Recent content by EdTittel

Check the reliability monitor (type "reli" into the search box and it should come right up). You should see errors on the days when the BSODs occurred, and they may shed some light on the device or devices that are causing the error to occur. This will help you zero in on potential fixes. HTH...

Another sure clue that electrical problems exist is temperature: if the brick is cool, or very hot, it's probably not working properly. If it's room temp (or feels cool) that usually means it's not getting any juice. If it's very warm or hot to the touch, that is often a sign of electrical...

Check out this article (I'm still looking for another that I translated fro Tom's Hardware back in 2005): Battery University "How to Prolong Lithium-Based Batteries" (How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries - Battery University). Here's the German version of the article I translated: Episode 1...

Yes, I hit this snag as well and even launched a support ticket on the problem. It affected 4 of my machines, and forced me to identify the process name (starts with vstor) which I killed ("end task" in Task Manager) to regain control of my machine. A couple of reboots later and the problem...

With Windows 10 (and 8.*) for that matter, there will no doubt be sources for .iso files that you can use to build a bootable USB Flash Drive (UFD) to install or repair. You probably won't need optical media of any kind. --Ed--

I've been struggling for two months to fix a situation where one or more USB 3 ports on my PC would fail, usually --but not always -- under heavy I/O loads. Read about the problem and my ultimate fix at Unraveling a USB Mystery | Ed Tittel. Sometimes, you just have to replace the wonky hardware...

If you want to extract the drivers from the file you referenced (it should show up as intel_usb_3.0.2.54(www.station-drivers.com).exe in your download directory, or wherever you put it), you can use 7-Zip to open the file as an archive. Inside that archive in the Drivers\Win7\x64 (or x86) folder...

Look around on the French website Station-Drivers - NEWS. I don't know how he/they does/do it: but this is always a good place to look for latest bleeding edge drivers. Poke around at Intel for the Intel USB 3.0 drivers of most recent creation. HTH, --Ed--

Note to all: anybody who's been having the Hyper-V + Wi-Fi problem (SP3 drops off the net after sleep, required disconnect/reconnect to restore working Wi-Fi) will find this problem solved with this firmware update. Hooray! --Ed--

In addition to potential RAID issues there is also a problem with Acronis and UEFI when you've got a TPM chip installed and are using Windows 8 (any version) Secure Boot. There's a hardware ID that is written to NVRAM on the motherboard that is different for every physical drive. When you try to...

Just updated my production desktop to the latest 331.58 Nvidia drivers and "Presto!" blurry text issues on this rig are a thing of the past. Could be awhile before the driver makers catch up across the board, but this seems to offer some hope of repair as well. Just checked Firefox, Chrome...

Dear Fafhrd: Thanks for the clarification. AFAIK, this doesn't migrate apps, though I think you can do some fiddling to move settings and preferences from Windows.old to the new runtime environment. I agree that this kind of upgrade is seldom worth doing, and like you, generally go for a clean...

If you get to know the Disk Management management console (diskmgmt.msc) in Windows 7 or 8, you'll find that unassigned partitions always appear when new unformatted drives are added to your system. And of course, when messing about with partitions, or working with drives of unknown provenance...

Great tutorial, thanks very much. First really good argument for USB 3 I've come across, aside from the usual impulse to go "Faster, FASTER!" in today's world. I'm thinking long and hard about adding USB 3 to my Lenovo notebooks (X220 Tablet and T520) via the regular (X220 Tablet) and half-size...

I've had pretty good luck with Norton Internet Security on a number -- somewhere between a half and a full dozen -- of Windows 8 installations on tablet, notebook, and desktop PCs. NIS has lost its bloat since 2009, and is actually both relatively modest in resource consumption and impact these...