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Techie007

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Everything posted by Techie007

  1. I shared that article with the Windows 10 Epic Fail crowd too. I'm sure they knew what to do! Regarding multiple votes, it looks like they check IP address. I was unable to vote again (I know, naughty naughty!).
  2. Are you in tablet mode? Click the Action center tray icon (or swipe in from the right-edge), and see if the Tablet mode button at the bottom is highlighted. If it is, turn it back off and see if your desktop works afterwards.
  3. Interestingly, his polls for "Will you upgrade to Windows 10" had a high affirmation level. I guess those people "upgraded" and then found out what a mess Windows 10 is! Thank you for sharing—I got my vote in too. Easy link for anyone else who wants to do the same: http://www.windowsobserver.com/2016/01/04/observed-tech-podcast-episode-185-otp/
  4. No, I have not experienced that, but I have experienced many machines that would fail to create recovery media when asked. Sometimes I could eventually get it to work by using different media (e.g. USB or DVD), and other times I just grabbed the key and reloaded Windows entirely.
  5. My personal take is this: While the market was disappointed by Windows 8, many were holding out to see what the next major release would bring. Many cited the "every other version" rule (selective as it was: ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8x, win!) and waited for Windows 9 with eager anticipation. Now that Windows 10 has been released and it shows little improvement while being even worse in many ways, I expect to see an unprecedented stagnation of the PC market with a smaller boost for alternatives, just like we saw happen suddenly in the months surrounding the release of Windows 8: Figure 1: "The velocity of computer sales" as visualized by the rapid takeover of Windows 7, replaced by the suddenly much slower rate of adoption of Windows 8. So, considering that Windows 10 was in the position to "undo the wrongs of Windows 8" and reassure the market of Microsoft's viability, but epic failed to do so, I do place much of the blame now on Windows 10. There were many of us that went into 2014 with the faith that Microsoft could "get it right this time" only to discover otherwise when the time came.
  6. Absolutely you can. If you're not concerned about port forwarding (for accessing services or servers on your network), there's no reason you can't disable the WiFi on your cable/DSL modem, plug the WAN port of a quality router into one of your modem's LAN ports and use your new router's WiFi/LAN ports instead. There's no risk of breaking anything since your new router will simply appear to the modem as another device. In fact, this is highly recommended given that the WiFi on many ISP modems isn't that great to begin with. The Asus routers I listed earlier all get top marks for wireless performance, in addition to being supported by Tomato. Those look like the Westell 7500 modem configuration pages. These modems offer little as far as customizability is concerned. I've had many of these where a customer wanted content filtering and I couldn't even specify the DNS servers without turning off DHCP on the Internet side, which would cause problems of its own. Such a basic setting! Anyway, I have quite a bit of experience setting up networks of various sizes, and would gladly assist you guys if you would like. Just create a thread over in the Networking section, and PM/link me so I find it. Noel, if I don't show up for awhile, you might need to get my attention elsewhere. My MSFN email notifications worked great when I joined, but suddenly stopped working on July 20 and haven't worked since. I'm only here now because I used a disposable email address to get re-confirmed. My half-dozen PMs regarding the issue have gone completely unanswered.
  7. Yes, taskhostw.exe should exit after stopping the following tasks (I have them all disabled on my computer): Multimedia\SystemSoundsService (redirected emulator for the PC Beep function; never missed it being off, although I do miss the physical PC speaker on PCs, and the old beep.sys that would make the PC speaker on existing PCs still function. Was very useful for alarms when the speakers were off, headphones plugged in, or the volume muted).TextServicesFramework\MsCtfMonitor (not sure that it does anything on a single-language system; I've never missed it being off).Wininet\CacheTask (never missed it being off; but I use Firefox for my web browsing and it uses its own web and DNS cache mechanisms). If there's a second instance of taskhostw.exe, it is probably caused by the following task: WDI\ResolutionHost (has to do with the Diagnostic Policy Service). Wait. . . they were all running on my Windows 10 computer even though I had them disabled! What?! If disabling tasks won't reliably stop them from executing, I'll move up to deleting them.
  8. Thank you for sharing this list of HOSTS providers. It is surprisingly hard to find quality results of that sort on Google for some reason. Anyway, after some of our past conversations, I decided to look into blocking some hosts on my home network just to see how it went, particularly because there are several mobile users on my network who surf with no protection. Additionally, since I wanted to get an idea of what was getting blocked, I changed the HOSTS rules to redirect all blacklisted traffic to my computer, which is running a dummy server. I was surprised not only how much was getting past Ghostery on the PCs, but also how much information was readily available in these requests. So thank you for prompting me to step up my security to the next level! These nefarious sites literally track nearly every page one has been to on the web, and all for ads I don't even want. Regarding hardware, right now I am using a Tenda N80 router running Tomato Shibby firmware. For its price, that router performs great, but I would not recommend it to someone else at this time because it is hard to flash, and has some up-time reliability issues. Tomato firmware supports a long list of routers (click the "Search by model" dropdown). My recommendations for most people right now are the Asus RT-N66U (N450/450), Asus RT-AC66U (N450/AC1300), and Asus RT-AC68U (N600/AC1300). The Tomato firmware has its own DNS server called DNSmasq which in addition to caching DNS requests, can also be used to enforce HOSTS files. There are several ways of doing it, but I have mine configured to load the HOSTS files from a USB drive I have plugged into the router.
  9. Right on! With all the Telemetry data Microsoft is collecting, they can sure see what a user is doing, almost down to the mouse-click in some places. However, what they cannot see is what that user is thinking while they're doing. Those three launches of Settings in the last hour and 15 minutes spent clicking though all the options, and no use of the Control Panel in the last month could mean any of the following: The user really likes the new Settings app and is exploring all the new options. Time to ditch the Control Panel because hardly anybody uses it anymore.The user is very frustrated with a default setting, but can't find the specific setting they're looking for. But they're still looking.The user can't find the Control Panel and is completely lost in the Settings app. This is why user feedback should be so much more important to Microsoft than usage (telemetry) feedback. In addition, it isn't the sheeple Microsoft needs to worry about. They either will or won't figure out the new systems and methods, but it won't make any difference anyway since they'll always blame themselves. It's the outspoken and knowledgeable users (like us!) that can do a company's reputation the most harm, because we know what we're talking about, know it isn't our fault, and will certainly share our experiences with others.
  10. I just tried it and was disappointed to find out that, just like Explorer, Classic Shell just hides the apps instead of uninstalling them. Disk space usage remains the same (or gets even higher) when uninstalling most apps this way. I've got a 16 GB tablet running Windows 10, and I need all the disk space I can get! Truely uninstalling all the apps saves over a gigabyte of disk space.
  11. Yeah right. Like why did Microsoft waste all that valuable development time "revamping" Calculator in the first place? The new monster Calculator app uses about 10x the amount of RAM that the old and faithful Win32 calc.exe used. Certainly there were better priorities for the coding team! Only this month did they finally fix the annoying bug that made it not always open the first time the [Calc] button was pressed on the keyboard.
  12. The SD value is the security descriptor that specifies the permissions for that task folder. Actual tasks will appear as subkeys containing the values Id, Index and SD. The Id value should map to a key having that ID with all the task details in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\TaskCache\Tasks. For some reason, there appears to be four tasks in my Task Scheduler key, all of which do not map to any task: Idle Maintenance {6D71909C-2476-40AD-A52D-B19859878FD6}Maintenance Configurator {3CCF9C21-B0ED-40DF-87F1-762E35D9222B}Manual Maintenance {8064E985-43F1-4F36-A0EE-A4CD8ABD7CD6}Regular Maintenance {0F96EA56-C1F2-4ABD-9051-9BB8ED5227CB} Honestly, I'm not sure what's up with those. Normally, this is an indication of corrupted (orphaned) tasks that should be deleted. In addition to the registry, there's three additional Tasks folders on the HDD: C:\Windows\TasksC:\Windows\system32\TasksC:\Windows\syswow64\Tasks Still nothing turns up regarding those four "phantom" tasks. I would recommend using a 3rd-party file browser to view the contents of those folders as administrator without having to change the permissions (which could cause damage).
  13. Uninstalling and hiding that update is the wrong way to disable the Windows 10 upgrade, so of course it is not effective long term. The correct way is to disable it via the registry while leaving GWX installed. Here's a batch file I made that will fully disable the Windows 10 upgrade for you: @echo offecho This tool will disable the GWX ^(Get Windows 10^) feature, advertisements, tray icon,echo and prevent Windows Update from downloading or installing Windows 10 in the future.echo.>nul 2>&1 "%systemroot%\system32\cacls.exe" "%systemroot%\system32\config\system"if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' ( pause echo. echo Requesting administrative privileges... echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\GetAdmin.vbs" echo UAC.ShellExecute "%~s0", "", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\GetAdmin.vbs" "%temp%\GetAdmin.vbs" exit /B)if exist "%temp%\GetAdmin.vbs" ( del "%temp%\GetAdmin.vbs" )echo Disabling GWX...timeout 3reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GWX" /v "DisableGWX" /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /freg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v "DisableOSUpgrade" /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /freg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade" /v "AllowOSUpgrade" /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /freg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade" /v "KickoffDownload" /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /freg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade" /v "OSUpgradeInteractive" /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /freg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade" /v "ReservationsAllowed" /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /fecho Finished!Pause
  14. Welcome to the New Age where Microsoft can remove any software they don't like on your PC every few months.
  15. At least you're getting some kind of MSFN notification by e-mail. It's been months since I've gotten any. --JorgeA I'm having the same problem too. Email notifications worked for me until July 20, when I received the last one. I tried to redo my email settings, but never got the confirmation emails to finish registering my email address. I'm currently on here with a disposable email address. My email provider is GMX, and they are giving me by far the best service I've had from an email provider. I've had issues with Yahoo and Outlook, and don't trust Google. I've private messaged xper several times with no response. Quite frustrating.
  16. Yea, I don’t buy it. No “optional update” is ever checked by default. Ever. That was deliberate, and they probably only scale back after some outrage happened. Even if it was an accident, (which I seriously doubt) this still scares me. This would be the second time in a month that there was an "accident" involving Windows Update. (the other one being the mystery test update that some Windows 7 users received last month) This is starting to become the new normal, and if auto-update is now required, this will do a lot of damage. "It was a mistake"—and this is the company we are supposed to trust with forced automatic updates in Windows 10? Microsoft has bricked PCs with their automatic updates before!
  17. Get that Marvin a cigar. Shocking. Are we really sure that this was a Microsoft employee? I ask because this is exactly how the Indian "Windows support" scammers write and speak, and very close to the script that most of them follow. Then again, I have seen some truly outrageous stuff from them over on the Microsoft Answers forum too. Direct link to the original Reddit thread Direct link to full set of images Looking through the rest of the images, the guy turned down the paid support offer and ironically, Microsoft then emailed him the (partial) instructions how to disable GWX for free. CROOKS!
  18. I finally got build 10565 earlier today. Ever since I started switching my account back to a local account, Microsoft's been punishing me by delaying my ability to download new builds. I simply don't like typing my long, secure web password to unlock my computer! Anyway, I was looking through some things in this new build, and happened upon this: It turns out that Microsoft renamed the Diagnostics Tracking Service to a more accurate Connected User Experiences and Telemetry, as evidenced by its internal name, DiagTrack, being the same. They also added a more accurate description. Here's a screenshot of what it used to look like (RTM build):
  19. It looks like there has to be something after Windows 10, because Windows 10's mainstream support ends October 13, 2020, and extended support ends October 14, 2025.
  20. Yes, hard work and not a "free upgrade" gimmick for the first time in Microsoft's history, along with advertisement software that is not designed to be disabled, that pops up every couple of days now on computers that still dare to run Windows 7 or 8.1: Unlike other notifications, that advertisement doesn't close automatically. Windows 10 has already been downloaded to this laptop at the cost of 6 GB of space and Internet bandwidth. Now Microsoft is just trying to coerce the user into clicking the button so it's not all in vain. I don't know about everyone else here, but given the extraordinary effort going into this, combined with its declining momentum, I see "failure" written all over this. Windows 10 should have passed XP long ago. Instead, I am still regularly seeing computers everywhere with the GWX icon. People are intentionally passing up the "free upgrade" offer, but don't know how to remove the advertisement, which seems to be getting more and more aggressive as time passes. Who passes up free?!
  21. I just learned more about taskhostw.exe today. It is the new task host process (surprise!) for several user-mode tasks that used to run inside of separate taskeng.exe processes under Windows 7 and 8. I love it when Microsoft innovates like this. Here, they were attempting to reduce the number of processes running in the background by consolidating two or three taskeng.exe processes into a single taskhostw.exe process. Process Explorer and Process Hacker both don't know how to enumerate the tasks it's hosting, so I found out the following by trial and error (watching its CPU usage while I started and stopped running tasks helped point me in the right direction). On my computer, it is hosting the following tasks: Multimedia\SystemSoundsService (redirected emulator for the PC Beep function; never missed it being off, although I do miss the physical PC speaker on PCs, and the old beep.sys that would make the PC speaker on existing PCs still function. Was very useful for alarms when the speakers were off, headphones plugged in, or the volume muted).TextServicesFramework\MsCtfMonitor (not sure that it does anything on a single-language system; I've never missed it being off).Wininet\CacheTask (never missed it being off; but I use Firefox for my web browsing and it uses its own web and DNS cache mechanisms). If you stop all those tasks, taskhostw.exe will exit. Now I'm not sure what ubpm.dll has to do with taskhostw.exe anymore, except that we know that it has its name and that mysterious GUID embedded inside.
  22. Disable the pagefile completely and see if you have any issues. I've got only 8GB of RAM in my main machine, I haven't used a pagefile in years and haven't had any "out of memory" related crashes either. If you do have issues, try a small (100 MB – 1 GB) pagefile on your SSD. Definitely keep the pagefile on the SSD. That's one of the best reasons to have one in the first place.
  23. Yes, Norton (and Avast too) are huge resource hogs. Malwarebytes, which uses much more RAM (and is more effective in my experience) is not a resource hog. Go figure. Considering the amounts of RAM that most systems have nowadays, RAM usage would be the least qualifying measure. Much more important are copious blocking disk accesses and spikes of high CPU usage that cause performance and battery life hits. Also, don't forget that antivirus software typically has many more components than just one process. Most use several processes and numerous drivers, the latter of whose RAM usage will be added to the System process. I call Windows Defender a resource hog because it greatly reduces the battery life on my tablet and makes it sluggish and no joy to use as it keeps randomly hanging. I have noticed it making some laptops slower as well (still nothing compared to Norton or Avast). My tablet would probably be a paperweight with either of those. However, the performance impact of antivirus software is much less noticeable on more powerful hardware. So you may not notice any impact with a quad-core, SSD powered PC.
  24. The autorun entry for sihost.exe is in "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ShellInfrastructure", and I believe that it is started by the Application Information service at the request of either Winlogon.exe or Explorer.exe. As others have stated, it is now a critical component for Explorer to work, now that the taskbar and everything associated with it is Metro. taskhostw.exe is launched by the Task Scheduler service, which also uses a similarly named process, taskeng.exe as a task shim for non-task processes that need managed by the scheduler. Like you, I have not yet found any information on the specific ClassID that it is being asked to run. svchost -k UnistackSvcGroup is running several super-hidden services (you can find them in the registry, but they do not show up in Computer Management or Process Hacker): Contact Data (manual start, PimIndexMaintenanceSvc, PimIndexMaintenance.dll)Sync Host (auto start, OneSyncSvc, APHostService.dll)User Data Storage (manual start, UnistoreSvc, unistore.dll)User Data Access (manual start, UserDataSvc, userdataservice.dll)
  25. He goes on to claim that you can't turn off Windows Defender. The way he puts it, it sounds to me like he thinks it's impossible to install any other AV (which of course requires turning Defender off), but I doubt that even Microsoft in its infinitesimal wisdom would go that far. I am confirming that it is now very hard to disable Windows Defender. In earlier builds of Windows 10 (and in Windows 8), I would easily disable Windows Defender by going into the registry and manually changing the WinDefend service's Start value to 4, thus bypassing the locked service configuration page. After rebooting, it would be disabled for good. However, when I upgraded to Windows 10 RTM and tried to reapply this tweak, I couldn't bypass the "Access denied" messages. I tried running Registry Editor as SYSTEM (I like to do this instead of manually taking ownership of registry keys), taking ownership (which succeeded), and several other tricks to disable it. I was stonewalled at each attempt to actually change the value, as if there was a rootkit in my computer subverting any attempt to change anything in the WindDefend registry key—even though the permissions granted Everyone full control. Eventually, I managed to get that resource hog killed for good by disabling it through the policy registry setting, booting from the installation disc, loading the SYSTEM registry hive into Registry Editor, and changing the Start value—this time, successfully. The downside? Besides all the effort (necessary to make my tablet usable), my computer has been upgraded to new builds several times now, and yet, somehow, Windows Defender is still disabled. Thing is, I can't re-enable it even if I wanted to. When I try to start the service, it starts and then automatically stops. After the policy change, the service still ran, which is why I went ahead and knocked it out with Registry Editor. Two things here: I understand the need for antivirus software to use shady (i.e. rootkit) means of defending themselves. However, I strongly believe that the user should have the last say whether such software (and Updates and Cortana, and the list goes on) runs at all. I wouldn't mind if my old trick (elevate to SYSTEM, change the Start value) worked. What I'm afraid of is that with some future update, Microsoft may do something similar to the Windows Update service. It is mandatory to ensure that updates won't terminate some important, long-term project (like uploading/rendering a large file, or recording an event). I have created a batch file on my desktop that stops and disables the BITS and Windows Update services, and another to revert those changes. The thing is, Microsoft could easily do something stupid like locking those keys too with the rootkit, or even worse, hardcode an automatic reversion of the default values into a core part of the OS. The pre-RTM Preview builds actually did this with the Windows Update service. I have not investigated whether this is still the case now. This is just silly. Microsoft needs to remember that user choice and comparability used to be selling points for Windows, and stop forcing their way at the expense of their users!
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