Windows 10 – “Automatic Repair” and Keyboard and Mouse aren’t responding

May 28th, 2024

A quick blog post to keep this site alive. LOL.

On an ancient computer we have attached to a TV, we had an issue, and I managed to get it into a reboot loop where it would try to go to repair mode, with “Automatic Repair” on the screen and the options “Restore” and “Cancel” (or something… I really should have written it down). Which is great, HOWEVER, neither my keyboard or mouse were able to select either of the two options on the screen. I tried a variety of keyboards, USB ports, and more.

Anyway, my searches on Google turned up some threads of people with similar issues.

After much trial and error, I disabled everything I could in the BIOS. And it worked! I was able to access the advanced repair options, including eventually getting into Safe Mode, where fortunately, I had a System Restore point that actually worked.

I think the most likely culprit was switching from the dedicated GPU to the IGP from the motherboard. Though, to be fair, I don’t really know. I also disabled on board audio, NIC, etc.

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Dell Touchpad Losing Multitouch After Second User Logs In

January 7th, 2022

Happy 2022! This dear old blog is long overdue for a theme update, eh?

My aging Dell E5550 has been losing the multitouch features (i.e. two finger scrolling in web browsers!) when a second person borrows my laptop (for work from home!).

This is in Windows 10. It may or may not apply to other laptops from Dell or other laptops that use the same OEM Touchpad from Alps Alpine.

There were some random webpage references to try specific older versions of the touchpad driver. I tried a couple upgrades and downgrades of the driver, but it didn’t seem to work.

So… I came up with a workaround. I created a little command script that kills 5 relevant processes and restarts them. It must be run with administrator privileges. Also… it’s probable that not all 5 are required to be restarted, but I didn’t feel like triaging it any further.

I’m doing this quick post because 1) it took way too long for me to spend fixing this stupid issue, and hopefully it helps someone else, 2) this blog has been silent for too long anyway.

Copy the code block below into a new “.cmd” file. And run it. Or make a shortcut and drag that shortcut into your Start Menu for easier access. Enjoy!

REM MUST RUN AS ADMIN! (In Advanced options of a short cut in Start Menu there is an Administrator permissions checkbox)
REM Workaround to fix TouchPad multi-touch when multiple users log in.
REM By Leonard Chan, Perceptus Solutioins Inc., www.perceptus.ca

REM 2022-01-04

taskkill /IM Apoint.exe
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

taskkill /IM ApntEx.exe
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

taskkill /IM ApMsgFwd.exe
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

REM This one needs more permissions for some reason.
taskkill /F /IM HidMonitorSvc.exe
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

taskkill /IM hidfind.exe
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

REM double quotes needed for optional title parameter if second parameter has quotes.
start "" "C:\Program Files\DellTPad\Apoint.exe"
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

start "" "C:\Program Files\DellTPad\ApntEx.exe"
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

start "" "C:\Program Files\DellTPad\ApMsgFwd.exe"
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

start "" "C:\Program Files\DellTPad\HidMonitorSvc.exe"
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

start "" "C:\Program Files\DellTPad\hidfind.exe"
PING -n 3 127.0.0.1>nul

ECHO Auto closing in about 60 seconds...
PING -n 60 127.0.0.1>nul

REM PAUSE

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Outlook Desktop Problem with Yahoo Email – Codes 0x800CCC0f and 0x800cc0e

February 24th, 2021

I had a random problem come up. A user who has been using Outlook Deskotop software (relatively recent, I think Outlook 2019), to access Yahoo via IMAP and SMTP.

It had worked fine for months and months until yesterday. The errors came with the codes 0x800CCC0f and 0x800cc0e.

For some reason the first results in my Google searches didn’t get me the fix – it took way longer than it should have to find out that Yahoo, in late 2020 started phasing in mandatory app passwords. See below for how to generate an app password in the Yahoo web interface, and then pop that into your IMAP or whatever email client.

Using Yahoo and AOL accounts in Outlook

It’s a good change, I assume it means that a compromised plain text password on one device can be “voided” without having to update passwords on other devices.

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Retired the Original Perceptus Virtual Private Server Today

January 18th, 2021

After many years of procrastination, we finally turned off the original VPS.

We had some straggling old website sitting on there. Most things, including this blog, had migrated off years ago. It was up since 2003!

It had been migrated by the vendor to new platforms and new data centers at least a couple times, and had been up sized at least a couple times too. IIRC, it started with a whopping 64MB of RAM allocation (which was actually pretty good at the time!), it ended at 1GB. The price dropped a bit over the years as well.

One less piece of technical debt on the books. One more piece of nostalgia.

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Slow Disk Access with Dell Latitude E5550 in Windows 10 – Hopefully Resolved

January 15th, 2021

A quick note here on what I hope is a fix to this laptop that has been annoying me ever since I did the free upgrade to Windows 10 a couple years ago.

This laptop ran extremely well for me under Windows 7. After the upgrade to Windows 10, I would get occasional cases where the hard drive would slow to a crawl for minutes at a time. Usually, it would recover, but, sometimes I would get a BSOD, and other times I would give up and do a manual hard power-off (not recommended!). It generally correlated to the amount of disk access at any given time, more disk use, more likely to get hung up.

The hard drive in question is a 1TB Seagate SHDD (one of those drives with an 8GB Flash “cache” on spinning rust) – this was bought at a time when 1TB SSD’s would have been over $300. It’s possible that I manually upgraded Intel Rapid Store drivers at some point.

Over time this got worse, but, I suspect this is because web pages have become ever more complex – and web browsing, with easily 20 or 30 tabs at a time is very common for me. For the last couple weeks, I was getting complete failures every other day, and minute long pauses every few hours.

I uninstalled many miscellaneous software items I no longer use, or never used. I moved my web browser caches and profiles to the SD Card (which has been great, and deserves it’s own blog post) but didn’t stop the problems. I did NOT re-install – that’s far too much work on my day to day computer to do on a whim.

In the end (fingers crossed), what seems to have worked for the last few days is to switch the hard drive from RAID to ACHI mode in the BIOS. WARNING: Windows 10 will freak out, you need to get Safe Mode started for the drivers to reconfigure for this change.

Some combination of search terms in Google lead me to this thread: https://superuser.com/questions/1152901/hard-disk-suddenly-is-extremely-slow

That lead to this interesting thread here on WHY most Dell laptops of this era had the disks configured to RAID mode: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/Pros-Cons-AHCI-vs-Raid-On-XPS13-9300-NVMe/td-p/7636984

For many people, it’s better to follow this to force Windows into Safe Mode on the first reboot after making the BIOS change, but I just waited for Windows 10 to freak out, and then worked my way through prompts to Safe Mode.

UPDATE: I’m not 100% sure this worked. I had stupid crawling HDD access again. I am now suspicious of a slow memory leak that slowly grows the pagefile.

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