Author: lebowitzit

One of the most common questions people ask me is “What’s a good brand of ______?” You can fill in the blank with whatever technology product you can imagine buying, but my answer is nearly always the same: “There is no good brand of ______. All companies that sell these products make some that I feel comfortable recommending and some that I don’t.” (That answer is not entirely truthful. There are a few manufacturers that make nothing I’m willing to recommend. But I’m not talking about them today.) People don’t like to hear this answer, because it requires them to pay attention to details that they would rather not have to think about. In today’s post, I’m going to tell you why I won’t simply recommend brands when requested. It all comes down to two concepts that I’m sure marketing professionals have more polite phrases for, but I call them Brand Dilution and Brand Prostitution.

Brand Dilution is what happens when a company has a brand that has a reputation for something that people like and respect, but then they begin using that brand to sell products that don’t measure up. For example, in the mid-1980s, Toshiba began producing laptops. Toshiba wasn’t the first company to make laptops, but their laptops were such an improvement on what had been available up to that point that they’re described by many industry pundits as the world’s first mass-market laptops. Toshiba soon earned a reputation for making laptops that were reliably sturdy, powerful, dependable and easier to live with than most others. (Note that we’re talking about a time in which a 16-pound laptop was considered portable, and 45 minutes of runtime per battery charge was considered long!) People came to expect that any laptop bearing the Toshiba brand would be a high-quality laptop.

But after a number of years, Toshiba introduced laptops that were cheaper, both in price and quality. Imagine my surprise the first time I encountered one of those: it was slow to the point of hanging constantly, and it felt downright rickety in my hands. I couldn’t understand why Toshiba would put their highly-respected name on such a piece of junk! The owner of the laptop couldn’t understand it either, and, not surprisingly, that was the last Toshiba branded computer she ever bought. Over time, I learned that if one wanted a high-quality Toshiba laptop, one had to shop for one of their Tecra or Portege models, which could only be found in places where businesses purchased computer equipment, and not in the big-box stores that had become the primary sellers of consumer electronics. But to people who don’t buy computer equipment on a regular basis, that distinction is invisible. It didn’t take long before most people came to regard Toshiba laptops as junk, and eschewed them in favor of other brands. It didn’t take the big-box retailers much longer than that to realize they weren’t selling many Toshiba laptops, after which they stopped carrying them.

Toshiba never managed to repair their brand image as far as laptops were concerned. They eventually sold off their laptop division to Sharp Corporation, which now produces Satellite Pro, Portege, Tecra and E models under the DynaBook brand. But I have never seen a DynaBook brand laptop in person, and I don’t know where to buy one other than online at the DynaBook web site. (That’s the danger of diluting your brand: you can damage it beyond hope of repair.)

Brand Prostitution is similar, but it happens when a company is indiscriminate about licensing use of their brand name by other companies. The harm to the brand is done when a licensee produces inferior products that are then sold under the brand name, thus compromising the brand’s reputation for high quality. For example, Verbatim was a company that became well-known for producing high-quality diskettes in the 1970s and ’80s, and since then has expanded into other storage products, including recordable CD and DVD blanks as well as flash storage media, like USB flash drives and SD cards. But Verbatim, the company, was acquired by Mitsubishi in 1990, and by 1994, it was nothing more than a brand name owned by Mitsubishi, and, most recently, CMC. Apparently, the brand wasn’t important to Mitsubishi, because they became quite cavalier about the products sold under the Verbatim label. Some Verbatim-branded products are made in factories owned by their parent company, and are excellent. Others are made under license by factories owned by other companies, and the quality, in my experience, is inconsistent. So, if you were to ask me, “Are Verbatim brand USB flash drives good?”, I would have to answer, “I really don’t know. It depends on who made the ones in the package you bought.”

My perception is that both Brand Dilution and Brand Prostitution are common in nearly all market sectors nowadays, and the result is that the consistency of product quality within brands is quite low. That’s why I refuse to make blanket brand recommendations. If I make a product recommendation, it will most likely be for specific models, and then only because my personal experience with those models has been positive.

The photo above is of a pair of Ethernet jacks, the kind we see on the backs of desktop computers and don’t really think about unless they mysteriously stop working properly, something they rarely do. That’s not to say that network connections never malfunction; it’s just that when they do, it’s rarely the fault of the network jack in the computer. Today’s tale is about a pair of problems that a client asked me to fix. One was that his network was down, and the other was a computer that wouldn’t boot normally, and those problems turned out to be related in a very unexpected way.

The more pressing issue that the client had was that none of his computers could connect to his network, even though all the cables appeared to be in the right places and all the expected network indicator lights were on or flashing, whichever was appropriate. His ISP had sent a field technician out to look at it, and the technician had concluded that the problem wasn’t with their equipment. This client is fairly tech-savvy, and had spent some time troubleshooting his LAN equipment – which consisted of the ISP’s gateway, a simple, unmanaged network switch and half a dozen CAT8 cables, one connecting the gateway to the switch, and the rest connecting computers to the switch.

No, CAT8 was not a typo. This client is using Category 8 Ethernet cables, which are intended for high-speed, short-range use in data centers and usually not deployed in office settings. This client obviously didn’t read up on IEEE, CCITT and ISO network cabling standards before buying these. But while I conducted some of my tests using a more appropriate CAT6 cable, that was mainly to rule out the idea that unorthodox use of CAT8 might be causing his problems. I was not, in fact, there to troubleshoot the network cables, as they had been in use for quite some time and the problem had only appeared a week or so before my visit.

Naturally, I concentrated my attention on the network switch, which is an unmanaged, 8-port PoE model (although the client doesn’t have any PoE devices). You might ask why I didn’t start with the gateway, which is one of those all-in-one cable modem/router/wifi devices that incorporates a 4-port switch. After all, many cable Internet companies deploy these to their customers, and they’ve been known to cause problems, mainly with VoIP phone service. But this client doesn’t have any VoIP phones, and the one computer that was communicating properly over the network was plugged directly into the gateway, So, the mystery was why the computer plugged directly into the router was working fine, but any computer plugged into the switch either failed to obtain an IP address, or, if it did manage to get a valid TCP/IP setup from the DHCP server (in the gateway), it still could not communicate on the network afterward. So, the logical place to start seemed to be the switch.

The client had a couple of spare network switches, so I tried swapping switches — no change. I checked and re-checked all the connections; again, everything appeared to be hooked up correctly. It made no difference if I connected up using my CAT6 cable or the client’s CAT8 one. If I connected my laptop to the gateway, my laptop got a working connection, but if I plugged into the switch, it didn’t. It seemed unlikely that all three switches were bad, especially since one of which was just a few weeks old.

So, I then turned my attention to the ISP’s gateway. I had never seen that particular model gateway before, so maybe there was some obscure setting in it that had could affect a connected switch and had accidentally been changed. But no matter where I looked in the gateway’s administration GUI, I couldn’t find any settings that might be responsible for causing issues with the switch.

So much for the places where I most often find this sort of trouble. I now had to start looking at the rest of the network. In a typical home or small business network, plugging certain kinds of rogue devices into the switch can bring down the network. Fortunately, this was a small network, and it was pretty much down anyway, so I unplugged all the client’s network cables from the switch, except for the one that connected it to the gateway, and then plugged just my laptop into the switch. Aha, now I was getting somewhere! My laptop was instantly assigned a valid IP configuration and went online.

Next, I began plugging the client’s network cables back in one by one, testing with my laptop after each. Since we’re only talking about four cables, it didn’t take long to find the problematic one. What surprised me, though, is that the cable that brought the network back down turned out to be plugged into the second problem I was asked to fix: the computer that didn’t work.

It’s instructive to note that a modern computer’s Ethernet jack works even if the computer is turned off, as long as a) it’s plugged into a working electrical outlet, b) the power supply is at least working well enough to energize the system board, and c) the Wake-On-LAN setting in the system board’s BIOS hasn’t been turned off. Apparently, this computer’s Ethernet jack was not only energized, but was also transmitting a constant stream of garbage data out over the network cable. That stream was causing the network outage.

The computer turned out to have some strange things about it. First of all, it has two network jacks instead of the usual one. (Two network jacks is quite common when the computer in question is a network server, but this one was a custom-built, but otherwise fairly ordinary, desktop PC, albeit one equipped with high-end components.) One of the jacks was, in fact, connected to the cable from the network switch. The other one was incorrectly connected to a network printer via a standard Ethernet patch cable. I had to explain to the client that such a connection doesn’t work, particularly not without a special crossover cable, and not without at least setting a static IP address on the printer. But even with a crossover cable, such a configuration was unlikely to make the printer work, so I removed the Ethernet cable that had connected the PC directly to the printer.

But could that unworkable connection have caused the network to go down? That seemed unlikely, because, as mentioned earlier, that computer wasn’t working. OK, to be more precise, it wasn’t running an operating system, because, as I would find out later, its power supply was failing. The system board was getting enough power in its off state to energize its Ethernet jacks, but unless there is something very strange about the way those Ethernet jacks were connected to the system board, having a printer improperly plugged into one of them shouldn’t have caused the other one to create problems on the network.

A failing power supply can, theoretically, cause a component like an onboard Ethernet module to fail, but this, too, seemed unlikely under the circumstances. The power supply in the computer was good enough to get the computer through its power-on self-test. It only failed shortly before or after Windows 10 displayed the logon screen, at which point it would shut down.

So, it seemed more likely that the Ethernet jack connected to the (correct) network cable had gone bad. Or maybe the Ethernet adapter circuitry to which that jack is soldered went bad. Either way, moving the network connection to the other Ethernet jack seems to have solved the network problem. Now the client is waiting on a new power supply for that computer.

The moral of the story is that after you’ve eliminated all the common causes for a common problem, be sure to investigate the uncommon causes before giving up.

Microsoft’s recent release of Windows 11 has spurred a fair amount of online chatter, much of it negative. However, whether the online talking heads like it or not, it is here, and a look at computer sellers’ advertisements and store displays makes it clear that if you’re shopping for a new computer, there’s a very good chance that the one you bring home is going to come with Windows 11 installed on it. Since I’m in the business of supporting computer equipment, and it stands to reason that it won’t be long before I start getting calls from people who need help with Windows 11, I decided it was best for me to begin familiarizing myself with the new operating system. So, when Windows Update offered me the upgrade free of charge on my laptop, I accepted the upgrade. And as long as I’m getting up close and personal with Windows 11, it occurred to me that this also presented me with a great opportunity to re-animate my stagnant blog by sharing my experiences with you. As an adorer of alliteration, I have decided to post these experiences midweek every week (at least until I run out of experiences) on what we will call Windows Wednesdays.

Let’s start with a very basic question: Should I get it, and, if so, how?

The first part of that question brings to mind a host of tired comparisons and recommendations from online pundits, most of whom have only experienced a pre-release version of Windows 11 and maybe not even that. “You never want to get Version 1.0 of anything.” “You can always tell who the pioneers are; they’re the ones with arrows in their backs.” “It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.” And while there is truth to such statements, I can tell you that, at very least, Windows 11 has been quite stable for me. That’s not to say there haven’t been a few glitches. For example, after the first update Microsoft pushed out (about 48 hours after I got the upgrade), my laptop developed an irritating habit of losing Internet access over its wi-fi connection. A new cumulative update I received last night (six days after I got the upgrade) seems to have cleared that up. But this is no worse than my initial experiences with Windows 11’s predecessor, Windows 10. Sure, it’s going to take a little while to shake all the bugs out, but so far, I haven’t encountered any show stoppers, just annoyances. At the moment, I’m not recommending that anyone rush out to get Windows 11, but I have yet to encounter any problems serious enough to advise avoiding it altogether.

If you want Windows 11 on your current computer, there are two ways to get it: Windows Update and direct download. If your computer runs Windows 10 now, and you open the Windows Update window (click the Start button, then the Settings icon, then click Update and security from the Settings window), you will probably see one of three messages about Windows 11: If your computer passes Microsoft’s Windows 11 compatibility checks and Microsoft has made the upgrade available to you, you will be able to click on a link to get it right then and there. If your computer passed the compatibility checks but Microsoft has not yet made the upgrade available to you, the message will tell you, essentially, to stay tuned. If your computer did not pass the compatibility checks, you will see a message saying your computer is not compatible, and, in that case, Microsoft will not offer you the upgrade.

If you’re in a hurry to get Windows 11 for some reason, you can download an installer on your own from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11. The installer will run the same compatibility checks that Windows Update runs, though, so if Windows Update tells you that your computer is not compatible, this download will not install Windows for you, either.

So what makes your computer compatible or incompatible with Windows 11? The most publicized requirement for Windows 11 is the presence of a TPM v2.0 chip in your computer. TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module, and it’s a hardware security chip that, up to this point, has mostly been used in corporate PCs as a hook for network security systems employed by medium to large businesses. Windows 11 uses TPM v2.0 to make it more difficult for cyber-criminals to gain access to computers. Other requirements for Windows 11 are much more conventional, and generally any computer that runs Windows 10 will meet them. There is plenty of information about this elsewhere online, as well as several methods for getting around the TPM v2.0 requirement. These, as well as the reliability of the TPM work-arounds, are beyond the scope of what I want to discuss in this series, so I will not be investigating them. I’ll simply say that if the compatibility checks indicate that your computer isn’t compatible with Windows 11, then that’s as good an excuse as any to stick with Windows 10 until you buy a new computer.

Will Microsoft attempt to force users to install Windows 11, as they did with Windows 10? As of right now, the answer appears to be no. Between the TPM requirement and, no doubt, lessons learned from the by-hook-or-by-crook automatic upgrades when Windows 10 first came out, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be pushing Windows 11 aggressively, at least not to Windows 10 users.

Should you get Windows 11? The fact is that at this time, there is no good reason why you should. At least for the time being, Windows 11 doesn’t do anything that Windows 10 can’t, there is no software on the market at this time that requires Windows 11, and Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will be supported until October 14, 2025. So, if you’re currently using Windows 10 and you’re happy with it, then stick with Windows 10 and don’t worry about upgrading. If you recently purchased a new computer that came with Windows 11 or is being offered Windows 11, or you are considering purchasing one in the near future, then stay tuned and enjoy this series.

And don’t worry, most of the entries in this series will be much shorter than this one!

I’ve been getting this question a lot lately, and until today, my answer has been “Alas, no. The pandemic caused a run on webcams, just as it caused runs on toilet paper, hand sanitizer and a number of other commodities (most recently, interestingly enough, bakers’ yeast). The few that are available are either overpriced or dubious imports, with long delivery estimates.”

It’s easy to imagine why webcams have been in short supply worldwide. After all, most everyone has been working remotely and attending virtual school classes for over a month now in much of the United States, and even longer than that in some other parts of the world. This requires webcams, so those people whose desktops didn’t have one (and whose laptops came with crummy ones) rushed out to buy them. But unlike some of the other commodities that people began to hoard, webcams were simply a victim of short supply to begin with. People who buy traditional desktops usually don’t buy webcams for them, and most all-in-one desktops and laptops come with webcams that are at least acceptable. So, under normal circumstances, retailers don’t stock a lot of webcams. After all, no retailer wants to store large quantities of a product that people don’t normally buy in large numbers. Doing so means a long wait to recoup their cost, not to mention the shelf space that the slow-moving product occupies, which could be more profitably occupied by more popular products. And, of course, it’s similarly unprofitable for distributors to keep large quantities of webcams in stock, and for manufacturers to produce them in large quantities. So, once people realized they were going to be stuck working and learning from home, it didn’t take long, or panic-buying or hoarding behavior, for the webcams in the pipeline to sell out.

A month and a half into pandemic stay-at-home orders (in the USA, that is), reasonably priced, webcams are starting to reappear, and it no longer takes 6+ weeks to get them. But the familiar webcam brands are still missing, and a lot of the end user reviews, when they’re present, look suspiciously like ‘bot-generated fakes. I’m still getting calls from clients who need webcams, but who wants to buy an unknown, untested model in hopes that it works? Who is going to take that risk?

The answer is: Lebowitz IT Services will! I just ordered the webcam pictured in this post. (I am not posting a link at this time, because I am not prepared to recommend it before I try it out.) It has genuine-looking reviews, some including photos and video, and most of them are positive. It’s in stock now on amazon.com, and I expect to receive mine in a week or so. When I do, I will run it through its paces, compare it with my trusty Logitech C270 webcam, and let you all know the results. After that, if the webcam proves worthy, it will be resold at cost, and more will be ordered for others who need or want them.