Author: Martin Brinkmann

When I was young, I studied German, History and English at Essen University in Germany. I worked in computer support for several years at the time to help other computer users when they ran into issues. Writing started out as a passion project, as I wanted to help more users and not just the ones that I handled in support. This lead to the founding of Ghacks Technology News in 2005. First, as a side-project, but shortly thereafter as a full-time project as the site's popularity exploded. I sold Ghacks to Softonic some years ago, but stayed on as Editor. You can still read my articles on the site. I do publish on Betanews as well. In recent years, I started to write and publish technology books, including my latest book "Windows 11 From Beginner to Advanced", which is available on Amazon. I'm also a freelance writer for the German publisher Gamestar. Chipp.in is my newest project. I want to use it to talk about my book projects, sell my books directly, and write about technology, as this is what interests me.

Display the power on hours and other hard drive stats on Windows

Posted on March 25, 2024March 25, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

All hard drives have a limited lifespan. It does not really matter if you use Solid State Drives or platter-based drives. Eventually, they will fail. It is therefore important to keep an eye on the status of hard drives. This gives you enough time to migrate the data to a new hard drive to avoid disaster.

Looking up hard drive usage information is also useful in other scenarios. Say you want to sell a hard drive. Buyers may want to know for how long the hard drive was used and how much writes it had. The latter is important for Solid State Drives, which support a limited number of writes.

One of the best applications for the job is Crystal Disk Info. The free software for Windows is easy to use. It displays internal hard drive data courtesy of S.M.A.R.T. — Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology — of hard drives.

S.M.A.R.T.’s primary purpose is to monitor and report drive reliability data. CrystalDiskInfo retrieves the information and displays them in its interface for each connected hard drive.

CrystalDiskInfo

You can download the latest version of CrystalDiskInfo from the developer’s website. Run the program after installation. It displays each hard drive in a tab in its interface.

Data of the primary hard drive is displayed automatically. Click on other hard drives to display their data in the interface.

Check the top right corner to get “total host reads”, “total host writes”, Total NAND writes”, “power on count” and “power on hours” information. These should give you a good view of the utilization of the drive.

Note that the information is slightly different for platter-based drives. These display the rotation rate, which is the speed more or less, as well as power on count and power on hours.

Additional information about the drive is displayed on the left side. You find the features that it supports there as well as the current transfer mode. This can also be useful to determine issues, e.g., if a drive is slow.

The app displays all S.M.A.R.T. values in a table below. Some, like the write error rate, temperature, or reallocated sectors count, may also be useful.

The current and worst values are displayed, as well as potential thresholds.

Closing Words

CrystalDiskInfo is a great app when it comes to hard drive information. It is free and easy to use. It is a good idea to check S.M.A.R.T. values regularly to detect failing hard drives as early as possible.

Now You: do you monitor S.M.A.R.T. values of hard drives?

Notepad is getting spellchecking support

Posted on March 24, 2024March 24, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Microsoft continues to enhance Notepad, the plain text editor of the Windows operating system. After adding features such as tabs, auto saves, or text formatting to Notepad, it is now testing spellchecking support.

The latest version of Notepad, version 11.2402.18.0, includes the functionality. It is available in the Canary and Dev development channels only. Not all testers get the feature right away, as Microsoft is — once again — rolling it out gradually to users. It can very well take weeks or months before a particular feature reaches all testers.

Microsoft describes the functionality on the Windows Insider Blog:

With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes. We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typing mistakes as you type.

Notepad Spellchecking

Microsoft notes that misspelled words are highlighted automatically by the editor. They appear in red. A click or tap on the word or phrase displays spelling suggestions. The keyboard Shift-F10 does that as well, but it appears less practicable to use.

Select a suggestion with the mouse, by touch, or keyboard, and it takes up the place of the misspelled word.

An option to add words to the dictionary is provided. This is useful if a word is spelled correctly but marked as misspelled by Notepad. There are also options to ignore words in a single document.

Spell checking is enabled for some file types only. For others, including log files and some files used for coding, it is turned off. Options to change the behavior are available in the settings.

AI or not?

Microsoft makes no mention of AI in the Windows Insider blog. The spell checking feature seems to run locally on the system. I cannot test it, thanks to Microsoft’s habit of rolling out features over a long period of time.

It looks to be a local feature that checks words using a local dictionary. Again, I could not confirm this at this stage.

Closing Words

Spell checking is a useful feature, even for a plain text editor like Notepad. Users who do not need it can turn the feature off in the settings.

With Wordpad deprecated, it looks as if Microsoft is putting the focus on Notepad. While it is not a full replacement, it is now getting features that Wordpad never supported.

Notepad is one of the few native Windows apps that I use regularly. What about you?

Windows 11: Lock Screen widgets in development

Posted on March 23, 2024March 23, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Microsoft released the Windows 11 update KB5035942 earlier this week. The update for the Windows 11 Release Preview channel includes several new features. One of them is that widgets may now be displayed on the lock screen.

Wait a minute, was not this just introduced already? Yes and no. The Windows 10 update KB5035941 for the operating system’s Release Preview channel introduced the change as well. It was released prior to the Windows 11 update, making it one of the rare occasions that Windows 10 got a feature earlier than Windows 11. Prior in this case means a few days earlier, but it is still remarkable enough to mention it.

Here is what Microsoft says about the addition of widgets on Windows 11’s lock screen:

New! This update adds more content to your lock screen. In addition to weather, sports, traffic, and finance content will appear. To turn on this feature, go to Settings > Personalization > Lock screen. Note this feature might not be available to all users because it will roll out gradually.

The lock screen cards display at the bottom of the display. They offer weather, finance, traffic, and sports information when enabled. The information appears to be similar to the content that Windows 11’s Widgets Board provides.

Windows Lock Screen Widgets

It appears, from Microsoft’s description at least, that users need to turn on the cards actively before they become available. This is done under Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen. Could change in the future.

Like the Windows 10 version, it is an all or nothing setting. Either you enable the feature and get all four cards on the lock screen, or you keep it disabled and get none. There is no option to select just some of the cards for display on the lock screen.

Since Microsoft pushed the new feature to Release Preview machines, it is only a matter of time before the change lands in stable versions as well.

It could be as early as on the April 2024 Patch Day for Windows 11, which is going to be on April 9, 2024.

Closing Words

It is up to each individual user of the operating system to decide whether lock screen cards are a useful feature. If you ask me, I have no use for it, but I do not really use the lock screen for anything other than to sign in.

Now You: what about you?

Firefox 124.0.1 fixes two critical security issues

Posted on March 22, 2024March 22, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

It has been just a few days since the release of Firefox 124.0, but here is Firefox 124.0.1 already. Usually, when this happens, it is either a security update or a bug fix update that address major issues.

It is a security update in the case of Firefox 124.0.1. The official release notes include just two words: “Security fixes”. The issue affects desktop versions of the web browser. It is unclear if the Android version is also affected. There is no release notes page for Firefox 124.0.1 for Android at the time of writing.

The security advisory page lists two security issues that Mozilla addressed in the Firefox update. Both have a severity rating of critical, which is the highest severity rating available:

CVE-2024-29943: Out-of-bounds access via Range Analysis bypass
CVE-2024-29944: Privileged JavaScript Execution via Event Handlers

Both security issues were reported to Mozilla by Manfred Paul via Trend Micro’s Zero Day initiative.

The first security issue could allow an attacker to “perform an out-of-bounds read or write” on JavaScript objects by “fooling range-based bounds check elimination”.

The second issue allows an attacker to “inject an event handler into a privileged object that would allow arbitrary JavaScript execution in the parent process”.

Without going into too many details on the issues, they’d allow an attacker to execute JavaScript code or control JavaScript objects in the Firefox web browser.

Mozilla does not reveal if the issues are exploited in the wild. It is a good idea to update Firefox Stable installations as soon as possible to protect the browser from potential attacks targeting the vulnerabilities.

Updating Firefox

The security update is available already. While most Firefox installations will get updated automatically, cautious Firefox users and system administrators may want to speed up the installation of the update.

Here is how this is done:

Open the Firefox web browser.
Select Menu > Help > About Firefox.
Firefox displays the current version. It should pick up the update at the same time. In other words, it is downloaded and installed automatically.
A restart of the browser is required to complete the process.

Repeat the steps above and you should see Firefox 124.0.1 listed as the version on the about page.

Firefox is also available on the Mozilla website. Click here to open the download page and download the latest version to the local system.

Brave 1.64 browser update brings more AI and blocks VPN services from installing by default

Posted on March 21, 2024March 21, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Brave Software released a new stable version of the company’s Brave browser today. Brave 1.64 continues the AI push in the browser, but it also privacy improvements as well as new features.

Existing installations of the browser should receive it automatically via the integrated updating functionality. Desktop users may speed up the installation of the new version by loading brave://settings/help in the address bar. An alternative to that is to click on Menu > Help > About Brave.

Brave displays the current version when the page opens. It runs a check for updates and will download and install new updates automatically at this point. Note that it is necessary to restart Brave once to complete the installation.

One big change of Brave 1.64 deserves special mention. Brave notes in the changelog that it is no longer installing VPN services automatically. This is only done when users purchase a VPN subscription or enable it.

Tip: check out six Brave features that you may like.

Brave 1.64

Like Google and Microsoft, Brave Software is also integrating AI into its browser. Called Leo, it is different from Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini. A core difference is that Leo gives you access to different large language models. Not all of them are free, but the core service is.

Brave 1.64 introduces a Leo AI Tools right-click context menu entry. Right-click on any text element on the webpage and you may select a diverse range of AI tools. The two main options are to ask the AI to provide context and for help with your creative efforts.

For instance, you could select a few paragraphs of text and ask Leo to summarize or explain it. When you are writing, you could ask Leo to rewrite the entire text, improve it, or change its tone or length.

How well this works depends on the text itself but also on other variables, including the large language model. Selecting the last sentence and asking Brave Leo to extend it resulted in the following three paragraphs of text:

The effectiveness of this method relies heavily on two main factors: the text being analyzed and the specific large language model being utilized. The text itself plays a crucial role, as the more nuanced and well-crafted it is, the better the language model can understand and generate appropriate responses. This, in turn, improves the overall outcome of the process.

However, the text is not the only determinant of success. The large language model chosen for the task also significantly influences the results. Different models have varying strengths and weaknesses, making some more suitable than others for specific tasks. For instance, a language model trained on scientific literature may not perform as well when dealing with colloquial language.

In conclusion, the combination of a well-structured text and a carefully selected language model is essential for achieving optimal results. By focusing on these two aspects, users can expect a more accurate and contextually appropriate response from the language model.

Other changes

The full changelog is long and you may want to check it out on Brave’s website to go through all the changes. Here is a quick overview of changes that are noteworthy:

There is a new “Bring all tabs to this window” option in the right-click tab context menu. It moves all tabs of other windows into the active one.
There is a new “show scrollbar” option when vertical tabs are enabled. This adds the option to use it for scrolling.
Chromium’s storage partitioning is now compatible with Brave’s ephemeral storage implementation.
Implemented stream isolation for third-party subresources in Private Windows with Tor to bring it up to par with Tor Browser’s implementation.

Now You: anything that you find interesting? Anything that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Inplace Upgrade Helper: Windows tool to switch between Windows editions

Posted on March 20, 2024March 20, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Inplace Upgrade Helper is an open source tool designed to help Windows users move between different Windows 10 and 11 editions.

The Windows edition, e.g., Home or Pro, determines whether certain features are available or not. A common example is that Home editions lack access to the Group Policy Editor.

Windows includes options to switch editions. In best case, all you need to do is open Settings > System > Activation, click on the “change” button next to Change product key, and type or paste the new key.

This process works well when you upgrade from a less expensive version. Upgrades from Home to Pro should work this way. You may still run into issues sometimes. While this happens often when you downgrade Windows to another edition, e.g., from Pro to Home, it is not uncommon that you run into issues when you try to upgrade the edition.

Inplace Upgrade Helper

Inplace Upgrade Helper supports all major versions of Windows and many special editions. Besides Home and Pro, it also supports Enterprise, Education, IoT Enterprise, Windows 11 SE CloudEdition, or Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021.

The open source tool includes four different methods to change editions in Windows 10 and 11. These are:

Using slmgr.
Running an in-place upgrade using setup.exe.
Running an in-place upgrade of any edition of Windows. This method blocks any “firmware-embedded keys” of the current edition.
Running a forced in-place upgrade to keep all apps and settings.

While that may sound complicated, it is not really. All you need to do download Windows installation media and extract it on the local system. You may use WinRAR for that or most file archivers.

Download the latest version of the Inplace Upgrade Helper tool and place it in the same directory as setup.exe.

Right-click on Inplace_Upgrade_Helper.bat and select “run as administrator” to start it.

From there it is just a matter of selecting the desired edition, e.g., 2 for Pro, and then the upgrade method, e.g., f for forcing the upgrade or k for trying to install the update using slmgr.

As always, it is recommended to create a backup of the system drive before you make any changes to the operating system.

Note that the tool does not activate Windows. It merely switches the edition.

Closing words

Trying Windows’ built-in option to change the key and edition is the best option if you upgrade from Home to Pro. The open source tool may be useful if you run into issues when you try to switch editions.

Now You: which edition of Windows do you run, if any? (via Deskmodder)

Microsoft continues to add Copilot to anything that moves: File Explorer next

Posted on March 19, 2024March 19, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Barely a week goes by with Microsoft making yet another announcement about Copilot AI or launching a new development build of Windows 11 with Copilot added to something. This time, Microsoft added Copilot functionality to the default file manager of Windows, File Explorer.

This particular implementation does not add Copilot directly to File Explorer though. Microsoft added right-click context menu options to File Explorer that interact with the AI when selected.

Right-click on a file in File Explorer or on the desktop, and you find the new Copilot > Send to Copilot option there. This works similarly to Copilot’s integrated file upload feature. In other words, it allows you to ask Copilot questions about the uploaded file.

For example, if it is an Excel document, you could ask Copilot to look up and return data. Word or PDF documents can be summarized. Speaking of summaries, the second context menu options asks the AI to summarize the selected document.

Weakness in tests

This did not work too well in tests some weeks ago. I asked Copilot to return data from an Excel spreadsheet. While it did return some data, it was not complete. Even when reminded that it missed data that matched the query, Copilot would not return the full set of expected data.

I concluded that this feature could become something useful in the future, but only if Microsoft and OpenAI get it right. And with right I mean that the AI’s output needs to be reliable all the time. Even without hallucinations, which refers to incorrect data being returned that is not found in the source, it the AI ignores some of the data.

For now, it is always necessary to verify the output of any AI on the market to make sure its output does not contain errors.

Microsoft has a few months of development time left before it releases the long-hailed first AI-focused version of Windows. It will be interesting to see if that version will be more reliable than the current versions available for testing.

Now You: have you tried Copilot or another AI?

Google is shutting down Keen, a platform you may have never heard of

Posted on March 18, 2024March 18, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

It is not uncommon for Google or Microsoft to shut down services or programs. In fact, there are entire websites dedicated to services and products that these companies shut down.

Google’s latest target is Keen. Keen was developed as a competitor to the incredibly popular Pinterest. As you may know, you can join Pinterest to create collections of “things” that you like. From classic game consoles over your favorite recipes to furniture and holiday destinations.

These collections may be explored by others. Add social features to the mix, and you got a highly addictive foundation.

Keen was not Google’s first rodeo. Remember Google Plus? It was another failed attempt by Google to establish a strong social service foothold.

Keen promised to do things just a tad different when compared to Pinterest. The service allowed users to “curate, collaborate & expand everything” that they were into.

The service was available on the web and on Google Play. Registered users could create so-called “Keens” and add links, text, images, or web searches to them.

Keen allowed users to collaborate and Google added machine learning to the mix to power recommendations.

Keen launched with some fanfare in 2020. While it did get an initial push, as anything that Google does to a degree, it seemed to underperform. The platform got fewer and fewer updates, and nothing really happened to it since December 2021.

Keen shutdown

When you open the Keen website today, you get a popup that informs you that it is shutting down on March 24, 2024.

Both the Keen website and Keen application won’t be accessible anymore after that date. Google says in the farewell message that Keen “was always intended as an experiment”. Keen users may use a data export tool to export their date before March 24, 2024.

All data, including posts, uploads, like, follows, and comments, will no longer be available after March 24, 2024.

Closing Words

Keen is the latest product in a long list of products that Google killed over the years. While there were lots of duds among them, some are missed by some users even today. This includes Google Reader, Google Specialized Search, or Picasa.

Now You: do you use any social media sites?

Mozilla reassures users that it won’t kill Manifest V2 support in Firefox

Posted on March 17, 2024March 17, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Mozilla confirmed this week that its Firefox web browser will continue to support the extensions Manifest V2 next to the new version Manifest V3.

Google announced several years ago that it would move Chrome’s extensions manifest to a new version. The manifest defines the capabilities of browser extensions. Google’s initial draft drew the ire from users, privacy advocates, and developers alike. The company’s engineers made several adjustments to Manifest V3, which addressed some criticism but not all of it.

It now plans to end support for Manifest V2 extensions later this year in Chrome. Most Chromium-based browsers will share the fate. In fact, the only option to avoid this is to spend engineering time on reintroducing support for Manifest V2 in the browser engine after removal by Google.

Mozilla is in a better position this time. The organization’s Firefox browser uses its own browser engine, which gives it more control over its set of features. While Mozilla has been pushing Firefox towards improved Chromium compatibility in the past, it has made decisions in the past against this if it thought that it would be in the best interest of the organization.

In the case of Manifest V2 and Manifest V3, Mozilla published a statement about the future of Manifest V2 shortly after Google’s announcement regarding the change. Summed it, it confirmed that Mozilla would not follow Google’s implementation to the letter. Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2, and thus all extensions that relied on it, next to Manifest V3.

In other words, Firefox users would get the best of both worlds. Future compatibility with Manifest V3 extensions and also backwards compatibility to make sure that extensions continued to work.

Not all extensions can be ported to Manifest V3. Some may be ported, but with an impact to the functionality. Especially content blockers and other security tools are on the receiving end in this regard.

Mozilla reiterates its stance

With Google’s deadline to end Manifest V2 support in Chrome coming closer and closer, Mozilla published an update on its stance regarding the change. Mozilla confirmed that it has not changed its strategy at all.

While Firefox is supporting Manifest V3 extensions to a degree already, it will continue to support Manifest V2 extensions as well. Firefox continues to “support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future” according to Mozilla.

Mozilla keeps a back door open, but you cannot really blame the organization for doing so. The organization promises that it will inform developers and users at least 12 months before making a a change in this regard, if it decides to re-revaluate the decision.

Closing Words

Firefox continues to support Manifest V2 extensions for the foreseeable future at the very least. It is too early to say if the decision will have an impact on the browser’s usage numbers. Once Google launches the change in Chrome, users with Manifest V2 extensions installed will notice that they cannot use these anymore.

These have several options, one of them is migrating to a browser that continues to support them. It will be especially interesting to see how content blockers behave after the changes land.

Now You: What is your take on the Manifest V3 push by Google?

Microsoft Office 2024 and Office LTSC 2024 announced

Posted on March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 by Martin Brinkmann

Microsoft announced Microsoft Office 2024 for consumers and Office LTSC 2024 for organizations this week. These will be the latest perpetual Office releases. In other words: customers buy these versions once without any recurring costs.

While that sounds like a good deal, perpetual Office versions are supported for only five years by Microsoft. While they may be used after support ends, it comes with risks as security issues are not fixed anymore by Microsoft.

Another factor plays a role. Whereas Microsoft 365 Office apps get constant feature updates, this is not the case for Office 2024 and any other perpetual version of Office. There is no technical reason for this limitation. Microsoft does so to cut costs and push its subscription-based business.

What we know about Office 2024

Microsoft does not reveal much about Microsoft Office 2024 or Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 at this point.

The consumer version will be sold for the same price as Office 2021, the last perpetual version of Office that Microsoft released.

The main edition of Office, Office Home & Student 2024, will therefore retail for $149.99. Microsoft Office Home & Business 2024 will retail for $249.99.

Microsoft 365 Personal is available for $69.99 per year. The business editions of Microsoft 365 start at $6 per month and user, but the cheapest version does not include desktop versions of Office programs. The Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan is available for $12.50 per month and user.

Here is the price overview:

	Office 2024 Home & Student	Office 2024 Home & Business	Microsoft 365 Home	Microsoft 365 Business

1-month	$149.99	$249.99	$69.99	$12.50
1-year	$149.99	$249.99	$69.99	$150
5-years	$149.99	$249.99	$349.95	$750

If you just look at the price, it is cheaper to buy a perpetual version of Office.

The main downside to buying one is that it won’t get any new features after release. Some features are also Microsoft 365 exclusive, especially for business users as Microsoft notes:

While Office LTSC 2024 offers many significant improvements over the previous Office LTSC release, as an on-premises product it will not offer the cloud-based capabilities of Microsoft 365 Apps, like real-time collaboration; AI-driven automation in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; or cloud-backed security and compliance capabilities that give added confidence in a hybrid world

Microsoft plans to increase the price of Office LTSC editions by 10% according to the announcement. Furthermore, Microsoft Publisher will not be included anymore in the bundle, as it is being retired.

Closing Words

It is good that Microsoft is giving customers the choice between the subscription-based Microsoft 365 and the perpetual version Office 2024. It is not as good that Microsoft is limiting functionality and blocking any new features from landing in Office 2024 editions after release.

Price-wise, perpetual licenses are still cheaper, if you compare the retail prices. Discounts may change this one way or the other.

There is also LibreOffice, which is free and works well in many cases, but not in all.

Now You: do you use Office?