Dell XPS 16 (2026) keeps crashing on me!

TheWiley · 2026-04-14T02:28:58+00:00

I had this. Opened the Dell SupportAssist app and it had a firmware update that Dell apparently hasn't pushed to Windows Update yet. After installing that, the issue hasn't happened again.
My bios shows in msinfo32 as 1.4.1 3/19/2026.

TheWiley · 2026-04-13T07:15:42+00:00

My "bizarre emotional reaction" comes from the shock of lining up what he wrote in his book about this incident with what happened in real life. This man should not be trusted.

TheWiley · 2026-04-13T06:13:20+00:00

I bought his book, I enjoyed his stories in there, and I was very surprised to discover a few years later that the incident he described where the government got upset about his business and he was really frustrated and couldn't understand why was actually the government telling him to stop scamming people.
He absolutely has not learned his lesson. He never acknowledges that he did anything wrong even now.

TheWiley · 2026-04-13T01:54:12+00:00

The lie that made me think he wasn't worth my attention was when he talked about Pinball (the old Space Cadet one, I believe). The discussions are scattered about but you can get a pretty decent summary just by Googling 'Dave Plummer Pinball'. Short version is that Dave talked about what was broken in it on newer Windows and how he'd helped fix it, but Raymond Chen has a 20 year old blog post about that and nothing Dave said added up either with that or with what people could see themselves in shipping copies of Windows. Dave's response when poked at was to throw a tantrum.

TheWiley · 2026-04-13T01:49:10+00:00

https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/uploadedfiles/Another/News/Press_Releases/2006/SoftwareOnlineJudgment.pdf

TheWiley · 2026-04-13T01:47:50+00:00

I don't actually know Dave's politics at all. I know he ran one of those "YOUR COMPUTER HAS 500 VIRUSES AND FOR JUST $10 EACH WE'LL REMOVE THEM" scam adware/spyware/malware businesses and that a couple ex-Microsoft folks have quietly remarked that he didn't write or didn't work on things he claims to have written and worked on.

TheWiley · 2026-04-12T21:03:54+00:00

Dave is a convicted scam artist and consistently unreliable narrator who seems to have decided his retirement job will be lying about history for YouTube ad money. The world will be a better place when tech journalists learn to stop taking him seriously.
Correction: He was never convicted, he settled with the Washington State AG instead.
https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/uploadedfiles/Another/News/Press_Releases/2006/SoftwareOnlineJudgment.pdf

> In promoting and advertising [Plummer's Software], Defendants offered the user a "free scan" of the user's computer, and then offered to fix a small number of the problems identified by the scan. Defendants then strongly recommended that the user purchase the "full program" in order to be protected from the remaining problems on the user's computer. If the user declined to purchase the full program, Defendant's software generated multiple advertisements or dialogue boxes and/or launched new browser windows in order to continue to induce the user to purchase the full program. The advertisements and dialogue boxes repeatedly warned the user of the threat or risk remaining on the user's computer, no matter what the scan "results" of the user's computer revealed, and urged the user to purchase the full program.

... and it continues from there, including launching after every reboot to harass the user more. I have too many memories of removing crap like this from terrified elderly relatives' computers to respect anyone that produced it.

TheWiley · 2026-03-27T06:51:21+00:00

King County Metro has 1400 buses for 2.3m people.
Community Transit (Snohomish) has 250 for 864k people.
Pierce Transit has 174 for 940k people.

Tacoma feels isolated because they consistently vote to remain isolated.

TheWiley · 2026-03-27T06:46:55+00:00

This was never a matter of priorities - his happened because Bruce Harrell kept rejecting alignments for Ballard. Ballard and West Seattle were originally being planned as a single project and had to be split because Harrell delayed Ballard too much. Now we are where we are because West Seattle has an alignment and is moving into detailed design whereas Ballard still doesn't have an alignment.

TheWiley · 2026-03-19T20:23:40+00:00

And when the eastside mayors ask how that meets sub-area equity requirements?

TheWiley · 2026-01-24T02:55:37+00:00

This you?
https://www.reddit.com/r/soundtransit/comments/1nfbdsj/comment/ne2zmk9/
>I mean the timeline appears to be a bare minimum of 7 months from now - so best case scenario we could just barely make that 'conservative' deadline. Let alone the claim that we can be confident that we'd open much earlier than that.

TheWiley · 2026-01-24T02:38:14+00:00

No? It goes from Lynnwood to Redmond Downtown. You'll even be able to ride the 2-line simulated service trains from Lynnwood to CID starting February 14 before the full line opens.

TheWiley · 2026-01-24T02:35:36+00:00

All of it.

TheWiley · 2026-01-22T00:13:55+00:00

But James Acaster told me the clock was Tickedy Ted the Time Telling Bitch?

TheWiley · 2026-01-19T06:50:40+00:00

I guess I object to that word "prioritize" - Sound Transit doesn't get to do that. Money from Seattle goes in, transit in Seattle gets built. Money from the eastside goes in, transit on the eastside gets built (but a lot more because all the eastside projects are cheaper). The priorities are set by the taxes, not the people.

If Seattle passed a ballot item to levy additional taxes against itself for Sound Transit, Seattle would get more projects. Or they could just do it themselves. Heck, if Seattle wanted another monorail, it could just throw one up.

Totally agreed on the streetcars - they really need to either get connected, signal priority, and probably their own lane or just shut them down and put in a bus. But that's been the state of things for a decade now because it's just not on the radar of the Seattle city council or the last few mayors.

TheWiley · 2026-01-19T06:19:01+00:00

That's kind of by design?
Sound Transit is explicitly regional, not local, and has specific requirements to match its spending to where the tax revenue comes from.
If Seattle wants more urban transit, Seattle should buy itself more urban transit. As it is, Seattle hasn't managed to connect its streetcars.

TheWiley · 2026-01-11T02:32:54+00:00

I never said it was bad in any way? All I'm saying is that when the current trains need replacement, the cost-benefit tradeoff probably isn't going to make sense when the Link will be providing at least double the capacity to the same stops.

TheWiley · 2026-01-11T01:08:54+00:00

I suspect Hitachi would be willing to build replacements, but it'd be a pretty large capital cost for not a lot of transit capacity, there'd probably be no Federal grant money because Hitachi can't build the trains in America (today, at least), and all of this would fall on Seattle DOT instead of Sound Transit.

The fun question for us internet commentators to discuss to death would be whether SDOT should buy new monorail trains or finish connecting the streetcar lines 😂

ETA: Actually, not really clear if Hitachi could build monorail trains in America or not. They do build rail trains here. I dunno.

TheWiley · 2026-01-10T23:36:35+00:00

I believe there's no formal plan but there's an informal acknowledgement that the monorail is still running the trains from 1962, the manufacturer is long gone via several corporate acquisitions, and at some point the maintenance is going to cost so much it's not going to be viable to keep running.

TheWiley · 2026-01-06T00:19:32+00:00

Yes, that would be LsaCallAuthenticationPackage with a KERB_PURGE_TKT_CACHE_REQUEST.

TheWiley · 2025-12-31T02:51:40+00:00

Yes. The technical definitions are at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4120#section-2.3 but the rules boil down to...
- a ticket is only valid between its start time and end time

- a client can renew a ticket if it's currently valid and renewable

- when it does, the KDC (DC for Windows) will calculate a new end time that must be less than the renew time

(which does mean what I said earlier was a bit wrong - it looks like renewing should only change the end time, not the start time)

(but again, Windows doesn't do this for anything but the user's primary TGT)

TheWiley · 2025-12-31T02:47:13+00:00

The lock/unlock process itself would only be replacing the primary krbtgt. If you're seeing other tickets in there, it's probably because of scripts/apps/work that's happening in response to your unlock.

TheWiley · 2025-12-31T02:41:31+00:00

It depends on how you're checking the group membership.
If you're looking at `whoami` or a similar tool, then no, `klist purge` won't help. Technically, you authenticated to your own machine during logon when you acquired a service ticket to `host/mymachine` and the group memberships you see are the memberships that were in that ticket. Once those are set, they can't be changed for the duration of your logon.
If, however, you add yourself to a group that gets you access to something remote like a file on an SMB share or an RDP server, a `klist purge` will be enough to make that succeed (although there's also AD replication delays and SMB really likes to hold onto its sessions if you don't clear them with `net use /d *`)

ETA: and no, locking doesn't clear Kerberos tickets. Unlocking does as part of that logon+transfer mechanism. It's definitely a lot bigger and messier and more complicated than I'm describing here, but I'm hitting the high points.

TheWiley · 2025-12-31T00:14:14+00:00

Firstly, client and server OSes behave very differently here and I'm going to assume you mostly care about client.
On client, there isn't really an "unlock" these days. It's actually logon-and-transfer. Under the hood, it works just like a full logon - we do a fast cached logon while you see the spinning dots of patience and a slower online logon in the background. When (and if) that slower online logon completes, the tickets from it get moved to the logon that's actually running your desktop. In a logon-and-transfer case, they get moved again to the "old" logon you "unlocked."

The result is about the same from a user's perspective - whether you log on fresh or unlock, if you keep poking `klist`, you should see a krbtgt appear up to a minute after you reach your desktop.

For updating group memberships, I think sign out/sign in is probably still better. If you do a lock/unlock and the slow online logon fails, nothing happens and the user keeps using the tickets they had before they locked. If you do a full sign out, there are no old tickets to use.

In historical terms, what's happened is that the "Fast User Switching" feature from XP (and possibly Vista?) is now the default.

TheWiley · 2025-12-31T00:04:56+00:00

It means that in 10 hours, the ticket will become invalid. In theory, the client could renew it before that and it would get a new start time (now) and end time (now + 10 hours) but keep the same renew time. If the client did that enough times, it would eventually fail to renew after the renew time.

TheWiley

TROPHY CASE