Nuke and Pave: Windows 10 Pro ver. 1709 - Aka The Fall Creators Update.

Just a quick update. About 2 weeks ago, I had a new post almost ready to publish, and then I lost it all. You see, I write the texts of these posts off-line and then upload the text and add the pictures and links before I publish them. Just as I was about to do this, Windows 10 automatically updated itself to the new "Fall Creators Update". The number of problems created by this update, made my computer so unstable, that the only solution was to re-format my hard drive and re-install Windows. Luckily, about 95% of my data was backed up. Unfortunately, the text of my blog post was not among that data. Here are the problems I ran into with the latest and "greatest" to come out of Redmond.

Problem - I was required to log into my computer two times. From my research, this was caused by the graphics card driver not talking to the Operating System (OS) properly. So I was logging into the OS with out the graphics card driver enabled the first time and then the OS with the graphics card driver enabled the second time.

Solution - Restart Windows in Safe mode and completely remove the graphics card driver. To make sure that these drivers were uninstalled fully, I did a registry search and a file search for anything nVidia and deleted them. When the computer restarted, I let Windows install the driver from their repositories instead of the one I downloaded from nVidia. I then installed the driver from nVidia's website, and things seemed to be fixed.

Problem - Local hard drives randomly disappearing and reappearing in File Explorer. Besides the SSD that I run Windows on, I have three other hard drives in my system. These other hard drives would randomly disappear from File Explorer even while they were being used. This was caused by problems with the chipset (Intel Z270) driver also not talking properly with the OS

Solution - Restart Windows in Safe Mode and completely uninstall the chipset driver following the same procedure as the graphics card driver. Once the driver was uninstalled, I reinstalled the latest driver available for my chipset. This also seemed to fix the problem.

I hope you all noticed that I said these fixes seemed to fix these two problems. Well, everything worked fine for about a day, and then the same problems returned. To ensure that they were not caused by a virus, I ran a virus scan and my system was clean. The instability caused by these two issues made the computer unusable. Windows would "Blue Screen" out and restart at random even in Safe Mode. To be honest, I felt like I was running a version of Windows ME! (Vista was never THAT bad). So I decided to do a complete re-install of Windows. Everything went great with the install. All the drivers installed properly and the system was very stable. There was a problem though and I did not notice it until it came time to configure my network. The "Settings" App interface was installed, but none of the programs listed there were installed! So I created some new install media and tried again. Only to get the same result. After a quick Google search, I found this article, LINK, and it suggested using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management Tool to fix the problem. This tool will analyses all the system files installed on your computer and downloads the fixes if any of them are corrupt. After running this command DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth as administrator in Power Shell, everything is now properly installed.

It has been over a week since I did these steps and the computer is running like a dream. I am redoing the blog post that I had lost and hope to have it up really soon. Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fixing an Over Heating Android TV Box

Image
I must apologize for the lack of content lately. In the last month I had problems with my Android TV in the bedroom overheating and then my home server decided to go on a permanent vacation. The server was an easy fix, but the Android TV took some time. Today, I would like to talk about my Android TV fix. While the solution I came up with was not as elegant as it could be, it was fun to do and a learning experience for me. In my previous post link , I talked about my Home Media Center setup. In my bedroom, I stated that I was using a Memobox Q-Box Android TV that I had purchased from Aliexpress, link . This little piece of hardware is pretty good for the price that you pay. The only problem I was having with it was heat. The box would get very hot during use. Hot enough, that the quad-core processor would slow its speed to try and cool itself off. This is called "thermal throttling". Thermal throttling is normal with modern processors. Both desktop and mobile processors use...
Read more

Setting up Plex to work with a Panasonic Viera HDTV and Kodi Comparisons

Image
Like many people I know, I have a television in my bedroom. In order to watch programs from my Media Server, I have an Android TV attached to it. After playing around with some of the options on the TV, I noticed that I had another option to stream content from my Media Server. Smart televisions from Panasonic and other manufacturers have the ability to stream media from servers that use the DLNA protocol. I was intrigued to see how this protocol worked. Since I needed some DLNA server software, it gave me an opportunity to try out Plex. Little did I know it at the time, but was I in for an interesting ride. Plex and the Panasonic Viera HDTV The first thing I needed to do was install the Plex Server software on my Media Server. This was accomplished quite easily on my Linux Mint 18.2 by using the provided deb file. It installed and configured itself without any noticeable hitches. Since at this point I was just experimenting, I added only one of my media hard drives to the server...
Read more

Kodi and the Disappearing Text - Tweaking Kodi to display English and non-Latin characters together

Image
In previous posts, we discussed the basics needed to get Kodi up and running from scratch. While Kodi works well out of the box, some tweaking is involved to use it to its fullest potential. One thing I really like about Kodi is that it is available in multiple languages. The interface and many of the official add-ons have been translated by the community into languages other than English. While displaying Kodi in your native language is great, the problem comes when you try to mix languages. This is especially evident when you try to mix languages that do not use the same style of alphabet such as English and Japanese. Kodi will display the non-Latin characters of the Japanese language as either boxes or gibberish. Since I live in a multi-language household, Thai and English, tweaking Kodi to display non-Latin characters, whether in media titles or subtitles, is a must. The reason why Kodi will not display languages such as English and Chinese together properly is due to fonts. Font...
Read more