Did you accidentally lock your administrator login by attempting the wrong password too many times? Do you need to re-enable the account, and reset the password? Try the following :
Hold SHIFT and click the power icon on the lock screen. Continue holding SHIFT and click on “Restart”. This will boot the machine into Troubleshooting mode
Select “Advanced Options” on the “Troubleshoot” screen
Select “Command Prompt”. This will open a command prompt window.
In the Command Prompt window, type the following command : net user Administrator /active:yes
Now that the Administrator account has been re-enabled, you can set a new password by typing this command : net user Administrator <type your password here>
Close the Command Prompt window
Restart the computer
Login with the Administrator account with the password you just set
When searching Google for reviews of the Fender Mike McCready Stratocaster, a made in Mexico replica of Mike’s beloved 60’s Strat, you’ll mostly find positive things being said. Yes, the fretwork is great. The rounded fret board edges are super comfortable. The electronics quality is impressive. If you like relic’ed guitars, then yes – it looks cool. BUT at a cost of $1899 (I bought mine B-stock for slightly less) there are some things about the guitar that has prompted me to return it.
I’m not going to bury the lead here, so I’ll start with the biggest issue, the back of the neck. The McCready model is supposed to have a “worn in” neck back where the gloss of the nitro finish has been worn off. If you look at the photos provided by the Fender website, you can see what I mean :
First off, one of the reasons I bought this guitar was because I was hankering for a 60s Strat but I’m not a fan of gloss necks. This sixties-esque model would have solved that dilemma for me but for whatever reason, the one I received wasn’t very “broken in”. Yes the gloss has been dulled, but not to the extent as shown in the marketing photos. The neck is STICKY. So much so, that sliding up and down the neck is a chore. I don’t think this is intended by design, but an indication of Fender’s recent quality control issues. My guess is that this one made it out of the factory with the “worn in” neck barely worn. (Perhaps my expectations are unrealistic here, but I’ve owned other MiM relic’ed guitars with the neck back worn, and in those cases it was almost a bare wood feel.) For this reason alone, I was highly considering a return.
Secondly, after playing the guitar for a good while, I found the neck pickup especially dark. So much so, I had to EQ my amp differently from all my other Strats. It was dark enough that at first I thought the neck tone knob was turned down. It wasn’t. And even with amp EQ changes, I still wasn’t happy with the neck pickup sounds.
Third, the action upon receipt was HIGH. I’m not one of those guys who needs his action super low to enjoy playing. Many of my guitars have what I’d call “medium” action, but this guitar’s setup exceeded even my tolerance. (Granted this could be an issue with the shop I bought it from, and their setup – not the fault of Fender) I adjusted the action to meet my needs and it was much better, but when paying as much as you do for one of these guitars you shouldn’t have to make such an adjustment.
Finally, we come to the case. It’s cool that it comes in it’s own special case. I dig the brown tweed, and the yellow interior. However, the case is not the highest quality. It’s flimsy. It flexes easily. Setting it down any kind of non-level surface will prevent the locks from lining up. The stitching of the interior fabric is not the result of someone being shall we say, detail oriented. There are sloppy folds, and wads of fabric in the corners. Being used to my G&L cases, this one was disappointing.
In the end, I’ve decided to send the guitar back. This is an expensive Mexican model (if not the most expensive) and for that price point it should really be an awesome experience to own one. For me it wasn’t. At that price point you could buy impeccable Indonesian models from other manufactures with more features and better quality control. In fact, I might just forgo my desire for a 60s-like Strat and go with one of those manufacturers. Or better yet, another G&L might be in my future.
New effects will be coming to Tone X in November. While the previous release added a tuner, this future release will include 2 delays, chorus, spring reverb, tremolo, phaser, flanger and rotary.
I recently wanted to put a larger SSD in my laptop. Unforunately, it can only have one drive. So, if I didn’t want to have to reinstall Windows and everything else on a new drive, I would need to move all the data off the old drive onto the new. This can be done with a Debian-based live distro called “Clonezilla” that will clone your existing drive to a new drive. Tom’s Hardware did an excellent write up at the link below.
Pete Thorn posted a new video telling the story of why Eddie Van Halen moved from Kramer to Ernie Ball Music Man, and how the Air Norton and Tone Zone pickups came to be.
If you’re like me and don’t dig the new cartoony icons for cut, copy, and paste in Windows 11 when you right click on things; you can use this terminal command to bring back the old context menus.
Hit Windows Key + X
Select “Terminal”
In the terminal window, copy and paste : reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
Hit Enter
Reboot your machine.
After you reboot, the right-click context menu should be displayed in the old way, with “Copy”, “Cut”, “Paste”, and “Delete” being words, and not icons.
My Zephyrus laptop has been having keyboard issues for quite some time. The “E” key has been intermittent at best and it doesn’t appear to be a hardware issue, but a software one.
The “E” key won’t type by itself at all, it will only register if it’s immediately follows another keystroke. So, for example, if you just type “e” nothing happens, but if you type “Pre” and hit “r” and “e” fast enough, you get “Pre”. (Sometimes it’ll do “Per” though, so it’ll even register the order wrong.) This appears to be related to ghost key detection, or sticky keys (even though I have it disabled in Windows 11) or rollover key detection. What’s weird and frustrating about this situation is that it doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes, the “e” won’t work at all.
The other oddity is that if I do a clean install of Windows 11, the keyboard works perfectly fine… for a while. Sometimes it’s a day, sometimes it’s a couple hours before it starts acting up again. This led me to believe it must be a software, or more specifically, a driver issue. Either Windows 11 is installing an update that breaks the keyboard driver, or the MyAsus utility is installing something that’s broken.
To test this, I reinstalled Windows 11, and I disabled Windows 11’s ability to include manufacturer updates. Like always the keyboard worked fine for a couple of hours, and then the “E” key started acting up again. So it’s not Windows Update that’s the issue. It MAY be MyAsus installing something that Windows 11 doesn’t like.
At this point I gave up, and decided to go with the nuclear option, and installed PopOS (Linux) on the laptop. Guess what? The keyboard is working fine now without issue. So, it’s definitely a software problem, not a hardware problem, and I guess I’ll just have to keep Linux on the machine from now on. (The laptop isn’t under warranty and I’m not paying $90 to Asus to have them take it in for repair because they wrote a crappy driver.)
Strike that. The keyboard had to be replaced at a local repair shop, with mixed results. No more Asus laptops in my future.
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