Category: Computers

Enable Administrator Login in Windows 11

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 :

  1. 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
  2. Select “Advanced Options” on the “Troubleshoot” screen
  3. Select “Command Prompt”. This will open a command prompt window.
  4. In the Command Prompt window, type the following command :
    net user Administrator /active:yes
  5. 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>
  6. Close the Command Prompt window
  7. Restart the computer
  8. Login with the Administrator account with the password you just set

Clone your Windows Drive to a Larger Drive

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.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/clone-your-ssd-or-hard-drive

Restore the Old “Right-click” Context Menus in Windows 11

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.

  1. Hit Windows Key + X
  2. Select “Terminal”
  3. In the terminal window, copy and paste :
    reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
  4. Hit Enter
  5. 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.

2022 Asus Zephyrus G15 Keyboard Issue Resolved? (Nope.)

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.

Linking a Local Folder with Microsoft’s One Drive

You may want to sync a folder on your computer with OneDrive that isn’t one of the Windows standard C: drive folders like “Documents”, “Pictures” etc. If that’s the case, here’s the command line for you to use to link any folder with OneDrive.

mklink /j “<path to configured OneDrive location>” “<path to directory you want synced>“

So, if I had a folder called “photos” on the D: drive that I wanted uploaded and synced with my OneDrive, and my OneDrive was configured to exist at c:\onedrive (the default is C:\users\<username>\onedrive) I’d do the following command in a Command Prompt window:

mklink /j “c:\onedrive” “d:\photos”

You’ll see the “photos” folder appear in your OneDrive, and the OneDrive app should start syncing the files from your local storage to the remote cloud-based storage.

Saitek X52 Pro Not Being Detected by Driver Installation Program (Windows 8 and 10)

My X-52 has been a real pain in the butt in Windows 10. It’s hit or miss if after a reboot the joystick is going to be detected by Windows. Attempting to re-run the driver installer doesn’t help. I found the following tip at the Windows Support site and seems to do the trick.

I finally found a Solution, when I try to load the driver and it gets to the point that it asked me to plug in the device I went to the device manager and when it asked me to install the driver I clicked “browse my computer” then”let me pick from a list” from there it gave me 3 choices, 2 of them were X52 Controllers, the 3rd was a generic USB device, I selected the Generic Device and then the Saitek Driver installer was able to finish its installation

Marketing is Too High a Priority at Apple Today

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-apple-users-really-hate-apple-software-20160208-column.html?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

Conjectures about why Apple can’t get its software act together abound. The most common is that the company has become so trapped in its cycle of annual hardware upgrades — a new iPhone had better appear every September, or else — that it’s simply incapable of keeping its software maintained. Programmer Marco Arment, in a widely-read comment last year, speculated that “the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. … They’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.”

Using 3D Touch on Apple 6s

http://www.macrumors.com/how-to/iphone-6s-3d-touch/

Apple’s iPhone 6s and 6s Plus has been selling strongly since its launch last month, thanks in part to a number of new features including 3D Touch. With it, users can access Quick Actions from the home screen and Peek and Pop from within a variety of stock and third-party apps.

 

  • Quick Action
  • Peek and Pop
  • Turn your Keyboard into a Trackpad
  • Activating Live Photos
  • Multitasking
  • Pressure-sensitive drawing