Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Without explaining the no-doubt interesting context for his question, reader M.R. asked: “Will booting up from a USB drive leave any trace on the computer?” Yup. In fact, if you know where to look, every PC boot — even one that’s using an operating system installed on a USB flash drive — will normally leave at…
Windows’ system-managed “Known Folders“ (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) rarely cause problems. But when they do, the fix can be messy, as longtime AskWoody subscriber Mark Guenin discovered: “I’ve been having trouble with my Dell laptop… intermittent app-lockup problems. For example, when using Chrome and downloading a PDF from a website, the browser will hang when…
Sometimes, Windows can’t or won’t delete old, no-longer-relevant log files. Worse, these files may be locked or still marked as in-use, preventing you from manually deleting them. There are several methods — including using Safe Mode — to rid your PC of old, hard-to-scrub log files, and to reclaim potentially large swathes of disk space. What’s involved,…
You may be able to extend the life and increase the speed of your SSD through overprovisioning — reassigning some of the drive’s file-storage capacity for internal use by the drive’s firmware. One significant gotcha: You may have to move or resize some hard drive partitions (but there are excellent tools available to make this…
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AskWoody Plus subscriber Dave Huch’s Win10 PC has become unusable due to an astonishing malfunction: A wild system error is generating some 600 EVTX files per minute — 10 per second! —totally saturating his entire drive system. Not surprisingly, his PC is totally unusable — even at full-throttle, it simply can’t keep up! My AskWoody Plus column this…
Two subscribers are having peculiar browser issues. In one case, Firefox is inexplicably slow on a very fast PC; in the second case, the mouse pointer disappears from time to time in Chrome and Firefox — and there’s no obvious pattern. Oddly, the solutions to both problems lie in totally opposite applications of the same…
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Writing from Bridgewater, CT, AskWoody subscriber Bill Chinn wonders why his copy of File Explorer gets confused. “Hi Fred! I have recently had an ongoing issue with the behavior of File Explorer in my version of Windows 10 Pro. “It seems that every time I open File Explorer and begin scrolling through the directories, after…
The newest AskWoody Plus newsletter is now available! In this issue: ON SECURITY: COVID-19: The challenges of working from home BEST OF THE LOUNGE: The telemetry of data collection LANGALIST: Win10 update breaks a USB modem? PATCH WATCH: Win10 optional updates placed on hold BEST UTILITIES: Freeware Spotlight — A Thousand Words Don’t miss out! Consider joining — there’s no set cost; you…
