Technology Ramblings

On July 26th, MS released two versions of build 16251 of Windows 10 to Fast Ring Insiders.   One was named 16251.Release and the second was 16251.pre-release.    Last week MS announced that Insiders could now choose something called Skip Ahead or the ability to begin receiving Redstone 4 pre-release builds instead of Redstone 3 "release" builds.    So what's the difference ?    For this release nothing other than the naming.  But soon I expect to see a split where we'll see multiple releases as we approach the Fall Creators update release date.    First there will be incremental releases of the .release builds - so like 16258 next week for example that will focus on Fall Creators, then 17xxx for Redstone 4 builds. There has no announcement on features or capabilities with Redstone 4 - so it may be a mixed bag.   I split my machines - so some will get Redstone 4 and others Redstone 3 release builds.   The nice news is ...

On July 13, MS released Windows 10 build 16241 to Fast Ring Insiders.  This was the build that will drive the next Bug Bash sessions of July 14, 18, & 21. The build focused on some new Shell capability around Password/Pin recover for Azure AD Premium customers and some new acrylic shading capabilities from Fluent design.  There were also improvements to Edge, Delivery Optimization, GPU monitoring, Gaming and Mixed Reality along with about 30 or so bug fixes. MS also made Canonical Ubuntu available in the store for those using the Windows Subsystem for Linux capabilities. Many of the updates and features are for components or apps I don't use on a daily basis and so not much to report on. The build installed cleanly across all my devices.   I did do a preemptive uninstall of Cisco AnyConnect on my laptop and then re-installed post update.   Updates are still slow however.  While the actual download of the update is fast, the preparation and applicat...

Last week - IDC and Gartner posted their PC shipment analysis of Q2 2017 and both show year over year declines of 3.3% and 4.2% respectively. Sales for Q2 1017 totaled around 60M units with the top five HP, Lenovo, Dell, Apple and Asus accounting for about 75% of all sales.  And the top 3 account for nearly 60% And while some firms like HP saw a nice 6.2% increase year over year - it's the Others category that continues to drag the entire industry sales numbers down with a 12.2% decline.   To me though the more important fact is that at the 60M unit pace seen for both Q1 and Q2 - that I believe the industry is going to have a hard time to meet a 250M plateau for the year.  In 2016 the industry sold 260M units - 250M would represent another nearly 4% decline.   And its not like their aren't some really great PCs out there.   One would have to argue that the current state of PCs with 7th Gen Core CPU, DDR4 Ram, M.2 SSD, 2K and higher displays, touch and in...

On July 7, MS released Windows 10 build 16237 to Fast Ring Insiders.   So couple of early points - in previous posts I had called out that the pace of builds had slowed - but it appears we are back on to a weekly schedule.  Additionally with this weeks announcement that two features shown at Build - namely Timeline and Cloud Clipboard will not make the Fall Creators Update release - I am effectively considering this branch to be feature complete. With that mindset - 16237 is all about polishing.  So from Edge, to Shell to People, Live Tiles, Input Methods, Hyper-V, Task Manager and about 30 other fixes - the focus has shifted to polish the current feature sets in preparation for September release.    Sure it's only July and we may get a surprise or two - but honestly I don't think so.  There is another Bug Bash coming up from Jul 14 - 21.   If MS stays true to it's historical September releases - I expect production release about Sept 20. ...

On June 28, MS released Windows 10 Build 16232 to fast Ring Insiders. I call this the Defender build due to focus on Windows Defender Application Guard and Security Center features.  Along with about 15 fixes - that was the 16232 update. The update installed across all platforms okay however I am still having to perform post install remove/reinstall of Cisco AnyConnect and then waiting for Conexant drivers to update and force another reboot on my laptop. With the focus on security for this build - I'll make some comments on my attitude and approach to security. My general approach with security is to strike a balance between usability and security.  There's the old adage the most secure computer is one that is not connected to the network and powered off.  And while this is very secure it's not very usable. To me the first and most important step in maintaining a good security profile is to keep current with patches / updates and the OS in general.  This is...