JON HONEYBALL
A shame-faced Jon migrates his final Windows 7 system to Windows 10, before putting his latest dodgy Amazon purchase through its paces
A shame-faced Jon migrates his final Windows 7 system to Windows 10, before putting his latest dodgy Amazon purchase through its paces.
Okay, I confess: just this morning, I moved my final Windows 7 installation to Windows 10. Yes, I know, this section should be called Jon is a Bad Boy, and I should have done this years ago. My only excuse, if there is one, is that this is Windows 7 in a virtual machine, it’s only fired up once a month for about five minutes and it runs a specific piece of software.
I guess you need some back story. In the lab, we have a full door control access system. This means that there’s a door tag reader on both sides of every door. You need to use an RFID token to open the door and the doors close automatically. While this is somewhat overkill in our small company, it’s what corporate and government visitors expect to see. On the outside of the front door is a PIN pad and each member of staff has their own PIN number to gain access, along with the appropriate security keys and alarm fobs.
The door controllers are embedded deep in the bowels of the lab. In simple terms, each door controller maintains a list of door tag RFID codes, along with the times and dates when they’re valid for that door. These controllers trundle along by themselves and don’t need oversight. The only time you need to talk to the door controllers is if you want to reprogramme them – add a member of staff, issue a new token, change someone’s working hours or access times.
This is done with a piece of software called Net2 from Paxton, a company well known in this space. Net2 consists of an old-fashionedlooking Windows application and a database engine for the back-end. This polls the door controllers and picks up all the movements, door entries and so forth. It’s all very clever: if you have a reception desk in your organisation then this can create a door tag for the day for a visitor, and assign them access to the doors they need.
In that example, you’d need the software running all the time, but in our case we only need to fire Net2 up when we make changes. I originally installed it many years ago into a Windows 7 VM, and every year or so I call up our alarm system company to get a download of the latest version of the software, to which I upgrade. Like much of the professional services software market, we can only access the mothership by going through our reseller.
To be honest, I just left sleeping dogs lie. It worked, I used it for a few minutes every month to download the logs and to check the system was still happy. At least it would be obvious if the doors didn’t work, so there wasn’t much scope for things going wrong. The door controllers themselves hold data for many weeks, so I wasn’t losing information by doing this.
This morning, I decided that I really had to do something about it. I fired up the Windows 10 media creation tool from the Microsoft site, told it to upgrade, keeping the existing software and accounts in place, and then sat back. I’d like to say it was a seamless process, but the Windows installer got a little upset about the apparent desktop size in the Parallels virtual machine. Still, after about 15 minutes of installation, updating and other fiddling, I was up and running.
The beauty of using a VM for this was that I could take an entire snapshot and copy before starting, in the unlikely event that the Net2 installation exploded on finding itself on Windows 10. It’s listed on its site as being supported, so I wasn’t expecting issues. But having a VM that you can copy is just so much more convenient than having a Windows installation running on a real computer, where recovery would be a major pain.
The downside of a virtual machine hosting an old OS and app that you rarely use is that it isn’t there looking at you with a withering glance every time you walk past the computer. Out of sight, out of mind, out of upgrade, for month after month. It’s so easy just to fire up what you need, decide that time is short and you’ll deal with it next time.
“But having a virtual machine that you can copy is just so much more convenient”
However, I’m happy to report that all Windows 7 has been expunged, except for a few VMs that I keep for test purposes. All I can do is ask for your forgiveness.
QuickBooks, American Express and open banking
Back in 2018, UK regulators (based on an EU directive dating all the way to 2015) rolled out a series of changes under the broad heading of “open banking”, which forced the nine biggest British banks to essentially open up their data. Up until then, it seems that accounts packages essentially did a screen scrape of banking websites in an attempt to pull out the data and load it into their account information.
This became impossible after the arrival of open banking, which ensured that there was a defined set of APIs that existed between trusted parties in the conversation. And that the user was fully involved and is required to reauthorise the connection every few months.
This is all very grown up and the sort of interfacing between accounts packages and banking services that you’d want to see in 2021.
The problem is the way in which it has been implemented. I moved to QuickBooks Online for the company accounts some two years ago, and it has mostly worked… albeit accompanied by the worrying feeling that it’s all hanging together using chewing gum and some masking tape. This view hasn’t been helped by the handling of open banking. For some years, I’ve used a British Airways American Express card, which has served me well. The benefits have been of little use since the Great Unpleasantness began and I haven’t flown since visiting CES with Mr Editor Danton back in January 2020. Nevertheless, I need to feed it into my QuickBooks Online accounts package.
Back in March, this connection stopped. QuickBooks said it was working on it. Every month or so, when pressed, it continued to say it wasworking on it. It’s still working on it now, with the company saying that it might have open banking working in 2021 at some point. This means that every week or so since March I’ve had to go to the American Express site, log in, download a CSV of transactions, then swap the sign of the transaction value for each entry in the CSV file (because QuickBooks and American Express can’t agree on what’s the correct sign for a credit and a debit), then import them into QuickBooks. At which point I can start handling the transactions. Frankly it’s a pain. What’s worse is that competing accounts packages such as Xero have working open banking feeds between their platforms and American Express.
It’s hard to know whether the problem lies with American Express or with QuickBooks, so I’m going to take the generous view and blame them both. It appears that open banking has exposed all sorts of unpleasantness, both at the banking and accounts package ends of the conversation. Moving my credit card away from American Express would be annoying, but it’s doable. Moving accounts packages is more painful. All I can do is wish them an Unhappy New Year and a plague on both their houses.
5G… but not with dual SIM
I’ve still managed to resist upgrading to the iPhone 12 Pro Max ( see issue 316, p73) to replace my long-suffering iPhone 11 Pro Max. The camera and speed improvements are tempting, but not enough to justify the cost. Nor the loss of the useful battery case that keeps my 11 Pro Max going for most of the day and makes battery life worries a thing of the past.
The 5G support? Well, I continue to be cynical about the whole 5G sales pitch, and it only takes a few minutes looking at the current 5G coverage maps for the big players to realise that, just like Pooh Bear, the more you look the more it isn’t there.
However, on those occasions when I travel to the centre of London, it could be nerdy fun to have 5G pop up on my phone and try some network speed checks. That might not the strongest of justifications for spending £1,500 or so, I accept. But even that idea fell apart when I found out that you can’t have 5G operating if you have two SIMs in your phone. That can be a physical SIM and an eSIM, or two eSIMs.
The iPhone has two radio sections and can log in to two separate networks at once. This is useful, and I have both a Vodafone business physical SIM and an EE eSIM in my iPhone. But dive into the Apple support page at pcpro.link/317dual and you find the following statement: “While using two lines in Dual SIM mode, 5G data isn’t supported on either line and will fall back to 4G LTE.” So as soon as you have two SIMs running, you lose 5G capabilities on both. There’s no mention of this limitation on the main iPhone 12 pages on the Apple website.
I’m told, but I haven’t confirmed this, that the issue afflicts other 5G phones too, including my Samsung S20 Ultra. I believe that the limitation is within the Qualcomm chipset, and a page on its site talks about 5G and multi-SIM, but it fails to clearly define that both should work at the same time ( pcpro.link/317multi).
Wherever the problem lies, the reality is that the iPhone 12 Pro Max can’t do multi-SIM and 5G. Which, for me, is the final nail in the coffin for any upgrade.
1TB microSD card
If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is going to disappoint. I was trundling around Amazon UK, looking at 1TB microSD cards. I didn’t really need one, and I confess I have concerns about that much storage in something so small. The prices have certainly come down, with Amazon selling the SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB device for a shade under £220 inc VAT, but then I spotted a 1TB microSD card for just £25.99. Clearly this was going to be a fake, but I was interested to see what came.
The first clue came from the vendor name of “binchengquz hongyiculiangfandian”, which is a bit of a mouthful. And then the description said “400GB/512GB/1,024GB Micro SD SDXC Flash Memory Card Class 10 for Cell Phone Camera Laptop + Free Adapter (1024GB)”. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, because many Amazon listings are for devices available at multiple sizes, and you choose on the page which of them you want. I hit “Buy now”.
The no-name product came in a no-name package. I popped it into my Dell
XPS 15 and it reported itself as being 1TB in size. So I fired up some SD card data-scrubbing and testing software, and let it run for several days.
The bottom line: there was 22GB or thereabouts of storage, and then a sea of red warnings. Was I surprised? Not at all. I could return it for a refund, but I’ll think I’ll hang onto it as a curiosity, sitting alongside the fake iPhone I bought from a man in the pub a few years ago. Yes, it really was a man in the pub. “Only for cash, mate – it’s a quality product.”
You have to be careful about what you buy and Amazon appears to attract a certain sort of scam artist.
The original advert for the product I bought has long since vanished from Amazon. However, it only took a handful of moments to find another today: a “1,024GB High Speed Class 10 SD SDXC Card” from a brand called “Genericca”. The price? £10. And you can have it in black, blue, yellow, purple or green. This time, however, I think I’ll pass.
“I’ll hang onto it as a curiosity, alongside the fake iPhone I bought from a man in the pub”
Memory matters on the M1
I was attempting to find out how much of the Unified Memory on the M1 chipset is actually used by the video/GPU function because Apple is being rather coy about the matter. It simply claims that it’s a movable feast, and that main system RAM and video/GPU RAM is all from the same on-package store. I looked at Activity Monitor, but that gave no clues. I also tried the ever-trusty iStat Menus, but its analysis maintained that there was 0GB of video RAM at all times, which wasn’t helpful.
Thanks, then, to a PC Pro reader on Twitter (@ peter_woodworth) who pointed me in the direction of another reporting tool called iStatistica Pro. I went online and bought this utility for a few pounds and fired it up. It’s currently reporting that I’m using 155MB of 301MB of RAM in the graphics subsystem. Fire up a graphically intensive task and this can rise to around 1.5GB. So it’s reporting numbers that mostly look correct. More investigation is required, but I shall keep digging.
Windows on ARM
Parallels, which makes the excellent hypervisor product for Intel Macs that I use on an almost daily basis, has announced that its M1-based beta programme will be starting soon. It has been somewhat reticent to say
what this will support. Obviously, it will be able to run ARM-based operating systems and code in the Apple hypervisor engine, and indeed Apple has already demonstrated a hypervisor doing exactly that.
The elephant in the room, however, is support for Win64 Intel code in Windows. I might be wrong, but this is what I think is going to happen. Parallels has apparently already ported its management tool to the M1 platform. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, has reportedly said that the ARM version of Windows could run on M1, but it would be “really up to Microsoft”. Remember that Windows 10 on ARM isn’t a retail or corporate-licensed product. It is only available with an ARM-based computer such as the Microsoft Surface Pro X.
Windows 10 on ARM currently supports Win32 Intel executables using a software emulation layer. Microsoft has said that Win64 support is coming sometime this year.
So here’s the likely path. Parallels persuades Microsoft to allow the Parallels M1 customer to in-app purchase a licence and download to a pre-built Windows 10 on ARM virtual machine, complete with Win64 Intel emulator. This neatly sidesteps the need to use Rosetta 2, the Apple tech that allows 64-bit Intel macOS apps to run on M1, and which Apple has explicitly said isn’t for use outside of its own ecosystem.
Is this a good idea? Well, it’s a solution for Parallels and gives it a market moving forward. I love Parallels on Intel Mac, but that’s a hardware virtualisation for the Windows Intel platform, and a Win64 app doesn’t know any different to a real computer. Running Win64 Intel code through the code translator within Windows 10 on ARM will immediately open up compa comparisons with how well devices such as t the e Microsoft Surface Pro X man manage to do the same thing. It might b be a comparison that Microsoft w would rather not happen. Only tim time will tell, but my M1 MacBook Air is ready and waiting, and I have ha signed up to the beta program programme. Let’s see what comes, and how ho well it works in real-world testin testing.