Stefan Helander

Windows 10 desktop disappeared

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A Windows 10 user contacted me because the desktop had disappeared.

The first thing to check is if Windows is in “Tablet mode” which disables the desktop.

  • Go to the Control panel
  • Search for “tablet” and click on “Table mode settings”
  • In the “When I sign in” change from “Use the apropriate mode for my hardware” to “Use desktop mode”
  • Log out and log back in again

If this doesn’t help the user profile might have become broken. In this case, the solution is (description below is just short notes taken from my memory):

  • Go to the Control panel and select accounts
  • Create a new account
  • Using a user with administrative rights, copy the content from the users folders like desktop, documents etc to the new user’s folder.
  • Log in using the new user
Ubuntu DesktopCanonical Ltd
Stefan Helander

Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04 Unity, Dash and Launcher missing

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If you end up missing the menu etc in Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04, i.e. you only see the desktop but nothing more. You can’t even restart the machine.

It can be resolved like this:

  • Right click on the desktop and select “Start a new terminal”
  • In the terminal window run the following commands;
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity
    sudo shutdown -r now

 

PrestaShop
Stefan Helander

Random product added to cart along with selected product in PrestaShop [solved]

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Using PrestaShop 1.6.1.18, this was an older shop that had been offline for a couple of years. It had been upgraded in steps from PrestaShop 1.4 via 1.5 to 1.6. While testing it before relaunch of the shop a problem was discovered. Sometimes when adding a product to the shopping cart, another random product was added. When testing the shop in incognito/private mode this happened more frequent.

It turned out to be a discrepancy between cart ID:s in the two tables ps_cart and ps_cart_product.

Solution:

  1. Use phpMyAdmin or similar to open your PrestaShop database.
  2. Go to the table ps_cart_product, make sure it is ordered by the id_cart column and go to the last page.
  3. Make a note of the highest id_cart value.
  4. Go to the table ps_cart, make sure it is ordered by the id_cart column and go to the last page.
  5. Compare this table’s highest id_cart value with the one you found in ps_cart_product. It will probably be a lower number and this is what is causing the problem. When a visitor puts something in a cart, a new row is created in ps_cart with id_cart value auto incremented but there is already a row in ps_cart_product with this id_cart value from a previous visitor.
  6. Add a new row to ps_cart and in the id_cart field enter the number of the highest value you found in ps_cart_product. Then save the row.
  7. You will probably see some error message about invalid or missing fields but that will be ok as long as the row is saved.