How to get a desktop Windows PC out of airplane mode

I had a mouse slip and accidentally put my desktop PC into airplane mode.  Then my wireless mouse and wireless keyboard didn't work.  Rebooting did not help.

The answer is to connect a wired mouse and turn off airplane mode from settings.  I happened to have an old wired mouse in a drawer and this worked.

Windows Task Scheduler

The Windows 10 Task Scheduler can run programs on a periodic schedule.  I found this tutorial helpful:

Windows 10 Task Scheduler tutorial on WindowsCentral

New PC and troubles with PCMover

It's been five years and I got a new PC.  Bigger and faster.  Now I've got to transfer everything over from the old PC.  Alas I got burned again by PCMover, same as the last time.  I'm making this blog post so maybe I will avoid it in future.

The problem with PC Mover Pro is that you think it does more than it does.  I have the illusion that you plug both PCs in an Ethernet router, start PCMover on both and shazam.  But no.  It starts OK then it gives a vague message about network problems and stalls, so little or no progress is made.  (The same thing happened to me five years ago.) And it's up to me to debug what's wrong.  If it can't fix the problems itself, it ought to at least diagnose what is wrong and not leave me to guess.  I'm disabling services, turning off firewalls and anti-virus and still no work.  I give up.  It's easier to transfer the data files using Windows, and then re-install the programs.  No mysteries there, it just takes time.

Here's my plan:

Install on my new PC:

Adobe Flash Player (alas)
Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements
Adobe Reader
Chess Hero
EXIF file date changer
Family Historian
Chrome, Firefox and Opera  web browsers
HP Printer Assistant
iTunes
Java
MS Office Pro
MS Visual Studio
MUP music authoring program
Net Uptime Monitor
PUTTY
Seagate Dashboard
Turbotax
WD SmartWare and URL
WinSCP FTP program

Uninstall on my new PC:

McAfee antivirus
Sample version of Office

GE Security Smart ConnectionCenter

So we got one of these when we added on to the house in 2006.  It centralizes connections for cable TV, telephone and internet.  We've had more people staying with us than usual and the WiFi has been so slow.  It finally dawned on me that this GE box was a bottleneck.  It has an 8-port Ethernet switch but the speed is only 10/100 mbps.  I got a NetGear gigabit 8-port switch for $39 and used that in place of the built-in slow one.  The GE box had enough room for it and a spare electrical outlet.  Very easy fix and now it's all fast and stuff.

AT&T Device Unlock Portal

If you have an AT&T cell phone and it's paid for, you can unlock it (for free) at the AT&T Device Unlock Portal.  The advantage of unlocking your cell phone is this:  if you travel abroad, you can buy a prepaid SIM card in the country you travel to, and swap it for your usual AT&T SIM card.  This will give you cheap voice and data access in the foreign country, compared to AT&T's foreign roving plans.  When you return to the US, you can switch the SIM card back.

Microsoft Sculpt Mice

My new setup.  I've got a 34" ultrawide LG monitor (5120x2160), Mackie 4" speakers and the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop and Mouse.  I also got the Sculpt Comfort Mouse and Sculpt Mobile Mouse.

All three mice work at once, but I only use one at a time.  They each have an on/off switch on the bottom.  The Comfort Mouse is the only one that is pure Bluetooth. The others communicate via a USB dongle. The dongles each store inside their mouse when not in use, which is a good idea else they'd get lost. The Ergonomic Mouse is big - almost as big as Doug Engelbart's original three-button wheel mouse from the 1970s.  The Mobile Mouse seems the most accurate for close work.  The wheel on all three has the nice feature that it can scroll sideways, as well as up and down. All but the Mobile Mouse have extra buttons that you can program.

The Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard takes some getting used to.  I've been using a split keyboard but this one tilts up on the side closest to me.

My new LG 34WK95U-W ultrawide 5K monitor

It seems like a long time from when this 5120x2160 monitor was announced until it became widely available.  At any rate, I finally got a LG 34WK95U-W and it's a beauty.

Before hooking it up, I needed to get a better graphics card.  I'm not a gamer so I don't need one of those high-priced power-hungry cards, but my old NVidia GeForce GTX 745 was insufficient.  I upgraded to a 1050 Ti with 4GB of memory.  It's priced reasonably, it's not too big for my motherboard (a 2015 HP) and it works with motherboard power.  I connected with DisplayPort 1.4.  The cable for this came with the monitor.

Installing the monitor was made harder by the skimpy documentation.  You'd think they would do better.  But I did figure it out.  The screen is beautiful and I love all that real estate.  I can have two or even three documents up at once.

ReSound Hearing Aids and Windows 10

I have ReSound hearing aids that I got from Costco.  They work fine and connect to my iPhone.  As near as I can determine, they use a non-standard version of Bluetooth to communicate.  I have tried to connect them to my Windows 10 computer, but no luck.  I can pair them via Bluetooth but they never show up as a sound device.  A standard sound device like Bluetooth headphones would show up automatically.  You can use these hearing aids fine with iOS and Android devices, but I believe they do not work with Windows devices, and likely not with Linux or Mac either.

HearingTrack.com summary

Netgear 8-port router FVS318G troubles - fixed!

We've been having troubles with our home network going down randomly.  It was getting worse and worse.  At first, I blamed Comcast, and there was indeed a problem there, but a technician came out and fixed that.  I finally figured out that the culprit must be our Netgear 8-port firewall router.  I think it has a relay in it and those eventually fail. (It would be nice if they supplied a circuit diagram, but that was the old days.)  This router was in use for years, not sure how many.  So I got a new FVS318Gv2 and installed it.  Bingo, no network problems.

What I Installed (and uninstalled) On My New PC

Installed:

Adobe Flash Player (alas)
Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 (from Costco)
Adobe Reader
Chess Hero
Eudora 6.2 (old mail program for my top 70 list)
EXIF file date changer
Firefox web browser
Houdini chess program
HP all-in-one software
iTunes
Java
MS HealthVault
MS Office Pro 2013
MS Visual Studio 2012
MUP music authoring program
NVIDIA graphics drivers
WD SmartWare backup
WinSCP FTP program

Uninstalled:

Bing Bar
Cyberlink
Norton

Paint Desktop Version

I got a new HP computer.  It's nice and fast.  I'm doing my usual customizing.

Starting with PaintDesktopVersion.  This shows the Windows version and build number that you're running in text in the lower right of the desktop background.

To activate (so I will remember in future): Windows key + R and run regedit.  Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.  Find the DWORD value PaintDesktopVersion (or create it if necessary) and set the value to 1.  Reboot.

Windows 8.1 very slow after update

Windows insisted on updating my Windows 8.1 installation.  It said save your stuff, we're rebooting in 14 minutes!  Now that's annoying, but even worse, after the reboot, it ran slow as molasses in winter.

I finally figured out what was wrong.  I ran Task Manager and clicked on the Performance tab.  Down at the bottom is a button/link for the Resource Manager.  I clicked that and it showed my C: disk, not full, but being used 100% of the time.  Sure enough, the disk light was on almost continuously.  Something funky with the C: disk!

After googling about this, I ran (in an admin level command line) chkdsk /r/f c: and then had to reboot for it to take effect.  This command checks and repairs the hard disk.  They tend to fail after about 5 years.  Anyway, this ran for HOURS stuck at 12% but finally completed and the problem was fixed!

So yay for chkdsk.

Problems with WD SmartWare install: UPDF_UNLK1.html

I had problems updating my Western Digital backup software, WD SmartWare.  It stopped in the middle of the install saying it couldn't copy the file UPDF_UNLK1.html and this file was like a tar baby - you touch it and Windows Exlorer hangs and I had to reboot.

I finally figured out a fix: rename the WD SmartWare folder to WD StupidWare.  After that, the install worked fine and even deleted the WD StupidWare folder, too.

More Windows 8.1

There were a couple of annoying things that came up in Windows 8.1.  I had to switch from my old "local" login to my xbox/hotmail Microsoft account, which I didn't want to do.  I found out later that I could have avoided this by disconnecting the Internet during the Windows 8.1 install -- word to the wise.

Also, I had to re-do the registry hack to add the Copy to Folder and Move to Folder options when right-clicking a file.  I had this before, but it got zapped during the "upgrade" to Windows 8.1.

So now I've had Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 for awhile.  It seems to me no better, and in some respects worse, than Windows 7.  Let's hope that in the post-Ballmer era, a new direction is found for Windows.

Extending our WiFi network

We have a fairly big house, and one corner of it was not getting WiFi from our Apple Airport Time Capsule.  I bought an Airport Extreme to extend it.  I was expecting a nightmare of configuration debugging to follow. I figured I would probably have to set it up as a separate Wifi.  But not so!  I hooked up the Airport extreme and went back to Shelly's iMac.  There was a dialog box asking me if I wanted to extend our existing network.  I said Yes and that was it!  The network was extended seamlessly to the far corner of the house.  Hats off to Apple for this one.

Windows 8.1

I downloaded Windows 8.1 from Microsoft.com.  Install over Windows 8 went smoothly.  I then needed to redo three customizations that I had on Windows 8.  I used regedit to set PaintDesktopVersion to 1 so that you see the exact Windows version in the lower right corner.  Then I re-installed 8GadgetPack and got my gadgets back.  Then I installed the latest version of StartIsBack to get the start button back.  Windows 8.1 doesn't really restore it - just a button that goes to the Metro interface.  StartIsBack setup also nicely sets Windows to boot to the desktop.  So now all is well.  Seems pretty much the same as Windows 8.

Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2012

After installing Windows 8, I also installed Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2012.  So far I have noticed only one improvement over previous versions: in Word you can now edit a PDF file, which is nice.  Other than that, it seems pretty much as in previous versions.  No doubt there are bug fixes and new features but they don't jump out at a person, I'll tell you that.  I think they have also reached maturity, so one wonders, what's next for Microsoft?

Moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8

I wouldn't call it an upgrade, nor a downgrade either - maybe a "sidegrade"?  Anyway, I installed Windows 8 Pro on my 2010 Gateway desktop machine.  The installation process went smoothly.  Microsoft's migration procedure is well done.  I've used Windows 8 for two weeks now, and here are my thoughts on it:

Pro:

1. I have two monitors and Windows 8 allows different desktop backgrounds on them, unlike Windows 7.  And it will even auto change them alternatively - nice.
2. One really annoying bit about Windows 7 is fixed: when copying files to a server, Windows 7 plopped the progress dialog box on top of the do-you-want-to-overwrite dialog box, so you had to move the progress box to another place in order to click on the overwrite choice.  Doesn't happen in Windows 8 - yay!
3. Windows 8 has a nice selection of free games.  I do miss Wes Cherry's original Klondike, though.

Con:

1. The Metro interface is lame, at least on a large screen desktop computer with a mouse, like mine.  And you need to use it, because the start menu is removed.  But there is a fix: StartIsBack is a $3 (for two licenses) app that duplicates the Windows 7 start menu faithfully.  Well worth the three bucks.
2. Desktop gadgets are gone.  I didn't like them for awhile but changed my mind. There's a fix: download 8gadgetpack for free.
3. Can't play DVDs.  I purchased Media Center from Microsoft for $10 to add this feature.  Save your money. It's a disappointment.  Media Center is hard to work with a mouse - seems meant for xBox or a touchscreen.  And it has few features. Then I downloaded the free open-source VLC Media Player - much better, works great.

P.S.  Two more things: PRO the photo viewer can now rotate iPhone pictures.  CON my Synology Data Replicator backup program stopped working right.

Hi-Res Monitor

I got a new high resolution monitor.  It's 2560x1440 pixels IPS 27" which is just like the 27" iMac except cheaper.  They sell these on eBay direct from South Korea. Mine's a Crossover monitor and the seller was accessorieswhole.  It works very well and I'm pleased with the beautiful view.  You do have to be careful that your graphics card can support the monitor.  The sellers have little tables about this, as I'm sure you'll see if you look on eBay.  Under $500 including express shipping. 

Postscript:  I've since learned that you can get even higher res 2560x1600.  And also that it's important to get one with a stand that tilts and swivels, sometimes noted with a -P suffix.
 

Catalyst Control Center not opening

I had a problem with my graphics card.  My computer hung and I rebooted and the screen went into VGA mode.  I tried bringing up Catalyst Control Center for my ATI card, but it refused to start - no GPU found!  So I thought something's gone wrong with the card, and went to Fry's to get a new one.

Fry's didn't have any of the graphics cards I wanted - they had a couple of really high-end $500 cards, slightly discounted because they had been returned, and then a whole bunch of $50 graphics cards, not as nice as the one I had.  I finally got a cheap nVidia one.  I had a similar problem a few months ago when I went to Fry's to get a new monitor.  I wanted a high-res one.  They had exactly one - 1920 x 1200 ASUS so that's what I bought.  Used to seem like Fry's had everything, but not so much these days.  On the other hand, I got a couple of 8gig USB flash memory cards there for $6 each, a bargain.

I removed the ATI drivers, removed the ATI card and installed the nVidia card and its drivers.  Same problem!  Booted up into VGA mode, though it could handle 1920 x 1200, but graphics GPU not found.

After going down many false paths, I finally figured out the problem:  I needed to install all the latest Windows updates.  Not at all sure what's going on here, but I'm happy that it's working again.  Now the next mystery: the Windows Experience Index (right click on My Computer and choose properties to see this) is lower for the new card.  I would go back to my old card, but the computer feels faster with the new one!  Again, a head scratcher but hey it's working again and I have more important things to worry about.