Mike's Window

MY PC continues to be a source of unwanted amusement. The situation has now morphed into ‘not gonna stay in hibernate’. A second attempt at updating the chipset drivers saw Core 4 of the CPU go into spasm, and the ‘System Interrupts’ entry reappeared in the list of processes. I created a restore point before […]

I see lots of complaints about wireless transceivers, broken, overheating, lost or whatever, and the big question is.. “why can’t I just buy a new one?” I will tell you why.. As far as the computer is concerned, the wireless transceiver is the mouse and/or keyboard. If it wasn’t that way, every time that it […]

The Empire is striking back.. see here. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-sues-us-based-tech-phony-tech-support-outfit/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61  It’s all about Microsoft suing a ‘US based phony tech support’ outfit. Not before time, I hear you say, but the trouble is that most of these outfits are NOT US based or Canada, or the UK or Australia. They hide in countries where they can’t be […]

No dump files, no BSODs, no nothing, just shutting off faster than you can ever get Windows to shut down normally. This has been what my PC has been doing at least once per day for the last two weeks. I haven’t added hardware or software for quite a while and the PC is not […]

So a guy buys a cheap tablet thinking that it will cope with all of his needs.. “I have a cheap PC that has a small 32gb hard drive.” It ISN’T a PC.. “When i first powered it on it had around 22-24gb of usable space. it crashed and became unusable and couldn’t even go […]

My once trusty Microsoft Mouse 5000, part of the Microsoft Comfort 5000 desktop set is KAPUT. Two days ago, the scroll wheel just let go. It still clicks but it doesn’t scroll, and on a 19” widescreen monitor, websites require a lot of scrolling. What about the scrollbars, you may ask? Well, if it wasn’t […]

OK. The latest round of updates should have run smoothly for you as long as you haven’t messed with the system or used utilities like registry cleaners which do. My production Windows 8.1 machine plus three Windows 7 machines updated and all is well some 24 hours later.. BUT, anybody running the Windows 10 Technical […]

The latest version of the preview, 9879, started to screw around with my main Windows 8.1 installation. The machine would boot into ‘10’ ok, but returning to ‘8.1’ prompted a disk check, and I have far too much invested in ‘8.1’ to see it trashed by a preview of ANYTHING. So, having repaired the early […]

See the icon over there? It is the icon which shows Wi-Fi connectivity when all is well. If you have this one, you also have Internet. There are variations on the theme. This is one of them. It shows just one bar which suggests that you are too far away from the router generating the […]

It has been a fairly quiet week here. Clients: The client with the Vista desktop machine is still complaining of freezing now and again, and I was supposed to be taking a Linux box over to him today. After a clean install, the HP machine is apparently still not stable, freezing up every now and […]

It looks like Notebooks equipped with touch screens are on the way out. See here.. http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20141201PD203.html  No tears from my corner, I can assure you. If I was in the market for a notebook, I would not be looking for touch anything other than the keyboard and touchpad, and the touchpad is cutting it fine.. […]