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I had the “Cold starts fail, but warm starts succeed” problem for a while.

The disks weren’t the problem, it was either the video adapter or the memory cards. I pulled them out and re-seated them and the problems went away. I suspect it was the video adapter.

FWIW I use Macrium Reflect Free for system backup/restore and Goodsynch Pro for data backup/restore. Been using that combo for the past several years.

nw

I got fed-up with Firefox telling me flash had crashed – so I disabled the wretched thing

45681-Capture

Guess what – now the videos at BBC, Torygraph etc are working – go figure :confused:

NW

Maybe there’s a Firefox extension that will fire Chrome with current url :rolleyes:

There are such things, Open in Chrome and Open in Edge – I’ll use the Edge one (it works), as I’m sometimes doing other things in Chrome, but I thought of another scenario where I can use Open in Chrome.

I’m amazed at how often I think — “I wonder if there’s a gadget that does XXX” — and 30 secs later I have an XXX gadget.

NW

Some things to try:
Is flash active – tools – Add-ons
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/adobe-flash-protected-mode-firefox?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=flash-protected-mode-settings

Mark

Ah-ha – I’d tried flipping that setting off, but I didn’t restart Firefox with it off – when I did it solved the problem :rolleyes:

I’ll report that fact to Adobe and Mozilla. I don’t want to run with it off.

But why do that work on Firefox 48 and not Firefox 49 both with latest Flash. And why do they work with the Flash support built into Chrome and Edge. That suggests its a problem with Firefox.

Flash works in my Firefox 49.0.1. Maybe it is a corrupt installation of Firefox.

Mark[/QUOTE]
I suspect you’re right.

I had a problem with Firefox (not with Flash) several years ago, that I could only resolve by reinstalling and reconfiguring it and all the extensions.

I’ll wait for Firefox 50 and see what happens. I have a workaround – if I really have to see a BBC or Torygraph video I can do it on Chrome or Edge.

Maybe there’s a Firefox extension that will fire Chrome with current url :rolleyes:

Thanks for your help.

Fire up your computer in normal mode.
Download Flash with Firefox. Make sure you un-tick the “optional” software that Adobe attempt to foist on you.
Go to the folder where you have downloaded the update.
Close Firefox. This is essential.
Run the update.

Some sites use HTML5 and don’t require flash. Maybe it’s those that are working.

cheers, Paul

I’ve done all that and more, did you not read mledman’s post and my responses?

I suspect you’re right, the sites whose videos work are using HTML5, the others are still using Flash. But why do that work on Firefox 48 and not Firefox 49 both with latest Flash. And why do they work with the Flash support built into Chrome and Edge. That suggests its a problem with Firefox. I might uniinstall and reinstall it tomorrow, the reconfiguring of the extensions is a pain – my fault for having too many 🙁

NW

😮 Just after I posted I realised when I tried to install in Safe Mode I was probably in No Network mode, rebooted into Safe Mode with Network and it installed in a few seconds

But it has not solved the problem, still have some sites – not working, I could understand if it was one or two odd sites, I’d blame them. But the BBC, CNN, SMH, UK Telegraph etc are main stream. But so are AJ , Guardian, WaPo, and NYT and they’re fine. And facebook videos are also OK :confused:

And the sites that don’t work with Firefox 49. work with Firefox 48.

Very odd. I have deferred Windows 10 AU, maybe that will fix it – although I’ve no idea why it should 🙂

Oh, yes – I also tried removing all cookies.

NW

Chrome and Edge have flash built into their browsers. Firefox uses a plugin. You could try uninstalling flash, https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html , reboot, then reinstall.

Mark

Thanks Mark – but, now it won’t install, been sitting there for 30 minutes – “Installation will begin shortly”. It wouldn’t install in safe mode

Previously it wasn’t all sites that flash wouldn’t work, eg BBC & CNN gave problems, WaPo and AJ were OK – now of course nothing &^%$* works.

I’m sending this from Chrome –

NW

IMO Link Shell Extension is the best solution for links of all kinds – junctions, symbolic links, mount points and hardlinks

I’ve been using LSE extensively for well over a decade (since Win 2000), can’t recall any significant problems over that time. I don’t use all of its features. e.g. DeLorean Copy.

nw

On the Nondestructive Reinstall of Win7 SP1, would it not be worth the time to make a slipstream version of Win7 SP1 and try a nondestructive reinstall that way?

I did this for XP and Win7 to maintain our office computers more easily.

I downloaded an Win7 SP1 slipstream ISO from Microsoft, I’ve used it several times since to rebuild ‘broken’ Win 7 systems.

nw

If you right click the MWB tray icon right after the notify message pops you’ll have an option to add the Site name/IP Address to MBs exclusion list. That should stop MWB popping the message every the time a particular IP address rears its ugly head.

NW

Rather than using the Task Manager for controlling what loads at boot up time, I would strongly suggest using the free Windows Sysinternals “Autoruns” program ( link: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx ).

The problem I have with Task Manager is once you stop a process, it may not show up again until your have that process running.

With Autoruns, the process stays in the list, If you uncheck it and something breaks, you can just reopen Autoruns and re-check it!

I suspect you’re looking at Task Manager from Windows 7 or earlier – later versions of Task Manager have the same ability to disable/enable tasks as autoruns. But what its doesn’t have, and IIRC nor does autoruns; is any control over shell extensions or tasks scheduled to run at startup – Piriforms CCleaner has both.

As well as using these tools to reduce startup times, the ability to disable tasks is very useful when trouble shooting.

Many programs won’t start on demand, so if you want them you either have to put them in Startup, or start them manually when their hot key doesn’t work, or the mouse scroll wheel doesn’t do what it ought, or the markup doesn’t get scrubbed when something is copied to clipboard… et cetera, et cetera. I have about a dozen such programs in my tray right now.

Re build your own or buy – Dell Alienware products can be customised, I have two of them and I don’t play games, one is almost 5 years old and totally trouble free, the other is a recently bought Alpha.

nw

I use Evernote for this – select what to save, click the elephant, click Save, tag the resultant EN Note as ‘Windows Secrets’, copy & paste Newsletter number and date into Note Title. Done.

If I wanted an EN Note as a PDF I would print the EN Note to a PDF printer – not that I ever have.

For some inexplicable reason, in Firefox, I cannot avoid selecting the line before Newsletter number and date (it’s the title of the first item) hence the cut and paste step. Maybe in Chrome I could, but for various reasons I keep Chrome free of extensions. Firefox is my goto browser.

Would it not be more logical if WS made the ‘title’ of the newsletter page the newsletter number and date, rather than the title of the first item. Probably, but…

NW

I should not have to do this. I paid for an e-mail newsletter and I am most definately not getting that now.

What we’re getting isn’t a Newsletter it’s what’s commonly called a Digest – one might have thought that an IT Publishing outfit would know that.

I like to save Newsletters to my tablet and read off line. Google hasn’t wi-fied my local riverbank nor is there a phone signal. That’s why I like to read there – no interrupts. Now I have to f**t-a**e around an get the full text of the ‘newsletter’ up on my browser and snip it to something like ON or EN and force it to synch to the cloud, then synch that to my tablet.

What took 1 minute now takes at least 5, and many more keystrokes, screen taps and mouse clicks and waits.

Technology ecosystems should make life simpler, but the geeks seemed determined to make it more complex.

BR

File locking is controlled by the OS, not by applications.

Programmer here – file locks are done by the OS at the request of the application – read the link in my previous post

Word 2007

[INDENT]I would open and edit mytext.docx in Word 2007, whilst it was unsaved and open I would to open the same file in my program (semantic analysis) – the open would fail with an OS error code indicating the file was locked – I would look aside and see I did indeed have the file open in Word and what’s more I hadn’t saved my changes. So, either I would save and close the file in Word and hit Retry in my program, or I would Cancel my program and finish off whatever I was doing in Word and run my program once I saved and closed the file in Word.[/INDENT]

Word 2010

[INDENT]I open and edit mytext.docx in Word 2010, whilst it is open I open the same file in my program. The file opens without an OS error code indicating the file is locked. Consequently my program reads the previously saved version, produces the same results as last time I ran it and I’m left scratching my head :confused:

I would like Word 2010 to lock the file as its predecessor did. It’s amazing that MS can introduce convoluted, intrusive mechanisms such UAC and Smartscreen to prevent users shooting themselves in the foot – yet get rid of something that’s been doing just that since the 1960’s (PDP/8, OS360)[/INDENT]

BTW a DOCX is a zip, inside they look like this

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Note its mainly XML (actually it’s all XML those .rel files are XML under the covers) – what’s XML suitable for:- not human consumption, that’s for sure; but it’s excellent computer software fodder, and there’s an abundance of XML parsers to help digest it. The XML is compliant with the ISO/IEC OOXML standards.

nw

I use a defunct program from Prismatic Software called Dup Detector – it analyses the content of the images, in terms of edges, gradients, colours, luminance etc – so it can find crops, mirrors, flips, greyscale copies. It comes with an excellent CHM help manual

Most modern equivalent programs (like Dupguru) are in the ‘dumb it down’ camp. Dup Detector is in the ‘you may learn something’ camp. I first used on Windows 2000 I’m now using on Windows 10/1511.

nw