Sunday, January 17, 2016

Some setting tweaks if your mouse appears to be dead

Starting with Windows 7 I noticed at times my mouse would stop working for a while.  I either had to unplug and plug the mouse back in, or, wait a few minutes for it to come back to life.  Windows 8 and it appears Windows 10 has the same issue.  It seems that by default Microsoft by default has 'Allow the computer to turn off this device' in power management turned on by default.


If you go to device manager, USB controllers and click on each hub.  If there is a power management setting click on that and turn off the check mark on the 'off'.



Blue tooth also has a similar setting and you may want to turn that off too.


So far it has been almost a day and the blue tooth mouse has been running without a problem.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Main machine upgraded to windows 10

After a few months of waiting and waiting for the bugs to show up & get fixed I finally upgraded my Dell laptop from Win8.1 to Win10.  Since Windows 8.0 is not being supported the writing is on the wall for Windows 8.1.  I figure this is a good time as the 'free' upgrade is still available and the initial bugs should have had a chance to get fixed.

Before I did the upgrade I did a full backup of every file I had on the laptop just-in-case.  The upgrade itself took about an hour and it looks good so far.  The upgrade preserved my settings, but, there are still a few tweaks to go for privacy.

One of the first things I did was to make Cortana an icon on my desktop bar at the bottom, I just don't want it hogging valuable real estate.  The second was to make Firefox the default browser as I never use IE (now Edge).  My anti-virus (Avast) still runs without issue and no glitches so far.

Over the next few days I will be stress testing the upgrade by playing my favorite on-line game (Old school Runescape), my office suite (LibreOffice), email (Thunderbird) and graphics (GIMP & Irfanview), scanner (older model Epson) and lastly my printers (wired laser & wi-fi inkjet).


Update 2016/02/13

True color doesn't work properly.  It is Windows 8.1 only.  First step is to turn autostart off, then true color off.  If you don't do it that way it can't be turned off at start-up.