Well, it’s not often I bother to write up a new blog post these days, but when I do, you know it’s something particularly irritating that I’ve decided to save you the trouble of solving on your own. This problem absolutely qualifies. When attempting to share a printer over the network from one Windows 10/11 machine to other Windows 10/11 machines, the above error now often appears. Myriad “solutions” across the internet exist, most of which involve uninstalling particular Windows hotfixes (KBxxxxxx) or manually adding the printer port. Problem is, none of these solutions actually work anymore ..read more

Here’s a really annoying one. Dell XPS and Alienware machines, despite their significant capabilities, experience super slow high-res video streaming on YouTube. The buffer is visibly razor-thin on anything 1080p or above without any obvious reason why. This occurred on a gigabit fiber connection in my case. The solution? As often is the case, the value-added (in this case, QoS traffic-shaping/packet inspection) networking software is actually value-subtracted. Simply navigate to the Killer Control Center software and disable the following (useless) option to correct the problem and reclaim yo ..read more

A pretty recent emerging issue I’ve encountered is problems with microphone volume during Zoom calls (specifically!) on some machines. One of the more popular models experiencing this problem regularly is Dell’s XPS 13 7390, which is an all-round terrific laptop. The common thread connecting all of these affected models is their use of the Realtek audio drivers (which very many laptops do these days). The solution — or, at least, the workaround — for this one is actually quite simple. It turns out that the 4/22/2020 driver version of the Realtek Audio Driver is problematic when paired with Zoo ..read more

Many machines experience a problem where a connected Bluetooth peripheral takes seconds to wake every time it’s left motionless for a short period or the user types on the keyboard. This delay can range between a second up to a few seconds, and it’s absolutely frustrating. Fortunately, it’s also incredibly easy to solve: Right-click the Start Button and choose Device Manager. Expand Bluetooth. Right-click your Bluetooth adapter and choose Properties. Click the Power Management tab and uncheck the box that reads “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” The power savings are ..read more

This is a quick and easy one. In previous versions of Windows 10 setup, selecting an offline (so-called “limited”) account was relatively easy. However, with the latest build of Windows 10 Home, if the machine is connected to the internet during setup, the option disappears. It’s true that you can simply disconnect from the network (or open cmd and delete the wlan profile), then click back and try again, to avoid this. But there’s a much easier way. Instead, in the sign-in field, type a bunch of random numbers, then click Next. At this point, you can choose to create a local/limited account in ..read more

This week, a client brought me a Windows 7 PC which refused to upgrade to Windows 10, despite their having reserved a license long ago for the OS and attempting to install it repeatedly. The error message they were receiving was: 0x8007001F – 0x20006 The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during REPLICATE_OC operation A screenshot of the setup error message which repeatedly plagued this machine My usual remedial measures, after poring through setup error logs and all that fun stuff, were completely unsuccessful in this instance. Myriad internet searches also turned up lot ..read more

Today, I encountered an issue that was new to me. A client’s PC refused to print any email within Outlook (in her case, Office 2013 version, but the same problem persisted in Outlook 365 prior to my correcting it). The error message she received was: There is a problem with the selected printer. You might need to reinstall this printer. Try again, or use a different printer. The problem persists regardless of which printer is selected—even if it’s a default built-in virtual printer such as Microsoft Print to PDF or the XLS printer. However, it won’t necessarily affect all email messages. So ..read more

So here’s a new one. Warning: this one’s rough. It’s an advanced one, and there are possibly more causes than simply this… so as always, I take zero responsibility for anyone messing with their own machines without professional help. This particular story is just that: a case study, basically, referencing the circumstances of the individual machine I was working on. This post is more for my reference than for anyone else’s from that standpoint. ? A client’s machine came to me, stuck in a boot loop to WinRE. Nothing corrected it, but the machine seemingly wasn’t even trying to boot to ..read more

Recently, a number of machines I’ve serviced have experienced a problem where particular Office files hang when scrolling through them. At first, this seemed likely to be an issue with Hardware Accelerated graphics rendering, but that wasn’t the case. The actual issue lies with what’s called Protected View. It’s designed to bolster security by limiting the permissions of files opened from risky locations, but at least currently, it’s leading to some broken functionality on a lot of machines. The best solution that I’ve found (as a workaround) is to simply disable Protected View entirely until ..read more

Recently, I’ve seen more and more machines (still a small amount, but an increasing number seemingly) with a problem upon boot following some recent updates to the Windows 10 Build 1709 subsystem.  Specifically, these machines hang on boot at a black screen following the Welcome/login screen with only the mouse cursor present for anywhere from a few to several minutes.  Task Manager can be invoked and CTRL+ALT+DEL still works, but the machine will not operate normally with the usual Windows shell interface (explorer.exe GUI etc.) until the process sees itself through to fruition.&nbs ..read more