Category: Windows

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Windows

GeForce Experience Stops Recording Itself

I like to use the Nvidia GeForce Experience built-in game recording feature to record various things, other than games — like for example recording a google meet I need to reference later. It’s a nice quick way, and I use the default “Alt-Z” binding to get the overlay up, and doing the basic recording has been great.

But just recently this stopped working as expected! It would record around 5 seconds and then just stop.

I tried the usual steps, updating drivers, rebooting, even running with no other applications, but nothing fixed it.

The solution turned out to be that I had HDR turned on! Apparently Alan Wake 2 turned that on for my one monitor and that caused the issue. I went into windows display settings and turned off HDR and everything is good now!

Curse you, Alan Wake! But also bless you, that game is soooo good.

Categories
Unix Windows

Powershell in Linux

If you are having to work with a Microsoft email server but typically use a Linux box for your daily work, being able to use Powershell to access it can be handy!

The page that MSFT provides to show how to install is at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/install-fedora?view=powershell-7.2

Now one note is that version 7.2 can have trouble with some versions of Linux, and this page could be helpful to explain that: https://issueexplorer.com/issue/PowerShell/PowerShell/16382

The error that I got when using v7.2 was: “New-PSSession: This parameter set requires WSMan, and no supported WSMan client library was found. WSMan is either not installed or unavailable for this system.”

The solution is to downgrade, this worked for me:

yum –showduplicates list available powershell

yum “downgrade” powershell-7.1.5-1.rhel.7

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Websites Windows

Windows Media Keyboard Keys Not Working

I have a windows box I use for certain things, and on it I have a music player that plays from my local library and I use the keyboard play/pause/next/prev buttons to control it.

But recently I found these keyboard buttons were refusing to work! After much diagnoses it turns out that Chrome was over-riding the functions, Now this is actually helpful if you are using Google Music or other music players in the browser. But if you want to disable that so your other player takes control you need to go to: chrome://flags/

And search for “hardware media” and disable that! Hopefully that helps someone from music player frustration syndrome.

Categories
Windows

Google Chrome changed background colors

I updated Chrome to version 68.0.3440.75 (Official Build) (64-bit) just the other day and found that my browser windows had the background color change from white to a washed out looking pink. At first I thought it was a monitor issue, but other browsers and applications looked fine.

I tried a few things to fix it, including changed chrome settings by going to “chrome://flags/#windows10-custom-titlebar” and trying that setting with both disabled/enabled.

Turns out what fixed it was to disable hardware acceleration! Not sure why the new version of Chrome handles that differently, the setting was the same on the older version. But in any case, to turn it off, go to “settings”, scroll to the bottom and click “Advanced”, then towards the end under “System” you can turn off hardware acceleration.

Categories
Windows

Recover missing space on USB thumb drive

I have an 8GB thumb drive that I used to burn a boot image onto, and then when I was done with it the damn thing showed 49MB and re-formatting did not make it any bigger! So how to get back my original free space?

I figured I was going to have to plug it into my linux box and do some gpart or fdisk stuff, but turns out Windows has some handy tools. First to see what your thumb drive looks like, search for “disk management” or “create and format hard disk partitions” and you’ll find the tool to use.

Choose the thumb drive and you’ll see all your missing space in the “unallocated” box!

Now run the windows command “diskpart” from msdos prompt. Type “list disk” to see the drives. Based on the disk number in the parition tool you will type “select disk N” where N is the disk number from the parition tool list.

Then do the commands “clean”, and “create primary partition”

If you have your partition tool open you will see these commands take effect realtime so you know it is working, and that is it!

 

Categories
Windows

Windows 10 DVD Player Not Showing Up

My first big problem was I was going to rip a Christmas CD and my new Windows 10 upgrade no longer saw my DCD/CD Asus player! It worked fine in Windows 7, but it would not even show up in the device manager (hint: windows-key + “R”, then type “control” and choose hardware -> device manager)

I tried a bunch of things before discovering I had to create a registry subkey! Follow these steps:

Press the Windows logo key + R to open the Run box. (or right-click on windows icon in lower left corner)

  • Type regedit in the Run box, then press Enter. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Allow
  • In the navigation pane, locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi
  • Right-click atapi, point to New, then click Key
  • Type Controller0, and then press Enter
  • Right-click Controller0, point to New, and then click DWORD(32-bit) Value
  • Type EnumDevice1, and then press Enter
  • Right-click EnumDevice1, click Modify
  • Type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK
  • Exit Registry Editor
  • Reboot

Now let me say to Microsoft, what the hell? One of the better things about the recent versions of Windows has been that it autodetects and installs drivers VERY well, and the fact that this happened to me (and frankly a LOT of others based on the dozens of online posts I had to wade through) really shows a lack of QA and continued driver support I would expect from MSFT.

Categories
Windows

Windows 10 Background Themes

I sure do like me a nice background theme! Whenever you start to realize that holy Hell I’ve been sitting in front of a computer for hours and why am I not outside enjoying the wonderful San Francisco weather — that is when you need to tune into a nice background theme and trick your mind into thinking you are on the beach or up in the mountains or playing Angry Birds?! Who the hell thought that was a good theme to make?

In any case, go check out the panoramic themes especially made for multiple monitors. Download and pick your favorite!

Then, make sure you go to control panel -> appearance -> personalization (you should be here already if you just downloaded and installed a theme), then click “Desktop Background” at the bottom and at the bottom of that settings page, make sure “Choose a fit” is set to “Span”. Note that you will need to do that for each theme since it doesn’t apply to all at once.

Enjoy!

Categories
Windows

Get rid of that Windows 10 reminder

Argh! That damn reminder for windows 10 is on my task bar and won’t go away!

Fear no longer, here’s what to do. Control Panel -> (do a search for ‘updates’) -> View installed updates

Then look around for “KB3035583” and “KB2952664” and uninstall them. Those are two that I have confirmed, I also have heard “KB3123862” should also be removed.

To make sure they don’t get re-installed automatically, you should change your settings (again, control panel, search for “turn automatic updating on or off”) so that windows downloads updates, but let’s you decide whether to install them. Then, when you see those two KB updates in the list, you can right-click them and choose “hide update”.

Another option entirely is to actually go ahead and agree to the windows 10 preview! Ha! You can’t tell by reading this, but I am laughing a lot right now.

Categories
Unix Windows

Using virt-install with KVM to install Windows XP

As a follow-up to my post on installing centos 6x using KVM, I have since had the need to install a winXP ISO on my KVM host. I had to play with the commands a bit before hitting upon the right mix, so here it is:

virt-install --name=vm_xp --ram=512 --vcpus=1,cores=1 \
--disk path=/opt/vm_xp.img,size=4 --network bridge=br0 \
-c /opt/en_winxp_pro_sp3.iso --os-variant winxp --os-type windows --hvm \
--graphics vnc,password=1234,port=5905,listen=192.168.2.10
Categories
Windows

Human Target Likes Windows 7

I was watching an episode of “Human Target” — not a bad show by the way — and I got a kick out of a scene where a guy is moving some windows around using Windows 7, and he used the “shakey” trick to hide the other windows and make the current one go big.

Usually when shows have computer stuff going on, they show a bunch of fake stuff that you can’t do on a computer, so it’s rare when you see something real, let alone a little known Windows 7 trick!

Kudos to Human Target!