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2 July 2021 - Podcast #750 - (21:04)
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Think of just about anything you want to do with your computer, other than throwing it out an open window, and you'll probably find there's an app for it. Some are free. Some are not. But maybe it's worth taking a few moments to see if Windows has the capability already built in.
I love utility applications and write about them when I find one that seems especially useful, but this overlooks the fact that sometimes Windows already is capable of performing a task without help from another application. Here are a few examples.
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When you plug a thumb drive into your computer, it will be assigned a letter. Depending on what other devices are installed, the drive letter may change from time to time. This is an easy problem to resolve without finding and purchasing an application.
Instead, just plug the drive in, then press the Windows Key and type disk management. Choose "create and format hard disk partitions". This opens the old-style Disk Management component that hasn't yet been ported to the Settings application.
The USB drive will be listed somewhere. In my example, it's drive J, but maybe I'd prefer to have it be drive X. Right-click the drive in the list of volumes and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths. Choose the Change button in the next dialog and then select the drive letter you want from the drop-down list.
Now when you plug the thumb drive in, it will always mount as drive X. This works only on the computer where you set the drive letter. In other words, if you plug the thumb drive into another computer, it will get whatever letter the operating system assigns.
When you buy a new disk drive to use with your computer, it will doubtless work as expected when you take it out of the box. But maybe you want the physical device to have two logical drives.
Why? I do this for organization. The computer has one built-in drive and five external drives. Four of those drives are in a housing that connects to the computer via a single USB port and the fifth is a standalone external drive.
Maybe I should file that under too much information; my main point here is that you might want to divide a large disk drive into several logical drives. A four-terabyte drive could be partitioned as four one-terabyte drives, for example, or two two-terabyte drives, or any other combination that adds up to four. There are plenty of applications that can be installed to perform this task and they offer some functions that Windows doesn't include in the built-in Disk Management tool (the same used to assign a USB drive a letter), but it will handle the most common tasks and it's already there.
If I wanted to add a second partition to disk 2, I could right-click it in the Disk Management tool and select Shrink to make some space available. It's a three-terabyte drive that's about half full, so I could shrink the logical drive to two terabytes and use the remainder to create a new drive.
After the shrink process, I would see a new partition shown as "unallocated". To create the new logical drive, I would select it and choose the option to create a new simple volume. When that was complete, I would need to format the drive and then optionally assign it the letter of my choice.
Most people have their devices connect automatically to the Wi-Fi router and you probably told the device to remember the passphrase, so you might not remember what it is. When you have house guests, you might want to give them access to Wi-Fi but perhaps you've forgotten the passphrase.
Before explaining two easy ways to find the passphrase, neither of which requires spending money on an app, let's consider a security issue: Guests should never have access to your primary network, and that's why a lot of routers offer a guest network. Those who use the guest network will have no access to network shares.
But if you need to give someone access to the Wi-Fi router, at least two quick and easy methods exist to remind you want the passphrase is.
I rarely use the Windows File Explorer because Q-Dir works much better for me, but the built-in file explorer has some helpful tricks.
If there's a folder that you need to visit frequently navigate to the folder and right-click it. Then select Pin to Quick Access. This will place a link to the directory in the top area of the File Explorer's left column.
In the example photo, I would be adding Downloads-Surface from Google Drive to the Quick access section. This is a directory where files that I download on the Surface tablet are synchronized to Google Drive so that they will be available on my primary computer.
Or maybe you'd like to change the appearance of a folder so that you'll be able to find it faster. Select the folder, right-click it, select the Customize tab, and click Change Icon. This will open %SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll and display all of the icons in the file. Choose the one you want and click OK. You're not limited to shell32.dll, either. Any file that contains icons can be used.
Other files you can search for icons: %systemroot%\system32\imageres.dll, %systemroot%\system32\pifmgr.dll, %systemroot%\explorer.exe, %systemroot%\system32\accessibilitycpl.dll, %systemroot%\system32\ddores.dll, %systemroot%\system32\moricons.dll, %systemroot%\system32\mmcndmgr.dll, %systemroot%\system32\mmres.dll, %systemroot%\system32\netcenter.dll, %systemroot%system32netshell.dll, %systemroot%\system32\networkexplorer.dll, %systemroot%\system32\pnidui.dll, %systemroot%\system32\sensorscpl.dll, %systemroot%\system32\setupapi.dll, %systemroot%\system32\wmploc.dll, %systemroot%\system32\wpdshext.dll, %systemroot%\system32\compstui.dll, %systemroot%\system32\ieframe.dll, %systemroot%\system32\dmdskres.dll, %systemroot%\system32\dsuiext.dll, %systemroot%\system32\mstscax.dll, %systemroot%\system32\wiashext.dll, %systemroot%\system32\comres.dll, and %systemroot%\system32\mstsc.exe. Some of these files contain icons from the earliest days of Windows. On most computers, %systemroot% resolves to "C:\Windows\"; using %systemroot% ensures that you'll be taken to the appropriate directory even for non-standard Windows installations. To use one of the alternate files, copy the link and paste it into the file name location of the Change Icon dialog.
All modern disk drives include firmware to monitor the drive's SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) status. Several handy utilities display the status figures, but a single PowerShell command also does the job.
Open PowerShell and type wmic diskdrive get status, size, model. The command will also work if you use the Command prompt, but it's better to use PowerShell whenever you're issuing a command that involves wmic (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line Utility).
To obtain a more useful report, run PowerShell with Administrator permissions and enter the command Get-DiskSNV (the long-form command is Get-DiskStorageNodeView). After a few moments, PowerShell will display a report for each drive. The report shows the disk number and health status as well as several other useful bits of information. If all drives are shown as "Healthy", the SMART system has found nothing that indicates potential failure.
However: Just as a person who has passed a rigorous physical exam may drop dead while leaving the doctor's office, "Healthy" is not a guarantee that the drive won't fail. Anything other than "Healthy" means that you should replace the drive immediately.
These are just a few of the tools that are included as part of the operating system. The more familiar you become with these tools, the more you'll know about your computer.
Crooks will do anything to mislead you, including making websites that look like sites operated by banks and businesses.
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These two letters look the same, don't they: "е" and "e"? But they're not. I had my text editor identify all of the lowercase English "e" letters and you'll immediately see that the first "е" isn't highlighted. Why? Because it's a Russian "е" (pronounced "ye", but it looks like an English "e"). Likewise "о" (oh), "т" (teh), "к" (keh), "с" (seh), and "а" (ah) among others.
So if you were directed to a website with the URL "take-care.com", you might not notice the difference if the displayed URL was таке-саrе.com. Someone has registered "take-care.com", but there is no associated website. The other domain "таке-саrе.com", is shown as being available.
The "т" and "к" letters should give the scam away, so a clever scammer wouldn't use those letters, but domain names can now be registered with non-English characters. Greek and Russian are just two languages that share several letterforms with English. "в" (veh), "м" (meh), "н" (en), "х" (hech) all are similar to English letters. So it's possible for scammers to create domain names that appear legitimate, but aren't.
When coupled with graphics stolen from a legitimate site, a fake website can appear to be completely real. Crooks no longer have to depend on fooling people with obfuscated domain names like "take-care.com.support.fake-domain.com". They can just use "таке-саrе.com". This is another reason why it's important not to trust links in email messages.
If you get a message that looks like it came from your bank, stay away from the link, open a browser, and type the bank's URL manually (or use) your password manager to open the site. After all, would you be able to tell the difference between "bankofamerica.com" (which is real and registered to the Bank of America) and "bаnkоfаmeriса.com" (which is fake and available to be registered)?
Try this: Copy bаnkоfаmeriса.com and paste it in to your browser's address line. It will NOT take you to the Bank of America website. You'll get an error message that says the domain can't be found unless some crook registers the phony domain name that contains several Cyrillic characters.
Be careful even when making an online payment. Scammers have been known to attack legitimate websites that offer online payments and redirect buyers to phony sites that appear real. If a site you're visiting redirects you to PayPal or some other payment site, it doesn't hurt to be extra careful by copying the domain name part of the URL and then using WhoIs to confirm that the site is actually owned by the right organization.
Because Windows provides a lot of built-in functions that take the place of separate applications, you might be wondering when to use an application instead of a built-in function. Sometimes it's just a case of personal preference.
You might like the way that an application works when compared to the built-in function. Take Notepad for example. It's improved quite a bit in the past decade, and some useful features have been added; but if you really need a text editor, you probably need more than what Notepad offers. Otherwise, there's really no strong argument one way or the other.
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Sometimes, though, it makes absolutely no sense to use the built-in function. Here's an example:
The Command Line and PowerShell both can be used to access the built-in file transfer protocol (FTP) application. Or for zero dollars you can acquire the FTP application Filezilla. You'll have to install it, but that takes only a moment or two. And you'll need to define a target account, which may take another moment or two, but you need to do that only once. It's been a long time since I've used a command-line FTP application, so I thought I'd give it a try for this article.
After launching the command prompt, but before starting the FTP process, I needed to open the directory that contained the file I wanted to transfer. That meant moving from C:\Users\willi> to E:\xampp\htdocs\TechByter.com\. Then I started the FTP application (ftp techbyter.com) and entered my user name and password. Once connected, I needed to determine where to place the uploaded file, so I asked the server for a list of files (dir). After identifying the directory (temp) and moving to that directory (cd temp), I requested a list of files on the local machine (!dir) by placing an exclamation point in front of the directory listing command.
The file I wanted to upload is the .htaccess file, so I issued the upload command (put .htaccess) and then confirmed that the file had been uploaded (dir) and logged off (bye). If that seems like a lot of work to upload a file from my computer to the TechByter server, it is.
Instead, I could have just opened Filezilla and done this:
Instead of taking several minutes and requiring a lot of typing, the task consumed less than a minute. So Microsoft may offer a built-in application that can accomplish a necessary task, but it's not always the best option — particularly when there's a free application that does the same job in considerably less time and with much less effort.
Microsoft plans not to stick with "Windows 10" after all. The plan is to release a Windows 11 version, which will probably amount to a basic feature update with some more than the usual number appearance changes and a new name.
The change doesn't affect pricing: Windows 11 will be a free update from Windows 10, and it will be insteresting to see if those who are still using Windows 7 or 8.1 will have any path to the new version. The expected lack of major changes hasn't kept users (who haven't yet seen the new version) from panicking and condeming it. They're going to switch to the MacOS. Or Linux. Or somehow back to Windows 7. Really?
Be prepared. Keep your towl handy. Don't panic.
If you've ever wondered why the internet seemed slow, you might have used the Ookla speed test, but it's a good idea to use more than one so that you'll have more than one opinion.
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Your internet service provider may recommend (or insist) that you use only their branded speed test. Wide Open West, for example, has a custom version of SpeedTest's diagnostic. It looks only at the connection from your location to WOW's servers because, WOW says that they can't be held responsible for slow service on the public internet. That may be true, but this also fails to report slowdowns that may be the result of faulty equipment operated by the ISP.
So use the ISP's branded test, but also try some others. There's Ookla, of course. It's one of the best known. HighSpeedInternet has another worthwhile test, as does and SpeedOfMe, which has an unusually informative display. You'll have a better case to present to your ISP if you can show that speed tests other than the branded one they provide show consistently worse performance.
France's home-grown Minitel system appeared to be about to be replaced by the internet.
I said "The French developed an on-line text-based service a couple of decades ago. Minitel was far ahead of anything available to people in the US. France's telecommunication officials handed out something like 3,000,000 Minitel terminals — 8-inch TV screens with keyboards starting around 1985. By about 2000, Minitel had 15,000,000 users and 25,000 services."
At the time, some internet-based services were becoming available via Minitel, but that seemed to be a temporary arrangement. I expected that the internet would fully supplant other online services in France as it has elsewhere in the world. That happened, but not in 2001 or 2002. Not even in that decade. In 2009, the Minitel network still had 10 million monthly connections. France Télécom finally ended the service in June 2012.