The Windows/PC support thread

[Johnnytheboy]

I'll add this weird incident here rather than start a new thread. Win 10 btw.

The other night my mouse wheel stopped working. I like my mouse so even though its less than a year old I just ordered another.

Thought "can live with this for a few days" then tried to play Civilization VI and realised I couldn't.

Plugged in a crappy old mouse... And the mouse wheel didn't work.

So resorted to updating the driver and it worked.

So plugged in original mouse, updated driver and it worked too. And cancelled the order for a new one..

So being a civilian, why did Windows apparently delete the drivers of all my mice, or just disable the mouse wheel?

[Jinx]

Johnnytheboy said:

So being a civilian, why did Windows apparently delete the drivers of all my mice, or just disable the mouse wheel?

The million dollar question. Check the thread about win 10 losing sound and the attempts to get it working again (spoiler: took a reinstall of windows to solve the problem) . You have learnt an important lesson - assume software is at fault in the first instance (well unless you can physically see a problem )
Uninstalling and re-installing drivers is a fairly common solution (feel for the poor souls who upgraded to win 10 1903 and had constant crashes due to win10 updating to the wrong gpu driver) and the amount of problems a fresh install of windows solves is pretty impressive (brought back many a machine from the dead with fresh install and the latest drivers from the manufacture websites downloaded separately on a USB stick) .

[Miserablegit]

Dont suppose anyone knows how to install Win10 these days?

I've done clean installs of win 7 and win 10 on machines before with no major problems

Just built a new pc
MSI x570 motherboard - with latest bios installed
Ryzen 5 3400g (inbuilt graphics will do me for the moment until the 2080s drop in price)
Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 memory
Kingston 240gb ssd

I've spent 3 days trying to install windows 10.
Constant hangs/crashes.
Google suggests latest windows build is POS with usb issues- after trying two different usb sticks I resorted to burning an iso onto dvd. Thjis went better but when it restarted it just seemed to hang on the white windows logo on the blue background....

Thanks in advance

[Jinx]

Miserablegit said:

Dont suppose anyone knows how to install Win10 these days?

I've done clean installs of win 7 and win 10 on machines before with no major problems

Just built a new pc
MSI x570 motherboard - with latest bios installed
Ryzen 5 3400g (inbuilt graphics will do me for the moment until the 2080s drop in price)
Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 memory
Kingston 240gb ssd

I've spent 3 days trying to install windows 10.
Constant hangs/crashes.
Google suggests latest windows build is POS with usb issues- after trying two different usb sticks I resorted to burning an iso onto dvd. Thjis went better but when it restarted it just seemed to hang on the white windows logo on the blue background....

Thanks in advance

Did it get into windows once, restart and now you are stuck? If so the issue is the drivers Win10 (post 1803 build) automatically installs for the Radeon GPU cores. So you'll need to download the latest drivers from the AMD site first, do another fresh win10 install (with no internet access) install the drivers you have downloaded and then restart.

[Miserablegit]

Jinx - that is exactly what it did- thank you.
Problem is I can no longer get it to install that far anymore. Wiped the ssd and now it just hangs on the dots on a blank screen on the restart following install.

Bring back the days of 8 floppy discs where at least the darn thing loaded up .

[Jinx]

Miserablegit said:

Jinx - that is exactly what it did- thank you.
Problem is I can no longer get it to install that far anymore. Wiped the ssd and now it just hangs on the dots on a blank screen on the restart following install.

Bring back the days of 8 floppy discs where at least the darn thing loaded up .

You need to start the re-install all over again i.e. boot from the USB, delete the partition on the OS drive and reinstall windows (do not give it internet access and install the new GPU drivers as the very first thing you do). Drove me mad doing this for my nephew's new PC - built from an older PC of mine and a new GPU (AMD 570 - very impressed with its 1080p performance and I'm running a 1080 Ti myself).

[Miserablegit]

Jinx said:

You need to start the re-install all over again i.e. boot from the USB, delete the partition on the OS drive and reinstall windows (do not give it internet access and install the new GPU drivers as the very first thing you do). Drove me mad doing this for my nephew's new PC - built from an older PC of mine and a new GPU (AMD 570 - very impressed with its 1080p performance and I'm running a 1080 Ti myself).

Thanks Jinx- tried all of that repeatedly and even used Diskpart on the command line to get rid of efi partitions.
After doing this repeatedly I opted to try to install windows 10 home rather than pro. Again, after multiple attempts I managed to get it to install (without internet access)
Just installing the amd drivers now- many thanks for your help. I fear I might have modified it all with a lump hammer had it take any longer.
Strikes me as an appalling piece of software but there is no other option for me.

[Jinx]

Miserablegit said:

Thanks Jinx- tried all of that repeatedly and even used Diskpart on the command line to get rid of efi partitions.
After doing this repeatedly I opted to try to install windows 10 home rather than pro. Again, after multiple attempts I managed to get it to install (without internet access)
Just installing the amd drivers now- many thanks for your help. I fear I might have modified it all with a lump hammer had it take any longer.
Strikes me as an appalling piece of software but there is no other option for me.

Did you get it all sorted?

[Miserablegit]

Alas no - got it to boot up doing as you said so thanks for that.
Loaded amd drivers onto usb and onto system. Then put msi driver disc into usb dvd to load other drivers (still with network off) and all seemed to be fine but after a restart the machine crashed again.
Have tried again this morning and am now wiping ssd again ready for another go. This time perhaps I won’t install the msi drivers from the dvd....

[LordGrover]

I think we're mostly past third party drivers. Windows does a good job of recognising and installing 99% hardware these day - I can't remember the last time I had to download/install drivers for anything other than printers/scanners/etc.

[Jinx]

LordGrover said:

I think we're mostly past third party drivers. Windows does a good job of recognising and installing 99% hardware these day - I can't remember the last time I had to download/install drivers for anything other than printers/scanners/etc.

Except the latest builds since 1803 - for some reason there is a real issue with certain AMD and Intel Gpu drivers on a fresh install.

[Miserablegit]

Thanks for your help but I've given up.
Serves me right for moving to AMD.

I'll take a look when the next windows build is up. I cannot believe Microsoft have released such a shoddy piece of software that is incompatible with a major chip manufacturer (and I started on windows 3...)

[Jinx]

Miserablegit said:

Thanks for your help but I've given up.
Serves me right for moving to AMD.

I'll take a look when the next windows build is up. I cannot believe Microsoft have released such a shoddy piece of software that is incompatible with a major chip manufacturer (and I started on windows 3...)

If you change your mind - I'd suggest creating a restore point when you get into Windows that first time. Install the GPU drivers and then reboot. If you find a subsequent win 10 driver update causes the boot/crash you should still be able to get into the repair mode by following the tips here. If you are able to find an earlier build of win 10 (I wish I had kept mine - but I foolishly used the same USB stick to download the latest version) - that may solve the problems as well - Some tips here on how to download 1803 but I haven't tried this method).

[Miserablegit]

Thank you Jinx

[Nigel_O]

Is anyone experiencing the VB6 / VBA errors caused by last week's Windows update? I believe the update was KB4511553

I'm pretty sure this is the cause of a small (but very important) bit of VBA not working in a workbook that I provide to a number of financial advisers

[HM-2]

Nigel_O said:

Is anyone experiencing the VB6 / VBA errors caused by last week's Windows update? I believe the update was KB4511553

I'm pretty sure this is the cause of a small (but very important) bit of VBA not working in a workbook that I provide to a number of financial advisers

Yes, it's a known/reported issue Microsoft have acknowledged.
KB4512534 should have a fix for this, apparently.

[Nigel_O]

HM-2 said:

Yes, it's a known/reported issue Microsoft have acknowledged.
KB4512534 should have a fix for this, apparently.

That's what I thought, but a hefty update has taken me from 1809 to 1903, so KB4512534 can't be applied.

I guess I could roll back to 1809 and then manually apply KB4512534?

[Miserablegit]

Don’t know what happened to my post...
But anyway thank you Jinx.
I couldn’t download anything older than October 2018 and that seemed even more buggy.
In the end I reset my mobo and reinstalled the latest bios ( not the beta one as the link to that is dead on the msi site !). I then tried to reinstall.
At last - got windows to run, kept network off and installed AMD drivers from usb stick
Did the same for a few more drivers
It has survived a few more restarts and looks stable at the moment.
Thanks once again.

[Jinx]

Miserablegit said:

Don’t know what happened to my post...
But anyway thank you Jinx.
I couldn’t download anything older than October 2018 and that seemed even more buggy.
In the end I reset my mobo and reinstalled the latest bios ( not the beta one as the link to that is dead on the msi site !). I then tried to reinstall.
At last - got windows to run, kept network off and installed AMD drivers from usb stick
Did the same for a few more drivers
It has survived a few more restarts and looks stable at the moment.
Thanks once again.

Happy that the pain I went through can help someone else Probably the best thing about the internet is finding someone else that has gone through what you are going through - and with luck has found a solution or workaround.

[Fastpedeller]

Are we all being taken on a ride by Windows? It seems after a while 'this won't be supported' 'that won't be supported' 'you'll need a new 'phone or else' etc etc.
Just received a notification from my bank that if using Windows Vista or XP, we won't be able to use internet banking after next month! WHAT, we all have to blindly accept this robbery because Windows 'wants an upgrade' ?
I have a 12 year old desktop that serves us well, so where do we go from here? The bank also said Windows 7 will be too old on 4th Jan 2020, so we 'might want to think about upgrading'.
So what happens if we upgrade, 5 years time that'll be too old as well? I've also heard Windows 10 has a lot of problems.
Makes my blood boil.
Any suggestions (sensible ones please, rather than the 'your computer is old, you are a dinosaur' comments) as to how to 'upgrade'
Is it just a case of buying the latest windows discs and loading them? I'd like to keep what we've got because I can't afford c£600 for a new computer, and it works ok ..... I don't want to add to the landfill.