Category: Windows 11

Zebra label printer stops working with UPS after Windows 11 upgrade

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Noticed that for a client, all their PCs were unable to print labels from UPS.com after upgrading to Windows 11.
It kept saying no thermal label printers found.

After a lot of troubleshooting I found the answer.

I dug into the UPS Thermal Printing App, located here, and found that the tool REQUIRES that the vendor name needs to be in the Name field for the printer.

It appears during the Windows 11 upgrade, it renamed the printer to match the driver, in this case “ZDesigner Gk420d”.
Once I prepended it with “Zebra”, the app magically found it and printing started working again.

Can’t upgrade to Windows 11 because your PC is too old?

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I meant to post this a while ago shortly after the Windows 11 release and never did. I still feel the same after all this time.

If you don’t remember the pains for the free and forced upgrade to Windows 10, please pause for a moment and read this through.
Yeah, it may seem like a hot take, but I promise I have a valid point.

Back when Windows 10 was released it was shoved down everyone’s throat. Nearly every PC that was alive got the upgrade, and this included PCs that barely met the requirements. We’re talking systems with ancient onboard graphics and 2GB of RAM.
It was generous to offer it way back to people with Windows 7, a decent attempt at an apology for Windows 8.

They, ran, awful. We were flooded with calls about terrible performance, broken drivers, and massive instability. Best answers were to roll back or get a new PC. Yeah Windows 8 wasn’t the best, but 10 was great (after a year….

Now with Windows 11 they have what many people consider high requirements. I call shenanigans. The specs they ask for cover any mid range PC made in the last few years. The only odd item is the TPM chip, but if it means PCs are more secure well then so be it.

I see countless people and business running PCs well past their useful lifespan and are the ones that I feel complain the most and tend to get compromised more often.

So we’re finally at a point where a line is drawn in the sand. It’s time to finally upgrade your stuff to something nice, and the best part is it will end up saving money in the long run.

I’ve seen many clients shave $50 off a pc to have half the ram, a painfully slow hard drive, or a terrible CPU. But they don’t think about how the $50 causes employees to have drastically reduced productivity. Start putting that math together. Those savings drops off immediately.

So please, if your system can’t take Windows 11, it’s time to rethink how you handle your tech.

Unable to stay on Windows 10 after rolling back from Windows 11 Preview?

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The title shows a recent issue I was having.

While I was enjoying the Windows 11 experience, I didn’t want to reload my PC from scratch just to upgrade when it’s released so close to now.
I decided to do a roll back, which went well. No issues when it was back except one that reared its head after a few day.

My PC did not want to stay on Windows 10, it kept moving me back to Windows 11.

I turned off the Insider feature, but that didn’t seem to matter.

I read a few other people having this problem and they provided a slew of fixes, most of which required registry/policy changes, or changing telemetry data gathering (more on that in another post).
Ultimately it seemed the most sure-fire way was to do a factory reset to Windows 10.

Since this is being pushed via Windows Update, I tried something interesting.

It was prepared to restart the PC to do the install, but before I let it do that, I did the standard fix for most Windows Update issues.

I stopped the WindowsUpdate service, renamed the SoftwareDistribution folder in C:\Windows, and started the service.

Several reboots and a manual update check later, no more attempts to upgrade!