Category Archives: windows

Windows 11 HDR not working switches off automatically

Do you want to use HDR on Windows 11? Go to System => Display and switch on Use HDR.

What if HDR doesn’t work on Windows?

It doesn’t work if you don’t have an HDR supported monitor or an HDR compatible graphics card on your computer. You also need a compatible cable. Windows 11 just switches off HDR again when it doesn’t work. It would be very handy if Windows would give a reason why it doesn’t work!

In my case the refresh rate was set to high! It was on 60 Hz, but my mini Displayport to HDMI cable only supports 30 Hz on a 3840 x 2160 resolution monitor. Switching back to 30 Hz does the trick and now HDR works again. Also a new cable would help!

Windows 11 HDR

UPDATE: I have a new cable which supports 8k and 60 Hz.
I can now watch 60 Hz 59.94 Hz content on 3840×2160. If the Use HDR switch switches back to off again on Windows try to reboot Windows. In my case Windows starts up with HDR turned on and it sets the output from 60 Hz to 59.94 Hz.

 

Windows 11 monitor turns black after full screen

When switching an application to full screen the monitor turns black for a couple of seconds. Reinstalling drivers and resetting the BenQ monitor didn’t help.

The solution was to change the refresh rate of the monitor from 59.94 Hz to 30 Hz. To do in Windows 11 go to Settings => System => Display => Advanced Display and switch “Choose a refresh rate” to 30 Hz.

UPDATE: the used cable doesn’t support 59.94 Hz or 60 Hz, so switching back to 30 Hz did the trick.

Advanced Display

Google Chrome update error code 3 0x80080005

To update Google Chrome you go to: Settings => About Chrome. Google Chrome than checks if there is a new version available.

Recently I got this error: Update check failed to start – error code 3: 0x80080005. Reinstalling Google Chrome didn’t work.

It turns out it has to do with the Google Update Service that Google is running in the background on Windows 11 (see Services: run services.msc or just type services in Windows 11). This doesn’t get uninstalled if you also have Google Chrome Dev. After reinstalling both browsers Chrome and Chrome Dev the Google Update Service worked again.

About Google Chrome

 

Windows 10 wrong display resolution

Normally you can change your display resolution in Windows 10 this way: go to settings => System => Display and under Scale and layout you change the Display resolution.

I couldn’t find my correct resolution. Windows 10 only allowed me to select 1920×1080 as the biggest option.

The main solution you can find on the internet is to update your drivers and/or uninstall your drivers in Device Manager so Windows automatically installs them again.

After reinstalling AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 drivers and AMD Software Pro Edition a couple of times. I still couldn’t select a higher resolution so I messed with a lot of settings AMD Software Pro offers.

I also installed the latest monitor drivers from the BENQ website.

I also changed my BIOS settings for my Video Display so it uses the Intel UHD Graphics 630 first instead of the AMD video cart. DON’T DO THAT, after changing this I couldn’t get back into BIOS settings. It was almost impossible to get the setting back in default mode.

It’s the cable stupid!

It turned out I used the wrong HDMi cable! I have two Cable Matters cables for my two monitors and they look exactly the same, but the newer one supports 4k monitors, and the other doesn’t.

Cable Matters

So if you get stuck with the same problem, check your cable specs!

Cable Matters

Now I know. I can finally enjoy my 3840×2160 resolution with 150% scaling.

How to opt out of dotnet telemetry

By default .NET core collects telemetry when you use it. Telemetry data should be an opt-in process and not ON by default. How do you disable it?

The DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable must be set to 1 or true.

In Windows you can do this by running in the command prompt:

set DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1

You can check if the environment variables by running “set” in the command prompt.

 

Microsoft Windows .NET Framework 4.5.2 install errors

There will be some new posts about some typical Microsoft Windows situations. Where you think the solution should be simple, but it turns out it’s almost impossible.

Installing .NET Framework 4.5.2 on Windows 7

This should be simple, the latest Framework will show up on Windows Update for installation, but this gives an error:

0x80070643

Microsoft offers some solutions for this here. Luckily none of them works.
If you try to install .NET Framework with the offline installer you get a strange error:

Returning IDOK. INSTALLMESSAGE_ERROR [Overlapped I/O operation is in progress. ]

After trying so many things I wanted to give up. Than I found a small message on the Microsoft website from a guy named: RURajesh Upadhayay:

The fix of this issue is to rename c:\program data\microsoft\crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18 and try re-installation of .net again.

This was the solution found after many hours waisted…

No Bootable Device

Lately my PC (Windows 8.1) randomly ran into a problem and needed to restart. After the restart I get the message:

No Bootable Device
Strike the F1 key to retry boot, F2 to run the setup utility

F1 doesn’t help, but turning the PC off and on again does help and the PC starts again. I get this problem ones in a while.

One of the possible solutions to this problem is to search for corrupt files with SFC:

  1. Open Command Prompt (Admin)
  2. Run: sfc /scannow
  3. restart PC

SFC Scannow

After the restart I still had some corrupt files. You can filter the log (C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\cbs.log) with this CMD command:

  1. findstr /c:”[SR]” %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log >”%userprofile%\
    Desktop\sfcdetails.txt”

Than I found corrupt files like these:

Cannot repair member file [l:24{12}]”sppc.dll.mui” of Microsoft-Windows-Security-SPP-Client.Resources, Version = 6.3.9600.16384, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture = [l:10{5}]”en-US”, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch

Because these files where not altered after the Windows install, it turned out I had to repair my Windows image file where the sfc scan is checked upon, this can be done with the CMD command:

  1. Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
  2. Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

After the image repair the system scan (sfc /scannow) had a verification 100% complete with no corrupt files.

MySQL For Excel

MySQL For Excel is very useful to quickly update or insert Excel sheets to the MySQL database.  You can install the application with the MySQL Installer. I’m using MySQL For Excel 1.3.2 in Excel 2010.

To insert Excel tables to MySQL:

  1. Open Excel > go to Data Tab > go to MySQL for Excel:
  2. MySQL For ExcelOpen Local instance MySQL
  3. Open your Schema and table you want to edit
  4. Use Edit MySQL Data and click on OK when the preview is shown.
  5. Now to insert a lot of rows you need to exit the edit mode. Otherwise you can only edit the data and not add rows (only one by one), so to Exit Edit mode right click on the gray screen like so:MySQL For Excel
  6. Now paste the data into the sheet and select all the data (Ctrl+A) and select Append Excel Data to Table
    MySQL For Excel
  7. Make sure your column names match and click on Append. Check your MySQL table in Query Bench to make sure everything is there.

 

 

WMI Provider Host spikes CPU usage

The last couple of weeks my computer (running Windows 8.1) was working so hard steam came out of the exhaust. In the Task Manager I found WMI Provider Host was using about 25% of the CPU on my system.

On StackExchange the same question is answered. To find which services depend on WMI Provider Host: open Computer Management > Services > Windows Management Instrumentation and go to tab Dependencies.

Windows Management Instrumentation

Dell Data Vault causes problems

I’ve performed a Windows Clean Boot to find the service which was causing this. The spike takes place a couple of minutes after a reboot. In the end it turned out the Dell Data Vault / Dell Data Vault Wizard was the cause of this.

Afterwards I found Dell was aware of problems with these services, but running the Dell PC Checkup didn’t give any results…

Update (2015-07-30):
I just did a reinstall of Dell SupportAssist and this uninstalled the Dell Data Vault / Wizard programs. I couldn’t figure out what these programs are doing anyway. Dell Support said they collect data from .dll files, but not why this done.