It all started a week or so ago with the having to restart my Windows workstation each morning before my day started because it was painfully laggy, and showing read latency on the boot disk that only seemed to ease up after a reboot, for a short while. Nothing fun in resource monitor to show any culprits smashing the disk, no high throughput, just 2-3 second latency spikes that made Windows sad.
I decided the path of least resistance was to reinstall Windows on it to firstly see if it took longer than the usual 15 mins it takes (proving the disk was due an RMA) or whether it was just cruft that had built up as it’d been a couple of years since the last purge and we’d be off to the races soon after.
Everything work related is stored in a SaaS-esque solution, long gone are the days of me storing anything remotely important locally on the disk … or so I thought as I always remember afterwards what I had forgotten what was indeed stored on the disk.
The OS reinstall stalled at 10% for nearly an hour, that confirmed the disk needed to be replaced – which wouldn’t have been a problem if the price of flash at the moment wasn’t sky high. Nonetheless this was sorted thanks to Amazon’s excellent customer service and a new disk arrived same day in 9hrs 31 minutes from point of order. (I do like the same day order delivery stuff, the little email it sends with a to the minute score of its efforts does make me chuckle)
Attempt no2 to reinstall the OS completed much more quickly but that only brought the realisation home that I had, as usual, not factored in the configuration of the half a dozen applications I regularly use. An annoyance to resolve, but not a catastrophe – but I felt compelled this time to try to not let future me encounter this same annoyance next time.
I quickly remembered an annoying issue I have with the motherboard in the workstation where the built-in Realtek driver that Windows 11 ships with is buggy. This means that it randomly decides to just stop passing traffic and say request timed out to everything until the device is disabled/enabled in Device Manager – or better still, to update the driver. With that done, thanks to the advent of a little USB3 Ethernet dongle I was able to continue.
I had recently played with the wonderful Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager product when setting up a new Macbook (I missed MTPUTTY too much) and finding the built in terminal application somewhat woeful. I installed the Devolution Remote Desktop Manager product just with a local datasource (this is why I lose my configs whenever I wipe a disk) so it was nice and easy to think oh I can just export this and import it into the Windows copy I’d just installed.
But no I thought how about being a bit more clever and using the rather clever Devolutions Hub on both the Windows workstation and Macbook to not only save me the manual effort of doing it again, but rather to keep them in sync going forward. I know, it sounds so simple, and so obvious – but I tend to get caught up in getting the job done than making it easier for myself next time. No this time though! Hah, this time, I spent the extra 30 minutes setting it up properly that the next disk failure I suffer won’t really bother me quite so much.
So now, I have my connections set up and synchronised between devices including pulling in my SSH Keys from the vault, these keys are also kept elsewhere but it made sense to not have any other dependencies. With my SSH tunnels and connections back in place I was happy (as happy as I normally am) so I ventured onto the next productivity tool I knew I’d forsaken … my web browser.
I use Brave as a browser and have several profiles configured within it – the majority of those profiles are just for individual Entra tenants so I can be logged into multiple simultaneously without relying on multiple browsers, or Incognito/Private Mode browsers etc. Brave has a nifty little ‘Sync’ feature where you can sync settings between computers (or even within profiles on the same computer if needed).
This played in rather well because I’d recently when setting up the Macbook had sync’d Brave from the Windows workstation, this time I could do it in reverse and not be kicking myself at the loss of data there.
A few clicks later, Office 365 was installed again, Sharepoint Libraries synchronised, Zoom installed, local printer added, and I was pretty much good to go.
Until next time >.<
Well worth pointing out that the lovely people at Devolutions kindly offer an NFR Starter Pack to folks like me – I’m very grateful to them for this and would strongly encourage you check out their product portfolio! I’ll definitely be buying them a beer if our paths ever cross.