Windows on Much Ado About IT

Windows 10 1803 Timeline Feature

Julian Knight — Tue, 29 May 2018 09:42:53 +0100

The May 2018 version of Windows 10 has an updated alt-tab view called the timeline. While it will eventually be more useful, its current implementation is poor.

When you press win+tab, you used to get a sticky view that showed all of the open application windows for each monitor with a miniature picture of the window.

As of the 1803 update in May, this view has slightly changed so that view now includes a timeline that you can scroll through rather than just a list. There is also a search box to make it easier to find what you want if you have lots of windows open.

The new view also includes application tabs as well as windows. But only if the application has been adapted.

I have to say, though, that the feature has been very poorly implemented so far:

Tabs only show if the application has been altered to make use of the new feature.

Currently these mainly seem to be Microsoft applications such as Edge and the Office 365 versions (Click-to-run) of Office applications.
Search only works with applications amended to work with it as above.

This is especially annoying as it should give a nice way to quickly search through all of the open window titles at least. That information is clearly shown above each window in the list but you can’t search it. Seems like a petty limitation.
Windows opened on a secondary monitor for applications not adapted to timeline don’t appear in the main timeline display (on the primary monitor) but applications that have been adapted do appear.

This is, in my view, a poor UX decision since it is confusing to people.
The search function is only available on the primary monitor even though it searches applications on other monitors (though only if they have been adapted for the timeline as already mentioned).

Again, this is unnecessarily confusing to users.

iTunes Finally Hits the Windows Store - What Does it Mean?

Julian Knight — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 08:11:13 +0000

iTunes on Windows has always been a horrible application. It is highly intrusive, installing many background services. It also has a terrible UX/design. So, now that it is available in the Windows Store, is there a difference? Improvement?

Yes, this will, or at least should, make a difference.

The reason is that Windows Store apps are actually wrapped in a sandbox environment. This means that your actual Windows environment, including your registry, will not be littered with rubbish.

It also means that, not only will iTunes be updated for you automatically by the Store, but if (when!) you decide to uninstall it, it will be totally gone. Unlike the standard installation that leaves behind all sorts of rubbish that slows down your PC.

Here are some articles that describe the Windows Store Sandbox and its implications:

And one more link that is relavent to the Windows Store version of iTunes as this is very likely how it has been built: Desktop Bridge – The bridge between desktop apps and the Universal Windows Platform – App Consult Team

Unfortunately, the expected raft of announcements on the various tech news sites, as so often, miss the whole point of why this is an important release. Most make no mention of the protections, performance and update benefits or if they do, they don’t explain why they are important:

BitLocker issues and fixes

Julian Knight — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 10:00:00 +0000

BitLocker allows you to fully encrypt drives. It can be enabled so that it protects drives before boot. It also allows administrative recovery keys. However, sometimes it can go wrong.

Setup

Make sure you create a backup of your BitLocker key when setting up. Keep that absolutely safe. If you lose it, you will not be able to recover the drive if you have an issue or need to move the drive to a different PC.

Issues

Disk faults or other operating systems

Remember that, if your drive is encrypted & if you have a fault on it, it will probably not be possible to recover the data.

Also remember that, when working with multiple operating systems installed on the drive (e.g. not virtual OS’s), they must all support BitLocker.

“This PC doesn’t support entering a BitLocker recovery password during startup. Ask your administrator to configure Windows Recovery Environment so that you can use BitLocker”

This error messsage appears to have a number of reasons.

Tablets

One is that you are using a tablet and so may not have a keyboard available during pre-boot where you might need to enter the BitLocker key. To fix this, try:

run gpedit.msc
Under computer configuration click on “administrative templates”
Click on “windows components”
Click on “bitlocker drive encryption”
Click “operating system drives”
Make sure that “require additional authentication at startup” is enabled
On Microsoft surface devices, make sure that “enable use of bitlocker authentication requiring preboot keyboard input on slates” is enabled.

Reference: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1401228-bitlocker-not-allowing-encryption

Other

Try:

Start an elevated command line
Run DISKPART
Enter LIST VOLUME
Select the “recovery” volume with SELECT VOLUME <number>. Number is the recovery volume number
ASSIGN LETTER=Q (to assign the letter Q:\ to the recovery partition)
FORMAT fs=ntfs label="Recovery" quick override. You can use any name for the label.
EXIT to leave diskpart
Run Robocopy.exe C:\Windows\System32\Recovery\ Q:\Recovery\WindowsRE\ /copyall /dcopy:t
Run reagentc /setreimage /path Q:\Recovery\WindowsRE
Run reagentc /enable
Run reagentc /info to check whether the setup worked. If everything worked OK, “WinRe-Status” should be enabled.
You can now remove the Q: drive letter to prevent accidental access (which should result in an “access denied” message anyway). Go back into DISKPART, follow steps 1 through 3 again. Then enter REMOVE LETTER=Q.

You don’t need to reboot.

Windows Hints and Tips

Julian Knight — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Information about Microsoft windows. Including specific support along with hints and tips.

A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

Julian Knight — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Like many people I receive an unmanageable amount of email each day. Many days I get through only around 1/3 of the email I receive.

However, the role I am in professionally requires me to retain a large proportion of correspondence. Some because it relates to ongoing projects, other because of security, audit or compliance reasons.

In addition, I work across many projects. It isn’t unusual for me to be involved in two dozen or so projects at any one time on top of my day-to-day management work.

So I have many folders – hundreds in fact – and filing email into the right folder has become a real drag. It can take an appreciable amount of time to hunt down the correct folder and Outlook does not provide any way to search/filter folder names in the UI.

Thankfully, I have access to VBA macros in Outlook. While the experience of using VBA macros to control Outlook is rarely pleasant, it does get the job done – mainly.

My requirements for the utility were as follows:

Must let me select multiple emails, if any have already been filed, show me the folder(s) so I can quickly file new email to the same folder as the rest of the conversation.
Must give me a list of all my folders with a simple way of filtering the list by typing a few letters.
Must also let me open a folder for viewing instead of filing or cancelling.

A couple of hours later, I was able to create a new utility which you can grab the code for from my GitHub repository: https://github.com/TotallyInformation/outlook-filer

There are a few tweaks I’d like to incorporate but as it is, it is highly useful and I use it many times a day.

DSC vs. GPO vs. SCCM vs. MDM (Intune)

Julian Knight — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 17:42:13 +0000

Microsoft Windows administrators now have a number of ways for managing their estates.

Group Policy (GPO)

Allows very fine-grained control over every aspect of Windows. Primarily aimed at Windows desktops. Requires Active Directory (AD) and very careful configuration. Requires well trained specialist staff to get it right.
System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)

Allows central control over software delivery. Also requires AD. Configuration of delivery packages can be complex and very careful change control is required. Software delivery via SCCM can also be intrusive to users. Requires well trained specialist staff to get it right.
Desired State Configuration (DSC)

Though extended by Microsoft this is actually part of a wider open standard “Open Management Infrastructure” and so applies to other platforms as well including Linux. Mainly aimed at server configurations. Falls into the DevOps camp as it defines server configurations in purely text format and so can be put under source control easily. DSC is typically dynamic and enforces the correct configuration (normally every 15 minutes) which greatly helps ensure secure configurations.
Mobile Device Management (MDM)

Primarily aimed at mobile devices, this style of configuration is increasingly applicable to Windows Desktops with the advent of Windows 10. Microsoft InTune is leading the way with other MDM vendors following on. Not everything on the desktop can yet be controlled this way, even with W10 but many key settings and controls are already available. A much simpler method for enforcing desktop settings than the other methods, it allows fewer administrators and much less specialist knowledge.

The article from FoxDeploy covers the first three of those and lays out the purpose of each. Well worth a read.

What is missing is the 4th method which uses Mobile Device Management tooling. The leading contender for this is Microsoft InTune. However, InTune is really only focussed on Windows 10 (desktop and mobile), it has limited control in other Operating Systems.

Servers only ever exist in a given state. If they deviate or we make changes, we refactor and redeploy. DSC drives it all and the machine will be up and running on a new OS, with data migrated in a matter of minutes.

For all practical purposes, the first true large scale management tool we had for Windows systems in the modern era was Group Policy, or GPO as it is commonly truncated.

Comparatively, SCCM and MDT allow us to we import an image from a Windows install disk and then run dozens of individual steps which are customized based on the target machines platform, model, office location and other factors. The sky is the limit.

Curated from DSC vs. GPO vs. SCCM, the case for each. – FoxDeploy.com

Update 2018-05-04 - Intune and Autopilot

It should be noted that Intune is now much more capable than when this was originally written.

Intune now has mobile device management that easily rivals any of the other MDM tools across all platforms. It is also well able to manage Apple OS X as far as Apple actually allow remote management of this type (they provide only a restricted set of API’s unlike Windows).

It should now be possible to manage and configure Windows desktops (at least Windows 10) just using Intune via the Cloud without any input from the other tools.

Intune coupled with Microsoft Autopilot provides a massively powerful and attractive set of tools for the deployment and configuration of Windows 10 based devices.

Autopilot lets you ship devices straight from the manufacturer to the end user with no build needed. The user only requires a broadband Internet connection. Devices are unboxed by the user and connected to the Internet. The user logs in with their cloud identity. Intune “knows” which organisation the device belongs to and begins configuration. The whole process takes about 10 minutes to give a device that can browse the Internet and 1 to 2 hours at most before all local client applications are installed and configured (in the background) depending on the complexity of your configuration.

A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

Julian Knight — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 19:56:06 +0000

Like many people I receive an unmanageable amount of email each day. Many days I get through only around 1/3 of the email I receive. However, the role I am in professionally requires me to retain a large proportion of correspondence. Some because it relates to ongoing projects, other because of security, audit or compliance reasons.

In addition, I work across many projects. It isn’t unusual for me to be involved in two dozen projects at any one time on top of my day-to-day management work.

Thankfully, I have access to VBA in Outlook. While the experience of using VBA macro’s to control Outlook is rarely pleasant, it does get the job done – mainly.

My requirements for the utility were as follows:

Must let me select multiple emails, if any have already been filed, show me the folder(s) so I can quickly file new email to the same folder as the rest of the conversation.
Must give me a list of all my folders with a simple way of filtering the list by typing a few letters.
Must also let me open a folder for viewing instead of filing or cancelling.

A couple of hours later, I was able to create a new utility. This has been published to Github and you can find it at: https://github.com/TotallyInformation/outlook-filer

New Laptop: Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga

Julian Knight — Fri, 02 May 2014 16:02:58 +0000

I have the pleasure of trying a new laptop right now as we consider them for work.

The Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga.

We have this configured with an Intel i5, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD with 16GB SDD speed boost, the touch & pen screen. It is a nice laptop with a screen that folds right over so you can use it as a slightly chunky tablet, the keyboard locks in this mode so you don’t accidentally press keys.

It is great to finally be able to afford a laptop with a proper, pressure sensitive pen interface, it is a joy to use with tools such as Microsoft OneNote.

The touch pad is also the best I’ve ever used. The pad itself is a proper mechanical button and once used, you will never want to go back to a trackpad that doesn’t provide such positive feedback and natural feel.

We have Windows 8.1 Pro on it and the usual ups and downs of that operating system apply. Personally, I find W8.1 less reliable than Windows 7 but I suspect that it comes down to the software you use. I can say categorically that the “Modern UI” apps are a disaster. In particular they do not fully close when you think you’ve closed them (check in the Task Manager) and I’ve often noticed a significant slow-down after having started and “closed” several Modern UI apps.

The laptop is certainly nice to use overall, it isn’t too heavy and can be used on one arm for 5-15 minutes without discomfort, longer than that becomes noticeable though. So not a complete tablet replacement. Great when sat however with it perched on a knee or supported with a table. No more scrappy paper notes for me! It is OneNote all the way.

The Good

Pen and touch with Windows 8.1 and Microsoft Office, a great combination.
Fairly thin considering the features available.
The fold-over screen is easy and natural to use.

The Indifferent

The Windows architecture doesn’t handle very high resolution screens well. I blame this on the development tools and Windows graphical UI libraries mainly. Too many applications do not correctly scale.
Only 2 USB ports. About average for a thin laptop but very limiting when there as so many devices needing USB.
After many years, Lenovo have finally changed their power connectors. Annoying though necessary, all those spare power supplies scattered around aren’t so useful now. Fortunately, you can buy a converter cable if you want to.
Some windows behave oddly, changing font sizes drastically for no apparent reason. Not sure if this is Windows or something to do with the laptop.

The Bad

The power button is in the wrong place, it gets clicked by mistake too often. It is on the right hand side of the base at the front. Right next to the volume buttons.
No drive LED indicator – really?! When using a PC this is essential if you want to know whether a pause in response is due to disk activity or something more serious.
Mini-HDMI interface. This is not good for a business laptop, we already have full and mini Display Link adaptors and now we need to have HDMI as well.
No native LAN interface. You have to give up one of the 2 USB ports and to get a USB-to-LAN cable if you want a wired connection. Again poor for a business laptop.
The usual pointless spamware is pre-installed. However, Lenovo are better than most, not installing too much and their own wares do seem to actually serve a purpose mainly (I probably kept 1/2 of their own tools and removed everything else). Driver and software updates seem regular.
Windows 8.1 Modern UI apps continue to be a very uncertain proposition with poor quality being rife and even the better quality apps seeming to regularly result in ongoing reduced performance on the PC. (Not Lenovo’s fault of course).

Conclusion

A worthy, flexible tool if you need or want both touch and pen interfaces. If not, save some money and go for a Lenovo X240. Possibly the most affordable convertible with pen and touch, at last such devices are in reach of mortals!

Microsoft 64-bit Application Support (lack-of)

Julian Knight — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:08:44 +0000

Microsoft's 64-bit support is still sorely fragmented as we find out with a brand new laptop trying to access Microsoft SharePoint.

The joys of working with Microsoft products!

So I have a brand-new, shiny 17″ HP laptop. 64-bit throughout. 6GB of RAM and comes pre-installed with 64-bit Windows. You would think, then, that you would want to use 64-bit applications right? Wrong!!

I automatically use the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer to access some Microsoft specific sites (Outlook Web Access and SharePoint 2007). I install and use the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office. Does this work well with SharePoint (from Microsoft)? No!

For starters, you cannot upload an Excel spreadsheet to a SharePoint list like you should be able to. You get an error:

Next you try to switch a list into a “Datasheet” view – which looks a bit like a spreadsheet. Inevitably, you get another error:

To fix these errors, you then have to download and install “2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components“. And you have to use the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

Diigo Bookmarks 05/20/2011

Julian Knight — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:31:04 +0000

<p class="diigo-tags">
<span>tags:</span> <a href="http://www.diigo.com/user/knightnet/windows">windows</a> <a href="http://www.diigo.com/user/knightnet/ipad">ipad</a> <a href="http://www.diigo.com/user/knightnet/iPhone">iPhone</a>
</p>

Nearest Postcode Search in Microsoft Excel

Julian Knight — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:52:30 +0000

I need to find a load of addresses by proximity to a postcode. I have the addresses in a Microsoft Access database.

Download Paul Jenkinsâ€™s UK Postcode csv and import into Access as a table
Create a query on your own table adding the following calculated field:

<pre>PCregion: Trim( Left( [My Table]![Postcode], InStr( [My Table]![Postcode], &#8221; &#8221; ) ) )</pre>

Create a second query that joins the above query to the imported postcode table. Join on the “PCregion” field created above. Also add in the latitude and longitude fields from the postcodes table
… Well, I couldn’t be bothered to fight with Access so I exported the key tables and used Excel instead! The principals are the same. Load the tables as tabs, load the Postcode data as a tab. Create a front sheet containing the reference Postcode (Create a Named Cell for this “STARTREGION”). Translate the reference Postcode to Latitude and Longitude by doing a VLOOKUP to the Postcode table, e.g.:

Where RC2 contains the reference Postcode and “UK_PostCodes!C1:C4” is the postcodes table (column 3 contains the Latitude and 4 the Longitude). Note that I’ve used R1C1 reference style as it is easier to mix fixed and relative references. Now use the same formula in the main data tables so that you have Lat. and Long. columns added based on the Postcode on each line. Finally add a “Distance” column to each data table with the following formula:

In this case, we’ve used the STARTREGION named cell and the Lat./Long. data is in columns 28 & 29 respectively. The calculation and Postcode reference data came from HM2K’s website: [How to search by nearest uk postcode in php][1]. [1]: http://www.hm2k.com/posts/how-to-search-by-nearest-uk-postcode-in-php

Cygwin BASH function to open the latest version of a document

Julian Knight — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:43:50 +0000

One handy function I’ve added to .bashrc (so it is always available) under Cygwin (the LINUX command environment for Windows) works out the current working version of a document. It assumes that you keep copies that have a version number or date in the file name that will sort correctly.

You can use it with an alias like this:

If you name your documents sensibly such as “a-document-2009-07-20.doc” or “a-document-v01.01.doc”, then the latest version of the file will be opened in the default application

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Windows command prompt vs PowerShell vs Cygwin for remote backup scripts

Julian Knight — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:44:00 +0000

I’ve been struggling with trying to get a new backup routine working for my Laptop. I should point out that I have several complex requirements for backup so my needs are probably not average. However, it really shouldn’t be this hard! I need to use a combination of BZR (Bazaar) for document version control and RSYNC (for files that don’t need version control and for those folders that might contain files too big for version control systems – around 1/3 to 1/2 available memory). All of the backups need to happen over a secure link since I am often outside of my home network – indeed quite often behind locked-down enterprise firewalls but that’s a story for another time. So I use SSH (Secure SHell) to manage the secure connection and transmission. Thankfully both BZR and RSYNC can both use SSH as a transport. I don’t want to have to enter my remote system password loads of times though and this is where things started to get annoying. Using the Windows native versions of BZR, RSYNC and SSH I could not get a single shared password to work no matter what I tried. I also had some problems trying to control the output from the various tools and use it to further control what happens next – for example getting an IP address and working out whether I am on a network and where that network is. I tried to do this with a Windows command script first but even with the Windows 7 extensions it really is far to hard to get anything useful done and when I found myself turning to more and more utilities to help I thought “enough is enough”. At that point I happened to be reading an article on Windows PowerShell, the .NET scripting host so I thought I’d give it another go (having tried it before). I soon found that, although powerful for controlling the WMI interface, it is desperately convoluted and annoying for general use. So, realising that most of the tools I wanted to use have their roots in the UNIX world, it would make sense to try out the latest version of Cygwin. This has really come on a long way since it’s early days and is far more mature. It is also very much lighter in weight than the Microsoft provided UNIX services for Windows or whatever they are currently calling it. The Microsoft provided tools load perhaps a dozen services into memory permanently though they are rarely required. Cygwin only uses memory when it needs to. After converting my backup script from Windows batch to a BASH script under Cygwin, I soon had everything working as I wanted it – including the seemingly intractable problem of the shared passwords, now using KEYCHAIN to manage the SSH-AGENT and keys. So now I only need to supply a password once, it is held reasonably securely in memory and used by SSH as and when required. I only need to enter it once per reboot. The full script not only backs things up, it also auto-commits changes to BZR and changes network settings to match my current location and proxy server requirements. The later is not yet converted from batch as I don’t need it just at the moment. Let me know if you are interested in a copy of the script and I’ll upload it somewhere.

Running Komodo Edit Open Source Code Editor Under Windows 7

Julian Knight — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:27:00 +0000

The open source version of Komodo’s code editor and development environment Komodo Edit is a great tool for development. I use it for PHP, HTML, JavaScript and more. However, I haven’t done any serious coding for a while so I haven’t needed to run it under Windows 7 even though I had it installed. When I did, I was disapointed to find it behaving very poorly. It wouldn’t resize properly without messing up the screen. I tried with some of the compatibility settings that Windows 7 gives you but that made no difference. I also tried an upgrade to the latest version. A quick search didn’t reveal anything about Windows 7 specifically but I did spot a discussion about problems under Vista that were related to file permissions. Sure enough, making Komodo Edit run as Administrator fixed the issues. I’ve had a few file permission issues under Windows 7, I’m fairly sure it is down to me messing around. However, it is clear that Windows Vista and Windows 7 are both rather sensitive to permissions issues which is worth bearing in mind. Looking at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\ActiveState\KomodoEdit, I could see that SYSTEM, my user and Administrators all had full access but that Administrator was the owner of some of the files. I can only summise that this is the issue. As this needs rebuilding with Windows 7 RC, I haven’t the time to test further but certainly running as Administrator does the trick. By the way, Komodo Edit is available for Mac and Linux as well as Windows. It has a big brother “Komodo IDE” with additional features if you need them. Both are highly configurable, support many languages and are based on the Mozilla code (like Firefox and Thunderbird) & can easily be extended with JavaScript.

Technorati : Development, Software, Vista, Win7 Diigo Tag Search : Development, Software, Vista, Win7

How-to show a Message of the Day (MOTD) at the Windows Command Prompt

Julian Knight — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:33:00 +0000

One of the features available under UNIX is the Message of the Day (MOTD). This is run every time you start a command prompt and displays the content of a file. In addition, the UNIX shells allow all sorts of stuff to be run and configured every time you start a new prompt using the .profile and .bashrc command files.

Windows users don’t generally expect that kind of flexibility from their command prompts. However, Windows does indeed support the use of an autorun into which you can shoe-horn any command you like.

So for my standard setup, I make the shell autorun run a .profile.cmd file that sits in the %USERPROFILE% folder. From that file, I can run anything I like.

To set up a shell autorun, you have to edit the registry so the usual warnings to be careful and back things up apply.

There are two locations you can set, one for the machine as a whole and one for the logged-in user.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor

If you want to set an autorun for another user, you need to go down HKEY_USERS and find the appropriate one. It is really easier just to log in!

In one or both of those locations, add a new “String Value” (REG_SZ) called AutoRun with the value:

%USERPROFILE%\.profile.cmd

Now create that file and put in a message such as:

@echo "Hello and welcome to my command prompt"

Save the file and open a new shell and you should see the message just after the Microsoft copyright.

This should work on all versions of Windows at least from XP onwards.

If you want to add this to a batch file to set up new machines, here is the command you need:

reg.exe ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor" /v AutoRun /t REG_SZ /d ^%USERPROFILE^%\.profile.cmd /f

(Note that the above needs to go on a single line)

Updates

2018-04-22 - Tidy formatting, reformat for Hugo output.

Technorati : Batch, Configuration, Scripting, Vista, Win7, Windows Diigo Tag Search : Batch, Configuration, Scripting, Vista, Win7, Windows