Windows

Rolling out new Windows Versions Concepts

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Windows 11 24H2 is slowly starting it’s rollout, and you might be wondering if you should update yet. Here’s some high level information to help you decide, control rollout, and be kept up to date with any issues. For those who haven’t needed to keep across how Windows Updates work, you might be wondering what would be difficult about it. Read on and learn :)

The starting point I’d recommend is https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/windows11-release-information which will show you Windows Servicing channels:

This will show you what the current Generally Available (GA) version of Windows is (there’s sections for Windows 11, Windows 10, and Windows Server) along with relevant dates. 24H2 has only been GA for a few weeks, which is quite early in it’s cycle. If you’ve overseen the rollout of Windows Updates before, you want to understand and be across any potential issues before even piloting.

Although this has changed a few times over the last few years, right now we see an annual feature update which upgrades the Windows version released in the second half of the year. Each feature update/version has 3 years of support for Enterprise, and 2 years for Home/Pro as you can see in the table above.

To understand currently known issues in a feature update, you can use the same section of Microsoft Learn to jump to the Version 24H2 > Known issues and notifications which is kept up to date with statuses and details:

You can also see this same information in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Health > Windows release health:

The content is the same on both – but I’d suggest going to the Microsoft 365 admin center version to at least turn on ‘Send me email notifications about Windows release health’ which is under the ‘Preferences’ button in the above screenshot. Once enabling, you can decide which versions of Windows you want to be notified of, and to what email addresses it should be sent to.

This will keep you across any new issues that may arise which is always useful information to know when managing a Windows environment.

Assuming you’re now ready to start testing, the rollout process starts with what tool you’re currently using for update management. You could be using:

Native Windows Update unconfigured – this may make sense for small companies that don’t really have any management in place, and you’re at the mercy of when Microsoft’s services decide your devices should receive the update. Microsoft uses a lot of telemetry and device information to make that call, for example if a driver is detected on the device that has a known issue, Windows Update may block or hold back the install.

Feature update methods:

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) – which despite getting some news lately, will still be around for probably 10+ years. This is the on-premises way of having a central point to download Windows Updates and has many inbuilt controls that let an administrator decide how they want to roll things out, which can either be automated or manual.

Servicing Channels – These options let you choose which channel a device sits in, which by default the General Availability channel. Unless you have a LTSC edition of Windows, your only other option is the Insider Program which will get feature updates ahead of general availability. Might be good to have a VM around enrolled in the Insider Program to get things early and have a play.

Windows Update for Business / Autopatch – these products have recently been joined together, to provide a cloud based way of controlling what updates go to a device.

Whichever path you use, you should be incorporating Update Rings to stagger any update rollout and avoid any big bang issues from your entire fleet updating overnight and hitting a business-stopping issue.

To find out how your feature update rollout is going, each method has it’s own way of reporting:

Intune has inbuilt reports for feature updates which is the same way Autopatch does it

Windows Update for Business also has it’s own reports which has a few options on how to present, including via the Microsoft 365 admin center Software Updates > Windows area. Alternatively, you can create an Azure workbook.

WSUS has inbuilt reporting options that can be built based on your requirements and can be exported, and supports using APIs if you want to roll your own solution there.

I’ve tried to give a high level overview of what’s involved and considerations on rolling out Windows versions, there’s a lot to it and many points depend on your approach.

Office365Concepts also has a great video on covering Feature Update Policies in Intune and how it fits in the larger picture of updates generally:

I’d also recommend these two articles on the deprecation of WSUS:

https://oofhours.com/2024/09/24/microsoft-deprecated-wsus-should-you-care/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/23/microsoft_wsus_deprecation

Three-Finger TrackPad Gestures on Windows

Posted on by Adam Fowler

There’s several useful gestures you can use when you’re without a mouse and relying on a laptop’s touchpad. If you’re not on a touchpad all the time, you may not be aware of these methods of quickly performing functions – I know I wasn’t until I re-discovered one and then wanted to refresh myself on the lot!

Swiping down with 3 fingers will take you straight to the desktop, the same way WinKey + D does.

Swiping up with 3 fingers will bring back the minimised windows from the above command. If your windows are already on screen, you’ll instead see the task view (like holding alt-tab or pressing the task view button in the Windows bar) but it will stay on screen, so you can use 1 finger to move the cursor around to select the window you want.

Swiping left or right with 3 fingers will do the same as alt-shift-tab or alt-tab – toggling between open windows in the same direction you swiped.

There’s also a 4 finger gesture for those of you who use multiple desktops via the task bar – swipe left or right to switch between each one. If you don’t have a second desktop open then your whole screen will slide around a bit but it won’t do anything.

What’s even better is that these gestures are configurable in Windows 11. Under Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Touchpad (which won’t show if you don’t have a Touchpad!) you’ll have a three-finger gestures section. The defaults are as I described above:

You can change these defaults so left and right switch desktops rather than apps:

Or if you’re not an app/desktop switcher, change the lot to control audio:

There’s also the option to change what the Three-finger tap does:

If you don’t like the out of the box options, you can go into the ‘Advanced gestures’ section and under ‘Configure three-finger gestures’ change it to any key combination you like:

And you can configure the 4 swipe directions to perform one of the listed functions:

If you’re like me and feel much less productive when using a trackpad compared to a proper mouse, then spend a bit of time looking at what you can do and change with three-fingered and even four-fingered gestures in Windows 11.

PowerShell Slow to Load and AutoFill

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I had this problem on a server for a while – when first launching PowerShell, it would take ~20 seconds or so to accept input. Also, when pressing tab to auto-complete a command, it would again take ~20 seconds to start, like it was freezing. These were one time problems when launching PowerShell, after that it would work fine until a new session was launched.

A lot of searching didn’t help me work it out, so I logged a Microsoft case. After a few task manager executable dumps, they worked out the delay was on a path I had in an environment variable. Somehow in my account’s user variable, I had a github desktop path that was mapping to a network share, using a PC name that was decommissioned (e.g. ;\\pcname\c$\Users\AdamFowler\AppData\Local\GitHubDesktop\bin.

I expect that this name was timing out, and PowerShell was waiting a while before giving up. In case you have the same symptoms as me, check the environment variables – user variables paths if it’s only your account affected, or the system variables if it’s all users. Click on the path value, then click edit, and remove anything that shoudn’t be there (take a backup of the text if you aren’t sure, it’s easy to put back in if you keep a copy).

To get to Environment Variables, depending on the OS version, get to System Properties, the Advanced tab, and then the Environment Variables button:

Hope that helps someone else with the same problem!

Enabling Dictation in Windows 10

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Dictation is a pretty cool feature in Windows 10. Press Winkey + H, and up comes a small prompt in the middle of your screen telling you it’s listening – you can start talking, and your words start appearing wherever your cursor is.

Not only that, but you can give commands like a light version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking such as ‘delete test’ to delete the last word ‘test’. Or ‘Select the next three words‘ to highlight them – basic cursor management you’d normally need a mouse for.

A managed Windows 10 computer however, may not have all the components required to use Dictation, and a user may not have the access to download the speech packs themselves.

I hit a problem where Dictation would say ‘Download a Speech package for dictation’, but clicking that link would take me to settings and show that it was already installed. An admin of the PC doing this however, would somehow trigger a component to install and Dictation would work fine.

An admin of the PC doing this however, would somehow trigger a component to install and Dictation would work fine.

Under the user context, going to the Speech settings would show all the options as greyed out and blank:

After raising this with Microsoft Support, this was the method we found to make it all work:

These are the components that I required for Dictation:

• Language Basic component
• Language Text-to-speech component
• Language Speech component

These components are available to download via the “Windows 10 Features on Demand Pack 1” which you can find in your MSDN My Visual Studio downloads (the latest being version 2004). You’ll probably need a subscription for this.

Features On Demand are also available via Windows Update but this may not help you if you have a WSUS server.

The resulting ISO, e.g. en_windows_10_features_on_demand_part_1_version_2004_x64_dvd_7669fc91.iso will contain a separate .cab file for each feature. From this, it’s then a matter of using the DISM tool to inject each feature into Windows 10:

Dism /Online /Add-Package /PackagePath:F:\Microsoft-Windows-LanguageFeatures-Basic-en-au-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~.cab

Note you can add multiple packages to the above command, so could do all three with a single line. If you want to know what packages are already installed on a Windows 10 device:

Dism /Online /Get-Packages

Privacy

There’s one big other catch with Dictation. You’ll need to enable ‘Online speech recognition’ which leverages Microsoft cloud based services as part of using Dictation.

Microsoft’s Privacy Statement

If you’re running a computer that’s logged on under a Microsoft account, everything you say is being captured. You can view this data here and choose to delete it:

https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/activity-history?view=voice

I’m still clarifying how this works in other scenarios, and will update this blog post if I find out any more information.

If as a company, you’ve decided and accepted this scenario, you can toggle the option on for users using this registry setting:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Settings\OnlineSpeechPrivacy

HasAccepted DWORD

0 = Off

1 = On

Maybe you won’t need to do any of the above at all – but it’s worth understanding what’s out there, and if you understand and accept the privacy aspect; and if you do, then promoting it to your userbase as a potentially big timesaver… especially for those 1 finger keyboard typists!

It’s also worth nothing that several Microsoft 365 products include Dictate inside the app, more about that here.

HEIC and HEIF Files Can’t Be Viewed on Windows 10 & 11

Posted on by Adam Fowler

If you haven’t come across these file formats already, you probably will soon. Created by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and adopted by Apple amongst others, it’s looking like a replacement for the old JPEG image format.

The format was added in iOS11 and created when doing things like taking a photo. Early on the files were being converted back to JPEG in many situations, including OneDrive Photo Roll syncs.

I expect something else has changed recently, as I’m seeing the files turn up over email from other parties where I’d never seen them before. If I find out more I’ll update this post.

.HEIC and .HEIF files ‘appear’ to be the same thing, but at this stage I can’t clearly find information explaining if there’s a difference, and if so what that is.

These files can’t be natively opened on Windows 11 or earlier, but there’s a few options you have to view them.

OneDrive

If you have access to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business (which doesn’t take much, a free Microsoft account will do), you can copy these files into OneDrive, right click and ‘View Online’. Via your browser, you can then view the image in OneDrive without any extra software required. However, Microsoft documentation currently does not list the formats as being supported, and I’m also asking questions about this in a few areas. (Update 3rd March 2020 – Microsoft updated this page after I asked :) )

Windows 10 & 11

The native Photos app was supposed to have support for this as per these Insider Build notes. I’ve tested on a few different PCs including a fully patched standard Microsoft build laptop, and Photos doesn’t recognise the files. I’ve been told the support of the files needs the two Windows Store apps, and that matches my testing:

HEIF Image Extensions

HEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer

Both are created by ‘Microsoft Corporation’ so they’re not third party, and both are free. Once installed, HEIC and HEIF files work everywhere I’ve tried, including in the native Photos app.

There is also a paid HEVC Video Extensions version from Microsoft that costs $1.45AU, I’m not sure why you’d need this one over the one ‘from the Device Manufacturer’.

Frustratingly, the ‘HEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer’ app doesn’t seem to be available to add in Windows Store for Business, but the HEIF Image Extensions is. I’m asking around to try and have that resolved, if I can find someone to listen to me :) (Update 3rd March 2020 – this probably won’t change anytime soon for licensing reasons)

Converting

One final option is to convert a HEIC to JPEG. Here’s a quick guide using Linux via a Debian WSL image, installed from the Microsoft Store (thanks Purana for the tip!)

I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions in the above, but hoping this at least helps others that might get stuck in finding a working solution in the meantime.