Month: October 2019

Did I ever tell you about the time Microsoft doled out a Windows 10 update to the wrong set of users? Probably not, because I don’t recall it happening before now. I’m not saying it never has, I just can’t think of another time, other than this one.

This one, by the way, refers to KB4523786, an optional update offered alongside a cumulative update for Windows 10 version 1903 with fixes for several bugs. The optional KB4523786 offers “quality improvements to Windows Autopilot configured devices.”

Business and IT admins use Autopilot to set up and configure new devices. In this case, however, Microsoft offered it to Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro users. The issue with this, as Microsoft notes, is that “Windows Autopilot update is not installed on Windows 10 Pro or a later version when the device is not registered or configured for Windows Autopilot deployment. Windows Autopilot update is never offered to Windows 10 Home.”

Fortunately, as far as facepalms go, this one is relatively minor.

As first reported by Windows Latest, Microsoft’s Intune Support Team noted on Twitter that it pulled the update, noting that anyone who might have already installed it (and shouldn’t have) need not worry about adverse effects.

No harm, no foul, in other words. It’s just a bit embarrassing, and it comes at a time when Microsoft’s Windows 10 updates have been put under the microscope due to several previously reported issues. One of the more persistent issues as of late is a Start Menu bug. I’m not sure how widespread it actually is, but affected users get an error message when trying to open the Start Menu. It reads, “Your Start Menu isn’t working. We’ll try to fix it the next time you sign in.”

While on the topic of updates, the next big upgrade to Windows 10 will be here soon. It’s called the November 2019 update (previously known as 19H2), and while it will not be as big as some of the previous major upgrades, now is a good time to think about backing up your important data, if you are not already on a backup routine.

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition 2-in-1 is a laptop whose biggest selling point is at odds with a harsh reality.

The laptop’s most notable feature is a 15.6-inch 4K display with Dolby Vision HDR, giving it one of the crispest and most vibrant pictures you’ll find on a consumer-grade notebook today. But using this laptop at its full resolution comes with a trade-off: In certain applications, animations and scrolling become choppy as the system struggles to keep up with the demands of its 4K display. The result is a feeling of sluggishness that’s unbecoming for a laptop currently listing at $1,549.

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition 2-in-1 does have other virtues. The stylus groove built into its display hinge lets you carry around a full-sized active pen without any risk of losing it, the keyboard is exceptionally comfortable to type on, and the aluminum design is attractive. Still, those benefits can be harder to appreciate through an occasionally sluggish interface.

Tech specs and design

4K panel aside, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition is fairly well-equipped. It has an Intel Core i7-8565U processor, Nvidia MX250 graphics, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 512GB Intel Optane H10 SSD, along with a fingerprint reader built into its power button. The 15.6-inch display also has a hinge that rotates 360 degrees, so you can fold the laptop around into tablet mode.

On the left side, Dell included an HDMI slot, a USB-C port, a MicroSD card slot, and a DC charging port. An additional USB-C port instead of proprietary charging would have been preferable, but you can charge through the USB-C port in a pinch if you supply your own charger.

On the right side, the laptop has a pair of USB-A 3.1 ports and a headphone/microphone combo jack. The top edge of the laptop’s display bezel houses a webcam. Dell says its four-lens elements is better than typical webcams at maintaining focus throughout the frame, but it’s still a grainy 720p camera in the end.

While Dell’s Inspiron line tends to be more utilitarian than stylish, the Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition’s dark-gray aluminum chassis is an exception. The laptop also has impressively slim bezels, measuring roughly 0.25 inches on the sides and 0.37 inches on the top. Still, at 4.78 pounds, it’s one of the heaviest 15-inch laptops you’ll find in this price range, and the power brick adds almost another pound.

The display’s ups and downs

Let’s start with the good news: The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition’s display looks gorgeous under the right conditions. Dim the lights and throw on an HDR video in Netflix or YouTube, and the picture might remind you of what you’d get on a high-end TV.

The right conditions, however, aren’t always so easy to come by. Dell advertises a maximum brightness of 300 nits, but we measured 263 nits in real-world testing, which is just average for a 15-inch laptop. (HP’s Spectre x360 15t touch, with a 4K AMOLED display, peaks at 485 nits.) The screen still looks great in normal lighting, especially with that crisp 4K panel, but the benefits of HDR are tougher to discern without more brightness. (Also worth noting: By default, the display will show HDR video only when the laptop is plugged in. You have to dig into Windows settings to enable HDR on battery power.)

The bigger issue is how the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition performs at its native 4K resolution. Depending on the application, you may experience janky animations or choppy scrolling, even with the laptop plugged into outlet power and set to its “Best Performance” power setting. Here are some scenarios in which the laptop’s graphics stuttered:

Pressing the Windows Start button

Scrolling through webpages in Firefox

Watching 4K videos in Firefox at 60 frames per second

Scrolling through an image-heavy PDF in Chrome

Scrolling through the game store in Steam

Scrolling through a text document in the free Markdown editor Typora

In fairness, not every app behaves this way. Microsoft Edge and Word, for instance, both offered buttery-smooth scrolling, and both Edge and Chrome handled 4K 60-fps videos without issue. It’s unclear exactly who or what is to blame here, but I did test a second review unit and found the exact same issues. Having to use specific applications just to get smooth performance is a big trade-off to make on a $1,500 laptop.

Keyboard, trackpad, and stylus

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition’s graphics performance issues mar what is otherwise a decent laptop, with its keyboard being one of the biggest highlights. The keycaps have a soft, matte surface that feels downright luxurious compared to other laptops, and while they’re fairly quiet to type on, they strike down with a satisfying pop.

Dell also includes an active pen (its PN350M, to be exact), which is pressure-sensitive but only at 1,024 levels. (Some other laptop pens, including Microsoft’s Surface Pen, support four times as many pressure levels.) Dell even came up with a slick way to store it, carving out a magnetic groove in the display hinge that holds the pen firmly but keeps it easily accessible in tablet mode. When you fold the laptop closed, the pen is tucked away safe and sound for travel.

Compared to the laptop’s other input methods, the Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition’s trackpad isn’t nearly as nice. The surface feels a bit sticky under your fingers, especially as you apply more pressure, and like most other Windows trackpads, the click mechanism gets stiffer as you move your finger toward the top edge. It does use Microsoft’s Precision Touchpad drivers, though, so it’s responsive and supports a wide range of multi-touch gestures, but Dell itself has offered much smoother trackpads than this (including the one on its new XPS 2-in-1).

Performance benchmarks

While benchmarks don’t tell the whole story about a laptop’s performance, they do provide some hard data to back up what we’re seeing in actual use. With the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition, for instance, we can see some evidence of how the 4K display creates performance compromises.

PCMark is one example, as Dell’s laptop is on the low end in this test of general productivity tasks. The HP Spectre x360 15t touch, which also has a 4K display, turned in similarly lackluster results, though the 13-inch version of Dell’s Black Edition Inspiron (without a 4K display) did poorly as well.

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition also struggled in our battery life test, which involves looping a video at about 250 nits’ brightness. That’s partly a consequence of the 4K display, but it also has to do with battery size, as the 4-cell, 68WHr battery in Dell’s laptop is on the small side for a 15-inch notebook.

Meanwhile, putting the laptop’s Intel Core i7-8565U to work yielded much stronger results. In Cinebench, which tests the CPU in short bursts, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition was near the top of the pack for both single- and multi-thread performance.

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition also trounced several other laptops with the same CPU and RAM while encoding a large video file using the free HandBrake utility. Dell makes a big deal of how the laptop uses “advanced algorithms and accelerometers” to ramp up power when the laptop is on a desk instead of a lap, and that clearly helped the Inspiron here. (Even the 13-inch version, which has less room inside for dissipating heat, distinguished itself from its algorithm-free counterparts.)

Due to its Nvidia MX250 graphics card, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition even outpaced several other laptops in its class in 3DMark, though HP’s Spectre x360 15t touch strangely came out on top despite using the last-generation version of Nvidia’s entry-level laptop GPU. Keep your gaming expectations in check, though: You won’t have any chance of playing games in 4K on this laptop, and with newer games, you’ll have to drop to 1080p or even 720p at low graphics settings to get a workable framerate. Besides, Dell’s 10th-generation Ice Lake CPUs are now delivering comparable graphics performance without the need for a dedicated GPU.

Should you buy the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition?

Though it’s often discounted a bit off its list price, Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition remains a tough sell. It’s a sturdy machine with a great keyboard and a gorgeous display, but a laptop costing north of $1,500 shouldn’t be saddled with weak battery life, subpar trackpad, and everyday graphics issues with its 4K display. I can’t shake the feeling that a lower-resolution panel might have solved a lot of the Inspiron 15 7000 Black Edition’s problems, even if it weakened the laptop’s marketing pitch.

With the IdeaPad C340-15IWL, Lenovo has a 15.6-inch convertible in its range. The 360-degree foldable IPS touchscreen display allows for various usage modes. Not only can it be operated with the fingers but also with the optional Lenovo Active Pen 2 (about 50 to 60 Euros (~$55 to ~$66)). The display provides stable viewing angles, a good contrast and a reasonably decent color reproduction. However, the maximum brightness is too low, and the color-space coverage isn’t convincing either.

The convertible’s highlight is the excellent battery life, which many office devices can’t achieve. The backlit keyboard left a good impression too and proved its suitability for everyday use.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, could have prefaced his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux, by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: I have nothing to offer but blood sweat and tears for dealing with Intel CPU’s security problems.

Or as a Chinese developer told him recently about these problems: “This is a sad talk.” The sadness is that the same Intel CPU speculative execution problems, which led to Meltdown and Spectre security issues, are alive and well and causing more trouble.

The problem with how Intel designed speculative execution is that, while anticipating the next action for the CPU to take does indeed speed things up, it also exposes data along the way. That’s bad enough on your own server, but when it breaks down the barriers between virtual machines (VM)s in cloud computing environments, it’s a security nightmare.

Kroah-Hartman said, “These problems are going to be with us for a very long time, they’re not going away. They’re all CPU bugs, in some ways they’re all the same problem,” but each has to be solved in its own way. “MDS, RDDL, Fallout, Zombieland: They’re all variants of the same basic problem.”

And they’re all potentially deadly for your security: “RIDL and Zombieload, for example, can steal data across applications, virtual machines, even secure enclaves. The last is really funny, because [Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX)] is what supposed to be secure inside Intel ships” [but, it turns out it’s] really porous. You can see right through this thing.”

To fix each problem as it pops up, you must patch both your Linux kernel and your CPU’s BIOS and microcode. This is not a Linux problem; any operating system faces the same problem.

OpenBSD, a BSD Unix devoted to security first and foremost, Kroah-Hartman freely admits was the first to come up with what’s currently the best answer for this class of security holes: Turn Intel’s simultaneous multithreading (SMT) off and deal with the performance hit. Linux has adopted this method.

But it’s not enough. You must secure the operating system as each new way to exploit hyper-threading appears. For Linux, that means flushing the CPU buffers every time there’s a context switch (e.g. when the CPU stops running one VM and starts another).

You can probably guess what the trouble is. Each buffer flush takes a lot of time, and the more VMs, containers, whatever, you’re running, the more time you lose.

How bad are these delays? It depends on the job. Kroah-Hartman said he spends his days writing and answering emails. That activity only takes a 2% performance hit. That’s not bad at all. He also is always building Linux kernels. That takes a much more painful 20% performance hit. Just how bad will it be for you? The only way to know is to benchmark your workloads.

Of course, it’s up to you, but as Kroah-Hartman said, “The bad part of this is that you now must choose: Performance or security. And that is not a good option.” It’s also, he reminded the developer-heavy crowd, which choice your cloud provider has made for you.

But wait! The bad news keeps coming. You must update your Linux kernel and patch your microcode as each Intel-related security update comes down the pike. The only way to be safe is to run the latest Canonical, Debian, Red Hat, or SUSE distros, or the newest long-term support Linux kernel. Kroah-Hartman added, “If you are not using a supported Linux distribution kernel or a stable/long term kernel, you have an insecure system.”

So, on that note, you can look forward to constantly updating your operating system and hardware until the current generation of Intel processors are in antique shops. And you’ll be stuck with poor performance if you elect to put security ahead of speed. Fun, fun, fun!

The subscription wars are in full-swing but today, Microsoft offered a compelling reason to give it more of your money. The company reintroduced its Xbox All Access program for players in the UK, US and Australia – which also includes the option to upgrade to its new console, Project Scarlett, once it hits shelves in 2020.

What you get with the Xbox All Access program is, well, an Xbox One, an Xbox wireless controller, a 24-month membership to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. In the UK, that means you roughly pay £18 a month for two years. Plus, the ability to upgrade to a Project Scarlett console next year means there’s less risk in buying now, as opposed to waiting for the 2020 holiday season. Not too shabby, though of course there are hoops to jump through and limitations.

For starters, to take part in the program, buyers will have to buy from specific retail partners. UK residents can go in-store to GAME, or in-person or online at Smyths Toys. In the US, that’s Amazon.com, while Australians can either buy either online or in-store at Telstra. That said, eligible Xbox One consoles depend on your region. In the UK and US, you can choose between the Xbox One X, Xbox One S, or the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition bundles. Australians are limited to the Xbox One X Forza Horizon 4 or Xbox One S Forza Horizon bundles.

Interested players will also have to pass a finance check through Microsoft’s partner banks: Klarna in the UK, Citizens Bank in the US, and Telstar in Australia.

If you buy everything new, and separately, that can set you back anywhere from £245-£425, not including the £11/month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Roughly speaking, that means you could pay anywhere from £445 to £625 for the 18 months before Project Scarlett hits. If you plan on upgrading, that’s not really worth the expense. On the other hand, if your Xbox is dying, you could theoretically save hundreds more via All Access. The Xbox One X – the most expensive option under the All Access program – costs £25 a month. But for a limited time, Microsoft will give XBox One X buyers the option of upgrading to Project Scarlett after 12 months. That means you only have to pay £300 of an estimated £600 value. Again, it depends on what individual deals you can find on the internet, but you could easily save a sizeable chunk of cash.

As for the fine print with upgrading to Project Scarlett, that too depends on your region. In the UK and US, you’ll have to have made at least 18 payments via the Xbox All Access program. (Australian users can buy out their consoles at any time.) Those looking to upgrade will also have to “purchase Project Scarlett with a new Xbox All Access purchase from the same retail partner where they joined the program.” You won’t get to keep the Xbox One either – you’ll have to trade that in. And, if you choose to upgrade from the All-Digital Version, you’ll also have to pay a fee.

If you do want to upgrade, you’ll also have to buy into the program by 31 December this year. You can’t throw your money at Microsoft just yet, however. Australians will have the first crack at the program starting 29 October. Meanwhile, the program will be available to UK residents starting 5 November, and US residents on 18 November.