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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
What Microsoft needs to include in Outlook 2016
How Cortana gets to know you, step by step
When Lounge member handcuff36 wrote to the Windows 10 forum, he was bemused by the apparent activity of Cortana, who wasn’t supposed to be working yet in Montréal.
Despite Cortana’s ambiguous immigration status in Canada, handcuff36 was quickly learning how to make himself understood to Cortana, French accent and all.
Check out the new Windows 10 forum. Among other things, you might benefit from handcuff36’s post about his learning curve.
The following links are this week’s most interesting Lounge threads, including several new questions for which you might have answers:
starred posts: particularly useful
If you’re not already a Lounge member, use the quick registration form to sign up for free. The ability to post comments and take advantage of other Lounge features is available only to registered members.
If you’re already registered, you can jump right into today’s discussions in the Lounge.
Another Amadeus, happy to entertain the world
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Amadeus, the pool dog, is a small black chihuahua with a strong disposition to please. More than a million mostly charmed YouTube viewers have watched him clear the pool table (apparently without leaving a single snag in the green baize), all the while talking to himself in high canine excitement. His people, the videographers, can’t get enough of his performance. And yet, some people complain because Amadeus hasn’t mastered rotation. Next they’ll be asking him to play the piano, like another Amadeus! Click below or go to the original YouTube video. |
| Post your thoughts about this story in the WS Columns forum. |
Options for upgrading your data storage
When you’ve cleaned out useless files on your hard drive, but you’re still running out of space, it’s time to up your storage capacity.
Here’s how to pick the best solution for your desktop or laptop system and how to move or distribute your files to a new drive.
That new drive could be either a traditional, platter-based hard drive or a solid-state drive (SSD). SSDs are considerably faster than typical hard drives, but higher-capacity SSDs are exceedingly expensive. For example, while most 1TB hard drives sell for about $80 (a few bucks more will get you a 2TB drive), a 1TB SSD will currently set you back $400 to $500. A 2TB SSD is typically north of $3,000.
There are ways to get hard drive–storage space with near-SSD speeds, though you’ll have to make some compromises. Below, I’ll review the best options for desktops and laptops, and I’ll provide the instructions for replacing your old drive with a new one. I’ll also discuss how to prepare Windows for new storage configurations.
Of course, if you’re not interested in significantly faster drive access, you can simply buy a larger hard drive and clone the contents of your old drive to your new one. For instructions, see my PCWorld article, “How to upgrade to a larger hard drive,” for details.
Whether you install an SSD or platter-based hard drive, the method you use to upgrade your storage comes down to one simple question: Does your PC have a spare drive bay? If you have a desktop, the answer is probably yes. If you have a laptop, it’s probably no. With that in mind, I’ll discuss separate desktop and laptop solutions. (If your desktop doesn’t have a spare drive bay, you can always use one of the laptop techniques.)
Desktop solution: Add a second hard drive
Sure they’re bulky, use more electricity, and can’t fit into your carry-on luggage, but many of us still use desktop PCs because they’re usually easy to upgrade and expand. With an empty drive bay, expanding your system’s storage is as simple as installing another internal drive. (The advice in this section also applies to those rare laptops with two drive bays.)
If your current drive is an SSD, adding a standard hard drive can vastly enlarge your storage capacity at very little cost. And if you set up the drives intelligently, the speed loss will be negligible. Much of the time, there won’t be any drop in drive access at all.
Here’s why. Your primary internal (typically, C:) drive spends most of its time accessing Windows, other programs, and a few data files that you work with often. The SSD will, of course, handle those files much faster than will a standard hard drive. The rest of your files — those that are infrequently accessed — can be moved to the slower hard drive. You can open them easily when needed, but doing so will have minimal impact on your system speed.
Once you’ve installed the second drive, it’s time to set it up and decide what to put on it. (If you run into boot problems after installing the new drive, go into the BIOS settings and make sure that the original drive is above the new drive in the boot-order list.)
Preparing the new drive for your less-used data:
Your new drive might come preformatted — in which case, when Windows boots, it will appear in Windows/File Explorer, typically as drive E:. If not, you’ll need to open the Windows Disk Management applet (diskmgmt.msc), set the new drive as active, and format it. (For more on this task, see the MS How-to page, “Create and format a hard disk partition.”)
Once you’ve got the drive fully accessible from Explorer, create a folder on it named with your sign-in. For instance, mine would be E:\Lincoln (assuming that Windows assigns the letter E to the new drive).
Within that folder, create new folders for the types of files you’re accessing infrequently. Typically, you’d start with Documents, Music, Pictures, and Video folders.
Next, add these new folders to the Windows libraries, where they’ll be easy to find and automatically archived by Windows’ built-in backup system. Note: The folders in libraries are virtual — think of them as shortcuts. Also, you’re not moving your existing libraries on the C: drive to the E: partition; you’re adding the new folders to the existing libraries.
To do so, open Explorer and select the appropriate subfolder under Libraries. (In Windows 8, you might have to make Libraries visible. Under File Explorer’s Home tab, click the Navigation pane icon and put a checkmark next to Show libraries.)
Next, add the new folders on the E: drive (or whatever the new drive is labeled) to the appropriate folders in Library. For example, right-click the Documents library folder and select Properties. In Win7, click the Include a folder button (Figure 1); in Win8, click Add. In the pop-up window, navigate to the E: drive and select the new Documents folder on the E: drive.
Figure 1. Libraries contain virtual folders linked to files and folders that can exist on various drives.
Repeat the process for the other folders you created on the new drive — i.e., link the E: drive’s Pictures folder to the Pictures library folder, Videos on E: to the Videos library folder, and so forth. (For a more detailed Libraries how-to, see the March 10, 2011, Top Story, “Make the most of Windows 7’s Libraries.”)
Now you’re ready to move most of your data from the primary drive to the second drive. And I do mean move — not copy.
Everyone has different work habits, so I can’t tell you specifically what to move. As a general guide, if you’re accessing a particular file several times a week, you should probably leave it on the SSD. Here’s how I would set up my system in this situation.
Documents: I’d keep the folders containing my current projects on the SSD and move everything else to the hard drive. When starting a new project, I’d create its folder on the SSD. When finished with a project or aware that I’m likely to need to access it infrequently, I’d move it to the hard drive.
Pictures and videos: I’d keep the images just downloaded from my camera on the SSD. I’d need to edit some and delete others. When finished with that task, I’d move them to the appropriate folders on the second drive.
Music: Just move everything to the hard drive. If you’re editing specific audio tracks, you can move them temporarily to the SSD.
Laptop solution 1: Install a new two-in-one
As noted above, most laptops have room for only one drive. But some desktops have only one drive bay, too. Obviously, you can’t install a second drive on these systems. So how can you get both SSD speed and hard-drive capacity?
Hybrid drives combine both technologies. They’re more expensive than a standard hard drive but significantly less expensive than a high-capacity SSD. For example, Western Digital’s WD Black² (info) hybrid combines a 120GB SSD with a 1TB hard drive. It sells for about $150.
That might seem like the best of both worlds, but dual-drive hybrids have their limitations. For instance, the Black² is 9.5mm thick, but many smaller laptops are limited to 7mm drives. And as far as I know, there are no hybrid models with hard-drive capacities beyond 1TB.
Moreover, WD’s Black² can be difficult to set up, and its manual isn’t all that helpful. Here are the steps I found useful:
- Go to the Black² Downloads page and grab two programs: Acronis True Image WD Edition and WD Black² installer for Windows.
- Use the USB-SATA adapter included with the Black² kit to connect the drive to your laptop.
- Install and run Acronis True Image and click the Clone disk option. When the Clone Disk Wizard starts, select Manual (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. To select the data to be cloned to SSD side of the Black², select the manual option.
- On the “What to exclude” page (Figure 3), check items that you want on the large-but-slow hard drive (rather than the small-and-fast SSD). Again, what you put on the SSD will depend on your work habits, but follow my guidelines in the preceding “Preparing the new drive for your less-used data” subsection. Keep in mind that everything you leave unchecked must fit onto the 120GB SSD, with some headroom to spare for new programs and temporary files.
Figure 3. Infrequently used files and folders should be excluded from the cloning process.
- When True Image finishes the job and shuts down the computer, remove the original drive and install the Black² in its place.
- Boot the laptop — and revel in a significantly faster boot (assuming you upgraded from a standard hard drive).
- Run the WD Black² installer application you downloaded earlier. This will initiate the new hard drive and make it available. (This program doesn’t work while the hybrid drive is connected via USB.)
- Create the appropriate folders on the new hard drive, as described above.
- Using the USB-SATA adapter to connect the old hard drive to the computer, copy to the new hard drive all files and folders you excluded (checked) on the “What to exclude” stage.
- Add the new folders to the Windows libraries, as described above.
Laptop solution 2: Upgrade to a semi-hybrid drive
If a 9.5mm drive won’t fit, there are smaller drives that still use some SSD technology. For example, Seagate’s SSHD line of hybrid drives (info) uses a small amount of SSD-like flash RAM as a high-speed cache.
As you might expect, these semi-hybrid drives won’t be as fast as models similar to the WD Black². But they’re much easier to set up. Maximum PC compared both types of drives in a July 31, 2014, article.
Seagate sells 7mm and 5mm models, so size isn’t likely to be an issue. And because your data is stored on a standard hard drive, the upgrade process is as simple as cloning the old drive to the new drive. (If speed is all-important and cost no impediment, you could buy a single, high-capacity SSD to hold all your data. Again, it’s a simple matter of cloning the old drive.)
Laptop solution 3: Add external storage
Adding an external drive is, of course, the simplest solution by far. You can move your infrequently used files to a USB hard drive or a network-attached storage (NAS) device. An external USB drive is the cheapest and easiest-to-set-up solution. But once set up, it’s kind of a hassle.
If your PC doesn’t have a USB 3.0 port, accessing files via USB 2.0 will be relatively slow — especially for really big files such as videos. More important, whenever you take your laptop on the road, you’ll have to choose between carrying the portable drive and temporarily doing without those files. By the way, I used this configuration last year when I went 30 days using only a Windows 8 laplet (article).
Alternatively, you could store files in the cloud and access them online when needed. Dropbox’s selective sync, for example, lets you keep all files in the cloud but only selected files on the laptop. You can do something similar with Microsoft’s OneDrive.
A NAS typically costs $50 to $60 more than a USB drive, and it lacks the plug-and-play setup of USB. But depending on your network, you should get better access speed.
Files stored on a NAS should be available from any computer on the network — whether connected by Ethernet or Wi-Fi. Moreover, most newer NAS systems have Web capabilities, allowing access to files from any machine attached to the Internet. And yes, these can be made secure.
Again, look over the preceding “Preparing the new drive for your less-used data” section to see how to distribute your files across the internal and external drives.
Balancing speed, price, capacity, and convenience
Data storage is cheap, and you have numerous choices. You don’t have to settle on one of the options I just described. With the massive amount of digital images, videos, music, and other types of files most of us now store, it’s likely you’ll end up with fast internal drives, slower external drives for infrequently needed files and backups, NAS drives for sharing data among multiple devices, and cloud storage for additional data security.
Now’s a good time to clean up your data and map out an overall solution for accessing and archiving it. In case you missed it, see the Jan. 22 Best Practices story, “Save money by cleaning up your hard drive.” Once you’ve removed your data detritus, you can decide whether it’s time for a new drive. (Why clutter up the new drive with duplicate and outdated files?)
A tour through Windows Process Explorer: Part 1
Windows has an exceptional number of diagnostic tools, some built in and others available as downloads from Microsoft.
Picking up where Task Manager leaves off, Process Explorer is an advanced, downloadable tool that provides a deep look at what’s running inside your operating system.
In this two-part series, I start with a quick tour though Process Explorer’s key views and options. In Part 2, I discuss some techniques for using Process Explorer, including ways to help hunt down potential malware.
An advanced tool for diving under the hood
Process Explorer is one of the many excellent tools available on the Microsoft Windows Sysinternals site. It provides a mind-boggling amount of information about what Windows is doing at any given moment. Whereas Task Manager shows a list of processes currently running, Process Explorer provides detailed information about each process and how it’s connected to other processes. It’s ideal for finding system bottlenecks and can even be used for ferreting out malware.
For example, Task Manager typically displays a long list of running svchost.exe files, but their purpose is largely unsaid. In Process Explorer, you can hover your cursor over a process and a tooltip will show you more information about the process.
That said, Process Explorer was designed as a troubleshooting tool for IT pros and can be daunting for most PC users. I’m no novice, but trying to learn how Process Explorer works was especially difficult. Many of the so-called tutorial links on the Microsoft site take you to the Microsoft Ignite Conference event page. Even the help file included with Process Explorer is thin and lacks tutorials.
I checked out the Process Explorer forums, but much of the content is quite old and not geared to first-time users. Needing some help, I reached out to my computing network and met up with TekTegrity’s Joshua Erdman. With his guidance, I was able to get a good foundation in what Process Explorer does and how to use it. Here’s what I learned.
Sorting through the haystack of running code
Process Explorer is essentially a portable app — in other words, it doesn’t fully install like most Windows applications. You won’t find it in Programs and Features. Simply double-click the downloaded ZIP file and then the procexp application file; Windows will create a new folder with the extracted files. Double-click procexp to launch Process Explorer. (You can also click the Run Process Explorer link on the Process Explorer site and run the utility directly from the Web.)
Process Explorer opens with a detailed list of running processes, with information on the CPU time each is using, how much memory is consumed, and other information (see Figure 1). For more information on a particular process, select View in the toolbar and then the Show Lower Pane option.
Figure 1. Process Explorer's main window provides information on all running apps and services.
One of the first steps in learning Process Explorer is understanding its color-coding system. You can customize the color codes using Options/Configure Colors (Figure 2), but the key default settings are these:
Figure 2. Process Explorer's color-coding system makes it easier to sort out different types of processes and process events.
- Green (New Objects): A process is starting.
- Red (Deleted Objects): A process that’s being stopped or killed. Normally, the process will flash red for a second before it disappears. You can extend that time by going to Options/Difference Highlight Duration and increasing the number of seconds the color shows before the process terminates.
This can be helpful when looking for malware. Quite often, malware infections are daisy-chained together, and each executable opens and closes quickly. Normally, you won’t have the time needed to see what the code is doing and then kill a process to break the chain. Using a longer highlight-duration time will slow things down a bit.
- Pale blue (Own Processes): These processes are running in the same user account as Process Explorer. Most of your currently running applications fall into this category.
- Pink (Services): These processes are running Win32 services. Most of them will be the ubiquitous but somewhat obscure svchost.exe that you also see in Task Manager. Simply put, svchost.exe is a process that hosts other processes. Unlike Task Manager, Process Explorer shows what each svchost.exe is hosting.
- Dark purple (Packed Images): For various reasons, executables might be compressed. When needed, they’re unpacked in memory. Legitimate applications such as VirtualBox and Skype might show up as packed images. But malware, too, is often packed to disguise its signature from antivirus applications.
- Dark orange (Jobs): These processes are part of a Win32 job. As noted on an MSDN Developer’s page, job objects are groups of processes that are managed as a single unit.
Other color-coding/process-type options are turned off by default. For example, .NET Processes (yellow) highlights applications that are using Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Note: The Configure Colors (Color Selection) dialog box has a ? icon, ostensibly for help with the tool. But it seems not to work. Clicking it added a question mark to my cursor, but when I clicked an item, the question mark simply vanished — nothing happened.
As we move deeper into Process Explorer, you will see what some of the other processes do.
Other Process Explorer configuration options
It’s not necessary to have administrative privileges to run Process Explorer, but without them you won’t see all details. Also, keep in mind that Process Explorer doesn’t show everything on your system — it shows only what’s running.
Process Explorer uses a tree structure to sort processes into parent/child relationships. As shown in Figure 1, child relationships appear as right-indented entries immediately below the parent. Any single process that’s left-justified is an orphan.
The table of entries and related information works as you might expect. If you want to sort by CPU use, click its heading. If you want to change the sort direction (e.g., ascending to descending), click the header again. When you click, say, CPU, Process Explorer collapses the tree structure so that entries are easier to read (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Clicking a column header reorganizes Process Explorer's information. In this example, processes are sorted by CPU activity.
When not sorted by name, process entries tend to jump up and down the list quickly, as Windows works on various tasks. That can make it hard to select and examine a particular process. If Process Explorer has a freeze-view function (as does the What’s my computer doing? app [download site]), I couldn’t find it. So if, for example, an unknown process seems to be using a lot of CPU time, it’s best to click the Process header (Ctrl + t) and look for that particular process in the tree.
If you want to see more details on processes, select File/Show Details for All Processes (not just the processes in use by the current user). Process Explorer will immediately refresh and then display more information such as Company Names, which can be useful when identifying processes. (Note: when you select All Processes, you’ll probably get a User Account Control warning.)
If you plan to use Process Explorer frequently, an option lets you use it in place of Task Manager. In Process Explorer, click Options/Replace Task Manager. The next time you click Ctrl + Alt + Delete and you select Start Task Manager, Process Explorer will pop up. (The tool doesn’t make this clear, but clicking Replace Task Manager again will restore Task Manager.)
To have the Process Explorer window remain on top of all other windows, select Options/Always On Top.
Process Explorer can also display small graphs of system information in the Windows taskbar’s notification area. Simply click Options/Tray Icons and select CPU History, I/O History, GPU History, Commit History, and/or Physical Memory History. When you hover your cursor over the mini-chart, a small popup displays current stats. (Note: To have the mini-charts show up on the taskbar, you might have to click the Show hidden icons triangle in the notification area, select Customize, and then select Show icon and notifications for each Process Explorer mini-chart.) Clicking any of the mini-charts pops up the full Process Explorer window.
If you find Process Explorer’s default font a bit hard to read, you can change it by selecting Options/Font.
You might find two other settings under Options useful: “Hide When Minimized” and “Allow Only One Instance.” With the Hide option selected, Process Explorer won’t show up among other taskbar application icons when you minimize it. It can, however, be found in the “Show hidden icons” list. Selecting the One Instance option prevents you from opening multiple windows of Process Explorer.
You can even change the opacity of the Process Explorer window so that other applications are less likely to be hidden behind it. Click View/Opacity and choose the percentage of transparency you want. However, Process Explorer is the proverbial “eye chart” by default; using almost any degree of transparency makes it even harder to read.
Charting overall system performance over time
Watching system activity in Process Explorer can quickly become overwhelming — it’s a mass of rapidly changing numbers. For stats such as overall CPU activity, memory consumption, and input/output traffic, charts can give you a better picture of potential system problems.
Click View/System Information, and Process Explorer pops up a separate window of charts (Figure 4). The first tab summarizes activity for the CPU, System Commit, Physical Memory, and I/O. Other tabs break those categories into their own separate charts and add text-based statistics. You’re undoubtedly aware of CPU and memory use, but System Commit and I/O might be less familiar.
Figure 4. Process Explorer's System Information charts showing the effects of playing a YouTube view
System Commit shows the amount of virtual memory reserved by processes. It typically goes up when applications open and down when apps close. There’s a commit limit, based on a system’s combined physical memory (RAM) and paged memory (the size of the hard drive–based pagefile). If your commit level keeps increasing, you could have a system problem.
The I/O chart shows the total level of system input/output tasks at any given moment. If you see a spike in the graph, hovering the cursor over the spike shows what’s causing it.
The lower pane: Diving deep into a process
Clicking View/Show Lower Pane opens a box below the main Process Explorer window (see Figure 5). Click on a process, and the lower pane displays either all related and open DLLs or system handles: files, Registry keys, synchronization objects (more info), and so forth. This information is mostly unfathomable to the average Windows user, but it can give you a map of all components associated with a process. You can switch between DLL and Handles views by clicking View/Lower Pane View or via the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + d and Ctrl + h.
Figure 5. Opening Process Explorer's lower pane provides extensive details about specific processes.
Up next: How to use Process Explorer. Stay tuned for “A tour through Windows Process Explorer: Part 2.” Think of Process Explorer as Task Manager on steroids. There’s a lot to this tool. Between now and publication of Part 2, I suggest you poke around in Process Explorer, so you have an even better idea of what it can show you.
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