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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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I wanted to figure out why my Steam icon gets hidden again every now and then and I have to go back and set it to "Show icon and notifications" (in Windows 7). A google search returned a page that recommended various things, monitoring the Registry one of them. I tried to do that using the Sysinternals Process Monitor, but that showed me like 10s of thousands of events per second! So I tried to close various things to get the event load down. AVG seemed to be a big cause of them so I temporarily disabled it using it's own UI, but it was still causing lots of events. So I tried to kill it's processes, and googled again. Result recommended disabling the Watchdog service and restarting. Did that, and it certainly seemed to have lessened the events a bit. Except there was still so much noise, so I filtered out almost every process in Process Monitor, and then went and manually changed the "Show icon and notifications" to "Only show notifications", but there were still so many registry events that I gave up. Now I tried turning AVG on again, but it didn't work. I could not enable the Watchdog service any more (access denied or whatever). After a couple of restarts, I tried to uninstall AVG, but that also failed! It couldn't delete another service. Finally, I chose to "Repair" AVG and surprisingly that turned it back on. Whew! 2 hours later, I'm no closer to solving my original problem.

Welcome to the future!

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Windows suddenly stopped telling me whether I have Caps Lock on, for no reason, about a year ago :(

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I wanted to figure out why my Steam icon gets hidden again every now and then and I have to go back and set it to "Show icon and notifications" (in Windows 7). A google search returned a page that recommended various things, monitoring the Registry one of them. I tried to do that using the Sysinternals Process Monitor, but that showed me like 10s of thousands of events per second! So I tried to close various things to get the event load down. AVG seemed to be a big cause of them so I temporarily disabled it using it's own UI, but it was still causing lots of events. So I tried to kill it's processes, and googled again. Result recommended disabling the Watchdog service and restarting. Did that, and it certainly seemed to have lessened the events a bit. Except there was still so much noise, so I filtered out almost every process in Process Monitor, and then went and manually changed the "Show icon and notifications" to "Only show notifications", but there were still so many registry events that I gave up. Now I tried turning AVG on again, but it didn't work. I could not enable the Watchdog service any more (access denied or whatever). After a couple of restarts, I tried to uninstall AVG, but that also failed! It couldn't delete another service. Finally, I chose to "Repair" AVG and surprisingly that turned it back on. Whew! 2 hours later, I'm no closer to solving my original problem.

Welcome to the future!

This sounds like a registry key or two is corrupted somewhere and is inhibiting the system from recording your preferences properly. Besides a bughunt through Regedit in search of a "could not access" error message, I couldn't tell you how to fix that, but it's a problem I've come across a couple times myself.

I lost a good two hours I'd laid out for work yesterday because the system sounds for Windows weren't working and I couldn't change my wallpaper or screensaver. Ends up one missing key in HKEY_USERS had caused Windows to freak out and disable all profile features, including all personalization. It was a joy to track that down (create a new profile, go line-by-line through the two registry directories to find the missing key, export and re-merge).

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Windows also you tell you your caps lock is on at the logon screen

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My word. After about three years of nonstop use, my laptop had become quite loud and warm. I thought it was nearing its end, until my mom walks in and performs a trick she used on her own laptop: she vacuums the whole thing, specifically the vents. I don't know if that's super bad for the hardware, but right away my laptop is super silent and cool again. Can anyone confirm whether this was the appropriate thing to do? It appears to work like goddamn magic.

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Buy compressed-air cans to clean out the heatsink. Blow the air through the intake side. Make sure the laptop is really turned off (best to remove the battery), you don't want the fans to be powered when doing this. Also, you might want to do this outside.

A vacuum works, but compressed-air works much much better.

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I'm kind of dreading dismounting my PC from the bracket under my desk at this point. The amount of shit that accumulates around it. O_O

Elmuerte gives some solid advice! :tup:

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I bought a little shop-blower, because compressed air leaves a slight residue that bothers me on a low, irrational level. Supposedly you're not supposed to use a vacuum because the action generates static, but that might belong among the same half-myths that sold grounding bracelets.

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Oh right. Wait 15 minutes before turning on your laptop for the liquid air to evaporate (it's not a harmful residue, it is not (or should not be) conducting), you just don't want the liquid to bother the fan when its turning.

If static electricity bothers you, touch your central heading while holding your laptop (or a top hat if you own one).

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I've always used a vacuum for cleaning my desktop machine. Should get me one of those compressed air thingies.

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I wanted to figure out why my Steam icon gets hidden again every now and then and I have to go back and set it to "Show icon and notifications" (in Windows 7).
Have you recently switched to the Steam beta? It’s a different application as far as Windows is concerned, so it needs its own preferences. I suspect that updates to the Beta or even the regular version could cause this as well.
AVG seemed to be a big cause of them so I temporarily disabled it using it's own UI, but it was still causing lots of events.
I recommend using Microsoft Security Essentials. You paid for it with your Windows license, why not use it?
Windows suddenly stopped telling me whether I have Caps Lock on, for no reason, about a year ago :(
Windows doesn’t have anything built in which tells you this—you must have installed some drivers with your keyboard. (or Windows did automatically—7 & 8 seem to do that with some hardware) Usually most keyboards have an LED to indicate whether Caps Lock is on or not though. BUT YOU CAN USUALLY FIGURE IT OUT ANYWAY.

Maybe check the manufacturer’s website and see if there are newer drivers to download.

My word. After about three years of nonstop use, my laptop had become quite loud and warm. I thought it was nearing its end, until my mom walks in and performs a trick she used on her own laptop: she vacuums the whole thing, specifically the vents. I don't know if that's super bad for the hardware, but right away my laptop is super silent and cool again. Can anyone confirm whether this was the appropriate thing to do? It appears to work like goddamn magic.
It works, but I don’t recommend it. It might seem daunting at first, but you are better off disassembling the laptop for cleaning. Ever built Lego? It shouldn’t be much more difficult than that, and there are usually instructions for your model online.

The problem with using a vacuum cleaner on it, is that it can wreck the bearings on the fans. And you never want to use a vacuum cleaner inside a PC, because they can generate a lot of static electricity, and that’s death to many electronics. In the PC repair trade, we have specially designed ESD Vacuum cleaners that don’t carry a static charge, that typically look something like this:

35848f1u8u.jpg

Often the thermal paste is improperly applied in notebooks, or it’s cheap stuff that loses effectiveness in a year or two, so you may want to replace that as well if you are disassembling it. Be sure to use a non-conductive thermal paste, and you only need a tiny spot on the center of any chips that have a heatsink attached. (CPU/GPU) If you want to get fancy about it, a small X on the center of the chip will provide the best coverage. Don’t spread it around, just attach the heatsink and let the clamping pressure do the work. If you spread it out with a spatula or a flat card, you are potentially creating voids between the heatsink and chip. If any comes out the sides, you have applied too much, it should only result in a very thin layer covering most of the surface of the chip. (the actual CPU/GPU die is only a tiny area in the center of the heat spreader—maybe 1/3 to 1/4 at most)

If you are unsure, a tube of thermal paste usually contains enough for several applications (tip: put it in a ziploc bag with the air squeezed out, and put that in a bowl of hot water for a couple of minutes before application) so you can apply what you think is right, pull the heatsink off, and see if you've done a good job. You need to clean the old thermal paste off and reapply if you do this though—you can’t pull it off to inspect it and then put that back on.

Buy compressed-air cans to clean out the heatsink. Blow the air through the intake side. Make sure the laptop is really turned off (best to remove the battery), you don't want the fans to be powered when doing this. Also, you might want to do this outside.
Same thing as the vacuum cleaner—don’t let the fan spin freely if you choose to do this.

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It might seem daunting at first, but you are better off disassembling the laptop for cleaning. Ever built Lego? It shouldn’t be much more difficult than that, and there are usually instructions for your model online.

It shouldn't, but it often is. Often even quite horrible. A lot of things you have to remove are kept in place by pressure between two pieces of plastic, not screws. But you're not sure if you got all screws and the damn thing still doesn't come loose until you apply more pressure, to the point where you think it's going to break, but then the part gets loose.

And for things you think are easily accessibly you often have to dismantle half the system (thinks like memory or the harddrive).

Same thing as the vacuum cleaner—don’t let the fan spin freely if you choose to do this.

Why not? And what's the best way to block the fan from spinning?

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Have you recently switched to the Steam beta? It’s a different application as far as Windows is concerned, so it needs its own preferences. I suspect that updates to the Beta or even the regular version could cause this as well.

Aha, that might have been it! Thanks.

PS why MS security essentials over AVG?

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Windows doesn’t have anything built in which tells you this—you must have installed some drivers with your keyboard. (or Windows did automatically—7 & 8 seem to do that with some hardware) Usually most keyboards have an LED to indicate whether Caps Lock is on or not though. BUT YOU CAN USUALLY FIGURE IT OUT ANYWAY.

This is on my DELL laptop, which has no LED. Perhaps some update I was unaware of took away the Caps Lock icon display, or I managed to disable it somehow. Obviously I can figure it out, but it's a pain when I'm entering passwords and having to open a Notepad doc just to check if CL is on (especially if it's a banking website with a three-attempt limit and I start to get OCD about whether I've hit Caps Lock in between checking on the doc and going back to the site).

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This is on my DELL laptop, which has no LED. Perhaps some update I was unaware of took away the Caps Lock icon display, or I managed to disable it somehow. Obviously I can figure it out, but it's a pain when I'm entering passwords and having to open a Notepad doc just to check if CL is on (especially if it's a banking website with a three-attempt limit and I start to get OCD about whether I've hit Caps Lock in between checking on the doc and going back to the site).

If you go to the Dell website and look for the downloads for your particular model of Laptop, you'll most likely find it there. (It's technically not a driver, but rather it'll most likely be under some sort of Dell software suite.) What happened to your spiffy new rig, anyway?

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That's hooked up to my tv for gaming, it's a bit of a faff for everyday use.

I'll give that a shot, thanks. I'd Googled it previously, but I think I was looking for Windows issues...

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I remember a day when I wasted a few hours trying to get my new DELL's webcam drivers -- turned out the machine just physically didn't have a webcam. A fact I had ignored thinking that all laptops must come with webcams. (also the same model had a variant with webcam I think)

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So the power goes out the other day, and when I turn it back on, I'm unable to connect to my NAS, and think «Jesus, what now?» I hook up a monitor to the NAS, reboot it and it hangs partway into the boot sequence. Since I recently lost an SSD to another power outage I figure something got to the SSD in the NAS, and decide to reinstall the OS on it. I wait a day to get a hold of an external DVD reader, burn an installation DVD, reinstall the OS, and get another weird error. The NAS is unable to connect to the DHCP server. I look a the NIC, and there's no lights, and I assume something's wrong with either the NIC or the motherboard. I open up the NAS and move the NIC to another slot and try again – no dice. I check the DHCP server, and it's not showing anything. I configure a static IP on the NAS and am still unable to connect or ping.

Then, I realise I should check whether there's a light in the network switch, and there isn't. In fact, the whole switch is dead! Now it all makes sense. The NAS was never dead – the reason I was unable to connect was the switch had died in the power outage. The reason it hanged in the boot sequence was most likely it waiting for a DHCP configuration.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: Never throw a network switch behind furniture and assume it'll work forever.

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