Category Archives: Windows 10

In keeping with its traditionally senseless naming conventions, Microsoft decides to skip Windows 9 and call its next O/S Windows 10.

Bug causes clock problems on Windows 10, 11, Windows Server

A recently-discovered bug in newer versions of Windows is causing bizarre local time shifts.

Keeping accurate time on computers is important for a lot of reasons, many of which are not obvious to non-technical users. Update schedules, scheduled background tasks, synchronization with server and cloud resources, and many other time-sensitive processes depend on your PC maintaining accurate time.

Because it’s so important, and because various factors can sometimes cause a PC’s clock to drift, operating systems use a variety of methods to check and adjust it. The most obvious of these in Windows can be seen in Windows 10 and 11 in Settings > Time & Language. Windows regularly compares the PC’s clock with an Internet-based clock, such as time.windows.com. When a discrepancy is observed, the PC’s clock is updated.

Between a PC’s internal clock and Windows’ time synchronization, most Windows-based computers are able to maintain accurate time.

But at some point, someone at Microsoft decided that Windows needed additional time checks. So they created something called Secure Time Seeding. This function regularly analyzes secure network traffic from a ‘known good’ host computer, and calculates the current time based on what it sees.

Sounds good, right? Anything that makes the clock more accurate is good, right? Well, no. There’s at least one major problem with Secure Time Seeding, which causes it to get confused about the date and time, and can set your computer’s time based on random values. This has been observed to incorrectly change the Windows clock by minutes, hours, days, or more. As you can imagine, this causes all manner of strange problems.

Microsoft’s response to the report of this bug has been disappointing: they are downplaying its scope and effects. And while it’s true that there are very few reports of this happening, the problems it can cause are bad enough that anyone running Windows 10 and up or Windows Server 2016 and up should disable Secure Time Seeding.

To disable Secure Time Seeding on a Windows 10 or 11 PC, follow the instructions provided by Microsoft.

Trying to make sense of the actions and statements of a corporate behemoth like Microsoft is an exercise in futility. It’s possible that they will realize that this bug is actually very bad, and fix it, or they may find a way to limit its effects, or they may change the feature so that it’s disabled by default. But in the meantime, there are potentially millions of computers out there that might start exhibiting strange clock problems for the forseeable future.

Cortana

Some technologies seem always to be just around the corner. Every few years, people get excited all over again, about 3D media, virtual reality, voice assistants, hoverboards, self-driving cars, flying cars, artificial intelligence, and other things that always turn out to be more hype than anything else.

I started writing the post below about Cortana way back in 2015, but never published it. I can’t even remember why it never got published, but presumably I just lost interest, and figured everyone else would as well.

For a while there, my main interest in Cortana was the ways in which it was making work difficult for IT staff. My favourite example of that is shown in this video of someone prepping a room full of new computers with Windows 10.

Now, all the excitement about Cortana, along with Amazon’s Alexa, has almost completely disappeared. Cortana is still around in recent versions of Windows, but much of its functionality has been stripped away (and now it’s gone). Alexa is being similarly sidelined, and increasingly viewed as a failure.

Why are voice control tools like Cortana and Alexa failing?

  1. Talking to your computer is amusing for a while, but once the novelty wears off, one can’t help noticing that it’s just as easy (and in many cases much easier) to use your mouse and keyboard.
  2. Privacy issues. Computers are really good at making our lives easier. And that’s good. But some technologies, to be truly useful, need to know about us — a lot about us. The most obvious example is Internet advertising: unless you’re blocking ads and related scripts and cookies in your web browser, the ads you see are based on what advertising networks know — or think they know — about you. And that’s just one example. A lot of what makes modern computers useful is based on this tradeoff between privacy and convenience. Computer ‘assistants’ like Cortana and Alexa rely on what they learn about you to improve their effectiveness. And of course they’re always listening.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote back in 2015:

Cortana limitations

Having a computer you can talk to is one of those things that most of us associate with science fiction. Cortana is Microsoft’s attempt to make that fantasy real. The extent to which they have succeeded depends on your point of view. There are loads of examples of cool things Cortana can do in response to your questions and commands, but they still feel very limited to me. Not to put too fine a point on it, there are some things Cortana is good at, and others it is not. If your idea of talking to your computer is to find out the weather, the time, and stock prices, or set up appointments in your calendar, you might find Cortana quite useful. To my way of thinking, unless I can debate philosophy or sports with a computer, I’m not really interested in talking to it.

That said, there are plenty of examples of useful ways to use Cortana (find some). (Editor’s note: I never found any, although admittedly I didn’t look very hard. I assumed if someone found a killer app for Cortana, I’d hear about it.)

Cortana is also region-dependent and may not be available in your country. If that’s the case, and you happen to be an English speaker (which I can assume given that you’re reading this), you can make Cortana work by configuring the Windows region settings to the US. I’m in Canada, and I’ve been using the US English Cortana for a while, and it works fine. The main difference between the versions is the speech recognition database, so the Canadian version is going to be pretty much identical to the US version. There may be other small difference as well, such as units of measurement. If you do decide to tweak the region settings to use the US Cortana, keep in mind that this will affect other apps as well. For instance, your web browser may tell search engines that you’re in the US, and your search results may be regionally skewed as a result. Still, most apps are more likely to use your location than your computer’s region configuration when doing their thing.

There are other problems. In my tests, the ‘Hey, Cortana’ feature worked for a few days, then stopped responding. Disabling and re-enabling the feature didn’t help.

Cortana is a fun feature, and it’s likely that many of the current issues will be resolved in the near future. It’s worth looking at, and anyone with Windows 10 should probably try it, but it’s not something that should figure prominently in deciding whether to use Windows 10 at all.

EdgeDeflector prevents Windows 10 from using Edge

The battle for web browser dominance on the Windows desktop continues, although Google is currently winning. “Google recommends using Chrome” messages seem to appear on every Google-managed web page even if you’re already using Chrome. But while annoying, those messages are arguably reasonable compared with some of Microsoft’s recent tactics.

Microsoft likes to reset certain settings back to their defaults when Windows updates are installed. They’ve been doing this for years, reverting user browser preference to Internet Explorer at every opportunity.

As a result, power users and software developers have been engaged in a tug of war with Microsoft over the default web browser in Windows. In recent years, Microsoft has made it impossible for the default browser to be changed by software, forcing browser makers to instead provide instructions to users on how to make that change. Microsoft can of course claim that this change was made to improve security, and given the prevalance of browser hijackers in past years, it’s difficult to disagree.

With Edge in Windows 10, Microsoft has taken this battle to new extremes. Even if you have another browser selected as the default, some sites and services will always be opened in Edge. To see this in action, click on the taskbar search box. A large panel will open, showing news and weather links. Anything you click here will open in Edge, not in your default browser.

That’s because internally, Windows is using a special protocol called URL:microsoft-edge, which forces the use of Edge for opening web pages that Microsoft has designated as special in some way, despite being ordinary web pages in every sense.

This is of course exactly the sort of behaviour that got Microsoft in trouble in the 1990s: using their dominance in the desktop O/S market to push their own web browser. But these days everyone’s attention seems to be on Google and Facebook, and Microsoft’s browser pushback is being largely ignored.

EdgeDeflector to the rescue

Daniel Aleksandersen’s EdgeDeflector is a small tool that overrides the URL:microsoft-edge protocol’s normal behaviour, forcing it to actually use the web browser you’ve chosen as the default. EdgeDeflector was recently updated to make it more palatable to anti-malware software, which previously flagged the tool as suspicious because of its behaviour.

You’ll have to change this Windows 10 setting manually to make EdgeDeflector work.

Once you install EdgeDeflector, you need to complete its setup with some manual steps. I can confirm that the end result is exactly as advertised: even when clicking news links from the Windows 10 search panel, those links will open in your default browser, not in Edge.

Of course, Microsoft will probably take steps to defeat this useful tool, with the most obvious step being to revert the changes EdgeDeflector has made when Windows 10 is next updated. And so there are no winners in this stupid, never-ending battle.

Patch Tuesday for October 2020

It’s time for another round of updates for your Windows computers. Earlier today Microsoft published fifty-eight bulletins, with associated updates, addressing eighty vulnerabilities in Flash, .NET, Office (2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019), SharePoint, Visual Studio, and Windows (7, 8.1, 10, and Server). Ten of the vulnerabilities are flagged as having Critical severity.

Get the full details directly from the source: Microsoft’s Security Update Guide.

Interestingly, there are no updates for any version of Internet Explorer this time around. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.

What you need to do

Windows 10

Unless you’re running one of the more recent major releases of Windows 10, and you’ve configured it to delay updates, you’re going to get the new updates within the next day or so.

If your version of Windows 10 has settings that allow you to delay updates, I strongly recommend that you use them. Given Microsoft’s recent track record with updates, which includes rushing out fixes for a sadly long series of problematic updates, it seems like the smart choice.

Windows 8.1

It’s been a while since Microsoft broke Windows 8.1 with a bad update, but if you’re at all wary about these things (as am I), you should make sure Windows Update is not configured to install updates automatically, then wait a few days before installing them manually with Windows Update.

The more adventurous among you may choose to install the new updates right away via Windows Update, or even (shudder) configure Windows Update to do it all automatically.

Windows 7

If the organization you work for has paid for extended updates, your Windows 7 computer will get any applicable updates, but your IT folks probably do that for you anyway.

The rest of the world’s Windows 7 users can only wonder how much less secure their computers are without the new updates.

Patch Tuesday for July 2020

Another month, another load of patches from Microsoft.

This month we have seventy-one bulletins and corresponding updates. One hundred and twenty-six vulnerabilities are addressed in all, affecting .NET, Internet Explorer 9 and 11, Edge, Office, SharePoint, Visual Studio, OneDrive, Skype, Windows, and Windows Defender. Nineteen of the vulnerabilities are flagged as having Critical severity.

As usual, you can find all the details in Microsoft’s Security Update Guide.

Those of you running Windows 10 know the drill: depending on which version of Windows 10 you’re running, you can delay installation of updates for a while, but not indefinitely. On Windows 8.1 computers, Windows Update is still the best way to install updates. Windows 7 users don’t have an official way to obtain updates for that O/S, despite the fact that Microsoft continues to develop them.

Update 2020Jul17: Again with this crap, Microsoft? One of the updates from this batch caused Outlook 2016 to crash on starting for users worldwide. This affected one of my clients, and affected critical business operations. A fix posted by someone other than Microsoft allowed Outlook to run, but killed the ability to print. Linux never looked so good.

You will now use Microsoft Edge!

On a related note, you may have noticed that Microsoft is pushing its new Chromium-based Edge browser to all Windows computers. This is happening not only on Windows 10 computers, but also those running Windows 8.1 and even 7. The new Edge cannot be removed in the usual way once it’s installed. This is causing consternation for many users, as Edge seems to take over once installed, forcing the user to make certain choices before the desktop can even be accessed. Isn’t this the kind of behaviour that got Microsoft in trouble in the 1990s?

The Verge has additional details. In case you were thinking about switching to Edge, you should be aware that a recent study by Yandex ranked Edge last in terms of privacy.

Windows 10 update problems continue

With Windows 10, Microsoft shifted a lot of their testing to users, through the Windows Insider program. Anyone can join the Insider program, and what you get is early access to new versions of Windows 10.

In return, you are expected to provide feedback to Microsoft when you encounter problems, primarily via the Windows 10 Feedback Hub app. I’ve used the Feedback Hub, and Microsoft does indeed seem to look at — and act on — user feedback.

While I do appreciate having the option of contributing to the quality of Windows 10, it seems clear that relying on users for testing is woefully inadequate, and hardly a substitute for systematic, formal software testing. Each new set of Windows 10 updates, and especially new versions, seem to cause more problems than they solve.

Windows 10 version 2004, released on May 27, is no exception. Microsoft has identified at least ten separate problems with the new version, mostly related to device drivers. Users unlucky enough to have the affected devices are reporting application crashes and good old Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). In some cases the new version renders affected computers unusable.

At least updates can now be delayed. Earlier versions of Windows 10 forced new updates on all computers. Without the ability to to put off updates, these unwanted and problematic changes would cause worldwide carnage at least every Patch Tuesday.

Hey, Microsoft. Thanks for giving us the option to help out with Windows testing. But please go back to doing more formal testing. Nobody needs these headaches. We’ve got enough problems without you piling on.

Update 2020Jun02: Microsoft has put a ‘compatibility hold’ on the recent problematic updates. If Microsoft decides that your device may have problems with an update, it won’t get installed until the hold is released. Of course that doesn’t help people who installed those updates before they were held.

Microsoft news: the good, the bad, and the spiteful

The Good

Windows 7 support ended earlier this month, and with it any hope of fixing newly-discovered security vulnerabilities. Or did it? Microsoft recently discovered a problem with an update, released in Novemeber 2019, that is causing problems with desktop wallpaper on Windows 7 computers. This isn’t a security issue, but it probably affects thousands of users, and Microsoft has now released a special update that fixes the wallpaper problem. You can get the update via Windows Update on Windows 7 computers.

The Bad

Microsoft’s plans for expanding advertising in Windows 10 continue, albeit very slowly. The latest change is in Windows 10’s default rich text editor, Wordpad. When you run Wordpad, you’ll see an advertisement for Microsoft Office. It’s not much, and many users will never see it, but I’m reminded of the proverbial frog in steadily-warming water.

The Spiteful

Microsoft’s shenanigans with Google show no signs of slowing down. Both companies have engaged in questionable behaviour in trying to promote their software and services. The latest shot from Microsoft is particularly annoying: when Office 365 updates itself — a process that is both frequent and difficult to control — it will look for an installation of Google’s Chrome web browser, and change its default search engine to Bing.

Microsoft has a history of inappropriately reverting settings during updates, which is annoying enough, but this is excessive and downright spiteful, in my opinion. Microsoft, please play out your differences with Google in a way that doesn’t annoy millions of users.

Update 2020Feb11: Microsoft relented, and won’t be switching Windows 10 searches to use Bing during Office 365 updates. I guess they realized that they didn’t need yet another public relations disaster.

MORE Windows 10 update problems

Today’s nightmare is brought to you by Microsoft

An open letter to Microsoft:

Dear Microsoft –

Please either allow us to disable Windows 10 updates, or stop pushing out updates that break millions of computers worldwide every few weeks.

Sincerely,
Almost a billion Windows 10 users

The problems with Windows 10 updates are getting worse, not better. The last major feature update (1903) had major issues at release, and more seem to be turning up with each new set of “quality” updates. Those quotes around the word ‘quality’ are very intentional, by the way.

I’ve just spent most of a day troubleshooting and fixing a heinous set of problems related to printing, affecting most of the computers at a retail client. Printing is a critical function for this client, as it is for most businesses.

What follows is the sequence of events leading up to the printing problem, and what finally fixed it.

All of the computers are running 64-bit Windows Professional release 1903 (build 18362.356).

SUMMARY: Update 4522016, which apparently caused these printing problems on some computers, was never installed on any of the affected PCs at this business. Update 4524147 caused the printing problems it was supposed to fix. Uninstalling update 4524147 fixed the printing problems on three otherwise up-to-date Windows 10 PCs.

  1. 2019Oct03: Update 4524147 was installed automatically on all affected PCs. This happened overnight, which is normal for these PCs.
  2. 2019Oct04: The client reported printing problems on several PCs.
  3. 2019Oct04: The usual troubleshooting for printing issues was ineffective. Research eventually showed that a recent Windows update (4522016) was causing printing problems for many users. But that update was never installed on any of the affected PCs.
  4. 2019Oct04: Since printing was working fine before 4524147 was installed, I uninstalled that update, and printing started working again. Repeating this on all affected computers resolved all the printing problems.
  5. 2019Oct05: On trying to log into one of the recently-fixed PCs, Windows 10 told me that the Start menu was broken. Research showed that update 4524147 was causing this problem (the second time an update broke the Start menu in recent weeks). I checked, and sure enough, 4524147 had been reinstalled automatically overnight. Uninstalling it fixed the Start menu.
  6. 2019Oct05: To delay recurrence of the printing problem, I used the Advanced settings on the Windows Update screen to delay updates as long as possible. On most of the PCs, I was able to delay updates for between 30 and 365 days. On one PC, these settings were inexplicably missing. I eventually had to use the Local Group Policy Editor to make the necessary changes.
  7. 2019Oct04: I reported this bizarre situation to Microsoft via its Windows 10 Feedback hub. It’s difficult to know whether anyone at Microsoft will actually see this, or take it seriously. I have doubts, which means that this problem seems likely to reappear at some point.

As predicted

This is in fact the nightmare scenario envisioned by myself and others when it became clear that Windows 10 updates would not be optional. While Microsoft has — grudgingly — made it possible to delay updates, it’s still not possible to avoid them completely, and if you’re one of the unlucky Windows 10 Home users, even that’s not an option.

Questions for Microsoft

Why did an update intended to fix printing problems actually cause those exact problems?

Why are some of the advanced Windows Update settings missing from one of several identically-configured Windows 10 PCs running the same build?

Why are you inflicting this garbage on us? Do you hate us?

WHY DON’T YOU LET US TURN OFF UPDATES? This is the simplest solution, and while I understand that you want Windows 10 installs to be secure (and that means installing fixes for security vulnerabilities), until you can produce updates that don’t cause massive problems, we don’t want them.

Related links

Update 2019Oct10: Apparently update 4517389, released on October 8 along with the rest of October’s updates, addresses this problem.

Microsoft relents; cedes more Windows 10 update control to users

Microsoft is finally waking up to what we’ve all been saying since before Windows 10 was released: forcing operating system updates on users is not a good idea. Amusingly, they are presenting their findings and announcing related changes as if these things were previously unknown to the world of computing.

Microsoft refers to the process of installing Windows updates as an ‘experience’, and uses adjectives like ‘great’ when describing what they want the experience to be like for users. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought about installing updates as a ‘great experience’. Nightmarish, never-ending, endurable, and dreaded are more familiar ways to describe my update experiences. The word I’d most like to use in connection with updates is ‘uneventful’.

Note: phrases like ‘great update experience’ were no doubt vetted by some Microsoft committee. Microsoft writers are presumably encouraged to use these phrases — and avoid negative terminology — when discussing Windows updates.

Microsoft still seems unable to understand what people actually want to ‘experience’ from a Windows update:

  1. We don’t want updates at all, really. We want software to not be full of security holes in the first place. But that’s a fantasy, and will never happen (sigh).
  2. We want updates to not cause problems. Ever.
  3. Updates should install quickly, and with minimal fuss. Giant downloads, massive storage requirements, lengthy update durations, and high CPU usage are unacceptable.
  4. It should be possible to easily, quickly, and effectively revert updates.
  5. Automatic updates are a nice option, but only if we have full control over when they occur.

Upcoming Windows Update changes

  • Download and install now option: a new option on the Windows Update page that installs ‘feature updates’, which provide new or improved functionality. Using this option effectively updates Windows 10 to the latest version in terms of features, without installing any bug or security fixes. According to Microsoft, it’s a way to get the latest features without installing anything potentially risky.
  • Extended ability to pause updates. This further extends your ability to delay installation of updates, although it’s still limited: you can delay an update up to 35 days (seven days at a time, up to five times). This one is important for Windows 10 Home users, because the feature was previously unavailable on that version.
  • Intelligent active hours. The ‘active hours’ setting, which was added in the Anniversary Update, allows you to specify a window of time during which updates should never occur. This will now adjust itself automatically, based on when it thinks the computer is actually being used. This sounds good, but in practise, it may cause more problems than it solves. We’ll see.
  • Improved update orchestration. This new feature will detect device usage, and attempt to install updates when utilization is low, such as when there is no user activity.

For additional details on the upcoming changes, see Microsoft’s recent Windows blog post, titled “Improving the Windows 10 update experience with control, quality and transparency“.

Other Windows Update changes are being tested and may appear in upcoming releases of Windows 10, such as the ability to automatically roll back a problematic update.

These are all welcome changes, but I’m hoping Microsoft goes even further. If the Windows 10 update process improves enough, I may even consider installing it again. For now, there are still too many problems, such as Windows Update’s excessive use of disk space.

At least Microsoft is listening to the complaints about update dialogs popping up over important presentations, and worse. And they’re being surprisingly transparent during this current round of Windows improvements. Several recent Windows update problems (like this one in March and the known issues with this April update and this one) were probably the main impetus behind the changes, though.

Update 2019Jun03: The May update has arrived, and Windows 10 Home users are not impressed with the minor improvements to Windows Update.

Microsoft resumes rollout of Windows 10 October Update

Last month, after users reported file deletion issues, Microsoft took the Windows 10 October Update offline. Yesterday, the (now fixed) update was again made available. Microsoft has slowed their rollout this time, and for now, you can only get the update by manually checking for updates in Windows Update. If there are no new problems, Microsoft will gradually push the update out to all Windows 10 computers over the coming weeks.

In the month since the October update was pulled, Microsoft did a lot of soul-searching (aka process review), and the results of that work, detailed in a November 13 blog post, make for interesting reading. Here are the highlights:

  • Microsoft is trying to be more transparent about how it tests new versions of Windows before they are released. This is a good thing.
  • Adequate testing is difficult because there are so many possible combinations of hardware and software being used on Windows 10.
  • Base functional testing is the responsibility of the development teams. Presumably dedicated testing staff did this previously.
  • Data and user feedback are being used to gauge quality.
  • According to Microsoft, October update issues aside, overall quality and user satisfaction are increasing with each new Windows 10 update.
  • Employees working on Windows 10 have to ‘eat their own dog food’, meaning that they are required to use Windows 10 themselves.
  • As many as 15,000 new device drivers are added to Windows each month.
  • “The first principle of a feature update rollout is to only update devices that our data shows will have a good experience.” I find this wording amusing: in this case a ‘good experience’ means one where you’re less likely to throw yourself off a building after trying to update your O/S.

Update 2018Dec19: “Rollout Status as of December 17, 2018: Windows 10, version 1809, is now fully available for advanced users who manually select “Check for updates” via Windows Update.” See Windows 10 Update History.