Replies

If you go into Bios, there should be a setting that enables USB Legacy mode. This should allow your USB keyboard to function before boot completion.

Hi Jerry.. Thanks for that but I found the problem was that I had the keyboard plugged into a USB 2.0 powered Hub rather than directly into the computers two “Top” USB ports in the back of the machine. This has now allowed me to use the USB keyboard

Try a clean boot and then a restart. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Jerry

Thanks Jerry, but I’ve already tried that but no joy as the same thing happens :huh:

Any other ideas? Anyone? :confused:

Best..

Andy

Further to the above, I’ve just discovered that if I power the machine down rather than “Start Orb > Restart”, then it will always boot up without issue.

The problem only occurs if the machine is rebooted via Start Orb > Restart. It does this consistently, every single time without fail.

I’ve also tried turning on “Msconfig > Boot > Boot Log” and doing two restarts, one by restarting from Windows, one by powering down and switching on. I saved the log from both attempts and so far as I can see, they’re identical and give no hint as to why the machine hangs when it’s restarted and not when it’s powered off and then powered back on again.

Finally, I tried (via Msconfig > Boot > Safe Boot) to boot into Safe mode and have the exact same issue if the machine is restarted rather than powered down and powered back on again.

This is quite bizarre and certainly something I’ve never struck before.

Hopefully someone who has struck a similar issue before can offer a few pointers.

Cheers..

Attached is a list of emails to try. But the actual lists are 50,000+ emails.

didadocom,

May I suggest removing the attachment now that your problem is resolved? I’m assuming all the emails in your “emails.txt” are valid, in which case any forum visitor who might be a spammer would love to get hold of list like that.

Just a thought

Cheers…

Well it’s been a whole day now and no more phantom drive mappings. Fixing the broken link to the excel spreadsheet on the Server seems to have fixed the problem.

Thanks for prompting me to look at that page again Bruce

Cheers…

Do the mappings persist after a re-boot?
Check the registry for drive mappings: HKEY_USERSuser_nameNetwork

Hi Paul.. yes the mapping persist appearing after a re-boot. No such registry path that you listed exists here though. (?)

I did find “HKEY_USERSS-1-5-21-3271936511-etc-etcNetwork” under HKEY_USERS in the registry, however the only drive letters listed under that Registry branch are the one’s I’ve mapped myself. None of the phantom mappings are listed.

Also try a clean boot to see if the problem persists

Thanks Jerry but I already tried that yesterday.. Problem persisted.

This can be caused by using a broken shortcut: 64 bit – Windows 7 Mapped Network Drive Multiplying to Create Duplicates all the way to Z:

Hi Bruce,

I was about to dismiss that suggestion because I found that possible cause and page you pointed me to during my own Google searches yesterday and thought I’d already checked for broken shortcut links.

I’d looked at my desktop and all the icons looked fine (normally a desktop icon will change after a restart if its link is broken). Today, after a good nights sleep and with a fresh look at the issue after reading your post, I decided to double click every shortcut on my desktop just in case and lo and behold, a shortcut to an Excel spreadsheet mapped to the G: drive was indeed broken, yet the the shortcut icon looked fine.

It’s a shortcut to an Excel spreadsheet the entire office refers to infrequently and some dodo went and accidentally deleted the thing about 3 weeks ago! I’ve now restored the spreadsheet from one of the Server’s incremental backups taken about 3 weeks ago (I do incremental images of the server drive with “ShadowProtect Small Business Server Edition” every night which saves the images to a local QNAP drive and then uploads to an offsite backup facility every night) so now I’m positive there are no broken shortcuts on my desktop.

I’m not totally confident yet that this will fix the problem though because I checked almost everyone’s workstation in the office yesterday (they all have the same shortcut and I looked at about 15 desktops). No one else was having the problem.

That said, my machine is the only Windows 7 computer in the office, the rest are all XP Pro, one Vista and an iMac for clients who use Macintosh computers and Accounting software that do not have a Windows equivalent. None of the workstations I checked had duplicated drives (yet I found posts by folks complaining about this identical problem on XP machines all over the web yesterday) so I’m now hoping this is an issue unique to Windows 7 machines and that the problem will be resolved. I have little enough hair left as it is and can’t afford to pull much more out because of this! :rolleyes:

So thanks for mentioning that as I’d already dismissed that as the cause of the problem. Your post prompted me to check again more thoroughly.

I’ve just deleted all the phantom drive mappings again and rebooted my machine and now waiting to see if the problem recurs. If it doesn’t and restoring that file fixed it, then I must admit I’m going to feel pretty stupid after all the hours I spent scouring the web for a solution.

I’ll be sure to post back later this afternoon with a result as it normally took an hour or two before the phantom mappings started to reappear yesterday, so the next few hours should tell.

Many thanks for taking the time to respond Bruce. If this works, I owe you one! Here’s hoping

Best..

Andy

I like it better my way. That’s about it.

As do tens of thousands of people all over the world, and mostly by users of Windows for many years, not to mention a hell of a lot Microsoft Certified Engineers in Microsoft’s own user groups.

Yet, despite ALL the evidence to the contrary, with Microsoft now caving to consumer demand (evidenced by talk of Windows 8.1 reinstating the Start button and the ability to boot directly to the desktop and by-passing the (imo) idiotic tiled screen on desktops fitted with Keyboard and Mouse without the need for third party add-ons). This is clear evidence that they’ve realised they failed dismally with the initial release of Windows 8 in so far as consumers are concerned and are purportedly working to fix it with the 8.1 release, you just can’t convince some people that Microsoft got it wrong.

These people will defend Windows 8’s first release to the death, despite now proven arguments to the contrary.. and if you don’t like it the way it is, then clearly, you don’t know how to use it?! :confused:

The reasoning behind them taking such a staunch position on this topic totally escapes me. Go figure :huh:

Cheers…

Andy

Microsoft did no such thing. That was the title of the Marketwatch article.[/Quote]

..and it was a perfectly accurate title by Marketwatch in my opinion.

Leaving out the Start Button and forcing desktop users to install third party Start Button replacements, which included the option to boot straight to a familiar desktop is testament to the fact that Microsoft’s idea is a total failure on a desktop computer. Heck, even you yourself admit to booting straight into a familiar desktop environment and admit that the Tiles (metro style interface) “just aren’t that great for a keyboard/mouse PC” :rolleyes:

Add to that the the fact that sales of Windows 8 pre-installed desktops are down to previous versions of the operating system and business users avoiding Windows 8 like the plague (admittedly, partly because of people like me who made a point of writing blogs and telling subscribed clients via newsletters to avoid the initial final release of Windows 8 for new or replacement desktops) also lends credence to the fact that Microsoft have admitted they got it wrong IF they’re now going to “publish Windows 8.1” with changes that replace an item that will again make it far more user friendly to long time Windows users and you simply can’t fault Marketwatch (and other publications) for using titles like that for their articles and reviews.

[Quote]Among the changes suggested are the ability to boot straight to the desktop and bypass the tiles, and also to restore the Start button.[/Quote]

I certainly hope that’s true, but will only believe it when I see it happen.. IF it is true, then it is also a clear admission of failure on MIcrosoft’s part. Third party Start button replacements providing the ability to boot straight into a “Desktop User Friendly” environment were on the market before the final release of Windows 8 even hit store retail shelves or places like Amazon, where if you read the user feedback reviews, have been flooded with refund requests by those that purchased Windows 8 from them.

That says volumes about Microsoft making a HUGE mistake by leaving those functions out of Windows 8 in the first place. They made a stupid decision and it’s [impacted] with sales and extremely poor reviews that can be found all over the Internet.

[Quote]I start my Win 8 and go to Desktop and work from there. The tiles are fine for a touchscreen tablet (which is why they’re there anyway), they just aren’t that great for a keyboard/mouse PC.[/Quote]

Indeed.. and you do that why? My guess is because you agree that their stupid tiles and swipe technology on a desktop with mouse and keyboard is not only counter productive, but also creates a huge and totally unnecessary (not to mention quite expensive!) learning curves for employer’s employees in the business sector – which is undeniably Microsoft’s biggest money spinner.

At the place I work and act as System Administrator / IT Manager, we have about 30 desktops now (plus 3 servers – 1 x 2003 SBS and 2 x 2003 File Servers). On all of those, 99% are still running either Windows XP Pro or Windows 7 Pro on machines recently replaced, with 1 computer running on Windows 8, purchased for my use only for the sole reason of keeping up with Microsoft’s latest madness being Windows 8. I hardly use the thing apart from providing remote support via LogMeIn Rescue (from the Desktop Environment) to provide help to existing and new clients (99.9% of those running Windows XP or Windows 7 as well)

Finally, the company I work for hires me out to external firms (Accountants, Law firms and other small businesses) and we’ve been paid no less than 3 times already to format Windows 8 out of recently purchased machines and replace them with Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate, despite the fact that I told them about Start8 and other similar third party add ons to try and save them money. They were so peeved about the loss of productivity Windows 8 caused them that rejected the idea of the add-ons outright.

Thanks for the thousands of dollars additional work Microsoft!

For the record, I have no Start button add-ons on my system at work – I am using it with no third party add-ons (apaprt from WebRoot – an Anti Virus released by Firetrust) and only with the tools provided by Microsoft. I find myself switching to Desktop mode as soon as I enter my password. Something I should not have to do – why people were not given that option during install is beyond me and a large part of the operating systems demise at this point and time imo. I’ve been using it for several months now and am yet to find anything endearing about the Tile “metro style” interface on a desktop fitted with a corded Microsoft Keyboard and Mouse

In my experience, the majority of the Business Sector *hates* Windows 8 because they are angry at Microsoft for tricking them into paying their employees for putting out less productivity because of how different Windows 8 is to what their employees are used to. All three got my news letter advising to avoid Windows 8 – all three apologised for not listening to my advise and told me they would pay more attention to my newsletters in the future.

I will not reveal who I work for publicly however am happy to reveal that information to a Senior moderator here (along with contact information to the company in Melbourne) if people reading this post doubt what I’ve said and am just making it up because I hate Microsoft. I will do so with the proviso that I am assured by the moderator(s) here that they will never reveal the company I Administrate and am the IT Manager at.

And just in case folks here decide to label me as a Microsoft Hater, I can assure you that noting could be further from the truth. I have been a Microsoft User since Windows 3.1 and have upgraded to each new version release ever since.. I like Microsoft and even had our company on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups when that was released, but since Bill Gates left the scene, I think Microsoft have lost the plot big time and made a huge mistake (aka “failed”) in their idea of forcing Windows 8 on people in it’s current incarnation, with no in-built start button or the ability to easily boot into a familiar Windows desktop environment without a third party add-on being installed.

Had they listened to their beta testers and all the feedback they got before the final release and included those options in the first place, Windows 8 could have been a huge success. It’s not without it’s problems, but it most certainly is a stable operating system and considerably more secure than Windows XP and Windows 7 straight out of the box.

I sure hope you’re right when you say…

[Quote]Microsoft simply announced that they will publish Windows 8.1. Among the changes suggested are the ability to boot straight to the desktop and bypass the tiles, and also to restore the Start button.[/Quote]

Peace…

Andy

Actually, unless you experience any problems with Office 2003, I would leave Office 2010 alone. If you uninstall it, I don’t think you can get it back if you decide you want it for any reason (like manipulating docx files).

Jerry

Actually, that shouldn’t be an issue. Though our entire office is now running MS Office 2010, for years people resisted because they much prefer the 2003 menu interface. (Some still hate the ribbon interface after using it for almost a year now!) To deal with manipulating .docx or .xlsx files, I just installed FileFormatConverters.exe available from Microsoft to all of the computers in our office – be they XP or Win 7.. You can get the File Converter for free here;

http://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=3

It converts the Word, Excel and Powerpoint files back into 2003 format and allows you to edit / manipulate them to your hearts content, though when you save, it’s saved in 2003 format and not the original 2007 / 2010 format. Note that with this solution you can (on some rare occasions) run into problems when dealing with highly complex spreadsheets or Word documents that make use of features only available in those versions of Office.

As a side note, for those of our employees who STILL hate the ribbon interface and just can’t get their heads around how to get things done using the Ribbons that they could easily do using 2003’s menus, I’ve given them a shortcut in their browsers to this page: http://tinyurl.com/oourom9

One of the most useful pages Microsoft have produced in my opinion. Takes you to a Microsoft page called “Learn where menu and toolbar commands are in Office 2010 and related products” (I think I may have originally learnt about it in these forums somewhere)

Has visual guides for Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Project, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher and Visio – The guide has been invaluable to some of our employees and even though I’ve (after MUCH persistence) now gotten quite used to the Ribbon Interface, I still occasionally refer to those guides from time to time. For the record, I “still” prefer the 2003 Menu interface to this day because I think it’s a far more productive way of working, probably because I’d gotten so used to it after using it for so many years. :rolleyes:

Hope it helps..

Andy

I had to do some research and spend several hours just experimenting before I could do everything.

According to many Windows 8 lovers here, it should have taken you less than 30 minutes to figure everyting out and that it was the easiest thing in the world to figure our how to do everything you could do before, so you must be among the minority.

Note that I said according to “many Windows 8 lovers” there.. I can assure you that I’m not one of them – certainly not in Windows 8 current default configuration and without third party applications (like Start8 or similar) making it usable to folks who have happily used Windows desktops for several years now. :p

Cheers…

I seriously doubt that there’s ANYONE here who is incapable of using Win 8 as shipped without anything resembling a steep learning curve save possibly in a few obscure corner cases: many of us are just really annoyed that Microsoft took it for granted that we’d accept its ‘take it or leave it’ attitude when it could instead have made the transition an extremely smooth one with essentially no additional effort on its part. That’s the kind of annoyance that doesn’t tend to fade with time or familiarity, as Microsoft has learned over the past 6 months. Whether they’ve learned the right lessons, though, is yet to be determined.

Great summary of my own thoughts. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Kudo’s to you for the way you explained it.

Andy

Hi Medico..

In order to leave Win 7 alone during a dual boot installation you would legally have to have a full version of Win 8, not an Upgrade version.

That’s a pretty bold statement you’ve made there. Do you have a link to a ruling in a court of law to support that theory? Note that a EULA (in legal terms) is nothing than a guide to what the developer wants until it’s content is tested in a court of law by someone with deep enough pockets to do so.

Cheers…

thank you for the posts on the charm bar. ..[snip].. if I had W8, seems like I would want to rip off my Win-key.

Actually, the Win-Key is probably the most useful thing you can use on Windows 8.. it allows you to quickly move between a Mouse/Keyboard workable desktop and get away from that incredibly ugly default Metro joke they try to call a “Start screen” .. Your Win-Key on your keyboard is the last thing you want to get rid of imo

Cheers…

W8 took me about 5 minutes to get used to — that was about how long it took me to load StartIsBack.

Going by that statement alone, I think it would be far more accurate for you to say it took 5 minutes to find a replacement Start button like StartIsBack so that you could actually begin to use Windows 8 and then go about learning how to use the default Touch Screen interface it boots into, which on a desktop without a touch screen and connected with Keyboard and Mouse, is about as useful as Teats are on a Bull. Microsoft’s biggest mistake since the initial release of Vista imo and that’s saying something!

The Charms are pretty easy to ignore.

I actually agree with that comment.

In fact, I don’t mind having them.

Heh.. you’ve lost me again. I dislike them because they keep appearing purely because I might happen to move my mouse pointer to that area of the screen. Yes, I know you can turn them off – but the point of the exercise for me is to keep the machine in a configuration others using Windows 8 for the first time will have who might want help.

Are you suggesting that when working on someone else’s Windows 8 PC your first suggestion is going to be to install StartIsBack or similar? Come now.. That’s no worse than my having sent out newsletters to hundreds of my business clients, advising them to avoid Windows 8 (in it’s current incarnation) like the plague and just buy machines preloaded with Windows 7 for the time being. Unless of course they want to transfer large amounts of cash from their bank accounts to companies like ours for basic support they’ll almost certainly need, which would be a non issue if they just stick with what isn’t broken for now.

I really want to get used to dealing with them, because I’ll have to deal with them when working on someone else’s Windows 8 PC.

..here we “kind of” agree again. Though if your purpose is to provide technical support to Windows 8 users, then why the installation of a third party utility like StartIsBack? It’s precisely the reason I have NOT put a Start button on my installation. I have a box with Windows 8 Pro configured stock standard as Microsoft intended it to be when it booted up. No start button on my Win8 box at all [That big ugly screen with squares can’t be called a “Start Button” by any stretch of the imagination imo] and after months of using and persisting with it now, I can still say with total honesty that in it’s default configuration, Win8 is [imho] next to totally useless when used without a touch screen and only serves to negatively affect productivity in a huge way.

I (well, the company I work for) has been paid to format the thing out at some small business locations and replace it with Windows 7 already because of software conflicts and the radical changes it introduced in the general GUI which proved to only slow employee performance levels down.. and yes, a couple of them had a third party Start Button utility installed as well. People don’t seem to be willing to spend the cash required to have external IT support reconfigure a brand new computer for their employees just so they can just use their machines with some sort of efficiency again – rather, many opt to pay to go back to what has worked for them perfectly well for years. An expensive lesson learnt for them and a mistake they’re unlikely to make again.

For one thing, the Wireless networking on Win8 remains buggy as hell on some configurations, with many manufacturers (laptop’s for example) being in no hurry to rectify their supposedly already certified drivers with ones that will actually work on existing wireless LAN configurations without having to jump through hoops to make it do so. I could list a ton of other problems with Win8 in business environments, but I’d just be repeating what’s been said in these forums dozens of times already so what’s the point :p

Cheers..

Anyone who would tell others not to try something simply because they don’t like it is doing those others a disservice IMO. Instead of telling them not to try it, show them how to make it easier to utilize this more secure and more stable OS, IMO

My clients disagree with your assessment Ted as is evidenced by the Windows 8 installations that I’ve formatted out and installed Windows 7 on for those 4 (to date) that *hate* the thing and say that it just caused them a whole heap of lost productivity time because they don’t have the time or money to pay to train their employees in using their computers all over again.

In so far as more secure and stable, that’s a matter of opinion.. My Windows 7 Pro installation gets rebooted maybe once a month when Security patches are released. Other than that it’s as stable and secure as ever. Same goes for all the client I look after.

Cheers…

This announcement doesn’t surprise me at all and I feel somewhat vindicated after getting so much flack from some users here when I revealed that I sent a bulk email to all of my clients to avoid Windows 8 like the plague and predicted that Windows 8 (in it’s current incarnation) would be a total flop.

Sales are down, refund requests are in the thousands and I’ve uninstalled Windows 8 for at least 4 clients to date who decided to ignore my advice or simply didn’t read the newsletter I sent out warning them to avoid the operating system in their business environment. The complaints about how much longer it took (more mouse clicks) to do tasks that they were used to doing so easily over the last few years have been plentiful here.

With regards to what I consider to be the biggest problems with the operating system, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft either re-introduced a “proper” start button in the next release / patch of Windows 8 or purchased the Start8 or Classic Shell addons and provided a built in option to boot directly to a desktop. Then, and only then could Windows 8 be considered for deployment in their biggest money spinners – the business sector.

Cheers…