This computer had an incredible amount of Ethernet Adapters listed! Something I've never seen before.. As being confronted with IT issues almost daily there are sometimes cases you haven´t seen in years or you aren´t sure if you have seen them at all! Recently I was asked to check a Danish Windows 10 laptop because despite having WiFi connection the Internet browser couldn´t open any more sites and video streams stopped working.
I checked the network adapters and was quite surprised! There were Ethernet Adapter numbered until 79! And sometimes even numbers were missing and the user had no idea about that! Then I went to the Device Manager to check and "TAP-Win32 Adapter Adapter OAS #22" was one of the many examples I found there. And the list almost did not stop flashing all the time... Anyway, I had to delete them all manually. All at once didn´t work. Once that was done the Internet connection worked fine again. Wonder why^^. I suggest a proper virus and malware scan afterwards just to be sure there`s nothing going on anything. A bit online checks mentioned it could might be through some VPN software or even an Office KMS activation...
I recently had a situation where the 2013 Office Suite was unable to be activated. But then I found a great solution... It was within a bigger environment where a KMS server is active. Usually the activation should run just by plugging your computer into the network for having a connection with the domain. But there was one case where it didn't work once the user was in the company for a few hours. The user was even working remotely via VPN. But I remember that there was a command to manually force your Office activation through a command. Was a long time ago and I had to look it up. It's this one (run as admin):
Just make sure that you select the correct path, because it's depending on your Office version and operating system. It's also working with Office14 (version 2010), but not with Office 2007 (Office12). After you executed this vbs script the confirmation that Office was activated appeared pretty quickly after that. Just make sure you are executing this Visual Basic Script while every program of the Office Suite is closed. Is better for the success of the process. In my case it was quite efficient and it avoided that the user had to return to the office again and could return working from remote.
You upgraded to Windows 10 and your DVD/Bluray drive is gone? It can become difficult or even impossible... In my case it's about the Matshita Bluray drive called 'UJ 225S' in a Medion Akoya P8610. Initially sold with Windows Vista was the system later upgraded to Windows 7. So it's already a few years old. Last year there was the possibility to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. The owner of that laptop did it, but he later noticed that his Bluray drive wasn't available anymore. Interestingly in the BIOS it's still there and you can even boot from it. Using a current live Linux distribution to boot you can still see in the device overview.
So what can you do from here? A helpful solution which I've seen quite often and it apparently solved the issue in many cases is the following: 1) Go to regedit and select the following path:
3) Create a new DWORD in Controller0 called EnumDevice1
4) Change the value of EnumDevice1 to 1
5) Restart your computer and your DVD/Bluray device should be back...
BUT IT DIDN'T WORKED!
I found other suggestions to update the BIOS to version M1.04, but the BIOS was already running with the version M1.08. So that wouldn't make real sense...
ANOTHER IDEA: CHIPSET DRIVER
Maybe it's an idea to update the chipset driver? But there are no official Windows 10 chipset drivers available. You 'just' find the ones for Windows 7. And if you try them with your Windows 10 Medion Akoya laptop... you'll end up having a bluescreen.
Better use system recovery and go back to a date before you tried that. CONCLUSION Basically it's something you end up nowhere. Either go back to Windows 7, use a Linux, use an external drive or maybe even change your optical drive completely. Too bad it's too old and not working with Windows 10, physically it's still very good.
In December a new updated version of DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 Latino Edition came out and with its new characters the game became even more awesome! How great it is I'd like to share with a few 5 vs. 5 battle I played against a friend.
'Tenkaichi 3' is despite being almost 10 years old still a fan-favourite - as I explained in another article. You can see that going on YouTube finding lots of battles with modded characters from the currently running new TV series Dragon Ball Super or even additional old ones who never made it to the official games. I tested the recent Latino Edition, where are lots of new characters included. Here's a short overview of the character selection:
Goku Black, Zamasu, their fusion, Hit, Cabba, SSJ Blue Vegetto, Future Trunks from Dragon Ball Super... it's all in it. Of course less important characters were replaced with new ones, but maybe they'll find a way to extent the amount of characters in the future.
Me and a friend are always enjoying the 5 versus 5 battles. Last time we did seven of these battles with new and old characters mixed up! Here's the result (Spoiler: I won the most of them :D).
Battle 01
Goku Black vs. Hit
Goku Black vs. Piccolo
Kid Buu vs. Piccolo
Kid Buu vs. SSJ4 Nappa
Super 17 vs. SSJ4 Nappa
Super 17 vs. Zaiko
Super 17 vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Freeza vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Vegeta (Buu Saga) vs SSJ Blue Vegeta
Battle 02
Vegeta (Buu Saga) vs. Whis
Broly vs. Whis
Freeza vs. Whis
Freeza vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Goku Black SSJ Rose vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Goku Black SSJ Rose vs. SSJ Blue Vegetto
Goku Black SSJ Rose vs. Piccolo
Goku Black SSJ Rose vs. Gine
Zamasu vs. Gine
Battle 03
SSJ2 Vegeta vs. Beerus
Kid Trunks vs. Beerus
SSJ Gotenks vs. Beerus
SSJ Gotenks vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
SSJ3 Gotenks vs. Golden Cell
Frieza vs. Golden Cell
Frieza vs. SSJ Cabba
Goku Black vs. SSJ Cabba
Goku Black vs. SSJ Future Trunks (Super)
Battle 04
Goku Black vs. SSJ4 Vegeta
Goku Black vs. SSJ Goten GT
Baby vs. SSJ Goten GT
Baby vs. Piccolo
Nova Shenron vs. Piccolo
Frieza vs. Piccolo
Frieza vs. SSJ Future Trunks (Super)
Frieza vs. SSJ4 Goku
Super 17 vs. SSJ4 Goku
Battle 05
Goku Black vs. SSJ4 Vegeta
Frieza Final Form 100% vs. SSJ4 Vegeta
Frieza Final Form 100% vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Frieza Final Form vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
SSJ2 Teen Gohan vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. SSJ Future Trunks (Super)
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. Piccolo
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. SSJ4 Goku
Battle 06
Goku Black vs. SSJ4 Pan
Goku Black vs. SSJ3 Kid Goku GT
LSSJ Broly vs. SSJ3 Kid Goku GT
SSJ4 Broly vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Kid Buu vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. Piccolo
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. Omega Shenron
Frieza Final Form 100% vs. Omega Shenron
Battle 07
Frieza vs. SSJ Blue Vegeta
Frieza vs. Piccolo
Majin Vegeta vs. Piccolo
Goku Black vs. Piccolo
Goku Black vs. SSJ4 Goku
Kid Buu vs. SSJ4 Goku
Kid Buu vs. SSJ Future Trunks Z
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. SSJ Future Trunks Z
SSJ Blue Bardock vs. Gine
These were my final battles of 2016 with the most recent mods at that time. Maybe this year I'll create my own mods after having made a bit experiences on how a few things on modding Tenkaichi 3 work - like exchanging music or downloaded characters. Let's see what 2017 brings - maybe even a new official Tenkaichi game? Better not giving up the hope and if not, there'll still be more mods!
You start your Windows 10 and your desktop is flashing, flickering or let's say just becoming black, your desktop icons are disappearing and coming again every few seconds. The only thing the might work is your task manager by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL. Everything else in the background is gone and appearing again. It all looked like this:
It's all pretty annoying. A solution to have a booting scenario without all of this could be using the Safe Mode. It might be hard to get there at all, but if you make it to go to 'Run' and type 'msconfig' you can select Safe Mode for the next restart. Within this mode I experienced none of this disturbing flashing. I often read that it's caused by the upgrade from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10. But in my case it was something else. Someone installed a certain suspicious 'driver updater' before the issue occurred. I removed the software of course, but the problem remained. I reinstalled a few drivers, but it didn't help. A malware scan with Malwarebytes Antimalware found more than 350 infections and cleaned them away, but the issue was still there. I found certain batch scripts while looking for a solution, but they didn't work either. In general this issue is caused by a specific software or driver. But you have to find it to fix it. So I reinstalled Windows 10, made the most sense since the computer only had a bit basic software installed and that was it. Saved the data, copied it back. Done. No issues anymore. The fastest and best way in cases like this.
Initially the cause wasn't clear. The computer was in some situations very slow and caused problems while agreeing admin permissions to install applications... First I was informed to take a check from remote, but that wasn't even possible. The other site of the line had problems installing TeamViewer, the computer hanged at the moment UAC popped up for agreeing admin permissions. At the moment nothing happened anymore. After the next restart the computer itself got even slower. A few spots on the taskbar didn't even work anymore. Seeing the difficult child myself, I just checked the basic stuff: Hard disk is fine, booting an alternate OS by DVD worked without issues, no malware or anything like that. But the issue got worse, at every attempt even slower!
After another test I wasn't able to start the computer anymore. The screen turned on for a moment but that was it. It remained black. Removing all drives didn't make any difference.
Ok.. so what's going on? From now it was clear it's a hardware problem. I did a BIOS reset (RTC RAM), restarted and the boot screen appeared, but unfortunately the screen froze from that moment on. I could press any key for entering Setup or changing the boot order - nothing happen. I turned off and there was the black screen again. A few other ideas:
Removing all boot devices (HDD, DVD) Booting without any RAM
Booting without graphics adapter
While doing this tests there wasn't any beeping or difference at all. The motherboard must be damaged! Else there would be any beeping alarm or a kind of warning that something's not attached.
To be sure, I ordered a new Asus M5A99X board in order to make sure it's really the issue. And I was right: I changed the board, moved the CPU, the cooler and everything else to the new motherboard and the computer started again.
But that's not the end of the story: After a successful restart the problems didn't really vanish. The Windows system was obviously damaged, too. I knew that the hard disk was ok, so I created an image of drive C and reinstalled Windows 10, basic software and updates. Now it's all working as fine as it should be. I copied all necessary files from the image back to the user folders and that was it...
I was recording a few videos recently and during the recording I could no longer press 'Stop'. Video wasn't saved properly and couldn't be played at all. But there was a *.tmp file left... Using my old Galaxy S3 mini my recording ended up with having no more space on the internal SD card and that's why the video couldn't be finalized and the phone also started rebooting afterwards.
At first, I couldn't really see if there was a temporary file or not, but the phone indeed created a 'mp4.tmp' file. From that point on I was sure I could save the video...
Some research...
At first I tried putting the file into video editing software, but no chance! Using Internet search engines you'll find a lot of software with that feature. I tested an app in Google PlayStore called 'MP4Fix': You first chose the damaged file and then another undamaged video file in order that the app can take the video header from it to repair the corrupted mp4 file.
The process was successful and then the app offered the option to 'Play' the video. It worked, it had the actual length and also the sound was working. But now the downside: If you chose 'Save' you'll get the offer to upgrade the app to 'Premium' for 3.99€. Of course that's an option and an easy an quick solution, but for me it was rather a challenge to find a free solution.
Some Windows software were using the same 'freemium' model like a software called 'Remo'. Fixing and watchng within the software works, but no free way to save or export it. Through further researching I actually saw a few times the same good solution by 'cheating a bit' while using a demo version of another repairing tool...
A little workaround...
Here's how it goes: Google for 'Video Repair tool Grau' and you'll find a demo version of that useful piece of software. The thing is that you can save 50% of your video with the free demo version! And if you cheat a bit, you can even save 100% of your video by converting 50% of two copies of your damaged file. But let's put into an order:
1) Download the tool 2) Copy your damaged file into an 'easy-to-reach' folder 3) Rename it simple (it chose just 'V1.mp4') 4) Copy 'V1.mp4' and name it 'V2.mp4'. Now you have two files with the same size.
5) Open command ('cmd') as administrator and go the folder with these two video files 6) Use this command to merge the two files:
copy/b V1.mp4 +V2.mp4
7) V1.mp4 is now twice as big as before.
8) Open the 'video repair tool'
9) Select the new 'V1.mp4' file and another reference video file from copied your phone. Click 'Scan' and the video will be created (because of the trick even in full length) in the 'repaired' folder as seen in the screenshot.
It's a quite simple workaround, but it works perfectly. My video was saved and I hope yours will be, too!
