Small windows problems thread

Software & Operating Systems Windows
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284

This may or may not be small, but how I got there is obvious.
UPDATE: So I ended up doing a plethora of tests, none with any success. Lastly I borrowed a buddy’s GPU and that GPU worked just fine. So that told me that my GPU died…but, as a complete last resort, I decided to take my GPU apart, clean it, and re-apply some thermal paste. It was pretty dusty, more than I’d like to admit. I’m guessing that all that dust must have caused a short somewhere.
Anyway, after a good clean, I tried it again, and no BIOS screen…then out of nowhere, it booted into Windows. I ran Time Spy and a quick stress test for 10 minutes and the temperatures were under 55C (I have a water cooling bracket and a water cooler on it) and I saw no artifacts. So everything seems fine now.

The only draw back is that for some reason I can’t get into the BIOS because the splash screen doesn’t come up, and neither does the Windows logo when loading the OS. It just gets to the login screen after a few seconds.

Consider this issue solved.

So I decided to do a clean re-install of my Nvidia drivers. I usually go with DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller), to do that, you usually have to be in safe mode. So I went to the msconfig, and set it to boot into safe mode…after the reboot, I get no display whatsoever. I tried getting into the BIOS, no dice, I tried the Windows boot menu, nothing either. I tried draining the power from the board, nothing, I tried different cables and displays, nothing. I even tried reseating the RAM, and nothing. I’m going to try reseating the GPU next, but if anyone has any suggestions, I’d greatly appreciate them.

285

I always turn my monitors off to save power when I leave the room, and until now it was never an issue. However, since getting new monitors that use DisplayPort instead of HDMI and DVI, any time I turn them off and back on, all my windows get thrown onto my primary monitor, and often have their dimensions changed as well. I’ve updated my drivers and messed with some registry settings after web searches, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Best I can do is a workaround with DisplayFusion that saves window positions when I lock it and restores them when I unlock it, but that’s not ideal. Any ideas?

GPU is a Radeon RX 470, with Radeon Software 21.10.4.

286

This’ll be because the card doesn’t just… come up like it should, likely, uefi is forcing it to boot.

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287

Fresh Windows 10 Pro install on a brand new NVME drive. [Specds: 5800X, 32GB DDR4 3200, Samung 980 Pro NVME drive, GTX 1080)

I’ve ran Chris Titus’ “Essential Tweaks” in his debloat tool, set time to UTC, and installed my apps.

When I restart or shutdown the system from within Windows it is extremely slow to launch the startup apps, and even getting logged in and land on the desktop for that matter. We’re looking at 10-15 seconds from moment of hitting enter on the login screen until I land on the desktop. And 5 minutes before any thing appears on the taskbar other than the Windows button, Task View button, clock, and notification icon. After 5 minutes my pinned apps show up, along with the networking icon, audio icon, and tray apps. Additionally the startup apps are launching until then as well - for example, after the taskbar finally loads in Discord pops up a few seconds later.

If I just hold the power button down until the system shuts down, and then boot back into Windows it does not do this. It’s roughly a second from Login to land on the desktop, and the apps start showing up right away.

I did run the SFC tool which said it found some corrupt files and successfully repaired them. However, whatever it found wasn’t the cause of this issue as it persists.

Any ideas?

-Quick edit, followed by me rewriting the entire post shortly-
Very occasionally a reboot will let me login instantly and start loading startup apps right away.
Also noticed that on these slow loads, if I click the Window icon the screen will flicker and my pinned apps show up and the startup apps launch quicker. If I don’t click on these slow loads, it will still take 4.5 - 5 minutes before the pinned apps appear and startup apps start.

I have also tried turning off Windows ‘Fast Startup’ in the control panel even though I’ve read that shouldn’t affect restarts, only shutdowns… and that is the case. It’s made no difference.

288

sounds like your tweaks have turned off a service the system is relying on at boot.

check event viewer control panel/admin tools/events
and look for apps that are timing out at boot time.
it sounds like an app is failing to load, timing out, and the next app inline does the same. end result a 5 min boot time.

so i would assume the tweaker you ran disabled a service worker they probably depend on.
load the tweaker back up and roll back your changes and see if that fixes it. (PSA! not all tweaks are good tweaks :wink: )

if you still cant figure out what caused it, try recovery from a restore point. there should have been one created before you started tweaking the system.

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289

Yeah, I had tried reverting the ‘Essential Tweaks’ → he has a button in the tool to reverse what it does, but that didn’t do anything. Also, there was a restore point, but it was from yesterday evening which would have been too late into this process to matter, but I tried restoring to that, and still have the same thing happening.

After doing a hard reboot I did manage to brick the install, as now I just get a blue screen that Windows 10 was unable to repair itself. So, I’m now booted into my old Windows 10 install on the other NVME drive. :slight_smile:

It looks I’ll be seeing if a clean Windows 10 install fixes the problem or not! Not exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my Sunday evening lol ---- reinstalling all my apps again,etc.

290

Interestingly after formatting the NVME drive, doing another fresh install of Windows 10 Pro [used Windows Media Creation Tool to create the installation media], the problem is there from the very beginning.

*Landed on desktop after the installation completed
*Restarted the PC from start menu
*Landed on Login screen
*Logged in and waited ~15 seconds before landing on desktop
*Spinning icon when hovering over Start button
*Clicking start button cause the screen to ‘flash’ and then the pinned app show up and the rest of the taskbar items that weren’t already there

291

unplug all other drives apart from the nvme and reboot.

did your boot time return to normal after?.

if it did then its likely something on another drive causing a conflict.
if not then its gonna be boot logging and event viewer info that will help most.

292

No, it wasn’t the second drive. When I reformatted I unplugged it before hand so the entire reformat and reinstall process only had the one drive connected.

293

hmm its odd that you bricked the install with a hard reboot.
have you checked the drives integrity?
(your eufi may have an nvme drive test. give it a go if available)

also check your motherboard specs and see if one or more sata ports are shared with the m.2 nvme.
if you have an m.2 nvme attached you may not be able to use 1 of the stata ports. if this is applicable there should be a note in the manual.
so try moving the sata ssd? to another port if you have one available.

294

I would dig into the Event Viewer, but I wouldn’t know exactly where or what I’m looking for. Even on systems that I don’t notice issues with I see tons of warnings and handful of errors in there the few times I’ve been looking around in the even viewer.

I’ll try running a check on the drive later this evening. It’s a brand new 980 Pro, but I could have got a bad one I suppose.

This system just has the nvme drive, nothing connected to any of the sata ports. After the fact I have put the 2nd nvme drive back in so I could copy files off it.

Tis an interesting one! Almost made me try doing a clean install of Windows 11… almost.

295

Interestingly enough after clearing all the logs, rebooting, and logging in again it landed on desktop with no delay, and everything was fine. There were 2 errors in the Applications section after this.

One was just an error related to PowerLauncher.exe which I’m thinking may or may not be Power Toys.
The other was…

SCEP Certificate enrollment initialization for WORKGROUP\DESKTOP-9OHK22C$ via https://AMD-KeyId-578c545f796951421221a4a578acdb5f682f89c8.microsoftaik.azure.net/templates/Aik/scep failed:

GetCACaps
GetCACaps: Not Found
{"Message":"The authority \"amd-keyid-578c545f796951421221a4a578acdb5f682f89c8.microsoftaik.azure.net\" does not exist."}

But in this case, I didn’t experience the issue. So, I cleared the logs again and rebooted. This time I did have the issue, and those same 2 errors were present plus an additional 2 → one more in Application and one in System.

The one in the Application section was related to explorer.exe

The program explorer.exe version 10.0.19041.1266 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.
 Process ID: 1310
 Start Time: 01d7d51eb6f2b009
 Termination Time: 11
 Application Path: C:\Windows\explorer.exe
 Report Id: e8718e96-5c0f-4e0c-a708-d6246e5bc0b2
 Faulting package full name: 
 Faulting package-relative application ID: 
 Hang type: Unknown

^ This one I believe is what’s thrown when I click the start button and the screen flashes and then loads. I tested this by clearing and rebooting again and waiting until the time on my phone changed so I could compare time of this happening in the log with the time on my phone (the clock on the taskbar is frozen during this time before I click the start button and cause the screen flash)… and the times match up.

The second new error in the System section was :
The server {FD06603A-2BDF-4BB1-B7DF-5DC68F353601} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

-edit-
The first entry in the log isn’t an error, but is saying something was unavailable to handle an event… here they are in order of what happens first…
The winlogon notification subscriber <WSearch> was unavailable to handle a notification event.

The winlogon notification subscriber <SessionEnv> was unavailable to handle a notification event.

The User Profile Service has stopped.

The EventSystem sub system is suppressing duplicate event log entries for a duration of 86400 seconds. The suppression timeout can be controlled by a REG_DWORD value named SuppressDuplicateDuration under the following registry key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\EventLog.

The winlogon notification subscriber <SessionEnv> was unavailable to handle a critical notification event.

I just attached them here if curious. I hope there’s nothing in there that I shouldn’t be sharing. :slight_smile:
Application-Events.txt (23.2 KB)
System-Events.txt (19.3 KB)

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296

I tried going into msconfig and doing a diagnostic boot as well as safe boot and the slowness was still there.

Decided to uninstall PowerToys and rebooted again… the login slowness was still there, but now when I landed in Windows clicking the start menu didn’t cause the screen to flash and everything to load in normal. It did nothing at all. I was limited to ctrl + alt + del and opening the Task Manager. From here I was able to go and run explorer.exe which did load the explorer. I was able to navigate around the file system, but still nothing happening in the task bar, and I didn’t appear to be connected to the internet because I did navigate to and launch Brave.

Then several minutes later the taskbar loaded in normally and things were fine again.

-edit-
I did notice there were some driver updates in the optional windows update section… Installed those and rebooted → instant login. Went to restart again and it had more updates so I did ‘update & restart’… → instant login again. Wow. Maybe that was it… so I reboot a 3rd time. Nope that wasn’t it. Slow login / explorer.exe crash again. :joy: :sob:

I feel like Linus doing the Linux Challenge… except this is Windows. :expressionless:

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297

Windows problems: Format and reinstall

298

Unfortunately, I have already :slight_smile: Started after a new build with fresh install on new drive. And continues after another format and fresh install.

299

you downloaded a fresh image for each install?
try a different usb drive with a fresh iso burnt with rufus.

300

It was the same USB drive with the same install as created by MS’s Media Creation Tool.

:’( I will try a different one this weekend. Round three of copying over all my data again! :slight_smile:

Good thing I haven’t formatted my other drive yet - at least copying from NVME to NVME goes pretty quick.

Unrelated to the performance, but related to SCEP Cert error in the Event Viewer… looks like this might be related to Windows && TPM based on some info here (although I think this link was related to issues in Windows 11, not 10):

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301

About 2 weeks out, I figured I’d give an update…

The past few reboots have worked perfectly: logging in immediately lands me on the desktop with no delay. I didn’t reinstall Windows yet, but there was a Windows update since I was initially having this problem which may have been part of the ‘fix’. Not sure.

If this continues to work correctly over the course of the next few times I have to reboot I’m going to call it good and start prepping my 2nd drive for Arch - otherwise I’ll be using it as data backup while I do another Windows reinstall. :slight_smile:

302

Hello everyone.

I have a Dell XPS 15 9570 and I can’t find a way to force Windows 11 Pro to use the dGPU. In fact, in the NVIDIA control panel I already have everything selected for it to use it. However, there is no way. Whenever I hit “Apply” it just resets. I am attaching a picture.

Any other way to get it to use the dGPU, am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for the help.

nvcplui_6UahlpWFUP
nvcplui_6UahlpWFUP811×637 25.2 KB

303

You’re on the configuration for PhysX, which is a physics simulation engine for games.
And as pointed to by the arrow, it’s already running on the dGPU, the monitor is just connected to the iGPU because that’s just how laptops work.

When you run a game it will probably already run on the dGPU anyway because that’s how the driver is set up by default.

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