Listen to the Podcast
5 Nov 2021 - Podcast #768 - (18:56)
It's Like NPR on the Web
If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
The Windows 11 Start menu differs quite a bit in appearance from Windows 10. Those who want to manipulate Start in Windows 11 manually can use the same procedures that worked in Windows 10, but you don't have to.
Windows 11 Start finally gets this operation right. The old, old Start Menu gave users the ability to create groups and move things around. Windows 11's Start eliminates the need to dig into the File Explorer to change the menu, and adds other useful features to Start.
Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
To modify Start the hard way in Windows 10 or Windows 11, you'll have to visit two special folders:
These folders are identical whether you're using Windows 10 or Windows 11.
Instead of doing it the hard way, I use techniques that Microsoft has baked in to the operating system. The good news is that Windows 11's Start is much better than Windows 10's Start. The bad news is that my primary computer doesn't support Windows 11.
The overall clunkiness of the Windows 10 Start Menu is the primary reason that I misuse the Taskbar to provide quick access to applications. Even so, Start can be customized.
To add an application to Start, (1) open All Apps, find what you want to add, right-click it, and choose Pin to Start. The icon will be added to an unnamed group. Drag the icon (2) to an existing group or hover the mouse cursor over the new unnamed group and click the horizontal lines icon at the right to edit the name. It's also possible to (3) drag an existing icon from a group to a blank space if you want to start a new group.
Windows 10 Start icons have a disconcerting propensity to disappear, leaving gaps in the structure. This may be the result of application updates that aren't handled properly, and it's yet another reason that I've largely ignored Windows 10 Start.
Live tiles (4) for the calendar, weather applications, stock reports and such can also be added to Start and most icons have size settings. The multiple sizes alone make arrangements clumsy at best.
Start and the Taskbar have always been closely related, and the relationship is even closer in Windows 11. I don't want to say that the Windows 11 Taskbar is less useful than it was in Windows 10, but the Windows 11 Taskbar IS less useful than it was in Windows 10. It cannot be moved from the bottom of the screen. It can't have more than one row of icons. Fortunately, the improvements made to Start make this unimportant.
The Windows 10 Start Menu is clunky, and that led me to retain a little more than 100 programs and utilities pinned to the Taskbar. The Windows 11 Start has some functions in common with the older (pre Windows 8) Start Menu, but a totally different visual interface.
Now it's possible to place and organize dozens of programs, utilities, and directories on Start so that the Taskbar can serve its primary purpose of displaying the applications that are in use and those few applications you want to access with a single click.
Adding something to Start is easy.
New items are added at the end of the pinned list in the top half of Start. Click and (2) drag any icon to move it elsewhere in the list. The (3) dots at the right side of the screen reveal the length of the Start selections.
I retain Mailwasher Pro, File Explorer, Authy, Vivaldi, Outlook, Spotify, One Note, and PowerShell on the Taskbar. Other application icons are added only when the applications are running.
The Taskbar is centered now by default, but right-clicking a blank spot and choosing Settings opens Taskbar personalization. Open Taskbar Behaviors and you can change the alignment from center to left if you prefer.
Toggles at the top of the Personalization tab hide or show Search, Task View, Widgets, and Chat on the left side of the Taskbar. Search is available directly on Start, so you might want to remove it from the Taskbar, but retaining it allows it to show the most recent three searches when the mouse hovers over the icon. Task View may be helpful for for users who haven't mastered keyboard shortcuts. The Widgets icon reveals the customizable highlight panel of weather, calendar, and other useful information. You'll want this if you're a fan of widgets. The Chat icon opens Microsoft Teams, so this is useful only if you and your friends and family have Teams accounts.
It's also possible to specify which locations you'd like to pin to the bottom of Start. These include Settings, File Explorer, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, Network, and your Personal Folder.
There are lots of other ways to customize Start and the Taskbar, and that brings me back to Start, where Tips will be pinned by default. Fight the urge to remove this icon from Start or to move it to the bottom of the list.
Until you're more familiar with new capabilities in Windows 11, you'll probably find the 60 or so topics here helpful. Not all new features are immediately obvious, and Microsoft created this section to make the transition smoother.
While you're looking at the Personalization settings for Start, you might want to enable the display of recent documents in the Recommended section in the lower half of Start.
Change is difficult and frustrating for some people, so understanding what changes have been made can help a lot. And you'll never, ever have to visit the directories that contain Start Menu entries again.
Anyone who owns a Windows computer has at least one disk drive that's formatted as NTFS, but is this the right file system for other connected devices?
Maybe. NTFS is shorthand for the NT File System and NT is shorthand for New Technology. So it's the New Technology File System, and it dates back to Windows NT. That probably wasn't a surprise, was it? NTFS was introduced in 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1.
Earlier file systems had substantial limitations regarding the number of files that could be saved in the disk's root directory and the maximum size of files. FAT is an acronym for file allocation table, and that's the format that Microsoft used initially for disk drives. There were three variants: FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32. The final version of the file allocation table specification, FAT32, had a maximum volume size of 16TB with 4096-byte sectors.
Those limitations became important as disk drives became larger. The exFAT (extended FAT) format was introduced in 2006 and was intedned for use with flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards.
NTFS supports hard drives up to nearly 16EB (exabytes) and individual file size is capped at approximately 256TB. The boot drive in your computer might be 4TB, but probably is 1TB or less, and it's doubtful that any file on your computer even approaches 1TB. Support for huge files and even larger disk drives is unimportant for most of us, but NTFS is a journaling file system, and that means the system writes notes about changes to a log (journal) before the changes are written to the disk drive. Journaling allows the file system to revert to a previous state if something goes wrong.
VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) is an NTFS feature used by backup programs to back up files that are in use when the backup is running. Without VSS, files that are in use could not be backed up.
All of this is good and it's not unreasonable to think that every disk drive attached to your computer should be formatted using NTFS.
But NTFS isn't the only option. Several choices are available for any disk drive that's connected to your computer. NTFS may be the default choice, but one of the other options might be better in some cases. Let's look back to 1993: Windows 3.1 inherited the MS-DOS (FAT) file system that supported nested folders and custom file attributes, but few people thought about security in those days. Anyone could read and change any files on the computer. NTFS added Unix-like concepts of file ownership and permissions.
Windows XP was Microsoft's attempt to give consumer and enterprise users a single platform, and that required a file system that included security. "But wait!" as they say on late-night television, "There's more!" NTFS included compression so that users could squeeze more data onto a hard disk. Compression is disabled by default, but it's easy to enable.
If your computer has one or more additional disk drives, choosing NTFS is almost always the best option. The primary exceptions are for USB thumb drives and other solid-state devices. Either FAT32 or exFAT are good choices, particularly if the device needs to be used with a MacOS computer. Apple's computers can read NTFS drives, but cannot write files to NTFS devices without the presence of third-party applications.
If you're sure that a new device will never be connected to any other computer, choose NTFS because of its clear advantages. Otherwise, think about choosing FAT32 or exFAT.
I'm a fan of utility applications. Recently I encountered System Ninja, which appears deceptively simple but comes with a lot of power even though it's free. There's a paid option, too, and I'll get to that in a bit.
System Ninja has four tabs: Junk Scanner, System Tools, PC Analysis, and Options.
Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
The first tab is a powerful junk file scanner that finds temporary files, various caches and history files, logs, crash dumps, what it called "incompatible files", links to recent files, and such. Among the incompatible files are ones with an ICNS extension. These are icon files used by MacOS applications. The files contains one or more images, and they're often installed on Windows computers by applications that have both Windows and MacOS versions.
The scanner found a surprising number of files. Many of the files were small, but the combined size of 17,216 junk files on my computer was more than 15GB, and that's without incompatible files, cookies, and configuration files. Some of the files to be removed had a size of zero and the largest was an 8GB crash dump.
The second tab includes a startup manager, uninstaller, process manager, and duplicate file finder. There's also a section called Additional Tools that's used to install plugins from the Singular Labs website. The plugins include a Registry cleaner, a function that controls Windows services, a multiple file rename, a file analyzer, and a utility to identify large files.
The third tab includes sections with information about the operating system, computer name, and user name; a list of physical hard drives and information about each; a list of all logical drives and details about each; specifications for the CPU; basic specifications for the motherboard and graphics card; details about the computer's BIOS settings, any attached optical drives; installed memory; and all network adapters.
The fourth tab contains settings such as whether you want scans to look only at the boot drive or to scan all drives, inclusions and exclusions for the scans, and a link to documentation for the utility and a support forum.
With all the free features, why would anyone want to pay $15 per year to be a member of the Singular Labs Pro Club? Because club members get System Ninja Pro, with a few extra features including automatic updates, command line arguments, a portable edition, and a System Notes app. Club members also receive faster support and access to the pro versions of System Ninja and Singular's other applications: Bzzt! Image Editor; ProcessAlive; and CCEnhancer. CCEnhancer adds cleaning rules to CCleaner, the application by Piriform. Bzzt is a simplified image editor that can compress, rotate, resize and convert images individually or in bulk. ProcessAlive monitors system process and restarts them if they stop.
Not bad for $15 a year. For more information, visit the Singular Labs website.
Apple is selling a "Polishing Cloth" for $19 and they're so popular that Apple can't keep them in stock.
If you're planning to buy one, perhaps I could interest you in some of the items I have on offer:
If you're interested in acquiring any of these priceless items, please let me know right away!
In mid-October, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a security problem with the Missouri State Education website. The website exposed Social Security numbers and other information about more than one hundred thousand teachers in the state.
One might expect the governor of Missouri to thank the newspaper and its reporters for discovering the flaw. Instead Missouri governor Mike Parson says he will have the state's attorney general prosecute them.
The newspaper had given the education department advance notice of the article, and the agency quickly took down the website components that exposed the data. In other words, the newspaper helped the state contain a problem that could have been much more serious.
The governor says that he wants to prosecute the reporter and the newspaper for unlawfully accessing teacher data. Let no good deed go unpunished.
Shoppers are worried that supply chain and delivery delays will create problems with holiday gifts this year, so some started shopping in early October.
Research by Oracle Retail shows that 52% of Americans are shopping earlier than usual this year. Of the respondents, 20% plan to order more gifts in case some are delayed or canceled, with that number jumping to 44% for Millennials. Others say that they'll take the easy way out and just buy gift cards. That applies to 58% of Baby Boomers.
Gift givers are worried they will be left holding an empty box as products may not be available or will take too long to arrive:
Consumers seem less concerned about the pandemic, with more shoppers opting to buy in-store this year:
The full report is available from the Oracle website.
Remember Iomega Drives? They were hot in 2001. I wrote "Those who need a lot of storage space should be watching two technologies. The first is Iomega's Peerless drives that currently offer 10 and 20GB capacity. These are fast removable drives that would seem to be ideal for video production and audio production. The next generation will offer 20 and 40GB versions. Iomega has been off the mark with some recent offerings, but Peerless looks good. They are magnetic storage drives that boast transfer rates up to 15 MB/sec (Firewire). The drives also support USB and SCSI so it'll work on just about any current computer."
There was a dark cloud in the future, though: "Rewritable DVDs are coming to market at reasonable prices. The drives are around $1000 and the media (each disk capable of holding about 4 and a half GB) will probably sell in the $20 price range at first. Watch for that to drop quickly, though. DVDs arenlt as fast as Iomega's Peerless and the drive costs about three times what Iomega charges, but those who need a lot of storage will find their overall costs a lot lower with DVD."
Iomega was acquired by EMC in 2008, and EMC was acquired by Lenovo in 2013. In 2018, Lenovo discontinued the LenovoEMC product line. Zip and Jaz drives are long gone, rewritable DVDs never really caught on, and a lot of storage and backup is now cloud based.