Laptop System Fan Failure

I had a HP laptop that was giving a system fan failure message on boot. The service code from HP was 90B, but related codes on HP’s website show it might also be a 900, 909, 90A, and 90F code. The CPU fan would spin up and down constantly and the CPU speed was capped at a very low speed. This made the laptop very slow.

I fixed this by disconnecting the fan and hard drive, turning on the notebook computer, then turning it off, and re-connecting the fan and hard drive. After doing that, everything worked just fine. This simple fix might work for other laptop computers.

There are some others things I recommend doing while you are doing all this.

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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.

HP Printer is Very Slow

Here is a problem that affects some HP printers. I can confirm that it affects the OfficeJet 3830 series. It appears that it only affects printers with two ink cartridges. The printer does a sweep, pauses for about 15 seconds, does the next sweep, pauses for about 15 seconds, and so on.

The problem with the printer is that one ink cartridge is bad. You need to remove one and test the printer in single cartridge mode. If the printer is fast again, you found your bad cartridge. If that doesn’t work, remove the other ink cartridge and return the first one. The printer should now be fast. If not, you will need to try again with a fresh cartridge, either color or black. If it still very slow, chances are good the problem is too expensive to fix.

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 Recovery Drive Does Not Work With NVMe drives

This is a bug that is affecting the most recent versions of Windows 10. I don’t know which versions, except that I can confirm it affects 2004 and 20H2 versions. If you create a recovery drive within Windows, you cannot use it to recover to M.2 NVMe drive. When you boot to the USB recovery drive, the option “Recover from a drive” is missing. This is a bug Microsoft is aware of.

If you buy a computer with a traditional hard drive (for a discount) and want to re-install Windows on a 5-year warranty NVMe drive, your only option right now is a fresh install. That actually might be a good thing so that you can avoid all the bloat pre-installed on a computer.

When I get a chance, I will try to downgrade the Windows 10 version to see if this will fix the problem.

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.)

What Are Cookies?

I know many of my customers keep asking me “What are cookies?” So, I am going to create this blog post to answer that and to help you understand.

Cookies are small files with a few characters that website can create. Each individual cookie has a name and a website identification. Each individual cookie also has an expiration date that can be whatever the website wants it to be. Cookies can be set to expire as soon as you leave the website. After the cookie expires, the web browser automatically deletes it. A cookie can only be created if your web browser accesses a website. For instance, facebook.com cannot create a cookie on your computer unless you go to facebook.com or unless the page you are viewing gets data from facebook.com.

1st party cookies are those created by the website you actually visit. 3rd party cookies are those created by websites which are accessed by the website you are on. Many, but not all, 3rd party cookies are created by advertisers.

It is important to remember that websites cannot access cookies for different websites.  For instance, the website facebook.com cannot view the cookies that google.com created.

Shrinking a Virtual Hard Drive Image

I have a QNap NAS with a virtual Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials on it. I use this virtual machine only as a backup. Recently I had a need to shrink, or compact, the virtual hard drive image file on it. I found this board post that described a way to do this. But it seemed overly complicated. And for me it would require a hard drive larger than 2 TB to do it. The only hard drive I had that large was in the NAS itself. So I needed a better way. This is the steps I used for my QNap virtual machine, which is based QEMU. The steps should work with any virtual machine, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VirtualBox, and Synology’s virtual machine. These steps should only be used if there is no other easy way to shrink the virtual hard drive image.

Xerox WorkCentre Printer No Longer Scans to Email

Here is a problem that affect some Xerox printers, especially older Xerox WorkCentre printers. You update your internet settings, and suddenly scan to email does not work anymore. You’ve updated your SMTP settings and are absolutely sure it is correct. It turns out, this is a simple DNS problem. If any of your DNS servers is in the range of 0.0.0.0 to 1.1.1.1, scan to email won’t work. So if you set your router’s DNS servers to Cloudfare’s DNS server of 1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1, it will mess up the Xerox scan to email feature. You can assign a static IP and DNS in the printer manually, or you could just use your ISP’s default DNS servers in your router.