My PC Is Suffering From Insomnia…

Quite a while back, my Windows 10 PC installed malware updates mandated by Microsoft, and it subsequently failed to resume from S3 sleep, for reasons which I did not have the time to investigate. I skirted the issue by disabling S3 sleep in BIOS, leaving only S1 sleep states available, which still worked…

About a week or two back, I started realising that my computer would not go to sleep at all

I needed to find the root cause and cure its insomnia; something was preventing Windows from going to sleep…

Continue reading

Microsoft: All You Beta Testers Belong To Us… (or “The Case of The Useless Drive”)…

With the shift to a more “app-like”, “force an update down your throat whether you like it or not” attitude from Microsoft, they have also seemingly shifted their testing stance and shafting their customers, taking from Xiaomi’s playbook: You are now our beta tester.

You Have a New (largely useless) Drive!

One of my family members have been complaining that an “E” drive suddenly appeared out of the blue. Navigating to it using Windows Explorer or via the command prompt shows it as empty, but, Windows Explorer shows the drive as “nearly full” (red bar), and Windows 10 continuously complains that the “E” drive is “full”…

Nothing in the Disk Management Microsoft Management Console “applet” could allow me to remove the drive letter, showing the partition type as an “OEM Parititon” – one of two that Microsoft littered on the already-small SSD like so many rabbit droppings (two other partitions are by the laptop manufacturer).

Continue reading

Windows Refusing to “Open With” Using Notepad++ Portable…

So, fed-up with an outdated, “sanctified” version of Notepad++ “published” by the IT team at my workplace on my work laptop, I uninstalled the published version, grabbed a copy of the portable version (choose the appropriate .zip or .7z package) and proceeded to live happily ever after…

Well… Not quite… Whenever I attempted to use Windows Explorer’s “Open with…” context menu option, attempting to select the Notepad++ portable’s executable would not have any result – the dialogue would just continue to sit there…

After some soul Google searching, I stumbled across the solution.

The registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\notepad++.exe\shell\open\command was still pointing at the uninstalled, (now) non-existent executable. Pointing it to the correct location made Notepad++ show up immediately as one of the selectable applications.