This was originally written when I first got a new laptop, a 14″ ACER; it’s a bit smaller than the last one, its CPU is about 4 times more powerful and it only took me a couple of hours to get going.  I got fed up with the recurring BSOD and “reset the PC” in Sept 21. This didn’t work and so I got a new system, which is my 3rd with W10. I upgraded to W11 in Jan 2023. I resurrected the Acer in Aug 2023. Here are my notes. …

No 3, a new HP | Acer 2, resurrection | Acer V1.5, after a reset | Acer V1

No 3, a new HP

What I did this time, I used a couple of techniques, including ninite, xcopy, web installs, and the microsoft store.



Some notes on installing the applications.

  1. How to i turn off the news taskbar preview in windows 10
  2. I have removed Real VNC, I used to use it for connecting to an Elementary OS then Ubuntu laptop.
  3. How to make a recovery usb drive.
  4. I had a sound fault, speakers weren’t working, so I downloaded new drivers from the HP site. See the comment.
  5. On upgrade to W11, I discovered that I had the beep while sleep feature, I turned of the windows default sound, i.e. set it to none. I used the sounds control panel applet.
  6. I looked at thisiswindows11, a GUI to the registry and an app management package. I think it’s key advantage is if one wants to uninstall the MS apps that come with the machine. I tend to use them. In hindsight, this is not a good idea, one needs more knowledge than I have to make this work well and I don’t want much removed.

I have made a comment about syncing OneDrive which points at this.

I tidied up my NAS storage, and have mounted it on a drive letter, microsoft call it mapping.

NB File associations are held locally, this is one reason that the file explorer does not render pictures properly it needs a ‘helper’ app. (It might be possible to copy the registry tree accross but I don’t know how). I associated photos with .png and wish with .tcl

I am not finished yet and I am very bored with this. I need to see if there’s a better way than this, will this article on windows package management help?

I have updated this to Windows 11 aka W11 29/1/2022

I need bash, see https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-desktop-windows-subsystem/ not the desktop, but the shell.

I have started to look at ccleaner, do I need it, do I need the premium tools? Here is an article on cleaning the registry, one on various techniques and tools, and here is one on keeping apps up to date., which refers to two other review articles. Do I need Choclatey, or is there something else? A review of Choclatey, another from wikipedia, and a video. On my HP, the issue is Skype and VirtualBox. NB for the HP I use the HP tools to assess the driver package currency.

I had to reinstall the HP Envy driver, see Home Printing on this wiki.

Link to Windows (was Your Phone)

This needs to be reconnected, use the app on the phone to reinitiate the pairing. You will be pointed at a URL/QR code. See this page, which is a bit out of date.

W11 Spotlight

This has been bugging me for a while. The configuration for spotlight differs between W10 & W11. This article talks about how to install the images. These images have no file suffix, and are pretty poor, some are .png and some are .jpeg. I used a shell script to rename them but once I viewed them, I came to the conclusion I didn’t like them. The settings panel, Personalisation -> Lock Screen then allows the specification of a folder holding the images. So I think, I’ll use my own collection. There are other parameters, and I am currently using slide show as the lock screen. I have changed it to a single image, but still on reboot it shows the most recent spotlight picture which is one of the few they offered I don’t like.

W11 Music Player

The machine had WMP which they now call legacy, I used the store to install “Media Player” which is meant to be the W11 application. they both have duplicate entries in the database. There are a couple of fixes out there, but this seems OK for a windows database (but didn’t work), and this talks about .wma vs .mp3. This offers a program designed to cleanup an itunes library. However, I came to the conclusion that the problem was that I had copies of the music in both the C:\User\${ME} and C:\Users\${ME}\Onedrive and I removed one from the application folder list in the app settings dialogue.

Acer Resurrection

In August 2023, I pulled the Acer out of the drawer, and rebooted it. The keyboard had failed and I replaced it with what looks like a French keyboard. I got to grips with the settings panel, “Time & Language” but it’s not quite right. The keyboard is QWERTY and the default soft French keyboard from MS is AZERTY; maybe the Quebecois keyboard is required. What I need to do is experiment with powershell! Can this be made to work with TCL? Setting the current keybd seems a bit of a mystery. But see this, or this.

This build is complicated by the fact that the desktop belongs to Microsoft account and strangely the keyboard setting seems to be common to all systems using the account.

The bios needs to configured to allow a boot from a USB. This article talks about how to do it.

I needed to turn the Mail app off.

After a Reset

I reset the PC, (see why) let’s see what’s broken? I looked at package managers but have reinstalled most apps by hand using firefox. I need the Firefox dictionary and language pack, and then got MS ToDo from the store.

I made a comment about .pdf readers. i.e. I have installed Adobe’s acroread, but there maybe better options from the store.

The windows mail app seems better behaved today and I have moved the stuff on anti-virus and video drivers to the comments. ccleaner now comes with a driver (& a limited product) updater. Sep 2021#

Version 1 2020

Applications

This is what I did once I unboxed the Acer. Filezilla, would not install from the browser, I had to save then run; this may have been Norton misbehaving. I have installed the games, and written a note on NWN2. Here’s how to transfer the putty settings. Yahoo Mail was a bit tricky.

Windows Terminal & Bash

There is new code for a Windows Terminal, which I have installed. It is called wt.exe, and I have installed a short cut in my More folder. On installing wt.exe, the second time, i.e after a reset, I discover I want/need bash. This takes me to this on installing the WSL, and this on the store for the bash implementation.

Windows Mail App & Gmail

This can be a bit of a problem. I came across the issue where W10 does not write to the “Sent” box for Gmail, which I documented, but on running the rest I moved my findings to the comments. The problem seems to have gone away/ by Sep 21. The following remains useful. How to  set the signature files in windows 10 mail.

Video Conferencing

The video conferencing apps misbehave. The detailed comments have been moved to the comments section of this page; the problem seemed to be related to version control of Skype and the video drivers. I updated the Skype version, and the video system driver using the MS driver interface in the systems applet of the control panel/settings panel. I sourced the driver from Intel. ACER did not have a video driver.

Dave Technology, W10, W11 , , , , , , , ,

23 Replies

  1. Pingback: Mucking around until it breaks |

  2. So I reset the PC today. In the following order on Day 1, I configured Edge, installed firefox, ccleaner, paint.net, office via office.com and chrome. I add whatsapp desktop & messenger from the store and visual studio code from the internet. Next a PDF reader! I wonder if this review will help.

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  6. On Windows Mail App, this can be a bit of a problem. I came across the issue where W10 does not write to the “Sent” box for Gmail. There are a couple of threads about this which can be found by Google, here is a thread called, “Windows 10 mail app not syncing sent folder”,.

    1. One correspondent, suggests in Nov 2015, that the problem is that gmail requires it’s sent items folder to me called “Sent Mail” while W10 Mail requires it to be called “Sent Items”, if this is the problem, then you’d think that MS might have solved this. Our correspondent suggest creating a label called “Sent Items” on gmail, but don’t think this works for me. i.e. this is not a synchronous download and messages sent from W10 mail are not recorded in either mail box but are sent to “spam”.
    2. It seems my problem is that the w10 mail app does not send a copy to the sent mail folder, they are sent to spam. I opened this thread. I found this video, which recommends resetting, or uninstalling, reinstalling and patching the mail product.
    3. It will only set out off office messages on Microsoft mail services. This in my opinion is a bit shit.
    Reply

  7. The video conferencing apps misbehave.

    1. Zoom cuts of the camera after some time, possibly only when hosting
    2. Skype, is misbehaving, if called, the video window doesn’t open, and it behaves as voice only connection.

    I have updated the Skype version, and the Video system driver which is sourced from Intel. ACER do not have a video driver. I have [found] some threads at Microsoft’s Community site

    1. Trouble with camera not showing with skype or zoom, asked as do many of these threads for the dxddiag list and discovered a down rev driver in the video stack, so platform specific.
    2. Upgrading Skype to avoid system crashes on w10, mainly written before the problems reoccurred, started by me.
    3. Does the zoom client interfere with skype on w10, resolution was to get the version of skype from the download site and not the store, nor from office.

    I have upgraded my video driver (Intel) using the MS driver interface in the systems applet of the control panel/settings panel. It seems better for this. Awaiting new symptoms.

    Reply

  8. I am moving to a new laptop. Most of my documents are on OneDrive, this includes my Pictures. I have a picture cache. The bulk of its contents have been written by the old laptop, this includes the Desktop folder. I am getting sync errors on the new machine, this from Microsoft is the start point. I am also having problems with a shared desktop. The apps and icon should be in the same place and so should work. Viewing the icons works in some cases and not in others. The old laptop does not connect with some of the applications.

    Why can’t I see my NAS drive[s]? How to make this work consistently? The new laptop found the network; I needed or maybe not to reboot the disk, now it seems invisible. The reset old laptop has lost touch with the Raspberry Pi and the NAS drive.

    Reply

    1. On the question of onedrive sync, this seems at the moment to be because the cached copy of the documents and images’ file permissions are held on the local machine. Also the file explorer’s image rendering needs a helper. I think this is fixed, but we’ll have to see as we begin to use and update documents.

      Reply

  9. My original notes on the applications install after the reset said this. I looked at package managers but have reinstalled by hand using firefox which I installed using Edge. Firefox, ccleaner, paint.net, & MS Office. I then installed whatsapp desktop and messenger using the MS Store (and I think, wt.exe) and then back to the browser for Visual Studio Code, Zoom and acroread. See below for bash, but I find that my activision installations of Python & TCL/TK seem to be fine as I installed them into C:\ and not the windows folder. Chrome via download using Edge . Firefox Ghostry and diigo! Then putty, filezilla & RealVNC. I failed to backup the configurations for the network utilities and will have to rebuild them by hand. I need the Firefox dictionary and language pack, and then got MS ToDo from the store.

    Reply

  10. On my 1st install, I originally said,

    Filezilla has an export/import feature to copy accross my saved site login parameters.

    The installation of quicktime failed; it’s not supported on W10. I did not reinstall microsoft azure cli, powershell nor its storage explorer; this can wait until I needed it again. The same can be said of Visual Studio. Also I did not reinstall sqirlz morph, the same is true of soda pdf, slack and my VNC tools. I’ll reinstall VNC when I need it. I have left Chocolatey off the machine, I used it for cURL, LAME and node.js but I have turned bash on. We’ll see what breaks. I left Context behind and am now using Visual Code. I took the opportunity to leave Opera behind, thought about Edge but, it’s poor in importing my bookmarks from Opera and doesn’t seem to run the diigo digolet. So Firefox it is then. However, I find that several e-commerce sites have a problem with Firefox and so I use Edge or Chrome to use these sites.

    I installed wish & python by copying, together with some of the small toys that I had collected over the years. (This is basically done, the languages come via Github, the toys, which include an MD5/SHA key generator, a double killer and wget, are easy to copy; Yahoo Mail is a bit tricky.

    Reply

  11. I had a sound fault, speakers weren’t working, I worked through the Microsoft worksheet, then used the HP Support Assistant, which was already installed on the system, I finally discovered that the jackplug worked and so on advice from my vendor update the Real Audio driver. I used driveridentifier to find the binary becasue the Real site is not so good, it scans the system and reports via HTML, this took me to an HP ftp site, another challange, I used filezilla but had to make hp.com a safe site. I downloaded the new driver, installed it and then I removed driveridentifier. (It runs as a daemon). driveridentifier seems to have a reasonable reputation. NB This is not very safe, but it’s done now

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  19. I have installed Kompozer and made the comment about the keyboards under the ACER section as I now have a French keyboard on it. Don’t ask.

    Reply

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NWN2 and W10 (2020)
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