Category Archives: Windows 10

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Glog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Windows Terminology: Enablement Package KB (eKB)

July 14, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In Microsoft’s Windows Client roadmap Update: July 2023 (published yesterday, July 13) I came across a new (to me, anyway) buzzword with associated acronym. As I add to my Windows terminology, enablement package KB (eKB) is now on the list.

Here’s the quote that got me looking around to learn more (I bolded those key words):

The upcoming Windows 11, version 23H2 shares the same servicing branch and code base as Windows 11, version 22H2. What does it mean for you? If you’re running Windows 11, version 22H2, it will be a simple update to version 23H2 via a small enablement package (eKB). Do you remember updating from Windows 10, version 1903 to 1909? Or how you’ve managed recent updates beginning with Windows 10, version 20H2 through 22H2? It will be that simple. Moreover, since both versions share the same source code, you don’t need to worry about application or device compatibility between the versions.

There’s also a Note of some interest as well. It reads:

Note: The eKB is not available on Volume Licensing Service Center. Media packages contain the complete Windows 11 operating system.

In fact, that last item is what really caught my attention and got me looking around, because eKB is an abbreviation/acronym I’d not seen before. My take: if MS thinks eKB is a thing, I’d like to know what kind of thing it is. Here goes…

Chasing Down Windows Terminology: Enablement Package KB (eKB)

A search on the acronym took me back to March 2022, to an answers.microsoft.com post. Entitled “What is Enablement Package KB (EKB)…?” it took me to an early instance of that terminology. It also references the KB5003791 announcement, which talks about enablement packages in general (though it doesn’t use the eKB term itself).

In the simplest of terms, it means that we’ll transition from 22H2 versions of Windows 11 to 23H2 versions through a small and simple Cumulative Update (CU), rather than a lengthy Windows install-based upgrade. A long story, for a short conclusion.

And if you look at the big quote above, the part that starts “Do you remember updating…?” provides some recent, notable examples of an eKB even if it doesn’t tie it directly to that term.

Now I know what an eKB is. And, if you’ve read this through, so do you. Cheers!

Cool Tools, Recent Activity, Uncategorized, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Gadget Fixes Notification Issue

July 10, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I have to laugh. Sunday morning, I was at my desk before 8 AM having made it back from my daily walk kinda early. I forgot that I’d turned on the external speakers (I usually use headphones). No sooner did I get to my desktop than my speakers started chiming as a flood of notifications bonged in — pretty loudly, too. And because those notifications appear on top of the notification area of the taskbar, I couldn’t get to the volume control to turn the volume down. This caused some mild panic, because I didn’t want to wake up other family members still asleep Ultimately, I used the Sound item in Control Panel to reduce the volume. But a gadget fixes notification issue one and for all, after I get past that initial flurry.

The Levels pane in the Sound item for the default output lets me turn things down…”

How a Gadget Fixes Notification Issue

Gadgets appear elsewhere on the desktop, so they aren’t rendered inaccessible when a flood of notifications appears. I can go to the Volume Control gadget shown as the lead-in graphic above any time, and click on the sound level I want to raise or lower volume levels.

The name of the gadget depicted is “Volume Control.” It appears on Page 3 in the 8GadgetPack collection (lower right; details at bottom).

Volume Control 1.2 makes it easy to raise or lower volume without accessing the notification tray Volume Control.

This may not seem like a big thing, but when you’re trying to let sleeping … err … family members …err lie, it’s kind of a lifesaver. ‘Nuff said!

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

PowerToys Team Closes WinGet Gap

July 7, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Now THAT’s what I like to see. Yesterday morning, I noticed a new version of PowerToys (v0.71.0) was out. So quite naturally, I ran WinGet to upgrade same. No dice. At 11:45 AM (Central) I tweeted about this. I observed it was “kind of surprising to see a new PowerToys release…without a matching WinGet upgrade manifest.” 8 minutes later, the team leader responded “we’re working on it.” And by that afternoon, the PowerToys team closes WinGet gap. There’s a working manifest for version 71 in place. Neat-o, and thanks, people!

PowerToys Team Closes WinGet Gap Quickly

It’s a real testment to the energy and drive of the teams involved that things were already in progress as I reported in. (In fact, I heard from the WinGet team lead, too.) This morning I installed PowerToys on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (8th-gen i9, 32 GB RAM, 1.5 TB SSD) and got the latest version. That sequence appears as the lead-in graphic above.

If you look at that graphic, you’ll see that WinGet found only a Zoom upgrade. Oops! That’s because PowerToys wasn’t installed on this PC — yet. But when I did install the .exe version (Microsoft. Powertoys) 0.71.0 (shown as v0.71.0 in the thumbnail at lower right) appears. That’s exactly what should have happened,. It also shows the WinGet manifest for that version of PowerToys is present and working properly.

Always Nice When Things Work Out…

I must say that both the WinGet and PowerToys teams have always been great to work with. They respond to input, questions, and feedback quickly. And when they have to act, they tend to do so sooner than later. Thus, my thanks to Demetrius Nelon (WinGet team lead) and his merry munchkins, as well as Clint Rutkas (PowerToys team lead) and his peppy people, too. Please: keep up the good work.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, PowerShell, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Sussing Out WinTerm Color Schemes

July 6, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In my writing and research work for TekkiGurus, I’m pursuing a GitHub project that works within the Windows Terminal environment. It’s called ColorTool. Simply put, ColorTool shows the colors used in the console window; it also lets you tweak them. Its color charts are kind of interesting and I’ve trying to figure them out. MS has a tendency to show them inside an Ubuntu command session inside Windows Terminal. I show them as they pop up in PowerShell in the lead-in graphic. As I’m learning how this all works, I’m sussing out WinTerm color schemes, too.

Bing Chatbot Helps When Sussing Out WinTerm Color Schemes

I’ve been reading a lot, and asking around to try to learn how to decode the values that show up in the display form of a Windows Terminal color scheme. So far, it’s proved rather more challenging than I had expected. So far, I’ve been attacking output strings to tease out their meanings. This is what I’ve learned so far, mostly thanks to the Bing Chatbot in Windows 11 Canary (Build 25393):

The string “gYw” that appears in the columns of rows 2-10) stands for gray, yellow and white. It uses prevailing foreground color, whatever that may be.
The values 30m through 37m that appear as row heads (first column left) are ANSI escape codes for foreground colors
The values 40m through 47m that appear as column heads (second column through 9th column left) are ANSI escape codes for background colors.
Looking at the color chart, the text strings “gYw” show the foreground color, while the solid bar for each column shows the background color.

In profound contrast, Ubuntu puts foreground colors as columns, and background colors as rows. I also shows escape sequences instead of color names. Initially, this bamboozled me. But now I see what’s going on…

Notice that background appears as double rows with escape codes at left in column 1, and foreground colors appear as the text for escape codes in rows 2-9).

Wow, it’s all starting to make a certain amount of sense. And I mostly have the Bing Chatbot to thank for explaining such extremely low-level details. Apparently, those who work with terminal/console color charts know all this stuff already.

Now, I finally understand that a color scheme assigns a range of color values to the 8 ANSI escape codes for the foreground colors 30m through 37m (which may also be expressed as ESC[30m …). It does the same for the 8 ANSI escape codes for the background colors, too (40m through 47m, likewise ESC[30m).

OK, Now I Know What’s What

Suddenly, I feel armed with the information I need to make sense of the Windows Terminal color schemes and their related color charts. This should make my jobs of explaining them, and their customization, a WHOLE LOT easier. I’m jazzed…

Cool Tools, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Teams App vs. Application Update Conundrum

June 23, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’m chuckling as I report this. Right now many people — including me — run both the app and the application version of Microsoft Teams on their Windows 10 and/or 11 PCs. I’ve been sussing out another update mystery in keeping Teams current, and have finally figured it out . . . I think. It seems there’s an easily overlooked Teams app vs application update conundrum in play. The Microsoft Store keeps the app version current on its own; regular applications often require human intervention for updates. And to make things more interesting, this is apparently a case where WinGet isn’t always equipped with pointers to the latest, greatest update packages. Sigh.

One more thing: Because the Teams application runs as part of the Office (365 or 2019 or later “dated versions”) running update in Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and so on also takes care of the Teams application update. Good to know!

Solving the Teams App vs. Application Update Conundrum

I started twigging to my issue when I saw two entries for Microsoft Teams in my update scanner SUMo. Winget told me one of those instances was an application (ID: Microsoft.Teams; version 1.6.00.12455 was most current, but I was still running 1.6.00.6754). The other one was an app (ID: MicrosoftTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe; version 23134.300.2089.5908; the _*weky… string in the ID is what tells you it’s an app, BTW).

That led to my “Aha!” moment. Microsoft Store keeps apps up to date pretty darn well without requiring human intervention. Regular applications, not so much. So I had to fire up the application, log in, navigate into Settings, and tell it to “Check for updates.” That did the trick, after which Teams was finally up-to-date. Amusingly it’s now running version 1.6.0.16322 — a higher version number than the SUMo recommendation that twigged me to this interesting issue in the first place. Go figure!

Keeping Windows apps and applications up-to-date is always interesting. In cases like this one, in fact, it may even be a little too interesting. But it’s always fun to figure things out.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

WizTree v4.14 Mystery Finally Resolved

June 22, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I must say I’m relieved. I keep in touch with Kyle Katarn. He’s the principal developer of Software Update Monitor (aka SUMo) and a bunch of other interesting software. Lately, SUMo’s been reporting there’s an update available for WizTree. But I’ve neither been able to find it, nor has the most recent available download resolved the discrepancy, either. Sigh. But this morning, the WizTree v4.14 mystery finally resolved itself. Indeed, its download page finally refers to — and makes available — the very version that SUMo recommends. See it in the lead-in graphic above.

Download Means WizTree v4.14 Mystery Finally Resolved

Even though it’s dated June 6 in that screencap, I swear by all that’s holy it’s only showed up on the download page recently. Somehow, Kyle’s data analysis tools figured out what was coming long before it actually appeared. This happens sometimes, when you use update tools that scan the web to figure out that new versions of existing apps may be available.

I’ve noticed, and reported, at least ten times a week lately that SUMo occasionally recommends things before they’re ready for consumption. And sometimes, it even recommends beta or preview versions of software instead of production ones. From messaging with Kyle I understand that’s because his tools pay close attention to version numbers. Apparently, that means the occasional false positive that selects an item based on version number even when that version isn’t yet ready for widespread distribution and use.

To his great credit, Kyle asked me to report these things to him as and when I find them. I do, and he almost always fixes them the same day (often within an hour or two). Indeed, I’m pretty impressed with his responsiveness and can-do attitude,

Enough! Or too much?

That balancing act actually comes from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell (1793). It’s as true today as it was then. And it describes the kind of dancing on a knife’s edge that tracking updates demands. One must be just aggressive enough to catch everything, everywhere, all the time. But one can’t be so aggressive as to recommend updates that aren’t yet generally available, or that shouldn’t be put forward. That means recognizing and steering clear of previews, alpha and beta test versions, and so forth, even though they almost always bear higher version numbers.

Things can get tricky from time to time, tracking and managing updates here in Windows-World. Yet somehow, we manage to carry on. Whether or not we also keep calm at the same time tends to vary…

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

File Explorer Restart Fixes Start Menu

June 20, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I don’t know what I — or Windows itself — did. But I do know for sure that when I logged into my production PC this morning, Start Menu search was broken. I could type anything I wanted into the search bar. But each search came up empty. I could still navigate to apps alphabetically, so I knew something odd or interesting was up. Fortunately, among its many other good qualities, a File Explorer restart fixes Start Menu, too.

How File Explorer Restart Fixes Start Menu

The lead-in graphic shows how it’s done. Fire up Task Manager (I like to use the CTRL-Shift-Esc shortcut, but you can right-click on the Taskbar to get at it through a pop-up menu, too). Find Windows Explorer (I still think of it by its older name as in the title for this blog post), right-click, and select “Restart” from the pop-up menu.

As the term indicates, this basically kills the runtime environment for Windows/File Explorer, which includes the Start Menu, the taskbar, and other stuff, as well as any and all open Explorer windows. All this gets restarted afresh. And when that happens, the new and pristine runtime usually works as it should.

Case in point this morning: my broken Start Menu search function started working again. I cheerfully confess I simply wanted to play Solitaire. But typing “Sol” into the search box did nothing for me. The fix took less than 10 seconds to complete, though. And when it was done it was back to “Windows business as usual.”

Good! That’s just what I wanted… Keep this in your hat: it’s sure to come in handy someday here in Windows-World.

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 10, Windows 11

Windows 10 COM Surrogate Errors Continue

June 6, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Hmmmm. About 18 months ago, I blogged about a source of regular crashes on my Windows 10 production PC. Entitled “Chronic COM Surrogate Windows 10 Failures” it goes into possible causes of and fixes for APPCRASH errors relates to the Windows COM Surrogate. As you can see in the Reliability Monitor output at the head of this story, my Windows 10 COM Surrogate errors continue, sometimes multiple times in a day. Sigh.

If Windows 10 COM Surrogate Errors Continue, Then…?

I’ve already tried all of the fixes described in the earlier item and the errors continue. My current error history goes back to May 6, and the COM Surrogate error is mentioned in over half the total error reports involved (5 of 7 items). As I look around online, I see I’m not alone in this situation. It also shows up on most, but not all, of my Windows 11 PCs (of which I currently have 11 at my fingertips).

This feels more like a “feature” even if it is manifestly an “APPCRASH” event. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to impact system stability, reliability or performance. Sometimes, things like this just pop up in Windows. This one is interesting and mildly vexing, but overall doesn’t seem to impair the user experience.

Feedback Hub Search Results

As I search Feedback Hub on some combination of COM Surrogate, APPCRASH, MoAppHang, and so forth, I see that PowerToys sometimes enters the picture, sometimes not. The nature of the error appears to depend on whether it emerges from an app (usually on the PowerToys components) or an executable (usually DllHost.exe).

But it looks like this issue hasn’t gone away since I dug into it a while back. And based on its common presence on Windows 10 and 11 PCs alike (across production, preview, beta, dev and canary channels as well) it looks like something more constant than intermittent. While I hope MS does fix it sometime (sooner would be better than later), I guess I can live with it while they’re searching for the right “round tuit.”

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Updates, Windows 10, Windows 11

Winget Upgrade May Require Cleanup

June 2, 2023 Ed Tittel 7 Comments

OK, then: yesterday dev lead Demetrius Nelson and his Winget team pushed an upgrade to winget. This comes courtesy of the Microsoft Store, and shows up as part of the App Installer and/or Windows Terminal packages. I noticed also that winget would occasionally throw the error “Failed in attempting to update the source: winget” as you can see in the lead-in screencap. What made it interesting was that it happens on some, but not all, of my Windows PCs. Now, let me explain why this post says that the “Winget upgrade may require cleanup.”

Why Say: Winget Upgrade May Require Cleanup?

When I saw this pop up in the wake of the new release, I figured the changes involved in pushing it out the door might have been involved. So I contacted Mr. Nelson and sent him (among other info) the screencap that leads this piece off. He responded this morning and explained how I could fix the issue, using the commands:
winget uninstall Microsoft.Winget.Source_8wekyb3d8bbwe winget source reset --force
The first string removes the winget package from the PC. The second resets the winget environment, which is why the user must agree to Terms again before winget will run. After that it shows no upgrades are available (“No installed package found matching input criteria” with no accompanying error message (“Failed in attempting to update the source: winget”).

Problem solved; case closed. It’s always good to get the fix right from the source. Had to laugh about the “It won’t break while the engineer is watching” comment he sent me, too. Isn’t that just the way things go in Windows-World (and elsewhere in life)? LOL

See the whole thing here:

The fix is in — and working! Good stuff…

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Thoughts & concerns, WED Blog, Windows 10

Concluding Windows 10 22H2 Non-Security Preview

May 24, 2023 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

There’s an interesting tidbit in the Support Note for KB5026435, released May 23, 2023. Indeed, it is the concluding Windows 10 22H2 non-security preview release, ever. It goes so far as to say “no more” such releases are forthcoming. In a way, this marks the beginning of the end for Windows 10, whose EOL date is 10/14/2025 (about 17.5 months from today). As you can see from the lead-in graphic, I just installed it onto my sole remaining Windows 10 production desktop.

Sussing Out the Concluding Windows 10
22H2 Non-Security Preview

MS elaborates further on the future release scheduling for Windows 10 in the afore-linked Support Note. It says:

Only cumulative monthly security updates (known as the “B” or Update Tuesday release) will continue for these versions. Windows 10, version 22H2 will continue to receive security and optional releases.

Here’s what I think this means:

22H2 is the final release for Windows 10 (unless something big changes).
No more second (4th) Tuesday preview releases for Windows 10 22H2.
There may be some second (4th) Tuesday security and optional releases from time to time.

The inescapable conclusion is that Windows 10 is now purely in “maintenance mode.” That means we’re unlikely to see more (or at least, precious few) Windows 11 features “back-ported” into 10.

Take it as a signal, business users. MS is clearly warning you that it’s time to start planning the transition to Windows 11 (or beyond). It should be interesting to see how this plays out between now and mid-October 2025. Stay tuned, and I’ll opine further on what’s up, what’s hot, and what’s not.