Category: Windows 10

Windows 10, NVidia, and Paint Shop Pro

I’m a luddite – I love Paint Shop Pro 9. Yeah, I use Illustrator and Photoshop and Inkscape and Gimp and all that goodness but, in a pinch, PSP9’s been my go-to quick and dirty image manipulator forever.

Then I got a fancy new laptop with a fancy new video card… and PSP9 wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t produce a window on launch, even though I could see it there in the task manager, running. And when I uninstalled and tried to reinstall, it hung for infinity on “registering modules.”

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OpenVPN reconnect

My OpenVPN likes to have difficulty and go yellow from time to time.  The problem with this is twofold – I have any and all downloads stop at the absence of VPN, and when I’m not home connecting to my server is more difficult when VPN has hundged up.  The simplest fix for now is just to restart/reconnect VPN on the daily.

I use OpenVPN with PIA.
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Windows 10 – Can’t enable System Restore

System Restore.JPG

For some reason on my most recent build of Win 10 (don’t get me started) the option to enable System Restore was grayed out.  I fixed it by running the following in a admin level CMD prompt:

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reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\SystemRestore" /v "DisableSR" /f
reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\SystemRestore" /v "DisableConfig" /f
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SPP\Clients" /v " {09F7EDC5-294E-4180-AF6A-FB0E6A0E9513}" /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d "1" /f

The first two lines didn’t find those keys, FYI.  Still, the third enabled my ability to set up System Restore.

Windows 10 – Here comes ads

I’m kinda shocked by it, but it looks like Microsoft’s going to be pushing ads into the File Explorer in Windows 10.

The good news is, for now, you can turn it off. Within File Explorer, click on View > Options > Change folder and search options. Click the View tab, scroll down to Show sync provider notifications, and uncheck it.

Windows 10 Hyper V Woes

I recently needed to set up a Win10 Hyper V, and then join it to a domain over a VPN connection.  The first issue that I faced was that Cisco Anyconnect VPN client detected the virtual machine as a Remote Desktop Connection and refused to allow it to connect.  I solved this by switching from Enhanced Session to Basic Session by clicking this on the toolbar of the virtual machine:

My second issue was that, even after successfully joining the machine to the domain, there was no Switch User option (I needed to switch to a domain user while on the VPN in order for it to authenticate to the domain server and build the local profile for the domain user).  No matter where I looked there was no option.  Not in the power options, not via Alt+F4, nowhere.

I solved this by invoking tsdiscon.exe directly via a run line.  Bear in mind that it’s my understanding tsdiscon.exe is not available in Win 10 Home edition, though I don’t know why anyone would build a virt of Home edition.