Asus H81M-K network disconnections - solved.

You are experiencing random Ethernet problems on a machine based on this motherboard, i.e - disconnections (cable unplugged even though it's plugged in, cable not detected as plugged in), limited connectivity, or sometimes even the connection seems stable (network cable recognized, IP address is correct) - there are still internet connection or LAN connection issues. The reason may be related the faulty NIC driver that comes with this motherboard.

The best way to stabilize your on-board NIC (Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller) performance is to downloaded the latest driver from Asus, and after it's installed do the following:

• Go into Device Manager and double click your NIC card in the list of devices.
• In the Power Management tab - untick the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" option.
• In the Advanced tab - Disable "Energy Effecient Ethernet" and "Green Ethernet"

This works for other motherboards that share the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller.

New USB devices or existing devices stop working in Windows 7/8

Recently I started noticing a widespread problem with certain machines not being able to accept new USB devices or they would have certain existing devices stop working (driver-wise). This may be related to a certain PUP called SafetyNut that is a subapplication that comes with Ask.fm toolbar.

If you are unable to use any new USB devices that your computer hasn't recognized before, or suddenly things like your lan or w-lan card stop working and have a driver problem inside the device manager - it may be due to the aforementioned problem.

The simple way to resolve this is to uninstall the Ask.fm toolbar.

A more thorough solution would be to run a malware cleaner, and disable the SafetyNut service (yes it actually runs as a service, which is recognized as a malicious service), clean the discovered PUPs and uninstall the Ask.fm toolbar.

Windows Update error 80246002

This error started appearing in Windows 7 a few days ago, some say due to the update KB2982791 (unconfirmed yet).

If you were affected by this error - here's how to fix it (so far).

First of all - what doesn't work:

• Uninstalling the KB2982791 update.
• Deleting the SoftwareDistribution folder contents inside the Windows folder (this used to work for me in previous Windows Update errors).
• Renaming the Download subfolder of the SoftwareDistribution folder.
• Restoring the system to an earlier state may not fix this problem.
• Running the Windows Update Troubleshooter may not fix this problem.
• Applying the KB947821 patch may not fix this problem.

What does work (confirmed by many cases, including my own experience with this error):

You need to manually set the DNS addresses (of a well known public DNS server, such as Google DNS) for your network connection to successfully get rid of the update error. 

1. Go to Network and Sharing center inside Control Panel.

2. Click "Change Adapter Settings" on the left side pane. 

3. Right click the network connection you're currently using to be connected to the internet.

4. Choose Properties.

5. Double click "Internet Protocol Version 4 (Tcp/IPv4)"

6. Change "Obtain DNS Server Address automatically" to "Use the following DNS server addresses" - enter 8.8.8.8 as Preferred DNS server, and 8.8.4.4 as Alternate DNS server.

7. OK all of the windows. 

8. Now either restart the machine and check your updates again, or run the ipconfig /flushdns command inside the command prompt in elevated mode.

After this procedure - Windows Update should start searching for updates, it will take a while, so be patient. Eventually you will be presented either with more updates, or the statement that there are no newer updates.

OneDrive for Business doesn't sync - solved.

Is your OneDrive folder not syncing anymore? Do you get sync errors that won't go away? Do all of the files in the sync folder have a red X on them? If so - here are the answers.

Sometimes you copy a large amount of data into your OneDrive sync folder or you make a drastic change in the folder structure (taking all of the main folders and putting them into one subfolder, for example) - this may lead to major sync problems.

What doesn't work:

Stopping - restarting sync, syncing a new folder, deleting everything in your sync folder and then hoping it would resync, deleting everything on the server and hoping it would resync from your pc folder, running the "repair" function of the OneDrive desktop software, uninstalling and reinstalling OneDrive.

If you've done all of the above and still no luck, read on.
The only solution I've found so far is doing the procedure below (recommended by MS support team) and it actually works.

Important! Make sure that your server-side copy of your files is up to date, because you will lose all of the local data from your computer's Sync folder and your computer will then resync from the server.
If it's not up to date, then backup the data in your sync folder, just in case.

1. Right click on the Windows status bar, select Start Task Manager, and get a list of running processes as follows:
If you’re running Windows 7: Select the Processes tab.If you’re running Windows 8: Select More Details in the bottom left and then select the Details tab.

2. Verify that none of the following processes are running:
groove.exe
msosync.exe
msouc.exe
winword.exe
excel.exe
powerpnt.exe

3. If any of the above processes are running, stop the process by right-clicking it and selecting End Process.

4. Give yourself an administrator role as follows:If you’re running Windows 7: Click the start button and type cmd in the search bar. When cmd.exe appears in the results, right-click it and select Run as Administrator.If you’re running Windows 8: Drag your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen, right click on the Start icon that appears, and then select Command Prompt (Admin).

5. At the command prompt, delete the Office file cache and Spw folders by issuing four commands as follows:
a. Type this and then press the Enter key:
cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ 
b. Type this and then press the Enter key:
rmdir OfficeFileCache /s 
c. Type this and then press the Enter key:
cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\  
d. Type this and then press the Enter key:
rmdir Spw /s

6. If you get an error when executing either rmdir command (steps b or d), one of the .exe processes is probably still running. Correct the problem by returning to the Task Manager (step 2), stopping the processes, and then removing the directories as described previously.

7. Start the OneDrive for Business client and re-sync the library.

Sync network folders to OneDrive automatically

A few weeks ago I have written a post about synchronizing your OneDrive local folder to a network folder, in this post, however, we will talk about synchronizing server folders to the OneDrive folder automatically using a Robocopy script.

First off let's create sub-folders inside your OneDrive sync folder that will represent your network shares. For example if we have a server named Server and shared folders on it named Folder1 and Folder2 - we shall create them as subfolders inside our OneDrive sync folder, as:
(assuming the system partition is C:)

C:\Users\username\OneDrive\Folder1 (and other shared folders)
or
C:\Users\username\OneDrive for Business\Folder1 (and other shared folders)

Then, after all of our subfolders are created, we create a batch script containing:

@echo off

 robocopy "Source network folder" "Destination OneDrive Sub-folder" /MIR /COPY:DT /MON:1

We will have to create a Robocopy command like this for each one of the network folders that needs to be synced with OneDrive.

If the server requires credentials, you will have to add a line before the Robocopy command:

net use \\servername /USER:username password

After the Robocopy command you might want the script to log out, using the following command:

net use \\servername /d

This is a syncing script, that's why we're using the /MIR switch, this means that if we delete the file in the source folder, the file will soon be deleted in the destination folder. If you wish to copy files and not sync them, you can use /E /COPY (or /COPY:DT) instead of /MIR.

I also should mention that /COPY:DT switch in the above script is optional, it instructs Robocopy to preserve the files' Date and Time stamps but not attributes. I just prefer using it in this situation for better stability.

Now we can save the script as a BAT or a CMD file and run it (preferably in elevated mode) to see how it works. The script will never close unless the command prompt is closed manually, so this may create an annoyance to the user. That's why it may be a good idea to automate it's execution and keep it hidden from the user.

To do that we go into Task Scheduler and create a task to run this script. I recommend the trigger being the user's logon. Because if the trigger is a certain time of day - there may be duplicates of the same process, because the process never stops anyway.

Make sure you set the SYSTEM account as the account running the task, and mark it Hidden. This will allow the script to run invisibly in the background. This starts the cmd.exe and robocopy.exe processes and they only take a few hundred kilobytes in memory.

Mouse and keyboard stop working in Windows 7

Today I have witnessed a rare problem with mouse and keyboard being unresponsive in Windows 7, even though they work in BIOS, boot manager, mini-windows, etc.

If this happened to you, it may be due to an unsuccessful upgrade or installation of Kaspersky Antivirus 2013.

The solution is quite complex and involves editing the registry offline, if you have never edited the registry before - this may not be a good time to start.
There are numerous guides online how to get into your registry when you can't do it from your system, I will not go into this here.

When you load your registry hive, you need to check two keys. The first key has the settings for keyboard:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e96b-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

and it should have a string called UpperFilters and it should have a value kbdclass (if there are any other values, delete them).

Second key has settings for the mouse:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e96f-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

and in the same UpperFilters string we should have the value mouclass (again, if there is anything else inside this string, delete it).

Here's an example of what it looks like when there is a residual erroneous key from Kaspersky inside the UpperFilters string for the keyboard:

That value "klkbdflt" is the troublemaker.

Windows cannot currently check for updates because the service is not running

Sometimes Windows 7 may not let you download updates because of some issues with the Software Distribution folder. This may even happen soon after a fresh install of Windows.

Here's how to fix it.

Open command prompt in elevated mode and type:

net stop wuauserv

This will stop the Windows Update service.

Next enter this command:

ren %windir%\SoftwareDistribution softwaredistributionold

This will rename the Software Distribution folder so the system will have to recreate a new empty one.

Now all we have to do is restart the Windows Update service by entering:

net start wuauserv

Now we can retry downloading updates from Windows Update.

Internet Explorer shows a white page instead of a website.

This happens on Windows 7 64 bit running the 32 bit version of IE9 or IE10. This is a very rare problem and not many solutions are given online so I decided to post my own solution that works.

First off - let's eliminate malware and viruses, the system is clean and updated.
Second - a lot of people seem to have a problem with "Hardware rendering" in IE - so we should enable software rendering.

Third - resetting the browser, cleaning temp files and cookies, uninstalling and downgrading to a previous version should be done.

If none of this helps - then come the big guns.

Most people in this case would do a repair installation of Windows, which I think is like killing a mosquito with a shotgun. A repair may bring other problems to your already installed and configured software. So this problem should be dealt with directly using the following method.

The root of this problem is a corrupt DLL file called d2d1.dll which, in this case, is located in the %systemroot%\SysWOW64 folder.
To confirm this we should scan the system for corrupt system files by going into elevated command prompt and running:

sfc /scannow

If the above file is in fact corrupt - SFC may repair it and the problem goes away. But in many cases it does not repair it because the backup copy of this file may also be corrupt. In this case we need to replace it with a "healthy" version.

I have posted a healthy version of this file here. (Use at your own risk, it may not be compatible with your system). This is for Windows 7 Pro 64bit SP1.

Now the tricky part is to replace a system file in a protected system folder. In this case inside the aforementioned SysWOW64 folder. The key to this is to first take ownership of the file inside and then change the file access permissions. So we right click d2d1.dll and go into Properties > Security >Advanced > Owner > Edit. Make your user or the administrators group the owner of the file. Then, while still inside the file properties window, under Security click on Edit and click on the Administrators group or the current user and click Allow: Full control check-box.

This will now enable us to edit or replace the file. Now we rename the file's extention to something like ".old" instead of ".dll" for it to be easily recoverable in case something goes wrong.
Once it's renamed - we can now copy the "healthy" file here. After that's done, no need to restart, just run your IE and it should all go back to normal.

What to do when your computer lags and there are no viruses/malware found.

Sometimes Windows may start strangely lagging. Open programs become non-responsive for a few seconds or tens of seconds, and you may see the hard drive light flashing rapidly or being lit continuously. This may be caused by a few factors.

Let's assume that there is no malware infection in the system, and there's adequate antiviral protection running. Let's also assume that the hard drive of the system is in good health.

If the PC start up is extremely slow, with hard drive light constantly lit, and all programs loading very slowly - it may be due to a "DMA step-down" - Windows is designed to step down one DMA speed after it encounters a hard drive transfer error, which makes everything work very slowly because of the drive transfer limitation.
In Windows XP - this can be resolved by running a small DMA reset script (available here - download and run the VBS)
In Windows Vista/7 the resetting of DMA speed can be achieved by going into Device Manager and deleting the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and letting Windows re-install it on its own.

But what if the DMA speed is correct and Windows is still lagging badly? Then it's time to dig deeper and see what keeps that hard drive so busy. A good tool for that is Sysinternals Process Monitor (available here). It shows the "behind the scenes" of Windows running processes and may let you see what is hanging up the system so badly. After running Process Monitor, go to Edit and check "Auto Scroll" to let you see the process logging in real time.

What you should look for is the "WriteFile" operation - it may come in big bunches. Identify the process responsible for it and check out what application is executing all this data writing. Removing or re-installing this application may solve the lagging problem.