Windows 11 and Drive Encryption

Windows 11 is terrible. And that is probably too kind. One of the more serious problems with Windows 11 is the foolish idea to encrypt everybody’s hard drive by default. This is a dumb dumb dumb idea. You almost certainly don’t have anything that you must keep secret. With you hard drive encrypted, if your computer goes bad, it can be very difficult to recover the files. But there is another serious flaw with drive encryption that can cause you to lose all your files. If the computer restarts while an encryption/decryption is in progress, it can make your files unrecoverable. Sadly, Windows Update is too dumb to know when an encryption/decryption is happening, so it will install updates and restart without your permission. This problem is almost certain to happen if one of the updates applies to the BIOS/UEFI.

There is a faster and safer way to decrypt your hard drive. These are the steps:

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Windows 11

I have just bought a new laptop just so I can experiment with Windows 11. I eventually settled on the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Generation 6. I chose this one only because of the screen. It has a 16″ screen (instead of the standard 15.6″ screen on laptops) that is Dolby Vision certified. I thought about some with an OLED screen, but you have to be careful with image burn-in for those screens. This laptop was on sale and I had a coupon. With tax, I paid $256 less than the MSRP (which doesn’t include tax). And even better, it shipped from Durham so I got it the next day! (I always thought it was funny that Lenovo, a Chinese company, still builds computers in North Carolina but HP and Dell, American companies, build most of their computers in China.)

These are my experiences with Windows 11. I am going to save you some time and sum up my experiences so far with this statement: overall, Windows 11 is even worse than Windows 10.

This post will be periodically updated. Content may change.

Task Host Is Stopping Background Tasks

There is a message you may get when you are restarting or shutting down Windows that is preventing the computer from automatically restarting. It might also prevent the computer from booting too. It will say:

Task Host Window
Task Host is stopping background tasks. (\Microsoft\Windows\Plug and Play\Device Install Reboot Required )

This is the result of some hardware that is either defective or not fully compatible with Windows. You need to isolate which one is the problem. Try the USB devices one at a time first. And if that doesn’t work, try the internal hardware. Once you find isolate the defective or incompatible device, leave it disconnected. If it is a USB device, you may still be able to use it, but you can only connect it when you need too and disconnect when you are done. If you are using Windows 10, the device may be compatible with an earlier version of it.

Upcoming Windows 11

For a long time we were told that Windows 10 would the last Windows version ever. That turned out to be a lie. In late June, Microsoft announced there would be a Windows 11.

This post will be updated periodically until Windows 11 becomes mainstream. Eventually, it will be deleted and replaced with a page about Windows 11.

Windows Freezes For Half-Second

Here is a problem that happened to a customer. Windows would freeze for a half-second then unfreeze for a few seconds, and repeat forever. It would not freeze in safe mode. Disabling or uninstalling the video card driver fixed the problem, but that caused other problems. This was a HP all-in-one. The fix was to update the BIOS (actually the UEFI). After a BIOS update, the problem was fixed. I would also disconnect the internet and do a clean install of the video card driver. You have to disconnect the internet because Microsoft thinks they know better than you and will try to reinstall the video card driver.

Some other websites mentioned that you need to update the video card driver to fix this problem. I actually did that first. But it didn’t fix the problem. On a hunch, I tried updating the BIOS. Since this computer came with Windows 8.1, on HP’s website I had to select Windows 8.1 as the OS before the BIOS updates appeared. (P.S. I do realize it really is an UEFI, but the HP website still calls it the BIOS.)