PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11 Microsoft's collection of Power Toys for the current versions of Windows has some nifty little helpers, and Power Run may be comfortingly familiar if you're more used to macOS. Far back in the lost aeons of the very late 20th century, Microsoft started offering a handy little set of tools for Windows 95 called the PowerToys – …
"But deep inside Microsoft, it looks like this knowledge is forgotten:"
Remember when mags like Windows User would have keyboard shortcut cheat sheets on the cover? Or handy little strips you could put along the top of your keyboard, along with the ones for WordPerfect etc? Keyboards needed to be a lot bigger in those days :)
I suppose this is related to the removal of underlines indicating the appropriate keyboard shortcut on menus, buttons etc. No doubt done for the look of the thing, but personally I see no reason to remove a handy feature for the sake of appearances. Guess I'm just getting old.
Thanks for the wave of nostalgia I got hearing the name TweakUI. Often the first app installed on a fresh Windows machine. It did get less useful over the years, as M$ bundled the best tools into Windows. I remember the main use towards the end was that Windows had a habit of losing all of the icons for app shortcuts and file associations and the best way to get them back was with a TweakUI refresh. I remember XP SP3 as being nice and stable but forgot that you’d need an app for things like that.
I’ve always thought of PowerToys as absolutely essential for windows. It makes it half usable. Still shite but half usable.
And interesting you should mention the windows search function. How exactly do you make a search function THAT slow. Same goes for file copying (“preparing to copy” - WTF is there to prepare? JFDI!!!) Seriously - if anyone knows, I would love to hear it. On the same subject, does windows search still fail to find stuff that’s blindingly findable? That was always a major annoyance
> (“preparing to copy” - WTF is there to prepare? JFDI!!!) Seriously - if anyone knows, I would love to hear it.
The excuse I heard for that delay is it is attempting to estimate how long the copy will take so you can get a highly accurate progress bar on screen...
And don't forget that hang at the end of a mass delete of your TEMP folder contents where it hits 99% and then just stops and thinks about the meaning of life...
I think the "preparing" message comes when the process is still recursively listing all the files. It should and probably does copy the first few while searching, but it doesn't even know how many files there are yet. Since the next version will count the number and size of files remaining to copy since the time estimate is so frequently wrong, it would be annoying if the files left box kept going up.
It wouldn't.
People are actually used to the idea of not knowing how big a task is until it's mostly done.
I've made many progress indicators that tick up both the "done" and "to do" for the first part of a task, and nobody has ever complained.
Probably they never noticed at all, but that works too.
After the latest forced update, my Windows PC keeps churning the disk and if I try and reboot posts: “Preparing to configure Windows. Do not turn off your computer”. Any solutions would be appreciated. Restoring and selecting "keep my files" of course doesn't keep any third party software. Summing up the time wasted in fixing former and current problems and at my former hourly rate, “billg” now owes me $1,000.00.
“Preparing to configure Windows. Do not turn off your computer”. Any solutions would be appreciated.
Sure, I have a solution! Reconfigure your PC as a Linux appliance and load in the virt-manager. Set up a new “Windows” VM but make sure to install “Ghost Spectre” instead. Turn off all updates, and also kill the network connection. Take a snapshot just in case you ever do get infected.
It’s lovely. Microsoft is banished from meddling with the system and you are free to run whatever legacy software that doesn’t have a Linux version. I’d banished the scourge of Microsoft updates for many years already, it’s great.
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I'd be tempted to point at a dodgy memory stick but you said it happened after an update. If it's not hardware then I'd take a look at drivers - any exclamation marks in Device Manager? I'm not a fan of BIOS updates but I don't think it could hurt you at this point. I'd see if your motherboard manufacturer is offering anything newer than you have right now. There is ram testing software out there, just to definitely exclude your RAM chips but that seems unlikely. If it's not drivers then you can do a "repair upgrade", which will install Windows over Windows and keep your apps and files.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to-perform-repair-upgrade-in-windows-11/8099a5ae-8afc-406f-864d-8d13c3742d8d
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You don’t say how long your PC has been churning,..
From experience with Win7 and more recently with 10, let it run for 48 hours and then do a power off…
I’ve had (Windows 10) systems which have taken forever to sort out an update, but left to churn finally got there or reverted back to the former state having failed to complete the update. I’ e also had other occasions where the update was waiting for a reboot to complete, but the updater didn’t update the on-screen status…
Add.
In both cases, once successfully restored a windows login, run disk cleanup and clean up system files etc.
It is also worth using tools like CCleanup to clean chrome and other caches. Then reboot.
When I’ve done this it’s freed up nearly 20GB of temp files.
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Regarding a repair upgrade, it won't touch your apps, regardless of whether they are M$ apps or 3rd party. You will lose some Windows settings tough.
Have you looked at "System Restore" (part of Windows) to see if a restore point was created before the last update? You might be able to roll back your PC to a point in time before that update. That won't affect any apps or data as it's unlikely you have created any data since this started happening.
Sounds like you’ve had competing and thus conflicting updates vying for processor time, hence why you will see high disk and cpu usilisarion and very sluggish performance.
Once you have a “usable” system, you may want to disable the av for a few hours and then run the OEM firmware/bios/drivers updater and then confirm all windows security updates have installed, finish off by re-enabling the av and forcing that to do an update and manual scan. Then update the third-party stuff the av is flagging as in need of update.
As noted above, use tools like ccleanup with thought, I change the cleanup setting to just do a cache clear, leaving cookies, history etc alone. (Likewise with disk cleanup, I tend to not clean the Download folder.)
LOVED the SE/30 and NCSA Mosaic, and its cheerful “quack” sound effects.
… ever since then, no.
(I still utilize Win10 as a VM, from within Ubuntu, with a dedicated Vega56. I suppose I could set up a OS-X VM, but the hill of “don’t care” has proven a bit too steep. I still occasionally fire up Win for CAD and Office 2007 Professional. What for, OS-X? The only things I ever used it for were #1 Bolo, #2 Spaceward Ho, #3 Aldus Pagemaker, and #4 Mosaic.)
[Author here]
> a vile program
Hey! I object! PageMaker was for me one of the single greatest pieces of software ever written. It was a joy to use, and I used it heavily for years. It made attractive page layouts simple and easy to achieve, whereas its rivals, from Ventura DTP to Quark Xpress, were overly complex tools for professionals, and much *much* less discoverable and usable by curious amateurs.
(FWIW, my other all-time favourite app for the x86 platform was PowerQuest Partition Magic.)
P.S.
Authorial postscript: an anonymous reader sent in a "correction" that PowerRun chose Alt-Space because Launchy did.
https://www.launchy.net/about.php
Note that Launchy first appeared in 2007 and the copyright date on its website is 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchy
MacOS 10.4 "Tiger" shipped two years earlier:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/04/12Apple-to-Ship-Mac-OS-X-Tiger-on-April-29/
I reckon Launchy uses Alt-Space because Tiger used Cmd-Space for Spotlight. In other words it uses it for the same reason PowerRun does.
Whatever the reason, I agree with you: Second thing I do after installing PowerToys is remap Run to Windows-Space. (First thing is to disable the PowerToys I don't use. No reason to have them enabled if I'm not going to use them; that's just asking for confusion.)
PT Run is so much better than Explorer's Run UI (Win-R) in every respect that I put it on every Win11 instance I have to use as soon as it's spun up. I don't use the dreadful Win11 Start menu at all now.
Most things still happen from the command line (Cygwin bash is my choice of refreshment), but PT Run is useful often enough.
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