Tong Family

Man I had forgotten how confusing Windows can be. Having loved windows and then been a Mac user for the last 10 years, I finally have a PC that I use mainly for gaming, but since it has a huge screen, it is also useful for other stuff and heck I’m a curious person. So here are some notes on hardward:

1. nVidia Drivers. Man I had forgotten what a mess these are. There are no less than three different ways to load them and it is confusing which to pick. First there is Windows Update, then Alienware Update and finally GeForce Experience. The main thing I have learned is to be cautious about updates. Don’t take them willy nilly, there are so many regressions that it doesn’t pay.
2. LG B9 and nVidia and Windows 10 loss of sync issues. I have no idea what is going on here, but sometime I boot and things are fine and other times the TV loses sync, goes blank and comes back every few seconds. AT first I thought this was related to HDR but it doesn’t seem to matter if GSync or HDR are on. No resolution here and nothing on the internet. Works fine with a Mac of course.
3. Logitech Brio Pro and Windows 10. Man this is sure confusing, but the net of it is that *you do not want to use* the Brio drivers. They are from 2017. Instead, you plug the Brio in, make sure the firmware is up to date by downloading a separate firmware driver installer. Then, you have to disable the Brio camera and then reboot. Automagically, a Biometric Devices appears in Device Manager and it works. The main thing is to unintuitively switch from the Logitech Driver to the generic Windows USB Camera Drive in what is called Imaging Devices. Confusingly when you reboot it is renamed Cameras as an aside. Argh! Note also that the download page doesn’t even have the firmware update at the top, you have to scroll and scroll.
4. Funky shortcut keys. I know I shouldn’t complain, but Window uses CTRL-X, V and C for copy and paste, but Macs use ALT-X, V and C so you should scoop install sharpkeys. There is no easy way to do a remap because the Alt key is not remappable although you can change the Windows key (. I really want to just swap the two keys (I do this all the time for the Mac). Also more muscle memory, CTRL-space on a mac gets search, but you need to do Windows-S for this on Windows. (Windows is called OPTION or that funny cloverleaf on the Mac). There needs to be a “Windows for Mac Users” configuration setting, if they really want to get developers back.
5. 1Password on Edge. This works differently, there is no simple 1Password extension, you have to use the full 1PasswordX. To me that’s always a little scary running your password manager in your browser which is always under attack by websites
6. Apple Music for the wEb. At least this is good, you can now have a web client for your Windows machine.
7. Command line scripting. What a mess, I just wish there was a real Bash for Windows. You can run Bash in WSL but then you have to change your scripts. For instance real Windows commands like choco have to be run as choco.exe and the file system is completely different, you have a ~ but your real Windows home is in /mnt/c/ which is pretty strange. They are getting closer.
8. Windows Terminal. This is their new terminal. Lots of problems here. With Windows edge, if you try to download the configuration, Edge crashes. You have to manually change the JSON typee in the Explorer to Notepad to see it.
9. Windows Hello Picture disappears when you choose use with Microsoft Accounts. There a million ways to login. One of the most convenient is Picture login where you just click on a photo. But this turns off silently if you choose windows hello only for Microsoft accounts. Another argh!
10. Natural Scrollling. The Mouse scrolling works completely backwards on Windows and there is no way to easily fix it. You literally have to registry hack to make this work. So good luck getting to \Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID and finding your VID* parament and then finally getting to Device Parameters\FlipFlopWheel