Some Notes on the Machines

• The NIC or NICs, including wireless, don’t work at all.
• The NIC or NICs, including wireless, work with static IPs, but do not do DHCP.
• When you change any NIC configuration, a popup occurs requesting a reboot.
• Offline Files won’t turn off.
• The desktop background does not stay as it is set, it appears to change by itself.

Here are two ways:

1. If IPS is in use, set it to Fast Scan. This is in Policy Manager —> Subscription Services —> Intrusion Prevention Service..
2. By default, internal certificates are not updated. If they are not up to date, they can cause slowdowns. This is in Policy Manager —> Setup —> Certificates —> Trusted CA Certificates.

The MMCSS (not sure why the extra letters) is a service in Vista (SP1+), 7, Server 2008, and Server 2008R2, which places priority on video and audio data. Here are some good tweaks. Click here for a VBS script, called MCSO, which does everything below automatically.

So we go here in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile

open the item named “NetworkThrottlingIndex”, and change it to “FFFFFFFF” (that’s eight F’s) hex. We can do the same for “SystemResponsiveness”.

Then drill further down to here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks

and you’ll see a list of folders. Each folder is a “multimedia profile” according to one reference. Each can contain the following:

Affinity        dword:00000000
Background Only        False
BackgroundPriority        dword:00000001
Clock Rate       dword:00002710
GPU Priority        dword:00000001
Priority       dword:00000001
Scheduling Category       High
SFIO Priority       High

I kept the “Window Manager” set at the default, and set the rest to the above. According to one reference it is possible to create custom multimedia profiles and use some applications’ capabilities to assign them, I have not tried this yet.

According to one reference, the above changes only activate at reboot. However, I have found that if you restart MMCSS and then Audiosrv, the same results obtain.

Addendum. Have just recently looked into Windows 10 in this. It appears to be a driver, not a service, in 10. Will be investigating further. Not sure about Audiosrv either.

Sometimes, when software won’t install, especially something like ShadowProtect SPX which includes a driver, it is because of corruption of one or more internal Windows certificates. A method recommended to some extent in a few Microsoft resources:

certutil.exe -generateSSTFromWU roots.sst
Import-Certificate -FilePath .\roots.sst -CertStoreLocation 'Cert:\LocalMachine\Root' -Verbose

This does not always work. The only thorough method currently known to this writer, is to download this:

http://media.kaspersky.com/utilities/CorporateUtilities/rootsupd.zip

which contains a binary called “rootsupd.exe”. It will unpack itself if one runs it in administrative CMD, with syntax like this:

rootsupd.exe /c /t:C:\rootsupd

It will create the folder C:\rootsupd. Then go into C:\rootsupd, and do these (administrative CMD, not Powershell for some reason!):

updroots.exe authroots.sst
updroots.exe -d delroots.sst
updroots.exe roots.sst
updroots.exe updroots.sst

rootsupd.exe was, according to Google, available by download from Microsoft, but is not at this writing.

One does not have to reboot the system after doing the above, so far it just works.

Very simple via ‘ffmpeg’, there are versions for all major platforms:

ffmpeg -i audio.mp3 -i picture.jpg out.avi

The above will produce an .AVI, and if you change out ‘avi’ for ‘mp4’, ‘mov’, et cetera, ffmpeg will follow your lead and build the indicated format. However, if you want to make a file which Facebook and Youtube will accept, you’ll have to get a lot fancier:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -framerate 2 -i input_picture.jpg -i input_audio.mp3 -c:v libx264 -preset medium -tune stillimage -crf 18 -c:a copy -shortest -pix_fmt yuv420p output_video.mkv

Sweet Lori and I have rather hard water from our city supply, lots of dissolved mineral content which until recently has gradually coated bathtub and kitchen fixtures et cetera, slowly but very steadily over time. We have had to replace three bathtub faucets, at least two shower heads, and two or three kitchen faucets, over the last twenty-plus years, and every time it was quite shocking to look in the business ends and see the light brown layering of hard-water deposit. I have looked at water softeners, but the space, effort, and expense just did not quite seem worth it, and also I have liked the taste and feel of “softened” water even less than the test of our water! I have looked at osmosis systems and other things, but always the expenses, both initial and ongoing; and with many of them, if you delay the maintenance you can put yourself and your family in some danger, and there’s no easy bypass unless you put in extra pipe or redo what you have. Bleaugh.

Yesterday (2019-12-15) though, I happened to remember that in March of this year, I had begun to try something, a simple derivative of something else I had found online which looked conceivably good. It turns out that this is working well: my best test is the business end of our kitchen sink sprayer-faucet (), and lo and behold, there is no new hard water scale, and what there is is slowly and steadily going away!:

In March that same end was getting to the point of needful replacement, there was layering, significant blockage, and related behavior. Any effective attempt to scrape, clearly would have damaged the device, but now slowly the gunk is going away! I am rather happy about the prospect of not replacing this among other potentially difficult things anytime soon!!!!

So the question is, how is this happening. Well, at first, in March, I was on the verge of buying one of the “electronic hard water descalers” which are made by quite a startling number of companies out there now. A simple Amazon or Qwant search will show you what I’m talking about. I noticed the large size of the plethora, and decided to dig in to see what these things are doing. I did not find nitty-gritty details, but I found enough to convince me that all of these things are driving electrical power or signal of some sort, through one or more coils wrapped around copper or PVC (and not iron) pipes. And the one thing which is absolutely consistent, is that doing this shall generate a magnetic field through that water, regardless of further detail.

And then I happened to blunder into two little companies, out of the huge throng, which were selling strong permanent magnets for exactly the same purpose. They were charging a good bit for those magnets.

So, thought I, permanent magnets are a whole lot simpler than electronic widgets, they need no power, they don’t burn out or short out or any of the other relevant concerns. So let’s try it, and no need to go the expensive specialist route, magnets are magnets, and powerful ones in very relevant shapes abound.

It turns out that a lot of small electric motors these days, are made using rings of “arc magnets”. I found that in our basement (which was subject to some plumbing creativity before we arrived), the city supply 3/4” is reduced quickly to 1/2”, so I bought two sets of ten of these:


from Apex Magnets.

The above picture shows eight of these arc magnets in a circle, but we need 10 to go around our standard 1/2” copper pipe. These are very strong magnets, they can easily do major harm to fingernails and even fingertips; if you don’t have strong hands, get someone with strong hands to do this for you, there is a certain amount of real danger. These are very strong.

And here is how our sets look in place:

Most house supply pipe is 3/4”, more of these will be indicated for this. The results are most happy over here! I am likely to get more, so I can put them on the street-side of the house valve, that should keep the scaling out of that valve. I’ll be looking for other arc magnets sized to hug 3/4” pipe better, too.

This command, run from one domain controller, replicates to all of the others set up for this:

repadmin /syncall /AdeP

When you encounter a user account that spins forever trying to sign in on a computer that already has a local copy of their profile, here is a few steps to resolve the issues quickly without either data loss or the need to create a new Windows profile:

1. Sign in on an account with Local Administrator rights
2. Navigate to “C:\Users”
3. Locate the profile folder of the user unable to sign in.
4. Rename the folder (Usually I add “.old”)
5. Sign out
6. Sign in as the user who’s profile has not been working
7. While signed in on this temporary profile, navigate back to “C:\Users”
8. Rename their profile folder back to what it was originally
9. Sign out
10. You should now be able to sign in normally to that user with their profile intact.

Contributed by the excellent Joe Busby.

If your Active Directory dates back to Server 2003, you may have “Internet Explorer Maintenance” items in GPO. These are obsolete IE control specifications which can not be edited on newer servers. To delete these items:

support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2722241/policy-reporting-tools-indicate-empty-internet-explorer-maintenance-po

Sometimes, StorageCraft ShadowProtect retention fails. One cause of this, is a corrupt database. There is no such warning in logs. The way to confirm, is to stop the ShadowProtect service, delete or rename SPX.DB3 located here:

%ProgramData%\StorageCraft\SPX

to SPX.SP3.OLD, restart the service, recreate both destination and job settings, and test. If the retention policy works, you’ve fixed it. Interestingly enough, when this works, it often will not need manual cleanup of the destination folder, but will take care of much or all of the cleanup of old chains automatically. Does not always happen however.