Windows 10 1903 - check your serial ports don't have Serial Enumeration on again

[Colin Haig]

If you've boldly gone into the world of Win 10 1903, and you've already dealt with any ACP auto-repair and MaxIm repair, one more thing to check.
One of my serial ports failed to work - turns out that Win 10 1903 feature update turns ON Serial Enumeration again, to look for MS Serial Mouse. DUMB. It should respect existing settings.

Fire up the Device Manager:
Start... Run devmgmt.msc

Look at all your COM ports.

For all your FTDIchip (and possibly other) USB/Serial devices, focusers, cloud sensors, dome controllers, etc, check the Advanced Settings for the FTDIchip drivers.
Turn OFF:
[] Serial Enumeration
[] Enable Selective Suspend

You might turn on:
[x] Disable modem control at startup


For other brands of serial devices, make sure this is OFF:
[] Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power

Also, check if there is a MS Serial Mouse (that probably should NOT be there these days) under the HID / mouse section.
Disable that device.

The good news is this upgrade left the FTDIchip drivers alone; they stayed current unlike the last time.

On another machine, it did remove nvidia video card drivers and intel drivers. Both were easily fixed, although it was annoying.

[Bob Denny]

I hope the people who were thinking of storming Area 51 instead decided to storm Redmond WA ha ha. Actually overall I am delighted with Microsoft. They should just stop putting their junior engineers on Windows updates (least glamorous therefore worst advancement potential).

[Eric Dose]

I've just now discovered that on my observatory PC, Win 10 1903 randomly enabled "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" on 2 (of 4) Generic USB Hubs and 1 (of 3) Root USB Hubs, of course without permission or notification.

My dog is smarter than Microsoft "engineers", and he's been dead for 20 years.

[Colin Haig]

In the beginning, there were mathematicians and electricians. Then came the electrical engineers, followed by computers (who were people), next the "hackers" (clever ones, not malicious), computer scientists and specialists in computation (like me), followed by software engineering that really didn't pan out, followed by computer engineering that seemed to work, followed by a weird transition where the CS, EE, and CE people went from programming to being programmers, to the devolution I first saw in the early 2000's - the "coders". That's what we have at M$FT. And ironically after switching from the electronics/computer industry after 25+ years, the astronomy field that pays my bills is now less about observing and more about data pipelines and computing. However, I remain optimistic. I am less optimistic about the reincarnation of Eric's dog as M$FT new CTO.

[Bob Denny]

I just got a radio message from Eric's dog:

giphy.gif

[Colin Haig]

.... .- .... .-
.... .. .... ..

[Bob Denny]

Colin check out Morse Code Tools. The video has several things, stay with it.