Windows 11 preview.

So after many years of hearing "This is the last version of windows.." Now we have a public preview of the all new windows 11! Here is what it looks like below,

This post is being typed on a pc running windows 11. It is a Bee Link mini Desktop running AMD Ryzen 7 with 512GB Solid state drive 16GB of ram. This little machine is really powerful for its size. It has Wifi 6 as well as the lastest bluetooth and even Dual ethernet connections. If I can setup a test network with this as a test bed this will be a great feature. As you can see a few big chnages in windows 11 so far. The Start menu is out in the center of the task bar. (I can hear the tech support calls now...) And as seen below the notifications look a little different. The whole OS is different. They have a 10 minute video of how they designed the new logo for the company. Big chnages are coming as you can see. Hopefully they will not cause too much change that all us IT folks will have to reteach our older family members how to use the computer again!

Technology Saved the day today

November 11 started just like any other day. But at 7:50 am as I was getting ready to start a full day of work despite it being Friday, my network appeared to have quit working. I looked over at my mesh router and saw a red light. “Oh CRAAAAAPPPP” I Greamed to no one in particular. Goan Scream. incase you were wondering what that word was… Anyway, I went to the main router where the internet comes in and that device too was stuck in red light city. A reboot of both did nothing for their status, so a reboot of the modem was needed. We had a pole out front and it was due to be changed today, I was hopeful I had a few problems in the past few weeks just as they started to investigate this pole and plan for the change out. So, the service stayed down after my modem reboot, you could see the online light was not lit up in any way. This is now a bad day getting worse. My work was getting backed up and my team was already down a person and that can be a challenge as it is. The guys show up to change out the Pole and as they disconnect our cable line, (It had to be taken off it was in the way of installing the new pole) They show us the cable and we can clearly see the issue… this cable was about 40 years old and had not been changed in all that time. It was so old the needle in a normal coaxial cable was gone. I should have taken a picture, but I just did not get to! So, they will reconnect everything, but they cannot promise ANYTHING will work. During all this I used the providers app to schedule an appointment for service and it said it could see an issue with my service. It was not an outage no one else on my street had any issues. My appointment was for Sunday afternoon from 4-6 pm. I also threw my name into the waiting list hat hoping for first thing Saturday Morning to get my service fixed. Now the new Pole is up, and all the cables are back to where they belong for now on the old pole. OH yeah, this crew puts the pole up… a 2nd crew and another company must come to move everything. (Nothing is ever simple!) After the line is reconnected, we have 1 working tv in my father’s room. He has the small old cable box that gets 13 channels. All he cared about was channel 7 for some news and to watch Jeopardy of course! Well, all the channels on his tv came up but jumped a lot and lost volume. Service was degraded quite a bit. We had no internet and no phones. The modem laughed at me with the same online light being out. The main tv worked at what ever channel it ended up on which was msnbc today. Probably from a car auction show the night before. So, we could not change the channel since the internet controls that part of the tv service with the provider… (They really do lock you in to need all their services) and any button press on the remote brought up the ever so helpful message that they are having trouble connecting to the internet and won’t we please check our connections and try again. So now not only is my work impacted but Dinnertime tv is now impacted. We now have a mountain, no mole hill here! Being a technology and gadget freak I had many options to try to get internet working for me and then steam some ABC TV for us to watch some shows in the evening. The best choice with the most advance options turned out to be my newest purchase aimed at trying to separate work and personal data further to make things easier, that device being the Microsoft Surface Duo! Thanks to ATT I live in a spot with 5G service and its pretty good in my house! I got 60 MB download speeds and 15MB upload speeds!

The upload speed added an extra 5MB onto my normal upload speed which was great as some of my work requires a public cloud connection with decent upload speeds. I set up the Surface Duo as a hot spot and connected my laptop to it. I ran my personal cell phone as the desk phone using the VOIP APP of my company to handle any calls. I ran like this all day and was able to help my team with support issues and help any customers without missing a beat. I use a remote connection tool and was able to remotely connect into machines and did not notice a performance difference at all. I had topped off the Surface Duo’s battery the night before, so I just left it there being a hot spot and it only went down to 60 percent battery life. Not bad! I even connected my printer to it so I could scan to PDF and it did that without any fuss at all. I ended my day at about 5:30 and shut down all the work stuff. I put the duo to sleep and turned off the hot spot. I was impressed. I went through the day and did not have to change my workflow much at all to be able to continue. In a normal situation I would have just went into the office to get the rest of the day done, but thanks to Technology I did not have to, that was a stress reliever in itself! As I prepped Dinner and started cooking, I knew I had to get ABC streaming some how so we could watch some news and shows. Luckily since my living room smart tv has limited apps to it, I needed something to get more content and I had just purchased a new apple tv last month. So, I planned on connecting the apple tv to the Surface as a hotspot and then running the ABC app. The connection worked as expected and within minutes my apple tv was on the hot spot at 5G! The ABC app had me sign in on my phone and verify my provider. I signed in and there we go, News at 6pm is on and steaming… And we steamed that way all through Primetime on ABC no stutter, no lag no jumps, just watched it like it was cable tv and a normal night. At 8pm we were done with TV so my father went to do his hobbies and I got an idea to see if I could play Grand theft auto 5 on 5G speeds! I connected my desktop to the surface duo and checked that I had internet and I did, ok let’s fire up Steam and GTA and here we go…. OH NO NOT GOOD>….. I got a message in the corner about double NAT something is wrong and could impact your play….. Essentially the way a cellular connection is made, the GTA game does not like that so it did not play well at all. I got on the game and was able to drive around, but I had no access to much else. I could not get my personal things or join any online missions. Ok it does not like that so we will quit that and forget that idea. How about Forza 7 Motorsports? Nope same thing. No access to anything. Gaming platforms do not like connecting through 5g hotspots. There could be some settings I would need to adjust to make it work, but it was only for one night. Because at this time I had gotten a text alert that a Saturday Morning appointment from 7 30 am to 9 am was open for me as long as I responded in the next, I don’t know how many minutes it said, I sent the letter Y for yes faster than I ever sent a text before! So, we were locked in for an early morning visit from comcast to fix our troubles. At 7 30 the next morning the technician was there checking all our lines out, I went out and spoke to him about what I was told and what we had going on, he looked at the line and said he will replace it, meanwhile he had another tech coming as he needed a line truck to replace a tap on the line as well. All of this was completed within 2 hours and by 9:30 I had full working service again. I had my full connection speeds of up to 600 download and 15 upload. The tv looked great and the home phone line was working. I later found out the tap we are on is an end tap, its just myself and my neighbor across the road. This answered my question as to why no one else in the neighborhood had any issues. Our service was restored in a very quick time frame, our technician was very polite and knowledgeable and answered questions while he did the repairs and neatly cleaned up. All in all, a much more pleasant experience than I have heard about from others. (some of the bad customer service stories are legendary!) I was pleased with the providers response and really pleased that technology helped keep us going during an outage and gave me hope that if they sort out all this 5G service, it might really be an upgrade we can all use.

Always check the simple things first.

I have said it many times and Ill say it many times in the future, when a problem appears, always always check the simple stuff first. Take my example today, My Cloud drive suddenly shows up with a solid red light....

And now I am thinking great, its curtainsfor all that data.... How much did I backup to the other drive last time?..... I was swampped in work today, so I unplugged the drive and let it sit for the day, fast forward to a half hour ago and I took another look. I plugged in the power and it sat and spun with a flashing blue light. Back to a solid red light... ok lets see what google turns up, some times you can save a lot of time just seeing what others have done. A quick search turned up some horror stories about screeching disks...crunching caclunk clunk sounds..and the high pitched wails of I DIDN'T PRESS SAVE...... Then in a forum someone posted the same issue as me and said loudly at the end in bold letters CHECK THE NETWWORK PLUG TO THE DRIVE...NO REALLY TAKE IT OUT AND CHECK THAT IT IS CONNECTED! Well ok that is a very simple step but I saw it before I was.....wait there is the end and when I trace it back and count the devices I have one missing! Well look at that there it is....

Editors Note: My picture shows it unplugged from the drive for example. But in my case it had come unplugged from the switch I remembered that earlier I had a crazy moment where I elbowed a full mug of coffee all over the place as the phone rang, In my hast of saving all electronic devices I must have pulled the ethernet cable free from the switch. So yes that person is right and 90 percent of the time that is always the answer. Check the simple things. So remember to do that and you will breathe a sigh of relief when you see the network cable unplugged and you can go back to your adult beverage!

Do you need to buy a premium device for a premium experience?

I bought a mid range device when I bought the Motorola Z2 Play a few years back. I since sold that phone but I also just recently bought the Motorola Z Power phone. That is a mid range device with a lower price point. Both phones have decent hardware in them, can do lots of great things for taking photos and have great play back for sound and video. But what are they missing from a premium device like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+? Well basically, a stylus... maybe some performance improvements for playing graphic intense games on the phone.. maybe a touch more battery life thanks to Samsung's power management system. Both screens look vibrant with lots of color. Pictures look great on the screen on both phones and both take excellent pictures.

So why the Higher price tag for the Samsung? Well the Note 10 Plus is rated P68 for water resistance which means you could submerge it in fresh water for some time and retrieve it, dry it out and the phone will still function. As I found out this is not the case when it comes to salt water... anything goes if it goes in salt water. But the Motorola phone is not rated for water resistance like that so it only will be protected against splashes like from rain. Also the Motorola does not have NFC so no contactless payments from the phone. Plus you cannot wireless charge the Motorola. That is not a deal breaker for me. I rarely use wireless charging. I'm still not thrilled with it and feel like it's better for the battery to always charge with a cable. The motorola does have some things the Samsung does not, like an audio jack for headphones. You can use any headphones for that phone without needing a dongle to connect them in like you would with the samsung which is sans audio jack. One personal thing I like more on the Motorola is the fingerprint button on the back, it works 100 percent of the time! Samsung has the in glass fingerprint unit and it works but its 60/40 if it will read the print correctly. I hope they improve that design on future phones. Mid range inexpensive phones can offer great features but there are always trade offs that you have to look at when choosing a lower end device. But there are a wide variety of mid range devices that are affordable and will offer a user a great phone experience.

How many phones is too many? UPDATED

Do you love cell phones? Do you have more than 2 of them? For “backups”… sound familiar? Don’t worry you’re in safe company. I have said the same thing. I am currently up to 4 cell phones unless you count the dead flip phone that I have no charger for…? Ok 5… The flip phone is an LG Dare? I forget the name of that one. I also have an LG G7 ThinQ from 2 years ago. It is still a great phone and is being updated to Android 10 OS very soon according to the Android news feeds. It’s the lightest of the 3 phones and has the best night vision for taking night shots. They always come out so bright on this phone and the other phones have trouble with night shots.
My daily driver of a phone is the Samsung Note 10 Plus. It has become one of the best phones I ever used. The size is perfect in my hand and not hard for 1 or 2 handed uses. The battery life gets me through a day and a half even if I am using the phone heavily. The camera takes amazing photos and I have not even really used the video feature yet. OH and the screen looks amazing. I currently still have the original screen protector from Samsung on the phone. But soon I will be putting on a Zagg screen protector. Just as soon as I watch the video more to make sure I can install it right.
UPDATE: Took off the stock screen protector and installed 2 from a company that does glass protectors applied with UV glue. I do not recommend these types. If the phone gets cold at all from air conditioning the glue will give and you will be prone to potential damage. I also have the HTC U11 phone. This older droid was just updated to Android 9 which was shocking as most of HTC phone staff moved to Google. This phone is STILL getting updates. I turned it on to check on the battery for this article and there is a software update pushing through. This phone is the shortest of all the phones but also the fattest. It is slightly uncomfortable to use single handed. This was before they went “bezel free” so there is 2 bezels at the top and bottom of the phone. But this phone sounds amazing for music. It was enhanced for audio both from the speakers and for when you plug a set of headphones in.
The last phone I have is a Motorola G Power. I just purchased this phone for 250 bucks. It’s unlocked for any carrier and it has a huge battery in it. I used it for one day just trying to sign into everything and get setup and I was about 6 hours of screen time in. The battery still lasted for another day after that! The phone does not have NFC built in and it does not do Wireless charging. But the phone is a great cheap phone to get and store in a drawer in case someone needs a phone in a hurry. Moto has some great actions they setup to make the phone easier to use. Make a chopping motion with your wrist and the flashlight comes on. Twist your wrist and the camera comes on. The phone is ringing on the table and you’re in a meeting, flip it over screen down, the phone shuts up till you pick it back up.
I am working to set these phones up so I can switch back and forth at a moment’s notice. If the Samsung suddenly develops a hardware issue and has to be sent in to replace, I want to be able to take the sim out pop it into either the Moto or the LG and continue working. Most of my stuff is setup in the cloud for backup and syncing. The last thing I did not have in a cloud backup was my text messages and I thought it wasn’t a big deal but more and more text messages are being used in business and starting to become items of record. So I stopped using the default Text program on the phones and moved to Google’s messaging program. This way all my stuff is backed up to Google’s cloud and when I sign into a different phone it can sync all the messages up and I won’t miss anything. I was getting close to the limit of Google’s free 15GB of storage. So I opted to pay for the 100Gb of space on Google’s Cloud. This way the phones can be backed up to the cloud as well and its one less thing I need to worry about. This is a whole other topic but I also have a Microsoft One Drive cloud with over 100 GB of space on it that I don’t pay for. I am not for one or the other, I use whatever works best for my needs. So that’s all my phones. What do you have in your collection? Leave me a comment and let me know. Apple products welcome too… there is no better one here, its whatever works for best you. Which should be the goal of all technology.

I forgot how fun it is to build a PC

My new custom built pc is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8 core processor
There is 16 GB of Gskill DDR 4 ram 2 8 GB chips.
The motherboard is an MSI X470 Gaming Pro board
I am running a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD drive as well as a 1 TB WD Blue Drive for storage.
The video card is an MSI GTX 1080
The Audio is the high Def Realtek chipset on the X470.
The power supply is an 800 Watt Corsair Modular PSU
The case is the spectacular blue Fractual Design Super Quiet!

All in all the most surprising thing about this build was how quiet all the fans are even when the system is cranking away keeping FPS up high. There is 2 120MM case fans along with the mighty Prism Cooler on the Ryzen chip. There is also the dual fans on the GTX card and a fan on the corsair. That is a lot of air flowing, but its 3 times quieter than my 5 year old Asus Tower I had. Was this a big upgrade for me? IT was. The Asus was an Intel Core i7 3.0 GHZ CPU with 8 GB of DDR3. The GTX 1080 I had for the last 6 months and it worked well in that Asus. (I also got the card right before the price shot up due to all the Crypto Currency mining demand.) I wanted to have good gaming performance so I went high end on the GPU as that is bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to gaming. I play Grand Theft Auto V and Forza Motorsport 7. Both visually stunning games with heavy GPU needs and a thirst for CPU cycles, both of these games have a stunning amount of detail to them. You will not enjoy them properly without the right hardware to keep visuals looking sharp. Building the new custom rig was a joy to me. I always loved building pc’s and I missed getting to do it on a regular basis. So I started with the graphics card and got the best one I could afford at the time. Then I started looking into CPU and motherboard combos and had to spend a lot of time deciding if I was going go use Intel again or check out the AMD offerings. AMD was always easier on the wallet but at times not always the best when it came to performance and heat dissipation. I liked all the Intel stuff I saw, the Coffee Lake CPU’s looked great. Everyone said you’re a gamer? Don’t bother with AMD! Just get the 8700 and you will love it. I really was leaning towards Intel. This was before the Ryzen 2.0 was announced. But then the Ryzen lineup was refreshed here comes the 12 MM CPU’s from AMD. And guess what, they include a heat sink and fan! I spent the next 2 weeks trying to read all I could about the new AMD stuff. Info was scarce no one had much info as AMD did not want to release anything before they launched.
So I set my calendar. I said let’s wait until the AMD comes out, give it a week then check out some reviews from the field. After that the new Motherboards started being released by all the vendors to support the new chips. I started looking at all those boards and options and finally decided on the 2700X 8 Core Ryzen and the MSI X470 Gaming Pro. I could have gone higher on the board but I do not plan on doing much over clocking, and I don’t need more high end features like Wi-Fi and USB C. They are both great, but I don’t use Wi-Fi on a desktop. I want the best online gaming experience and one small glitch from your Wi-Fi can mean the difference between taking turn 7 perfectly or being pushed into the Wall. Thanks to this well thought out designed case, putting all the components together was easy fun and there was a lot of room for nice clean cable management. A lot of cables can sit behind the motherboard tray and its easy to bend them into a nice clean design. (I still have the front cables to clean up yet but I have one more install to do. I did not realize how much motherboard design had evolved since the last build I did was about 12 years ago!

When did Fan ports go to 4 port? What is that USB connector? I don’t have one of those do i? These were some of the question s I had when I was reading through the Motherboard manual the night before. I always read them cover to cover to make sure I know what I am doing. Ok well this time, in the interest of time I skimmed a lot of the BIOS section. I just wanted to know how to set it on a good stable setting and leave it alone. This case also has a section on the back of the motherboard tray that you can mount an SSD Drive to it. I did not choose to do that as I wanted all the storage in the 3.5 bays in the front of the case.

I was very happy to test the Audio quality once I was booted into Windows 10. I also wanted great sound quality as I do enjoy a lot of music playback on my pc. I stream a lot of you tube clips and like to listen to my Satellite Radio on their web site. The sound is excellent and crisp and will go louder than is allowed in the noise ordinance section of the town code. Performance of this machine has been top notch. The PC boots up in less than 20 seconds thanks to the speedy SSD drive and the Gigabit Ethernet connection keeps me running laps with the best racers in the Forza Community! Performance has been ultra smooth with no glitches that I can see. Shadows and water looks great and realistic in Grand Theft Auto and standing at the Pier watching the sunset in game with the boardwalk behind you is memorizing and leaves you questioning which side of the screen you’re in.
Oh the Operating system is important too isn’t it? I am running Windows 10 with the latest updates. I had installed Windows 10 on this drive a while ago then put it away till the new build was ready. It booted right up allowed me to sign in and validate my copy of windows and everything came up with the settings it brought over from the previous pc. I was able to let it boot up and Windows took care of getting all the drivers in order to make sure it could boot and operate while it found the best drivers during the next update. I ran the pc for 3 days before I even remembered to check out the drivers on the cd and make sure I had the ones I needed. Of course I ran to the website and made sure to get the latest versions of drivers but I did install the CPU-Z that came with the board and I had a blast playing with the LED patterns in the Mystic light app. The LED lighting on the CPU and the Motherboard looks great and with the Window in the side of the case I get a nice colorful glow under my desk.

This has been a fun build and went pretty smooth. Building PC can be a lot of fun and rewarding, care just has to be applied to always be consistent how you build and be thorough in following install guides. Now if you will excuse me I need to practice running some laps on the Indy track..

The Motorola Z2 Play. A premium device with an affordable price.

A few weeks ago I got the desire to try a different device. Not because of any issue or anything like that, I just decided I want to have a different phone. For some reason the thought of jumping between devices to try a few out is appealing to me. And now with the cloud holding most all of the data I use on the phone switching back and forth is easier than ever. I currently have an HTC U11 phone that has been a blast to use every day for the past 6 months. I never had an issue with it, everything runs smoothly and the battery life is great. I get a day to a day and a half if I’m conservative with my streaming. The phone looks awesome it’s a bright red metallic color that everyone notices. I have it enclosed in a clear case and put a shatter proof screen on it. I had a spur of the moment inkling to check out the Motorola phones again after they sent me an email with a large sale on some of their newer flagship devices.

I checked them out and decided on the Z2 play from Motorola. This is a nice thin lightweight phone with a 5.5 inch LCD which is bigger than the screen on the HTC. The phone is so light and easy to hold too. I forgot how much weight the HTC had to it till I picked it up to do this review. Its not a bad thing either its just different.

The Moto has a nice bright screen that is easy to see and everything looks vivid and sharp. The camera is a 12 MP shooter in the back with a 5MP in the front for great self portraits. Pictures look great on it and seem to capture a lot of detail. The phone is quick and responsive and everything is easy to find when looking for your favorite apps. This is an unlocked device that is carrier neutral so there is no bloat ware on it. I love this feature as the HTC was the same way and it is great not to be force fed apps that I cannot uninstall and will never use.

The phone being a bigger size is still easy to use one handed thanks to the thin sized footprint. It has a head phone jack which I like and it also has a usb C connector for the charger. I tried USB C headphones but they did not recognize on the phone so they cant be used unless you have the head phone jack adapter. The battery life has been outstanding I can push this and get a full day and a half out before I need to charge it again. There is also a Moto Mod add on that is an extended battery should you need more juice. I stream quite a bit and run different music apps like sound cloud and the Sirius XM app for on demand shows. I have more than 40 percent battery life left at night before I put the phone down to sleep. The included turbo charge will give it a 50 percent boost in 15 minutes so to get you through a long day should you need it. The phone has one downside when coming off the HTC, it is running Nougat of Android 7.1 and the 8.0 Oreo update is still pending. Moto seems to have an issue getting updates out quickly. This has not been an issue to me except I miss the nice emoji icons when doing text messages. I have not seen any major issues with the phone and it has been a joy to use. I have only seen one small issue and I am still testing to see if it happens on all audio apps or just one. What happens is after some time the volume just decreases half way. The volume is set all the way up on the phone and on the app but it just is a lowered volume. This happens on the
Sirus app and closing the app and restarting it takes away the issue. I have yet to test this on other apps and I am not sure if it’s a power saving feature or some bug. Either way I will keep testing and report back. This is a really great phone and for a less expensive price point it can be an affordable device for someone who just needs a phone and doesn’t need the latest and greatest. I will probably use this for a few weeks then I may switch back to my HTC device. Either way I have two great devices that can get me through a whole day without fail and they are both reliable and dependable. That’s all I want at the end of the day.