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When Backupper is creating a bootable USB drive, from where is it getting a copy of WinPE?

Does it ensure that the WinPE closely matches the version of Windows it’s backing up?

Does the restore work if the backup drive is encrypted with Bitlocker, and is the restored drive still encrypted?

And finally, what does it use if you don’t check that box to download WinPE?

Please remember that by default, you have only 10 days to revert Windows 11 back to Windows 10. You can extend this time period using registry edits mentioned by Susan Bradley.

However – reverting to Windows 10 after an extended period (>10 days) may not work and may result in an unbootable system. This occurred on a Lenovo Thinkpad T470 which I upgraded to Windows 11 for testing using a registry edit to bypass the TPM2.0 check. When I had to put it into production 40 days later after 1 cycle of monthly updates, reverting to Win10 appeared to go well until I rebooted to a blue screen. I didn’t have time to figure out what went wrong, so I booted into recovery mode and did a Reset, which removed all the programs but kept all the data.

Does DeviceRescue show all non-present devices without setting an environment variable (DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1) that Device Manager requires?

Yay for MS Expression Web 4! One of the better products to come out of MS, and it was free, IIRC. It was extremely helpful 20 years ago when we were changing over from faxed forms to emailed forms (PO’s, SO’s, invoices). Created WYSIWYG content that yielded compact HTML code which was readable in most email programs. Not to mention easy to use.

Logitech has said their usb receivers should be plugged into usb 2.0 ports because usb 3.0 can cause interference with the 2.4ghz signal. I’ve seen this happen myself when I plugged a tranceiver directly into one of the 3.2 ports on the back of the motherboard. Using a USB extension cord, hub, or ports not directly on the motherboard also alleviates this interference problem.

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Ed Tittel, Steve79, SupremeLaW

You are correct. The Office license is per device, not per user.

I think it would be instructive to expand the article graphic to include the Windows 7 timeline above the Windows 10 timeline. We could see just how close to Win7 EOL people waited before switching over to Win10, having deliberately skipped over Win8/8.1.

Windows 11 has similarities to Windows 8/8.1 in that no one really wants to migrate to it until certain UI shortcomings are addressed and fixed. For me, the underlying Windows 11 o/s is a great improvement, but not to the extent that I want to give up my years of familiarity with the Win7/10 UI. And I’m well-aware of workarounds such as Start11, but we shouldn’t have to settle for those non-MS fixes.

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KevSpa, Charlie, Will Fastie

Intel RST initializes a new RAID 1 by clearing the contents of both drives to ensure that both drives are mirrors of each other. If you’re using new drives and are certain that both drives are blank, you can leave the Initialize box unchecked and the RAID 1 will be instantly created.

Intel RST also allows you to convert a non-RAID disk into a RAID 1 by adding a similar or larger disk and letting it sync in the background for those 4 to 8 hours.

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Will Fastie

Over the Labor Day 2022 weekend, People’s United Bank merged with M&T Bank.

Despite months of planning, things did not go well. They were, in fact, disastrous, with many customers completely locked out of their accounts for a week or longer.

Personally, I forgot to finish downloading 7 years of bank statements, and they’re no longer freely accessible to me thru M&T. (I could pay a small fortune to have them manually recovered.)

URL syntax allows the following:

https://username:password@www.domain.com

I’ve used this myself for easy link or bookmark access to FTP servers:

ftp://username:password@ftp.domain.com

The username and password are transmitted as plaintext, and is a potential security problem, but it’s just a formality for most ftp sites to prohibit casual file access and google scanning. In addition, that access is usually always read-only for all directories except /tmp .

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rc primak

If Bing AI is bypassing bing.com for search results, what implications does this have for companies that pay for Bing.com advertising and promotion, their version of Google Ads?

Re: Opting in to the Canary channel

If you are currently in the Dev channel, you are automatically opted in to the Canary channel, like it or not, because you’re already on release 25000 or higher. Leaving or setting the Windows Insider level at Dev means that you’ll remain at whatever 25xxx level you’re currently on, because you can never revert to a lower level insider build.

You must do a fresh, clean install of Windows 11 and opt-in to the Windows Insider program again at the Dev level, which is now using the release 23000 series.

If, like me, you boot SATA disks for testing and your production OS is on an M.2 NVMe drive, you must physically remove the M.2 drive during the clean install on the SATA disk to ensure that the SATA disk can stand alone with its own system/boot partition. (On virtually all motherboards, it’s impossible to disable an NVMe drive in the BIOS, and you’ll end up with a dual boot configuration in the NVMe’s system partition.)

Bluestacks 5 (free from http://www.bluestacks.com) emulates an Android smartphone on Windows 10 or 11 and can run most Play Store apps.

I’m unclear as to when to apply the

DISM /Online /Set-OSUninstallWindow /Value:60

command. Should it be done before updating to Win11, or after the update but before the default 10-day uninstall window expires? On my current Win10 22H2 system, I do get the Error 1138 when I attempt to apply it.

I agree on disabling “Fast Startup” on all my Win10 & Win11 pc’s. The few seconds you save during bootup are inconsequential compared to the disaster awaiting your disk storage if you boot from another o/s on the same system or have to move that disk to a different system. At least Windows now respects and maintains your Fast Startup choice during release upgrades.

Remember that, with Fast Startup enabled, system shutdown and then restarting the system is not the same as using Restart, which bypasses Fast Startup.

I’ve also resorted to using the Eject option when trying to remove USB drives. Win11 and new installations of Win10 usually allow you to remove the drive from the USB system tray icon, but that’s seldom true with systems which have gone thru several upgrades. Eject always works, but the Explorer window doesn’t close for that drive until you physically remove the drive, and one has to wonder what happens if you try to continue to reference files on a drive that has been ejected but not removed.