anyway?

Webp is yet another compact, accurate image format. A Google design, it made its debut in 2010 but didn’t go widely public until April 2018 (when the vendor released a stable “supporting library” for the format — See Wikipedia). Looking at the bunny above, I see that Webp has some characteristics in common with the XML-based SVG graphics format. That said, it also supports captured photos, animation, tiling, advanced meta-data and more.

Visit Google’s WebP page for the official line on this format, which is gaining wider acceptance and use. As Google explains “WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.”

This was an interesting exercise for me, and a good learning experience. Worth digging into for IT and web professionals alike, if you haven’t dug in here already…

Note: Webp does NOT work in Photos in Windows 10 or Window 11 (versions with numbers lower than those for Canary or Dev channels, 25357 and 23451, respectively). Outside the OS umbrella, though, Webp seems to work in browsers and image apps and applications of all kinds.

Here’s a real Homer Simpson moment for you: Doh! I just figured out why I can’t find the Advanced Startup option on some of my Windows 11 PCs (see lead-in screen-cap, then compare to the next one below). It came when I checked a reference on running that ability from the command line. Simply put: the missing Advanced Startup gets explained as a local-remote distinction. It shows up when accessing a device directly, but not via Remote Desktop.

Now you see it, now you don’t (vice-versa, actually…)

Quick Note Means Missing Advanced Startup Gets Explained

I referred to a pureinfotech story to figure out how to get to advanced startup when it didn’t show up as in the lead-in graphic. Turns out the explanation appeared in a “Quick Note” in a discussion of accessing Advanced Startup via Settings → System → Recovery. It reads:

Quick note: The Advanced Startup option in the Settings app isn’t available through a Remote Desktop Connection.

And wouldn’t you know it? I was accessing a test PC via RDP (Remote Desktop Connection) at the time. Sure enough, as soon as I broke the remote session and logged into that same machine via the local keyboard, the Advanced Startup entry made itself available. Doh again!

Command Line Method Works Remotely, Tho…

The old standby shutdown command at an administrative command prompt still works, even in a remote session. For the record, that syntax is:

shutdown /r /o /f /t 00

Those switches work as follows:
/r  Restarts the computer after shutdown
/o  Goes to Advanced Boot options menu
/f   Forces running applications to close sans user warnings
/t   Waits 0 seconds before restart (works immediately)

So now I finally understand why the Advanced Startup item under Recovery sometimes goes missing on me. It MUST be run locally to work. Can I get one more Doh!?

Son Gregory is back from college for the summer, bearing his Lenovo ThinkPad X390 Yoga laptop. Its 8th-gen i7-8565U CPU, 16 GB RAM, and 500 GB Intel SSD are entirely adequate for his mobile computing needs. But I couldn’t see his device on the LAN when he first joined back in. Indeed, an X390 network return required discovery tweaks to make itself entirely visible. A couple of quick, minor toggles in “Advanced sharing settings” made everything OK.

Understanding X390 Network Return Requires Discovery Tweaks

I’m still getting used to digging into Advanced sharing settings inside the Windows settings app. That’s where I made sure the following toggles were in the “On” position:

Once I made sure discovery was working, Presto! the X390 (computer name = “DinaX390” as shown in the lead-in graphic) appeared. Sometimes, it’s the little things that mean alot.

The X390 Gets a Thorough Once-Over

I’m glad to see the machine is running Windows 11 22H2 (Build 22621.1702). SUMo also gives its paltry 17 identifiable programs a clean bill of health, update-wise. I have to say that it looks like Gregory took excellent care of his laptop while away at school. Good for him!

Now that it’s showing up inside Advanced IP Scanner, I can see what it’s doing on the network, too. All’s well that ends well.

Every now and then, I step back from the day-to-day Windows routine. I like to reflect on what I’ve seen and done. Looking at my Update History, I see 30 problem-free upgrades since July 2022. It’s end-of-April, so that means 30 updates in 9 months (3.33 updates per month). And nary a lick of trouble with any of them either in the Dev or Canary channels. Remarkable!

What 30 Problem-Free Upgrades Since July 2022 Means

This is on the 2018 vintage Lenovo ThinkPad X380 Yoga. It’s an 8th-gen Intel i7-8650 CPU, 16 GB DDR4, 1 TB (nominal) Toshiba SSD. On my newer X12 Hybrid ThinkPad (11th-Gen i7-1180G7, 16 GB DDR4, 1TB (nominal) WD SSD), I had to clean install Canary after my initial attempts to upgrade from Dev Channel to Canary failed. That was a pain!

But the X380 Yoga keeps chugging along. It’s a little slower than the X12 hybrid — as you’d expect, given the age difference (2018 vs 2020) — but it’s proved rock-solid and completely reliable. My son has an X390 Yoga (2017 model,  i7-8665U CPU, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) that’s been equally reliable as his carry-around, note-taking machine for use in class.

ThinkPad, ThinkPad, All the Way…

Looking around the house right now, I have 6 laptops here (plus the one in Boston with son, Gregory). 5 of 7 are ThinkPads, one’s a Lenovo Legion, and the last (and soon-to-be-retired) is a 2014 vintage Surface Pro 3. I have come to be a big believer in ThinkPads because:

1. I like the keyboards
2. The maker provides easy access to technical manuals for DIY upgrades
3. These laptops have handled everything I’ve thrown at them and just keep working
4. Shopping around delivers amazing buys (I paid under $1K each for the two X380 and one X390 Yoga I currently own; ditto for my former X220 Tablet and T25 Notebook machines, now retired).

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you certainly can judge a notebook/laptop brand on a decade-plus of mostly stellar experiences. I’m completely sold on the ThinkPad brand.

Personal Note…

I’ve been quiet since April 28 for good reason. We flew to Boston on May 1 to pick son Gregory up after his first year at college (move-out day was May 4). Then we spent the next 4 days in NYC on a family adventure that included more walking than I thought I could handle. It was great! We’re all glad to be back at home, and I’m glad to be resuming a normal work schedule tomorrow. I wrote this blog post just before I left to have something to post immediately upon my return home. Let the games resume!!!