Sometimes it can be handy to create virtual com port pairs or virtual null modem using software. There are several solutions available, free and paid. The commercial softwares do work but with prices like 130 USD it is a bit out of range for a hobby project.
However, I found a project called com0com which is free. This software works well with Windows 10, both 32 and 64-bit versions available.
Your dropbox is full and the amount of space you are using shown in the app or web interface does not correspond to the size of the Dropbox folder on your computer. You are not using selective syncing, i.e. all folders in the Dropbox cloud should be equal to the size of the Dropbox folder on your computer.
The reason might be you are using an external USB-drive on your computer.
When external USB-drives are connected, Dropbox asks if they should be backed up. If you selected yes, the content of the USB drive is copied to Dropbox cloud and occupies your space. If this was not the intention (for example if the external drive contains a backup copy of your files in the Dropbox folder), remove the external drive from the Dropbox folder.
If you’ve tried the Windows 10 Enterprise Evaluation and decide to go on and buy the full version, Microsoft doesn’t support a simple way of just converting or upgrading.
This is how you do it.
You will need:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
In Windows 10 the user is asked to set a PIN-code for login instead of password. At login, the user can manually switch to password login each time. To completely disable PIN-code login, which also will disable fingerprint and face recognition login, do as follows:
Don’t worry, if you want to enable it again you just follow the same steps but choose to install PIN.
When trying to install Samsung Kies 3 on a Windows 10 machine, the error message “Side by side configuration is incorrect” was displayed.
The reason to this error is that the Visual C++ 2008 runtime is not installed.
To solve the problem you need to download and install Microsoft Visual C++ 2008.
Download it from these links (directly from Microsoft), install them and then retry the Kies installation:
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.
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):
With Microsoft Windows 10 Fall Creators update many users have ran into problems updating becuase their computer was installed with a too small EFI partition (100 MB). I’d consider this a warranty issue with the computer supplier, becuase obviously the computer wasn’t Windows 10 ready. The problem is that the hardware supplier will happily take your machine in, erase it and factory install it with a new Windows 10 image with a bigger EFI, but you will lose all your data.
A solution would of cause to make a backup and let them erase the machine but some of my clients have computers that will take 1-2 work days to reinstall and configure all software. So resizing the EFI is preferred.
This guide shows a simple way to do it with EaseUS partition master (requires to buy a license, but 50-60 usd is worth it if I can save 1-2 days of work). The problem is that in my case it wasn’t so simple as the guide shows, because there were no unallocated space after the EFI partition and the 16 MB MSR partition following it wasn’t possible to move. The layout looked like this (simplified):
EFI-partition -> 16 MB MSR partition (file system type “Other”) -> circa 500 GB NTFS Windows partition (C:)
This is how I solved it using EaseUS partition master:
I had retrieved a harddisk out of a broken laptop containing Windows 10 in order to retrieve some files from it. The harddisk had been removed from the broken laptop and then installed in a HDD enclosure with USB connection. When I connected it to a Windows computer I could browse the Users folder but clicking on a user’s folder displayed a message that I didn’t have permissions to open it unless I continued as administrator. After the progress bar had went to 100%, I still couldn’t access the folder.
Instead I connected it to a Linux/Ubuntu computer and now the message “The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the `ro` mount option.” was displayed when connected. The original laptop had been in a hibernate state when it broke which locks the filesystem.
It turned out that the easiest solution was to connect the USB harddrive to a laptop and press F10 to select boot device during boot up (the key might be different depending on brand, on my Samsing it was F10). I selected the USB harddisk and it booted after fixing the disk automatically. I was actually a bit hesitant to do this because I know from earlier Windows version that it usually was a hopeless task to boot on a harddisk that had been moved from one host computer to another. In Windows 10 it looks like they have fixed this.
I could log in to Windows as the original user and retrieve the files. After shutting it down in a controlled manner, it was also possible to mount the disk in Linux/Ubuntu..
In Windows 7. 8 or 10 Contacts there is only a possibility to import contacts in CSV format. If you have your contacts in VCF files you need to use Windows Live mail program in order to import them.
First of all, if you have your contacts in many different VCF files it can be convenient to combine them into one single file. That way you can import one file instead of thousands. This post describes how to combine them.
USB memory sticks or external disks that has been formatted on a Mac might not be readable if you connect it to a Windows computer. The reason is that the Mac has formatted it using a file system unknown by Windows.
To read the disk you can use the free tool hfsexplorer.
hfsexlorer