Windows Tips

Infopackets Reader Tom T. writes: " Dear Dennis, I recently had to reinstall Windows and I'm trying to clean up the root directory of my C drive to keep things tidy. I have a Windows.old.000 folder that I would like to remove, but every time I try ... to delete it, I get a window that says 'You need permission to perform this action' and nothing gets deleted. I've tried ccleaner (crap cleaner) and check marked the 'Delete old windows installation' option (under the Advanced menu), but that doesn't work, either. What do I have to do to remove the Windows.old.000 folder and its contents? " My ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Gros C. writes: " Dear Dennis, By mistake I installed both Windows 10 64 bit and Windows 32 bit on my machine. Both installations reside on separate partitions. I want to keep the Windows 10 64 bit, but the problem is that I don't ... know how to safely remove the Windows 10 32 bit from my machine. Can you give me a bit of advice on how to remote Windows 10 32 bit? " My response: This can be very, very tricky, as how to remove Windows 10 32 bit (or even the 64 bit version) on a separate partition depends on which installation of Windows contains the master boot record. For ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Gord F. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have a very vexing issue. For the last few weeks, Firefox randomly produces a ' This connection is untrusted ' message whenever I try to sign out of my Outlook email account (outlook.live.com), or ... when I visit other secure websites. It seems to work one minute, then it won't work the next. If I shut down and restart the computer the 'This connection is untrusted' error disappears, only to pop up again the next time I visit a secure website at some point in the day. When I see a 'This connection is untrusted' message, I've clicked the ' ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Marion L. writes: " Dear Dennis, I haven't used my laptop for a few weeks. I went to turn it on today, but it won't turn on at all. I have it plugged in to the wall power outlet, but it still doesn't work. What do I do now? " My ... response: This is a fairly common issue with laptops; oftentimes the laptop won't turn on even if it's plugged into the wall if it's been sitting for a while - in your case, a few weeks. Sometimes, however, something else has gone wrong, and parts of the laptop may be corrupt or not working, or the laptop may have died. I'll explain what you need to ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Teresa P. writes: " Dear Dennis, My computer has been acting terribly slow! I pressed CTRL + ALT + DEL to bring up Task Manager to see what was going on, and I have a task called presentationfontcache.exe that is eating 25% of my ... CPU. This is an older computer, and these days I need all the CPU processing power I can get - and this definitely isn't helping! Can you please tell me how I can disable presentationfontcache.exe in Windows 7? " My response: I have not had this problem before so I asked Teresa if she would like me to look at the issue more closely using my remote ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Sam R. writes: " Dear Dennis, The other day I wanted to connect to my wife's PC using Remote Desktop, but the Remote Desktop settings are missing. I've right clicked 'This PC', then selected Properties, then clicked on the 'Remote ... Desktop' link, but all I see is an option for 'Remote assistance' - there is no option for 'Remote Desktop' as there is on my machine. She is running Windows 10 Home. What gives? " My response: Unfortunately, there is no way to manage the Remote Desktop service using Windows Home versions; you need the "Pro" version of Windows to be able to use ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader John R. writes: " Dear Dennis, I'm running Windows 10. For the last week, Windows Update fails every time with this error: 'Critical Update for SQL Server 2016 MSVCRT Prerequisites KB3164398 - Error 0x80070643'. Any idea how to ... fix this? " My response: I have not had this problem before so I asked John if he would like me to connect to his machine using my remote desktop service , and he agreed. The reason for the SQL Server update (KB3164398) failing was an interesting problem, as it was not very obvious. I'll explain more about that further down - for now I'll go through ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Scott W. writes: " Dear Dennis, Dennis, I have not been able to update Google Chrome for about a year. If I click Help -> About, it says it's up to date, but it's not. Sometimes I get an error message that says: 'An error ... occurred while checking for updates: The installer encountered error 106. (error code 7: 0x80040902: 106 -- system level).' I have no idea what that means. I tried uninstalling Chrome but Windows 10 says 'You do not have sufficient access to uninstall Chrome'. What is going on here? I would like to hire you to fix this vexing issue because my business ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Ron C. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have several drives on my network that I'd like to defrag, but none of the defrag software programs I've tried allow me to defrag a network drive. Any suggestions on how to defrag a network drive, ... or a program that can provide this functionality? " My response: The reason you can't find a program to defrag a network drive is because this is not possible - the easiest way to explain "why" is that the remote drives are owned by another operating system. Simply put: your system does not have permission to move these files around. With ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Tom G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I recently had to reinstall Windows, which also required reinstalling all my programs. Ever since then, whenever I try to access my work's website (which uses a Java applet), I receive an error ... message that says: 'Your security settings have blocked an application with an expired or not-yet-valid certificate from running.' I cannot proceed past that, and am therefore unable to access the website. The Java applet worked fine before I reinstalled Windows, so how can I get past this error? " My response: I had a sneaking suspicion that the website ... (view more)