Category Archives: Windows 11

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

Catching Up Can Be Hard to Do

January 23, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ll admit it. I’m lazy. When I hooked up the Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q Tiny PC a couple of weeks ago, I cheated. How? By hooking up the power, networking, video, keyboard, mouse and camera that had previously been driving the ThinkStation P3 Ultra Gen 2 mini-PC. Yesterday, I had some free time so I unhooked the former and reconnected to the latter. Given the hiatus a storm of updates followed (as expected). When I checked Reliability Monitor (ReliMon) this morning, I found a couple of unexpected errors for the Lenovo TSSIOMonitor (aka Super IO Monitor). When I asked Copilot for help reading those tea leaves, its response: “Catching up can be hard, especially after a prolonged idle period.”

Why Catching Up Can Be Hard

As I look at ReliMon for yesterday afternoon, I see a steady stream of updates and installs that start at 3:38PM and run through 4:09PM (60 in all). According to Copilot, TSSIOMonitor.exe is a Lenovo executable that’s constantly monitoring hardware. Its job is to throw errors when things don’t look or work correctly.

One potential cause of the error is when sensor data is invalid. Another is when driver data doesn’t match what the monitor expects. That’s precisely what happens when chipset drivers update, ACPI tables get rebuilt, embedded controllers reinitialize, and Super I/O registers may be unstable. Basically, the monitor was using stale data to analyze a fresh situation, and erroring because of inevitable mismatches. Good to know.

Copilot Offers Insight, But I Must Assess Same

I’m getting used to asking Copilot to opine on system stuff when I need help understanding what’s going on. It certainly has more access to deep Windows arcana that I do, but I do notice occasional hiccups and hallucinations as it recites specific details. Indeed it sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t relate to my specific situation, but do play into the general circumstances and experiences around it.

This time, Copilot’s explanation makes good sense. And it helps me understand why such errors might occur when they did. It’s even comforting for it to tell me what I already knew: that a one-off or two-off error while a bunch of updates are underway isn’t terribly concerning. But we both agree that if it kept on happening (TSSIOmonitor.exe has been quiet ever since updates finished) there would be cause for concern, and possible action.

What Ronald Reagan said about nuclear arms monitoring apparently also provides to ingesting information from Copilot: “Trust, but verify.” Words to live by, here in a brave new AI-informed Windows-World.

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

Fixing WinKey+X Menu Change

January 22, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

The Win+X menu — that little power‑user gem tucked behind the Start button — is a Windows feature you don’t think about much until it breaks. When it does, the symptoms can be maddening: missing entries, wrong icons, dead shortcuts, or menu items that don’t launch. I recently went through a repair of the Win+X system on my production desktop. That process revealed just how many layers contribute to this simple menu. Here’s a recap of how the issue was resolved in fixing WinKey+X menu change.

Getting Started: Fixing WinKey+X Menu Change

The first clue was that the Win+X menu wasn’t launching Windows Terminal correctly. Instead of opening a PowerShell or Terminal instance, it either did nothing or threw an error. That pointed to a problem in the Win+X shortcut groups. These reside beneath the user profile at:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WinX

Windows organizes these shortcuts into GroupN folders (N = 1-3). Group3 is where Terminal and PowerShell entries live. When I opened that folder, those shortcuts were either missing or pointing to stale AppX registrations. This can happen after uninstalling or repairing Windows Terminal, or some profile migration wherein AppX package identities change.

Making Shortcuts Happen…

The next step meant rebuilding shortcuts manually. Windows Terminal doesn’t include .lnk files. Hence, I created fresh ones by right‑clicking the desktop and choosing New → Shortcut, and pointing them at the program. It lives under WindowsApps and includes current version info in its actual filename.

Because Windows Terminal’s AppX path changes with every update, hard‑coding its location isn’t smart. Thus, I used the stable execution alias: wt.exe

Once the shortcut was created, I renamed it to match canonical Win+X naming conventions:
Windows Terminal.lnk Windows Terminal (Admin).lnk

Then I moved them into the Group3 folder. At this point, the shortcuts existed, but they were MIA on the menu. That’s because Win+X system caches entries and doesn’t refresh automatically. I forcibly rebuilt that cache by signing out and back in. After the next login, the menu finally displayed the new Terminal entries — but the icons were wrong.

What About Them Icons?

This led to the next discovery: Windows Terminal’s icon is stored inside its AppX manifest, not in a traditional .ico file. To fix them, I edited each shortcut’s properties and pointed the icon field to the stable Windows Terminal executable under Program Files. That exposed the correct embedded icon. Once updated, Win+X displayed the proper visuals.

The final step was cleaning up legacy entries. A repaired Microsoft Account caused Windows to resurrect old Win+X shortcuts from a now-defunct installation. Removing stale .lnk files from Group3 eliminated duplicates and restored the menu to a clean state.

By the end of the trail, Win+X worked again: correct icons, correct commands, and a clean set of shortcuts that launch reliably. The repair reinforced something I’ve seen before in Windows troubleshooting . A system often holds onto old paths, old identities, and old assumptions long after underlying components change or go away. Fixing things means understanding where Windows stores its info, and updating each layer one by one.

If your Win+X menu ever starts acting strangely, a careful rebuild of Group3 shortcuts may be exactly what brings it back to life. Here in Windows-World you can always try. It might work. And if it doesn’t, there’s always something else to try instead.

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog, Windows 11, Windows OS Musings

NVIDIA Enters Windows on ARM Field

January 20, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s an interesting bit of news: AI heavyweight NVIDIA enters Windows on ARM field, as discussion of its N1 and N1X SoC offerings proliferate. These stories are popping today (Jan 20) but rumors have apparently been flying since last year. I got my info from WinBuzzer, but other key stories from TechRadar, DigiTimes, Tom’s Hardware, and more, are also worth a peek. Qualcomm’s exclusivity looks ready to expire, and x86/AMD64 CPUs likely to get even more competition soon.

As NVIDIA Enters Windows on ARM Field, Here’s What’s Known

The initial offering involves two “system-on-a-chip” (SoC) architectures known as N1 and N1X. According to WinBuzzer (confirmed at other sources) “the N1 designation likely targets desktops while N1X focuses on notebooks…” Deeper technical details are still emerging but here are some broad possibilities:

20-core ARM CPU designed with MediaTek
10 Cortex-X925 performance cores
10 Cortex-A725 efficiency cores
NVIDIA Blackwell GPU
Built on TSMC 3mm process
NPU delivers up to 1000 TOPS for AI
Includes 128GB RAM shared between CPU & GPU

That certain raises the bar from where things stand with either generation of Snapdragon X processors (shipping X1 variant since last year, X2 planned for Q126 delivery).

Things Could Get Interesting…

The big news here, of course, is that NVIDIA is building in GPU capabilities that match their current discrete and laptop 5070 class devices. Qualcomm’s offerings have delivered sufficient computing power and astounding battery life. But their Adreno GPUs are underpowered for serious gaming, 3D modeling, simulations, and other display-intensive workloads.

Looks like NVIDIA is throwing down a gauntlet in the Windows marketplace. This should make life interesting for everybody, including prospective buyers, but also intel, AMD, Qualcomm. The biggest PC OEMs are already on board. Look out Windows-World, here comes another 800lb gorilla!

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

CrapFixer Gives ASUS A14 Low Bloat Rating

January 19, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

One of the “interesting parts” of new machine intake is the process of removing things the system maker installs that you don’t want. This is often called “debloating” or “degunking.” I’m adding this to my intake process going forward, and reporting on it today, because I’m mostly convinced that the GitHub CrapFixer project does a good job of taking stock and reporting on unwanted apps (among many other things). I just ran it on my newest Copilot+ PC, and I’m pleased to report that CrapFixer Gives ASUS A14 low bloat rating. I’ll explain…

How CrapFixer Gives ASUS A14 Low Bloat Rating

I’m basing my “low bloat rating” on the information that appears in the lead-in graphic. It’s the CrapFixer “Analyze” output that shows up under the “APPS ANALYSIS” heading. Indeed, there are 17 entries there. BUT inspection reveals that none of these items come from third parties: they are items included by default in a normal Windows 11 installation.

That ties into the definition or bloatware or crapware that I think makes most sense. That definition: software apps from third parties that at least some user neither want nor need on their PCs. Frequent examples include:

Trial AntiVirus Suites: McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro, etc.
Cloud Storage trials: Dropbox, Box, etc.
Media/entertainment trials: Netflix, Spotify, etc.
Game trials or freemium games: Candy Crush, Hidden City, etc.

The ASUS A14 Zenbook includes none of these, except stuff that Microsoft bundles with the OS. That’s about as low as bloat gets. For the record, my recently-added Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q gets the same rating, for the same reason.

Here in Windows-World bloatware is not uncommon on new PCs and laptops. It’s nice when little or none presents. And both ASUS and Lenovo make third-party offers available for owners thru their update apps (MyASUS and Lenovo Vantage, respectively). But they don’t preinstall them on their PCs. Good -oh!

Hardware Reviews, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

ARM Desktop: Neo 50q Pros and Cons

January 16, 2026 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

OK, then. I’ve been playing and working with the Lenovo ThinkCentre neo 50q for a couple of weeks now (see my Jan 9 first looks post). Now that it’s been in harness for a bit, I can speak more to what this tiny PC can — and can’t — do. I’ll lay out this ARM desktop (Neo 50q) pros and cons for your consideration. Let’s go…

Considering ARM Desktop: Neo 50q Pros and Cons

The lead-in graphic speaks indirectly to one of my profound reservations about this otherwise nifty mini-PC: the CPU is too under-powered for it to qualify as a Copilot+ PC. Note the model appears as X126100. Its NPU is rated at 45 TOPS but it’s neither a Snapdragon X Elite nor X Plus model. Thus, it doesn’t make the grade, and ships without the Copilot AI namespace, and does not appear on the Microsoft Copilot Plus list. This quibble boils down to: why acquire an ARM desktop if it’s not Copilot+ capable? Good question!

Neo 50q Pros

That’s where the pros for this unit come into play — namely:

Compact form factor: works well for small footprint workspaces
Incredibly quiet operation: I’ve heard the fan come on only a handful of times in two weeks. When it does it’s still pretty quiet.
Low power draw: the overall PC sips rather than sucks power (5-9 W at Windows desktop, 10-18 W normal load; 26 W peak)
Instant-on startup: ARM works well with Modern Standby so the unit wakes in 2-3 seconds. Boot & restart times are also speedy.
Enough oomph for everyday computing: handles office apps, surfing & email, Teams & Zoom sessions with aplomb
Enterprise-friendly security capability: Pluton support, hardened drivers, Secure Boot & Modern Standby make Neo 50q a good fit for managed environments and secure for standalone use
First ARM desktop available, and reasonably affordable at US$589 (does need monitor; mouse & keyboard included)

Neo 50q Cons

Let’s contrast this to the Neo 50q’s various cons — to wit:

No Copilot+ capability may deter some users, but only 2-5% of PCs sold today meet those requirements
USB-C port does not support Thunderbolt 4 or USB4
Limited upgradeability: RAM is soldered. only 1 M.2 slot, no PCIe expansion
ARM still imposes some compatibility and performance limitations: some apps won’t run while others run more slowly
ARM Adreno GPU limits graphics so it won’t handle serious games nor heavy creativity workloads

Net-Net: Good for Students & Office workers

I give the Neo 50q lots of points for cute, quiet, low power and minimal maintenance requirements. But it’s not a powerhouse by any stretch. It fits well into dorm rooms, home offices and business workspaces for people who need basic computing services. The Neo 50q won’t serve well for those who need more horsepower, who write code or create/edit videos. It can’t (and won’t) do much AI stuff of any kind.

All in all, it’s a niche product that fills that niche well but can’t wander outside those narrow boundaries. Given that the Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini X — a real Copilot+ mini-desktop — lists for US$1365, the next step up is a pretty big one. This will make the Neo 50q very appealing for some, and not at all for others. For myself, I like it very much for what it is and can live with what it isn’t.

Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Updates, WED Blog, Windows 11

Intel Graphics DSA Update Weirdness

January 15, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

It’s strange. I just got a notification on the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Hybrid tablet that Intel DSA had 3 updates pending: Bluetooth, Graphics and Wi-Fi. Of the three, BT and Wi-Fi went swimmingly. The graphics update, however, hung in unexpected ways. That’s how I found myself fixing Intel Graphics DSA update weirdness minutes ago. The trick is fortuitous, as I’ll explain…

Overcoming Intel Graphics DSA Update Weirdness

I have kind of a built-in timer when it comes to waiting for Windows installs to finish up. If an installer shows a progress bar, and I see no progress at all for 5 minutes, I start getting antsy. At 10 minutes, I pull the plug and kill the installer to see what happens.

Killing an installer may take varying degrees of effort. The Intel Graphics installer was well-enough behaved to respond to the “close window” controls at its upper right corner. In other, more stubborn cases, I’ve been known to resort to Task Manager, where I’ll find and kill the installer process itself. Sigh.

Imagine my surprise when the DSA installer reported success in installing the new Graphics driver. Seems that their current installer had finished, but simply neglected to update the UI to report said progress.

As Luck Would Have It…

My impatience spurred me into doing exactly the right thing. I’ve had other Windows installers hang, where killing the installer meant I had to start over and install again. In some more extreme cases, I first had to clean up the leftovers from the hung installer before a new install would work. That’s where a tool like Revo Uninstaller (in “Hunter Mode”) can be helpful: if you can find a UI trace left behind –such as the DSA notification tray icon — you can use it to help you clean up.

All I can say is “Thank goodness no cleanup was needed.” Here in Windows-World, when things get messy, they can really suck up some serious time. I ran into that last Monday, when WinGet in my primary MSA got profoundly bollixed. Go figure!

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Remote Desktop (RDP), WED Blog, Windows 11

Odd Restart Following KB5074109

January 14, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday. This morning, I checked over the fleet to make sure all had gone well. With one exception — the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen1 — it had. But the P16 showed me a restart behavior I’d never seen before. Indeed, I can only observe this machine experienced an odd restart following KB5074109. Let me explain what happened…

Delineating Odd Restart Following KB5074109

Some of this oddity is no doubt self-induced. I fired off the restart command in Windows Update through an RDP session. That closed the remote desktop session on the client. On the P16 host, the logged-in Windows session kept running. The desktop stayed visible, and the Start menu popped up in response to the usual cursor activity. But apps didn’t work, and I couldn’t open settings to fire off the restart command again. Even more interestingly, the power button in the Start menu didn’t work either. How to force a restart?

WinKey-X let me open an administrative Windows Terminal session. From there I used shutdown /r /f /t 0, where /r tells Windows to restart, /f summarily kills any open apps that might otherwise block restart (seemed like a good idea to me, given circumstances), and /t 0 tells shutdown to do its thing right away (in 0 seconds, that is).

That did the trick! The P16 transitioned into an “Updates underway” screen that let me know the pending updates were being applied. Then it restarted, finished the post-GUI update process, and took me to the desktop.

How do I know it worked? Edge popped up the now-customary post update browser window as the P16 finished booting to the desktop:

Problem solved, I guess. I’m not sure what caused this strange behavior. I didn’t see this on any of my other updated PCs or VMs, But then I didn’t have RDP sessions open into them at the time, either. Just another niggling little mystery here in Windows-World. Just another normal day…

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

Primary Desktop: Something Profoundly Wrong

January 12, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ve been fighting dragons here at Chez Tittel all day long. On my primary desktop, something profoundly wrong is dogging my steps, and docking my productivity. I can’t boot to a recovery drive to fix a relatively simple problem with application package provisioning. Behind the scenes, something is amazingly weird, and blocking my every move to try to get things fixed. Let me explain…

More About Primary Desktop: Something Profoundly Wrong

It all started with WinGet. It (Microsoft.AppInstaller) wouldn’t update properly . I went through a lengthy and trying series of misadventures (that took the best part of a full day). I only slowly determined the ed@edtittel.com account profile was thoroughly messed up.

First, I went through three iterations building a WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) bootable USB flash drive. I realized something fundamental and serious was broken. Copilot says it’s not because of any of these:

Not a bad install.
Not a missing EXE.
Not a PATH issue.
Not a system‑wide problem.

Rather, it’s a borked reparse point. It’s coupled with missing shims inside user-level WindowsApps and Winget folders.

A Wilderness of Errors

Here are some of errors I’ve fought today:

“The system cannot find the path specified”
Winget working in one account but not another
App Installer reinstall not fixing anything
PATH looking correct but still failing
Winget.exe present but nonfunctional
Commands failing instantly with no useful error text
Ephemeral pop‑ups and disappearing error dialogs

TLDR: I couldn’t build a bootable WinRE UFD that worked. I’ve switched to another PC. Now, it’s the Lenovo ThinkStation P16 Gen1. It’s frustrating… But at last a bootable UFD via the Windows 11 Download page and msconfig to get into “Safe Mode” worked. That said, I never got WinGet working on my primary MSA.

An Alexandrine Solution

I’ve now been up and down, and back and forth, over the same ground. I can’t make WinGet work in my primary login. It works fine in an alternate MSA. After spending a long, long day trying to fix this, I am throwing in the towel. I can run WinGet from the old MSA, and for now, that’s good enough for me.

Sigh. Another wasted day (at least 8 hours) here in Windows-World. Sometimes, all the effort just doesn’t produce the desired outcome. It’s a real pickle!

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, WED Blog, Windows 11

More Spurious Win 11 Reclaimables

January 7, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Don’t ask me why. But every now and then, MS drops a couple of old, outmoded, and obsolete packages into its Windows 11 updates. They also show up should you perform an in-place upgrade repair (“Reinstall now” via Settings > System > Recovery). Ditto for a clean install. I call them spurious reclaimables because they shows up in DISM … /cleanup-image if you run /analyzecomponentstore. Well, they showed back up on my Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra yesterday. With more spurious Win 11 reclaimables to clean up, that’s just what I did. Here’s how…

Handling More Spurious Win 11 Reclaimables

Through repeated exposure to this phenomenon, and repeated prior cleanups, I’ve learned the names of the packages involved. I’ll also note they come in both AMD64 and ARM64 flavors. If you look at the lead-in graphic you can suss those names out. I repeat them here for readability:

Package_for_RollupFix~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~26100.1742.1.10 Microsoft-Windows-FodMetadataServicing-Desktop-Metadata-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.26100.1742

These go into the following DISM command for easy removal (if they’re not present, the command will fail gracefully with no damage to a Windows image):

dism /online /remove-package /packagename:

Paste the package name right after the colon at the end of the string (no spaces). For ARM64 installations change the “amd” in “amd64” in the preceding package names to “arm” (e.g. “arm64”). That’ll do it.

Note: upon double-checking this info on another PC just now, I observed that removing the rollupfix package also removes the FodMetadataServicing package. Thus, a manual attempt to remove the latter fails. Never fear: a quick check of reclaimable packages in DISM shows the count at zero (0). Good-oh! On ARM64 PCs, however, both items (with the stipulated replacement above) MUST be done separately.

Why Do These Spurious Reclaimables Occasionally Come Back from Oblivion?

Copilot explains this as something that’s a “known defect baked directly into the original Windows 11 24H2 installation media.” Apparently this means they will come back in 24H2 and 25H2 images from time to time. When updates that include them are applied, it’s like the movie Poltergeist: “They’re heeeeeere!”

When that happens you can leave them alone. Or, if you tend toward OCD in seeking clean Windows images, you can use DISM to return them to the oblivion they so richly deserve. That’s the way things go occasionally, here in Windows-World. I enjoy such things, in case you can’t tell…

Note: I’ve written on this topic repeatedly. Run this Google search if you’d care to scan some of my other musings on these little zombies.

AI, Copilot+ PCs, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 11

Notification Reveals RDP Recall Gotcha

January 6, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here at Chez Tittel, there are 9 PCs in my office (6 laptops, 3 desktops). I tend to remote into 8 of those 9, working from my primary desktop. It’s running an Asrock B550 Extreme 4 with AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU, 128GB RAM, and an NVIDIA 3070Ti GPU. When I remoted into the ASUS Zenbook A14 this morning, a seemingly innocuous notification popped up in the RDP window, lower right. That notification reveals RDP Recall Gotcha that reads “Recall: Sign-in with Windows Hello to resume, no snapshots are being saved.”

When Notification Reveals RDP Recall Gotcha , Then What?

I followed the notification’s instruction: Walked up to the laptop, and let the camera log me in locally via facial recognition. When I fired up the RDP session again, there was no such notification showing. So, I checked Windows Hello status, and it shows that facial recognition is enabled and working for my phiz.

Then I checked Recall settings. It shows two interesting facets to what is apparently a real and present RDP gotcha:

1. For RDP to work, it’s necessary to turn off “Require Windows Hello login” in Sign-in Settings (aka “enhanced sign-in security”). For Recall to work this must be enabled.

2. Lack of enhanced sign-in security apparently makes the RDP session behave as if Windows Hello is neither enabled nor defined on this system.

Can you say “Catch-22?” Looks like if you want to use Recall on a Copilot+ PC, you can only do so through a local login. At least for me, it doesn’t work through RDP. Good to know! Though I can’t say I like this much, it is important to understand the limitations of Recall for users who might wish to take advantage of its capabilities.

Looks like Recall requires local operation. My conclusion: To use Recall (and I presume other AI features) go local, or go home. It’s always something, here in Windows-World.