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One of the first things you notice when you display the Windows 11 Start Menu is that while it’s still there – unlike Windows 8, where it wasn’t – it’s a departure from Windows 10, which brought back something resembling the venerable Windows 7 Start Menu. Gone are your categories of tiles, and gone, or at least hidden, is the alphabetical list of programs. They’ve been replaced with a collection of pinned apps and a curious section labeled “Recommended”. We will explore those in future posts. Right now, though, a user new to Windows 11 could be forgiven for thinking, “How the $#^@& do I find anything in this new Windows?!” Fortunately, Windows Search is still here, it’s prominently featured (I’ve circled it in the lead screen shot, above), and it’s better than ever.

Windows Search has been around a long time – about 20 years, in fact. It was first added as an optional update in Windows XP, but that early edition of Windows Search was balky, slow, not very effective and tended to cause the whole computer to get sluggish. But with every version of Windows since then, Windows Search has become better and more tightly integrated. Many people never discovered that they could click the Windows 7 Start button, begin typing without pointing the mouse at anything and find menu items, Control Panel applets and software. That was too bad, because it brought much of the power of Windows 7 right to your fingertips. It was invaluable in Windows 8, which had an annoying habit of hiding frequently-used tiles in unintuitive places. I still use the click-Start-and-search trick constantly on my Windows 10 desktop PC, where it does a decent job of finding data files as well as software. My experience with it so far on my laptop suggests that it’s one of the handful of real under-the-hood improvements in Windows 11.

While searching for software this way in Windows 10 is usually faster than scrolling the alphabetical app list in the Start menu when I need a program that isn’t pinned to Start or the Taskbar, I’ve often found that newly installed software can take several days to get indexed by Windows Search, and, some software, particularly infrequently-used programs, just never seems to show up at all. It does a better job of indexing data files that are stored in common locations, such as Documents or Pictures. And depending on how busy the computer is, searches can sometimes take awhile, and occasionally fail. But all this seems to work like clockwork in Windows 11!

Here, I’ve done a search for the Intel Driver & Support Assistant, a program I don’t run frequently from the Start menu. (It auto-launches in the background, and I usually launch it via the Taskbar Notification Area.) By the time I finish typing “intel” I see:

Similarly, here’s a search for a spare computer parts Excel workbook that I’ve never actually opened on this laptop before. As with the program search, I’m barely done typing the first word of the title when Windows finds it for me:

Windows Search in Windows 11 is so good at finding everything you need that you could probably use the new operating system productively without learning how to navigate the new interface at all!

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.