The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

caleb posted:

I updated to the newest version of Windows a few weeks ago and now every time I open my laptop to shitpost or look at a video on youtube or send a quick email or something I have to spend 15 minutes in task manager force closing everything with the word 'Microsoft' or 'Windows' in the name. They usually relaunch themselves 3 or 4 times so it's kind of like playing whack-a-mole. Then after doing all of that my disk usage returns to 0% from 100% and I can finally use my computer. It's a really cool mini-game that does not make me angry at all.
I have disabled everything I possibly can

Msconfig disable from startup things you don't like, go to services do the same, I keep Microsoft stuff, but prune the "non-Microsoft" services. This is the most helpful thing that 1/2 people don't seem to know.

Fame Douglas posted:

Also, to edit autorun entries, you can simply open the task manager and go to the "Startup" tab. For more advanced control that includes Scheduled tasks etc., Microsoft's Autoruns is very handy.

Or this, but I thought you had to install sysinternals to get them.

I added the new powertoys and am digging the screensnap and alt-space to search for apps like on Macs.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2020 16:26

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 01:35

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

DarkestLite posted:

Hey, my build is less than 2 weeks old on a fresh install of windows and my PC has been locking up. It's killing me and I want to figure out why and don't know where to start

Windows repair? Maybe something's installed improperly and corrupted.
SFC.exe and DISM

Or check drive health with crystaldiskinfo.
Or what the other posters said.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2020 12:26

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Shibawanko posted:

thanks! turns out the program i needed was the one i already had installed, it works perfectly for what i wanted to do

And that program's name was:

Albert Einstein

# ¿ Jan 19, 2021 16:57

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Klyith posted:

d. If you want another torrent app to try, I just recently saw this one called LIII that's very lightweight and minimal. Like if you're one-off downloading an actual linux iso or libreoffice, rather than have torrents running all the time, it might be a good choice.

Tixati is 5mb more but has some cool unique features.

Such as Decentralized sharing channels it's kind of like soulseek for torrents or you can view/share audio/video streams.

Sometimes you get more seeds from the channels you are in.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 12:13

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

I don't use it, but yeah I know a lot of people happy with parsec.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2021 19:10

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

My dad still insists on using antivirus and it uses like 16% of his bulldozer cores at all times and runs like poo poo.

I used to tweak everything about windows growing up but each version of windows has had less of a need. I'm almost 100% stock now.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2021 16:56

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Tiny Timbs posted:

Is there a way I can see USB connects/disconnects in a log somewhere? I'm getting "device unplugged/plugged" noises at fairly random times that I don't think I'll catch by just keeping device manager open.

I hope you fixed this, but this sounds like the famous Ryzen USB Connectivity Issue that plagued some users for the last 2 years or so until recently.

Possible Fixes:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-suggest-possible-fixes-for-usb-connectivity-issues

# ¿ Dec 9, 2022 18:37

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

I've always had the opposite problem where
"Don't ask me again" on msconfig never applied.

I think they finally fixed that with windows 11 though, or maybe it was just weird computer stuff.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2022 11:56

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

You can use a third-party equalizer. Equalizer APO with the "Peace" GUI is the go-to.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/equalizerapo/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/peace-equalizer-apo-extension/

You can install it for any sound device, just make sure you restart your computer after installation for it to take affect. You also have to redo this after certain windows updates which can be a pain.

I do this, but I slap
https://sourceforge.net/p/hesuvi/wiki/Help/
On top of it for virtualized 7.1 surround sound on my high dollar, non gamer headphones so I don't have to pay the gamer tax on subpar gamer headphones.

PM me for help if needed and I'll try, but it just works for me natively, some headphones you have to make a virtual device and do a passthrough hack for it.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 16:40

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Strong Sauce posted:

okay so whats going on here. why can't i do anything with the missing 1.6TB space?

i tried downloading easeus partition to merge the two partitions together but the program just comes up blank for me

edit: mbr to gpt issues

Last time this happened to me I think I fixed it off a Linux distro on a USB stick. ( I can't remember what I used, but it helped to have everything unmounted)

It was kind of a pain and partition stuff is scary because I've accidentally wiped my backup drive or other wrong drives before.

Now I just make sure I format GPT from the get go and I'd probably just do a fresh install to fix that.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2023 11:59

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Pharnakes posted:

So I just updated to win11 last night because windows offered it to me and I'd heard it was supposed to be pretty good, however I really really like being able to move the taskbar around. Short of uninstalling everything and reinstalling windows 10, is there any less drastic measures I can take?

StartAllBack seems to be what most use, it's free until Ukraine becomes fixed.

I used to use open shell for classic start menu (and I believe it allows taskbar move as well) but I quit using the start menu mostly and launch things via power toys recently.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2023 21:50

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Pharnakes posted:

Thank you, that's definitely an improvement. Anyway to be able to put it on a secondary monitor though?

No idea I used open shell until windows 11 then I quit using those.

Strong Sauce posted:

so my main hd with my os on it is mbr. i want to back it up because i have some files on the main drive that i want to transfer over.

since i'm really just keeping it for those files and not to restore my old OS... i'm about to just do a straight copy over to the new HD. is there any reason i shouldn't just do that?

That's what I do, if it's basically media files it shouldn't need credentials or permissions or anything, not sure if your drive is encrypted.

I used to use terracopy or something like that to drastically improve on windows multi file copy times, some 3rd party utilities used to reduce the amount of time for multi thousand file copies by like 80% somehow.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2023 20:30

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

I've been using Firefox for the last 6 months and I'm about ready to switch back to chrome. or maybe edge, i don't know. Firefox is just so slow in almost everything it does. I think hardware acceleration is just plain broken for me. it works in every browser but firefox, no matter what settings i use. And they still haven't bothered implemented basic features that have been a part of chrome for many years now, like hdr video support.

I thought about saying maybe hardware acceleration off may be your best bet, you may be onto something there.
(To the other Firefox poster)

# ¿ Apr 5, 2023 20:37

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

It is a hard habit to break from early PC days.

Ideally you want as much ram as possible allocated intelligently to things you commonly do/use because that's faster.

Also on phones, I grew up immediately closing anything I wasn't using, but rebooting an app you use frequently costs more battery than just letting it lie dormant. (I still close things I only occasionally use)

OS's have gotten better at managing these things and tech specs have gotten greater in the last 20 years.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2023 10:28

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

Have you ran windows clean up and then ran it again including windows files like old update rollbacks

Checking every box
because that adds up to several gb after a few years.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2023 21:32

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

I'm just guessing, but wouldn't LTSC lack new features like ryzen3d/intel scheduling tweaks, new gaming PC features and optimizations, auto HDR for my OLED monitor, and better multi monitor support?

I prefer chocolatey GUI as a package manager but windows store hijacked some of the stuff I installed, but using both keeps me 95% updated and security patched.

# ¿ May 13, 2023 14:46

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

I bounced off foobar a few times over the years and sometimes use clementine or strawberry

Or plex.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2023 13:28

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

It worked for fixing errors from my ram that was going bad, but not as well as replacing that ram.

A year or 2 of flaky behavior could have been avoided if I'd have memtested my ram.

You shouldn't have to run those commands a few times a year (like I did, oops)

# ¿ Nov 15, 2023 20:41

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

I've switched from using event viewer to the new reliability monitor unless I really need to drill down a persistent error.

It's just a tad easier to read and it doesn't show hundreds/thousands of "normal windows behavior" reports for me to sort through.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2023 11:49

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 01:35

Quaint Quail Quilt: Jun 19, 2006; Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay

I'd look into this
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/

Basically if you can run something with cake or fq-codel on your network it should fix that.

Personally I got a firewalla gold box, but it's kinda pricey.

You could use some enterprise network gear that supports it or use openwrt on an existing router or pfsense on an old computer.

Openwrt or an open source router firmware like tomato should support it, but you really need a beefy CPU to run that feature well (it's like a form of qos called sqm)

For a speed test to diagnose and set that up I've been using fast.com and check every box and set it to however many upload and download channels your modem or whatever supports or maybe one or 2 less if it freaks out and run that for 2-5 minutes or so to get a good reading without any interference from "burst"

Improves game ping as well! It's basically the same thing you do to torrent well so you are not choking your connection, your overall speed will go down slightly but the connection will be much better with less latency and it won't choke.

I've noticed a lot of Internet connections technically give you the rated speed even if that would make the connection shittier, rather than admitting that they are only capable of giving you 85-95% of what you pay for.

edit: Windows 11 or some weird network settings under device manager may also fix this, but my solution works with ALL devices on your home network.

Quaint Quail Quilt fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Apr 1, 2024

# ¿ Apr 1, 2024 11:16

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Windows and Windows Software Megathread