Aaron44126

Uh, errors in Device Manager are gross. So, I went and spent 20 minutes to learn how to put together a dummy/stub driver that replaces the NVIDIA High Definition Audio Controller device driver, doesn't cause an error, but also does absolutely nothing so it should not have a problem (I hope). It is literally just this. I signed it using the same method that I previously used to sign modified NVIDIA drivers, so Windows doesn't even complain about it. This INF can be modified (different device ID and class) to create a stub driver for any device.

In BIOS setup, wherever the BIOS update options are, there is an option for BIOS "capsule updates" that you can toggle on and off. Turn that off and Windows Update will not be able to update your BIOS. (You will still be able to update using the downloadable .exe from Dell's site.) The mechanism used is, if "capsule updates" are enabled then you will see a "Firmware" device in Device Manager. Microsoft ships an update to this "driver" and that will trigger the BIOS update whenever it loads. You can roll the "driver" back to an older version to stop this (and also take steps to prevent it from being updated again via Windows Update) ... but all of that is unnecessary if you just turn "capsule updates" off.

Yeah, the key thing here is that the behavior has changed without warning. You can try on Windows 10, and File->Exit will only close the current window. (This was also the case on Windows 11 until earlier this week when they pushed out this update.) Maybe I'm just old fashioned. One could go back and forth over which behavior is more appropriate, but that's not really what I care about. I think that behavioral changes to Windows components should not be disallowed, but they should be reserved for major revisions and the user should have some input as to when such a major update gets applied. That way, you know when to expect changes, and otherwise there is no chance for workflow disruption. Microsoft always used to stick with this, until pretty recently. Now, it's just fair game as to when they want to change pretty much anything, and users are just along for the ride... As a case in point, Rafael Rivera notes that he was using Alt+F,X instead of Alt+F4 just because it is less of a stretch on the keyboard, and it's basically muscle memory for him (having been the way Notepad has worked for ... 30 years?), and now he has to learn a new behavior (assuming Microsoft doesn't promptly restore the old behavior).

Did you add the "UpgradedSystem" registry entry (and then reboot) as described in the very first post in this thread? [Edit] Checked the specs of your system. It's a newer one. 11th gen and up (2021 systems and newer) don't support this fan control mechanism. I'm not aware of any software that can control the fans on these systems.

And I was referring to the power limit (≈100W), not the clock speed limit ...

How hard is it to tell a guy he can't use the Internet ..... SBF tries to revise bail conditions after judge noted suspicious VPN use https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/sbf-tries-to-revise-bail-conditions-after-judge-noted-suspicious-vpn-use/ I feel like prosecutors aren't trying to have is bail revoked mostly because he won't shut up and there's a pretty decent chance that some stuff he says now will come back to bite him when the trial happens.

Yeah, it's not just tabs that it tries to close though. It makes sense if you close a window then it will try to close all of the tabs. But what happens is, if you have multiple Notepad windows open (whole separate windows, not just separate tabs), File->Exit in one window will try to close all of them, and that could definitely be seen as weird, especially if you are used to separate Notepad windows being "unrelated" to each other. (You can open multiple Notepad windows just by firing up the app multiple times.) It will stop and ask about saving things if there are unsaved changes, but I can see a case of "Where did that window go ...?" happening if there were not unsaved changes. There must be a setting for this because this is not the behavior that I experience. If I try to close it and there are unsaved changes, I am prompted to ask about saving them. There are actually five options (Yes, No, Cancel, Yes to all, No to all) — and I can actually remember when they added those "Yes/No to all" options, I was very appreciative because before that I would have to go through several prompts answering "No, no, no, no" to get it to close. (I tend to do "scratch work" in Notepad++ and it's normal for me to have multiple tabs filled with junk that I do not want to save.) I know that I have turned off the session management function that causes it to reopen the same files that were open before when a new instance is started. I don't find that to be desirable behavior in most apps, I want a clean slate when I open it. Maybe that has something to do with it. [Edit] It looks like the option might be in Preferences, under Backup, "Remember current session for next launch" (disabled for me). There's also options in there about how often to "snapshot" the session and where to save the session backup files.

Yeah, the thing is (speaking as someone who has done some iOS dev work), there's no supported mechanism for a programmer to get at the messaging data on an iPhone or to send messages (other than the simple Bluetooth messaging interface), Apple has that locked down. Intel's solution also uses the Bluetooth messaging interface with the same limitations, and "third-party" iMessage solutions that I have seen rely on jailbreaking an iPhone/iPad or running messages through an actual Mac. Doing any better would require cooperation from Apple. Now, Microsoft may be able to strike some agreement with Apple allowing them to get to things in a way that no one else can. There is precedent for this; as an example, they did recently start offering iCloud Photos integration in the Windows 11 photos app, and that required collaboration between Microsoft and Apple to make happen. On the other hand, Apple has made statements in the past making it clear that they view iMessage as something that they want to keep locked down, as a way to keep people in the Apple ecosystem, so I don't know if they'd be willing to "partner" with Microsoft on that. (This was around considering whether to offer an iMessage app for Android.) They may be forced to cooperate soon, though, again looking at the new rules coming out of the EU digital markets act.

Ugh. So, starting yesterday, I was getting microstutters both when trying to watch fullscreen video and also in games. I could probably have rebooted to clear it up, but I like to know why when stuff like this happens, so I left it alone and this evening I dug into it. I noticed that the "System" process was running a high load (about 4% reported by Task Manager, but that's a full CPU core's worth). I dug in there with Process Explorer and saw that it was a "PoFxReportDevicePoweredOn" thread doing the bulk of the CPU work. ...Some device keeps powering off and on again? Further digging with xperf revealed the problem device to be VEN_10DE&DEV_2288&SUBSYS_000010DE — that is, the NVIDIA "High Definition Audio Controller". And sure enough, as soon as I disabled that in Device Manager, the problem immediately stopped. Everything is running silky smooth again. Not sure why the NVIDIA audio controller was even doing anything at all? Audio still works fine with the device disabled (through the Realtek audio controller). I'd presume that this is for routing audio to external displays, but I do not have any connected. The system is running with graphics switching / Optimus on and I do not even have the option set to attach external displays to the NVIDIA GPU. Everything goes through the iGPU. As far as I know, with this setup there is no way to engage the NVIDIA audio controller. Not sure who to blame (NVIDIA / Microsoft / Dell / combination). I'll probably just leave it disabled...

Information. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/02/28/previewing-phone-link-for-iphone-users-on-windows-11-with-windows-insiders/ There are some compromises compared to what you'd get by just using a Mac, or the phone directly. (Doesn't fetch message history, can't send images, can't reply to group messages, ...) I think that they're basically doing the best that they can with the limited Bluetooth messaging interface that Apple provides (that you'd use to, say, reply to incoming messages using the dictation system in your car). But if it works well for what it does do, that'll be something anyway.

The headline feature for moment 2 (the whole thing about AI-enhanced Bing search), as far as it relates to Windows itself, apparently boils down to: The update will add the search box back to the taskbar if you previously removed it. (I always remove it, it takes up space and you can search just by starting to type while the Start Menu is open.) If you try to search using the search box on the taskbar, it behaves the same as it did prior to the update. ...But if you click the search box and do not type anything, you will notice they've added a big button to "try the new Bing" and some prompts to engage with their AI chat thing — interacting with this just opens Edge and takes you to a Bing web site. (...They don't care about your default browser, you'll get Edge.) So, basically they've just added another advertisement for Bing (& Edge). https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-11-moment-2s-headline-feature-is-nothing-but-an-ad-for-bing-and-edge/ This, this is how you do an update. Override user preferences, and try to nudge people someplace where you can collect some ad revenue. 😕

Yesterday's "optional" Windows 11 22H2 moment 2 update breaks some Windows 11 customization tools (ExplorerPatcher, StartAllBack, Start11, etc.). An update to these products will be required. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-explorerpatcher-startallback-start11-break-on-windows-11-moment-2-kb5022913/ StartAllBack has posted an update already, and Start11 posted a "beta" update which you can find on their forums with a full release imminent. Interestingly, Microsoft has acknowledged this in their known issues page (so they must know there are people out there that dislike their feature removals around the taskbar and start menu, right??). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/status-windows-11-22H2#third-party-ui-customization-apps-might-cause-windows-to-not-start-up And on the subject of "this should have been tested more before shipping" (common theme with Windows 11), the new tabbed Notepad shipped with a regression that could be obnoxious to some. If you try to close just one Notepad window with File->Exit (or the Alt+F, X keyboard sequence), it will try to close all of them. Maybe you could argue that this is appropriate behavior — you asked to "Exit" Notepad so it should close out everything. But, it is a difference from how it behaved before, and behavioral changes to core apps like that shouldn't be made willy-nilly. https://twitter.com/WithinRafael/status/1630691488635166720

It's definitely there in the F12 boot selection menu. Look off to the right (not in the main list on the left). (Repeatedly tap the F12 button when the Dell logo is displayed to get it to go to the boot selection menu.)

You need to take Dell's Intel RST executable to another PC, run it, and choose the option to extract the files. In the pile of files that comes out, you should be able to drill down and find a folder named "f6flpy" or similar, and inside there, a folder with a small number of files including a .inf file and some .sys files. This is the RAID driver. Copy these files to a flash drive and point the Windows installer to them when you get to the "load driver" part of drive selection. If you haven't made your RAID array yet, you want to do that before you try to install Windows. At the Dell startup screen, hit F12, and from the boot selection menu, there is an oddly named option (something generic like "device configuration") that will get you to the RAID setup screen.

The command prompt features are available on Windows 10 but you have to download the separate "Terminal" app from the Windows Store. (It's provided by Microsoft.) It's a slick app and highly configurable. I easily added a Ubuntu Linux WSL shell option to the menu to go along with the default "cmd" and "PowerShell" options, customizing the color to have a dark purple background (like "real" Ubuntu). Microsoft has bundled it with Windows 11 and made it the default console. Notepad has not been updated on Windows 10 (as you noticed). However, Notepad is sort of a last-resort text editor for me. I generally fire up Notepad++ (free) if I'm not using a dedicated code editor like Visual Studio; UltraEdit is also nice (not free).

Apparently, I am behind on leaks. RTX 2000, 3000, 3500, 4000, and 5000 Ada mobile GPUs are all listed on TechPowerUp. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-2000-mobile-ada-generation.c4093 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-3000-mobile-ada-generation.c4095 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-3500-mobile-ada-generation.c4098 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-4000-mobile-ada-generation.c4096 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/rtx-5000-mobile-ada-generation.c4097 RTX 2000 Ada ≈ GeForce 4050 mobile (but with more vRAM) RTX 3000 Ada ≈ GeForce 4070 mobile RTX 3500 Ada slots in between 4070 and 4080 mobile RTX 4000 Ada ≈ GeForce 4080 mobile RTX 5000 Ada ≈ GeForce 4090 mobile (Disclosure: It has happened before that TechPowerUp posts leaked GPU specs that turn out to be wrong... but they're usually right.) RTX 5000 Ada has an AD103 chip, the same as the one used in a desktop GeForce RTX 4080 GPU. It has 9728 CUDA cores, which is about 19% more than RTX A5000 (Ampere). Of course, with the "low" power limit of a laptop GPU, the high CUDA core count matters less. Based on what we are seeing with the consumer/GeForce GPUs, I think that a 20-30% GPU performance boost from Ampere would be a reasonable expectation. The boost will mostly come from the node shrink causing each CUDA core to need less power. The node shrink is from "8nm" (Ampere) to "4nm" (Ada), but those numbers have no basis in reality at this point, I doubt that they have cut anything's size in half. (The days of a 80%+ performance boost from one GPU generation to the next might be gone forever.) AD103 supports up to 10240 CUDA cores, but there are no GPUs shipping with that configuration. That does mean that there is potential for a mid-generation refresh (in 2024 Precision systems), but it wouldn't be tremendously significant. I also doubt that we'll see them try to cram an AD102 chip into a laptop.

NVIDIA's product naming is all messed up... RTX 5000 Ada should correspond with GeForce RTX 4090 mobile, I do rather doubt that they will try to cram that into an XPS chassis. Found this seemingly orderable Precision 7780. No idea if this page is legit, but it has reasonable specs listed. Photos look exactly like Precision 7770 (which I would expect for this generation). https://premiumstation.pl/product/Laptop-Dell-Precision-7780-FullHD-i5-13600HX-32-GB-1-TB-SSD-RTX-2000-Ada-IRcamFHD-Win11Pro-3-lata-gwarancji/6316 [Edit] More configurations. https://premiumstation.pl/search/laptopy-dell-precision-7780 They have listed these GPUs: RTX A1000 (presumably Ampere) – 6 GB RTX 2000 Ada – 8 GB RTX 3500 Ada – 12 GB ...If that's right, NVIDIA's product stack might even be more messed up than I thought. 😛 They aren't just going to go 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 like normal? Does 3500 mean there is no 3000 or 4000? Also Precision 7680 (same story). https://premiumstation.pl/search/laptopy-dell-precision-7680

Same here, 500 Server Error after logging in. (Maybe they learned from last year.) Though continuing the story of "What's going on with Precision 5000 series?".... 3000 and 7000 series spec sheets seem to exist as you noted (500 error), 5000 series spec sheets do not (404 error).

I wish they had the physical dock port still. I think it's a space-saving thing more than anything else — once the technology to move the extra "dock ports" off of the motherboard and into an external box matured enough, they no longer saw a reason to use board/surface space for that giant dock port. (My experience has been that the newer docks have a lot more flaky behaviors than the old ones, which basically didn't have much inside in the way of electronics and were just hookups to ports hosted by the mainbord itself).

Not a Precision announcement, but sort of related, since Precision 5000 and the XPS line tightly connected. Dell XPS 15 and XPS 17 models with Intel 13th-gen CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000-series GPUs will launch on March 2. No changes to speak of other than the spec boost. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23602572/dell-xps-15-17-laptop-intel-nvidia-launch-announcement

NVIDIA has launched the 530 driver branch today for "enterprise" GPUs. https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/199989/en-us/ There is also a corresponding GeForce release (but no Studio driver release yet). https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/199991/en-us/ A new feature is NVIDIA RTX "Video Super Resolution", available on Chromium-based browsers with Ampere GPUs or better (and will presumably be available in other browsers & apps later on...?). They will do AI upscaling to maybe do a better job cleaning up low-resolution video for high-resolution displays than the standard scaling algorithm does.

From Microsoft today, we have some news on the next feature updates coming to Windows 11 (available today on-demand, or will be rolled out to everyone on March 14 with the security update). https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/continuous-innovation-coming-to-windows-11-in-march/ba-p/3754057 Without sacrificing quality? Right... Windows 11 quality continues to be suspect for me. Apparently you haven't been able to sleep a Windows 11 system with a game controller connected until this month. Regarding pushing forward without testing carefully enough, they were recently offering Windows 11 upgrades to Windows 10 systems that don't even meet the hardware requirements for Windows 11. Anyway, this feature drip without regular (non-business) end users really having a way to control when changes are pushed upon them also continues to be an issue. (Maybe I have concerns about the AI-enhanced Bing search taskbar widget that is being added...) Not that I expect this to ever change... So, here are some more details about the update. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/02/28/introducing-a-big-update-to-windows-11-making-the-everyday-easier-including-bringing-the-new-ai-powered-bing-to-the-taskbar/ OK, there's some appreciable stuff in here. Screen recording in the Snipping Tool is cool (I've always wondered why Windows doesn't have a built-in screen recording function), as well as tabs for Notepad. Better iOS support for the phone link app is welcome as well, for iPhone users anyway, but apparently that is not going to be production-ready and will be available for Insiders only for now. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/02/28/previewing-phone-link-for-iphone-users-on-windows-11-with-windows-insiders/ Looking forward to trying it all out ..... in another ≈21 months when there is a long-term support version.

On the topic. There are announcements today about new features coming to Windows 11 in March. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/02/28/introducing-a-big-update-to-windows-11-making-the-everyday-easier-including-bringing-the-new-ai-powered-bing-to-the-taskbar/ One that caught my eye is "Introducing Phone Link for iOS in preview". Apparently, Microsoft is (finally) adding their own iOS integration and it includes messaging support. Wonder if it'll work better than Intel's.... (Glad to see progress in this area, but I'm still not likely to upgrade to Windows 11 until towards the end of next year, at the earliest. Maybe I'll give this a try in a VM after the update is out.) [Edit] There's another article specifically about this. Looks like it might be available to "Insiders" only for now? Kind of misleading since most of Panay's post was about features included with the March 14 production update to Windows 11. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/02/28/previewing-phone-link-for-iphone-users-on-windows-11-with-windows-insiders/

That's one way to get off of Windows. I have given it deep consideration. I use other Apple products (iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV, etc.) and I'm aware of how slick the interaction between devices in the ecosystem can be. I'm also quite familiar with macOS (I was system admin for many years for a school that used Macs in labs and for faculty/staff systems). And, it would be easier to transition my "workload" to macOS than to Linux, just because of the applications available. I even have a Mac Mini that exists to allow me to build iOS apps (but mostly I use it to do iMessage from my Windows PC via a VNC connection). I also applaud Apple for having the best rating for "treating end user privacy as more important than a higher profit margin" among the big tech companies (though they are not perfect in that regard). ...But... Man do I dislike the keyboard layout on their laptops. Give me a numeric keypad, home/end and PgUp/PgDn keys please...... It's not a great platform for gaming; the library for native games is pretty limited, and I wouldn't look forward to have to fight to get whatever Windows game that I want to play working through VMware Fusion / Crossover / etc. Apple does what Apple does — no guarantee that an app will still work when the yearly OS upgrade comes around, in particular if it is an older app (or game) that is no longer maintained, and it relies on something that Apple has deprecated or targets an older architecture. (Apple has consistently offered a backwards compatibility solution when they switch platforms, and that is in place with "Rosetta 2" allowing Intel x64 macOS applications to run right now. They have also consistently removed their backwards compatibility solutions after a period of time has passed, and I expect that will happen with "Rosetta 2" in due time.) Microsoft and Linux both have a much stronger commitment to backwards compatibility.

Hoping the EU actually makes good on this, we could see some additional options for third-party iMessage integration in the next year or so... https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/29/23001295/eu-law-digital-markets-act-message-interoperability-whatsapp-imessage https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/25/apple-forced-to-allow-third-party-app-stores/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act