The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[m_b_metcalf]

This one is about the long restart time. Even after the desktop has come up and looks OK, W10 is still working on the restart, for several minutes. Last week I attempted to bring up a spreadsheet, whilst the restart was in progress and the result was that W10 destroyed the file. Luckily for me, I'm only half stupid, so I do back up all my important files.

It seems that you can right-click on the taskbar, click on Task Manager, click on Startup, and then at least see what's involved in the start-up on your own machine, listed by impact. Is there anything strange there?

Regards,

mike

[Leren]

Thanks for the tip Mike, but nothing seems too suspicious. I'm not the only one who has noticed this. On p1 of this thread creint commented, inter alia "-Restarting is so slow its way faster to kill power an start pc again."

I always felt that this was true, but with each update of W10 the restart time seems to get longer and longer. If you look carefully at the screen at one stage a ghostly dialog box appears momentarily and then disappears, so you know something is going on. Also, various things can get going before others. eg you can bring up a web page before most other things. The last thing that gets going for me is Norton Internet Security. When you can actually bring that up you know you are finally up and running fully. I've just assumed that Microsoft has been burn't so many times with previous W10 updates that they are going out of their way to ensure that absolutely every setting you had before your restart is reapplied, and that presumably takes time. So my best advice is, if you do a restart, go and make yourself a cup of tea.

Leren

[Mathimagics]

And if 6
turned out to be 9,
I don't mind …

I was (and still am) so enraged by the process-killing unauthorised restart "feature" of Win10 that I totally forgot to mention the other major issue that plagued me from the very start …

The late, great (and still sorely missed) author of "If 6 was 9" would be greatly amused, I like to think, to learn that Win10 performs tricks just like this, like turning "Shift+6" into, well, not "Shift+9", but something very similar … courtesy of the RKMR feature! (Random Keyboard Mapping Reassignment)

When you are writing code, lots and lots of it, you use the "special characters" (like @#$\|&) a hell of a lot, so you can imagine how disturbing it is when all of a sudden none of these keys work, they are mostly scrambled.

To the uninitiated (as I was when this all began) you might think somebody had hacked into and hijacked your system, or simply that your cheap keyboard has broken down. I thought the wireless kbd/mouse that I was using was the cause and so I went out and bought cord-connected replacements, but the problem persisted. I finally found out that it wasn't the keyboard, it was those @#$\|& clowns at Microsoft, again!

This problem has not gone away, but I am now so conditioned to invoking the magic keyboard sequence that fixes it (hold Windows key down, then press spacebar, Enter) that the 3 weeks it took me to find out how to recover my Kbd layout have faded from my memory, replaced by all those other Win10 "features" that don't have such simple work-arounds ….

[Leren]

Hmmm... I have a minor keyboard problem too. On one PC the @ and " characters are interchanged. As MM said, I thought it was the El Cheapo keyboard I bought (the ones that come with PCs are often made for midgets) but now he says this may be yet another W10 "feature". Is there a fix for this? It would have to be easy, permanent and not potentially dangerous because the problem is not such a big deal for me.

Leren

[1to9only]

On one PC the @ and " characters are interchanged.

These 2 characters are swapped on US and GB keyboard layouts, so it may be a simple matter of configuring the keyboard layout country to match the physical keyboard!

[Leren]

I'm sure you are right, except that fixing it does not seem a to be a simple matter even though it ought to be. No matter what I try nothing works. I think I'll just live with this minor issue. Leren

[Mathimagics]

fixing it does not seem to be a simple matter even though it ought to be.

This is the "Windows Doctrine" in a nutshell …

[Leren]

Success ! Solved the keyboard problem.

Apparently W10 Settings screens vary a bit depending on what brand of PC you have. So I only had the problem on a HP PC. Go into Settings and under Time and Language, there is a sub-menu called "Region and Language". On the Acer PC's there are separate sub-menus for "Region" and for "Language". Anyway on the HP PC there is a sub-sub menu called "Advanced Keyboard Settings" (which does not exist in the Acer PC's). Under that sub-sub-menu all I had to do was change the Keyboard Input Method from "English (United States) - US" to "English (Australia) - US" and the @ "" swap problem is fixed !

Simple - well, everything is simple when you know the answer - the trick is to know the answer, then it's simple - ummm ... I think.

So, was this a W10 problem or a HP problem? A bit of both I think.

If the HP PC was being sold in Australia, why didn't the Keyboard language setting default to the correct one ? That makes it sound like a HP problem.

On the other hand, its generally true that W10 has to cope with so many PC and board manufacturers, that it is inherently complicated. This was evident with the dreaded W10 Black Screen of Death. It only affected a small number of people who had PC's with certain hardware (graphics accelerator boards or the like). The geniuses at the board factory try to get into the guts of the operating system, to make their boards operate faster, but when the operating system is updated things become unstuck. Who is at fault there ?

Anyway, problem fixed - until the next W10 update at least.

[Smythe Dakota]

I don't know, maybe yellow and purple polka-dot death?

Bill Smythe

[Mathimagics]

I think Bill is responding to Leren's earlier question (bottom of page 2):

Anybody know of any other coloured W10 Death screens ?

PS: I too have noticed Bill's reported MS Edge quirk (sometimes incomplete display of forum post text). It had me puzzled (!) too, but a refresh of the page usually fixes it, so I just ignore it now. It doesn't seem to happen too often (yet ).

PPS: Leren, what was that movie? Who said "I like griping!"?

[Leren]

The movie was Ridley Scott's masterpiece Alien. Veronica Cartwright's character Lambert is griping about the terrible weather on the way to the alien spaceship. When she was told to stop griping she says "I like griping ! " Definitely the best line in the whole movie. Bad things happened after that. So which is worse, the Alien or W10? I'm not so sure.

Leren

[Mathimagics]

Ok, thanks!

BTW: next time you're griping, try a little Olivia Newton John!

Let's get critical (critical)
I wanna get critical
Let Bill see your gripe list (your gripe list) …

[tarek]

It looks that “Paint” is going to stay

tarek

[Leren]

Time to start griping about W10 Updates again. Following the "massive feature updates" in May there have been at least three (3) further updates on each of my PC's, presumably to fix bugs or security problems from the "feature update".

Apart from having no idea what the new features were, at least two updates caused unauthorised restarts on my PC's. The last one just occurred in the last hour, so I hurriedly checked my other PC's and, yes, an update was pending on one other, so I had the opportunity to stop what I was doing and get this update out of the way. Anybody else having this sort of experience ?

Leren

[champagne]

Anybody else having this sort of experience ?Leren

Windows 10 updating is a nightmare.

Last month, one of my PC's had no more access to the update of the path
It came back three of four updates later.
Each update creates an unpredictable situation on the local network.
And as you, I had to suffer several updates on each PC in the last days.

For me, it t means that all the ongoing batches are cancelled, have to be restarted on the last checkpoint and that partial results have to be collected carefully. Lost of power, more risk to have an error handling partial files ...