Page 4 - September_Newsletter_2020

So what does that mean? Well, beginning later this year, people who continue to login to Mi-
crosoft Teams and other web services using the latest version of Internet Explorer will start to see
a downgraded experience at best – or be unable to use any of these services at worst.

Microsoft have announced that support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app will stop on
March 9, 2021, and after March 9, 2021, the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app will not receive
new security updates.

In other words, it's finally time to move away from Internet Explorer and the original Microsoft
Edge in favour of the Chromium-based version, or a rival web browser from other companies, like
Google Chrome, Opera, or Mozilla Firefox.

The next version of Spinrite

Members may recall me talking about Steve Gibson several times over the years, and I have done
a couple of presentations about SQRL ( Secure Quick Reliable Login).

SQRL is now finished, in that Steve has it working on some of his web sites, a few other sites have
also adopted it, clients now exist for Windows, iOS, Linux and Android, and there are some
browser plugins for Firefox and others. In recent months, Steve has turned back to the develop-
ment of the next version of Spinrite, his disk maintenance and recovery tool, which was interrupt-
ed by SQRL some 7 years ago!

One of the problems with the previous version of Spinrite was that, being developed in 2004, it did
not handle AHCI or NVMe disks, and being DOS based, it was reading and writing to disks in one
sector ( 512 bytes) chunks. This meant that with ever larger disks, running Spinrite could take
many hours.

He has now found a way, whilst still remaining in DOS, to read/write 32MB at a time. Over the
last few weeks he has developed a number of small test programs to identify the various types of
disk installed on a PC, e.g. IDE, SATA, AHCI and NVMe, and then to benchmark the disk speeds.
These benchmarks also identify the differences in disk speed across the disk, by testing 1GB ( 2
million 512 byte sectors) data transfers at 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the disk size.

Here is the sample output from my old Windows PC.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| AHCI - Release 30 - Working to merge IDE/ATA into the AHCI benchmark. |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Location Clas PgIf Vend Devi Pin Irq# P:Cmd Ctrl S:Cmd Ctrl Mast
-------- ---- ---- ---- ---- --- ---- ----------- ----------- ----
0:20:1 0101 8A 1002 439C 1 0 C 0000 0000 C 0000 0000 FF00