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I, too, have used VueScan for years, most recently with an elderly Canon Perfection 2450, with a maximum resolution of 2400 bpi. Easy to use with many menu choices. Minimum annual subscription is $29.95, and VueScan continues to function flawlessly even when the annual subscription lapses. Unbeatable. THE BEST!
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I’ll save my rants about BitLocker and Microsoft accounts for a future article.
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Bitlocker sounds oh, so nice until it isn’t.
Recently a client brought me a laptop, locked out of a Microsoft login due to forgotten or inadvertently changed Microsoft account password. I had not choice except to wipe the system clean and install Windows 11.
The moral of this story is that there is a large community of naive computer users who simply accept the Microsoft way and do not do any organized recordkeeping. Having clear and readily accessible records of Microsoft account user name/password or even just the BitLocker key would have prevented this loss of personal data.
What bothers me no end is that as part of setup of a new computer, Microsoft does not tell new owners of computers to make good records of username-password and the BitLocker key. It needs to do so emphatically, almost as emphatic as the phony virus infection screens that exhort the user to call a scam phone number to remove the virus.
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Wow! NotifyIcons does a lot, covering for several other freeware apps I install routinely on client computers. Need to download it and give it a try.
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Interesting and certainly surprising. My guess unsupported by actual facts is that Intel’s recent years of turmoil have distracted them from promoting Thunderbolt.
Because most tower computers have a fair amount of internal real estate, it’s probably more cost-effective to mount an NVMe SSD on a card, but more work to do so. Gee! Open up the chassis and use a screwdriver!
Some PCI-e cards handle two or more NVMe SSDs. I have used them and they work well, even in a pair of 24/7 servers that serve up VMs. Heat dissipation can become an issue with the larger capacity SSDs, whether inside a computer or attached externally via Thunderbolt or USB. Thermal pads help dissipate the heat.
Mounting SSDs inside a Wintel computer reduces the need of many users for Thunderbolt-mounted SSDs.
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Significant, but up to a limit, not that high. Both can provide enough power to SSDs, but not enough for a spinning hard drive or a Thunderbolt RAID array, both of which require their own power supplies.
It is not clear how Thunderbolt deals with electrical shorts, although the perfectly symmetric modern connector and port go a long way to reducing the frequency of shorts. By comparison, how often how you run into older USB ports in a laptop or desktop, because the owner was careless, and simply smashed a USB connector into a port upside down? I have seen too many of these.
AFAIK, a docking station and a USB hub are the solutions for working around a destroyed USB port, providing that there is still one USB port working correctly. I recently bought a large number of tiny USB3 hubs that were surplus from a company. Now I can offer an inexpensive hub to extend a single port to handle four USB connections.
There is no point whatsoever in trying to repair a broken USB port on either desktop or laptop, unless the laptop design just happens to have an easily replaced interior part with the USB port and maybe some other function. These possibilities are rare in my experience.
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POTS is essential in areas where there is a constant threat of lost electrical power. In over 40 years here, our old-style phone with copper wire has never failed, despite the substandard electrical service from National Grid.
POTS is really good because it supplies the electrical power needed to be able to use a touch-tone phone that does not require its own electrical power. We have two older touch-tone phones here, one on my desk with battery-operated caller ID in the phone circuit, and the other near a phone outlet in the kitchen. My computer is connected to the same phone line, too, and I use it to send faxes to laggard medical and legal practitioners who eschew even encrypted email.
Very useful is POTS, yet AT&T on the left coast and Verizon in our area want to rip up all the copper without offering a suitably reliable alternative.
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As several posts have stated, install Steve Gibson’s InControl to stop Win 11 24H2. Why not make InControl part of the MS-DEFCON recommendations, hand-in-hand with the long list of known defects in 24H2. And, of course, has Microsoft indicated when we might see an improved 24H2 with bug fixes or maybe a 25H1 with bug fixes to remove ambiguity as to just which 24H2 it is.
I need to set up a couple of my clients with InControl on the Windows 11 systems they bought.
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I’ve thought about your considered response for a while now, much appreciated. Here is what I have to say.
In the context of assuring that a computer is working 100% A-OK, my motivations for testing CPUs are twofold. I simply need to have assurance that a CPU is 100% functional. I do not want to or need to test a CPU for hours and hours. Intel’s test runs about 5 minutes, about right.
Others may care about performance, but performance is not the goal of making sure a computer is working well UNLESS there is an obvious performance anomaly. CINEBENCH is a very good test of overall computer performance, not just graphics.
If, as part of setting up a computer for someone, I am asked to assess performance, I will do so, to make sure the performance meets buyer expectations.
I still prefer an AMD-supplied CPU test available to the general public, but so far my request through AMD’s media people has been crickets. AIDA64 is worth a look as a surrogate for an actual AMD utility. Maybe Intel’s CPU test is, too, but I need to make the time to find out.
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