How to set up your own instance of EdRefCard so you can create a card for your HOTAS config in Elite Dangerous. Share with friends, import friends config files and get cards made for those. What? – This used to be served at https://edrefcard.info but the site has been down recently. So I went to …
Author Archives: jeffstokes2014
Windows 10 Task Manager ‘% CPU’ skew – A Tale of Two Metrics
EDIT: My co-worker, Aaron Margosis, wrote his take on this issue, you can read about it here: Task Managers CPU Numbers Are All But Meaningless! Windows 10 Task Manager is often used by end users to gauge the performance of their machine, especially when they think something is amiss. There are several reasons why this …
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How to collect a boot trace on Windows 10 using xbootmgr
Sometimes in support you’ll be asked to collect a boot trace to help troubleshoot slow boot or slow logon scenarios. The symptoms are a long time passes from startup to the CTRL+ALT+DEL or from CTRL+ALT+DEL to a usable desktop experience. This blog will walk you through the steps needed to do this. While you can …
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Windows 10 20H2 boot trace – dropped events
TLDR: At time of writing, Windows 10 20H2 has a bug where the default buffer allocations in boot tracing are inadequate to capture the data of a boot trace. The fix is pretty simple, use good old xbootmgr instead. This is a binary from the older ADK and gets installed when you install the current …
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What’s using your video RAM? Xbox Game Services naturally…
Applies to: Windows 10, Gamers One of my routines when installing Windows 10 fresh (or updating builds when it wipes my preferences) is to change Task Manager’s view to report on additional columns of value. Let me show you what I’m doing: My machine has an uptime of 1 day, 15 hours. I game …
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Microsft Edge – “This site is trying to open” dialog box hell – Fix
Applies to: Edge I was downloading mods to start up a game of Witcher 3 and every time I tried to download a mod to Vortex, this dialog box appeared, which no “ffs stop asking this” option. This gets tedious quite quickly. So, this article walks you through getting around the warning: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies#externalprotocoldialogshowalwaysopencheckbox But, this …
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Why does HyperX NGenuity need 1.16 GB for my headset?!
I was looking at space used on my C drive in Windows 10 (just upgraded to 2004 build, yay!) and found something that seemed off to me.Now, it’s not unusual to …
How to get a user dump and immediate kernel dump in Windows on application crash.
Scenario – Application crashes randomly. Dump attempts have been spotty and point to a potential kernel issue. You want a dump of the process + a dump of the Windows kernel to examine.
[Guest blog] What I Learnt While Not Remembering: Technology and its use in Traumatic Brain Injury
I wrote a post for Microsoft’s Humans of IT tech community on my experiences with traumatic brain injury and working in technology. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/humans-of-it-blog/guest-blog-what-i-learnt-while-not-remembering-technology-and/ba-p/1343228 Hope you enjoy it. Jeff
Solution: Origin keeps ‘alt-tab’ing in front of my game!
Problem: You are gaming/typing/using your computer and your foreground window in Windows loses focus. Origin game client may appear briefly in front of your window, then disappear. TL/DR – in my instance, it was Star Wars Battlefront 2 (I even caught it once running Battlefront 2 (update maybe?) and it seized control of foreground 3-4 …
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