Adventures in Tech

My Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop experienced some weird problems earlier in the Windows 10 preview cycle; it would crash after a couple of sleep/wakeup cycles, and reboot afterwards. I was surprised that I was the only one experiencing that problem internally, especially since all the preview flighting was going smoothly. But when the problem persisted after a couple of internal upgrades, I decided to dig deeper and figure out what was going on. When Windows crashes, it writes a memory dump to the  C:\Windows\memory.dmp file, and you can examine the contents of that file, and figure out reasons for the crash through windows kernel debugger (Windbg). Windbg is available for download either separately or as part of the WDK . Once it is downloaded, the process is easy. First run Windbg with elevated permissions (Run as Administrator), and open the memory dump file (CTRL+D). If the debugger complains about the symbols, try to fix them and reload through: .symfix; .reload You c...

When I first installed Windows 10 preview on my laptop, IE11 scrolling stopped working when using the touchpad to scroll. Interestingly scrolling worked great in all other programs: explorer, outlook, one note, and many others. For IE11, unless I click on the tab title, and avoid clicking on anything else in the tab area, scrolling did not work. It was quite an annoying behavior, but not a show stopper for trying out Windows 10. I ended up learning how to use the keyboard for scrolling through the web pages in lieu of touchpad goodness. With preview updates, the problem did not get any better, so I searched on the web to see if the issue was widespread. It turns out that it was, and it was not restricted to Windows 10 preview either. There were a lot of solutions online, that did not make much sense, like resetting IE11, going to the advanced tab and disabling smooth scrolling, and a slew of others. The one that made sense was a problem in the Synaptics driver, which for older style...

While using my preview build of windows 10, sometimes I face the dreaded "Limited Wi-Fi Internet" connectivity issues, where the Wi-Fi adapter seems to be connected to the Wi-Fi router, but full Internet access is not possible. I often attributed these issues to quirks in the preview builds, and a simple computer restart--reminiscent of the older Windows releases--seemed to fix the issue. But not yesterday, where multiple restarts did not ease the pain. Even deleting the Wi-Fi network and recreating it again did not help. The dreaded "Limited Wi-Fi" banner under the Wi-Fi network name continued to rear its ugly head. Luckily I had an Ethernet cable handy, so I hard wired the laptop and checked online to see if others have faced a similar issue. There was a considerable number of people experiencing the issue, with various solutions. The one that made sense for me was a bad wireless driver install, which was easy to fix. Before you attempt to replicate the solut...

The other day I heard a great educational segment on thunderstorms and lightening on NPR. The segment highlighted that since thunderstorms and lightening strikes were not very common on the west coast, a lot of the older buildings and houses are not equipped to handle them well like their counterparts on the east coast. And because lightening strikes are relatively rare here, when one occurs it becomes news around the area. The segment mentioned that the most famous one was when lightening struck a tree in an arboretum and caused the tree to explode. The lightening passed through the core of the tree, and generated a lot of energy that heated up the moisture within the bark, and turned it into steam. The steam expanded and turned the tree into projectile shards that flew 30 yards away from the tree and got embedded in the soil. It must have been scary to witness such an event. The segment ended by offering some practical advice on what to do if you're ...

Over the long weekend I got a Nokia Lumia 640XL phone. I decided to graduate to the new ridiculously large screen size phone after sticking with the more manageable screen sizes of the iPhone 5 and its predecessors. I would have stayed within the iOS/Android eco-systems, but I wanted to give a Windows phone a try, and see why the platform has not been successful in the past. The phone is nice and relatively inexpensive ($240 without a contract), with a ridiculous screen size, great graphics and battery life. The screen size is a blessing when reading emails, Kindle books, and surfing the Internet, and I believe my usage has increased accordingly. The screen is sharp, and the sound quality of calls is great. With heavy email and web browsing the battery lasted 2 days. The phone comes with crippled memory though (8GB which used be good, but after years of using iOS phones, it is not enough). Luckily the phone is expandable through Micro SD cards, and a 128 GB MicroSD would set you b...

There are a lot of articles on the Internet comparing font rendering philosophies between Windows and Mac, including Damien's,   Jeff Atwood's, and Joel Spolsky's. The articles come with a vibrant set of comments that advocate one rendering philosophy over the other based on aesthetics, readability, and eye comfort. So far I have been oblivious to the difference, since I have been using the Mac exclusively for the last 15 years. But with my recent switch to Windows the rendering difference popped up, and it was not the font aesthetics since the font rendering on both platforms looked good to me. Rather I noticed that I can read on Windows for a long period of time without my eyes getting tired. On the Mac I needed AntiRSI or Timeout to help me take work breaks every half hour to alleviate eye soreness. After I switched to Windows I have not had a need to search for their equivalents.

I've been using an earlier version of Windows 10 preview for a couple of weeks, and have been pleased with it. However when I tried to upgrade to a new drop, I was greeted with a cryptic message: "Cannot update the system reserved partition". A little bit of research internally and on the Web exposed that the message appears when the system partition is full. To see the details of your drive: partitions, volumes and all, the command "diskpart" is your friend. First list the volumes on the disk you're interested in: diskpart> list volume Some of the volumes might not have a drive letter associated with them. You can assign drive letters to the volumes you'd like to explore through diskpart> select volume=N Then assigning a drive letter through diskpart> assign letter=E Now you can look around the drive and figure out how to create some free space for the install, and all will be well.