We have an employee with a Razer Lycosa keyboard. His Windows 10 machine became unresponsive. The wireless mouse worked fine, but no keyboard input. We rebooted and went through BIOS settings and Advanced Start Up tools; however, none of these fixed the issue.
We put an old USB keyboard in place of the Razer, and everything worked fine. We didn’t spend any time on this issue, but don’t be surprised if you own one and have issues with it.
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We got a call from a user who’s start menu wasn’t working normally on her desktop machine. When we logged in the start menu was already popped up and the taskbar wasn’t visible. Not sure what the user had done but we I clicked in the Notification area I saw the machine was in “Tablet Mode”. Unchecked this and everything was normal.
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We got a call where someone’s all important Snipping Tool wasn’t working. When I connected to them to take a look it was easy to see what they saw. When you clicked on the shortcut this was all you would get.
This was an easy fix by making a new shortcut to the executable. It was C:\Windows\system32\snippingtool.exe.
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We got a call from a user that just got their laptop upgraded to Windows 10 using Office 2013. When the user tried to create their signature Outlook would freeze. Found a couple of links with suggestions, but this one did the trick.
The trick was to Settings >> Search for Apps. Click on “Apps and Features”, and uninstall “Microsoft Office Desktop Apps” and uninstall it. It did require a reboot, but everything was working after that.
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Had a customer whos machine was running slow. We ran WinDirStat to see what was eating up the space on the machine. The pagesys file was huge, but a large chunk was under VIPRE. Specifically with the PatchManagement Patches.
According to VIPRE is it okay to delete out the contents of this folder. We found this information here.
https://support.threattracksecurity.com/support/discussions/topics/1000090855
Deleting the files went fine. We left the small .pup files since they were small.
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We got a call for a slow machine. Specifically when they would right-click on the desktop to create a new folder it took a couple of minutes before the panel would show up.
After doing some clean up and installing some Windows updates we decided to also try a registry fix we stumbled upon.
When we got to the ContextMenuHandlers we removed the one entry for “Desktop”, and right-a-way the right-click on the desktop was working the way it should.
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Windows 10 allows you to download the Operating System Software. This is a big change for the way Microsoft distributed the installation disks. You may need this to perform a system repair. Here is a link to the download.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
Another link we often need is for the Windows Update Catalog. Here you can search for the appropriate update. There is often a listing for a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version, so be careful of which one you download. Here is the link.
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/
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We had a call where the user wasn’t able to select the default printer while in Acrobat reader DC. It did work in every other program. He was working from home and connected to his work network via VPN. When he opened Acrobat and tried to select the local printer the printer selection would automatically go back to the network printer. I disconnected the VPN and removed the network printer knowing when he connected the network again he would get it back.
Now when we tried to select the network printer in Acrobat it would jump up to the first choice of “Fax”. Different but not better. Another tech noticed it happened when ever we tried to use the Windows scroller on the side of a window it was autoscrolling.
We thought it might be the touch pad or something else wrong with Windows so we patched the Dell with new chipset, BIOS, touchpad driver, and nothing worked.
The problem was solved when we noticed there were two mice in the device manager. One was a generic “HID mouse” we removed this and everything was working.
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We got a call for a customer’s monitor showing “out of range“. This is all the customer could see. We were able to use ScreenConnect and we could see the desktop fine, so it must be the monitor.
One suggestion was to go to “msconfig“, in the “boot” tab, check “base video“, and reboot.
This got the user to be able to see their monitor; however, when we tried to set the resolution to what they had before the monitor went black again with the warning “out of range”. Since we were connected remotely we could see the desktop and make the changes to get desktop visible again. A tech went on-site.
The tech had an extra DVI cable in the vehicle and swapping the cable totally fixed the issue. We think a recent power surge there may have caused the issue.
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We got a call from a customer who’s machine was having issues. We were able to force a restart on the machine, but when the machine came back up all their desktop files and icons were not there. I went to restore a few of them when I got the warning that the shortcut I was adding was already there. Never seen this before.
A quick search lead me to this page:
https://appuals.com/desktop-icons-are-missing-in-windows-10/
This solved the issue. We just had to check “Show desktop icons” and everything came back.
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