Flashing Busy Cursor in Win 10
So about a week ago, I finally got fed up with something my desktop machine was doing. Let me back up to about a week before that, as that’s about when I noticed it. The issue was that my cursor for no apparent reason kept flashing the default “busy” cursor constantly. At first (and for a few days), it was inconsistent, and happened only infrequently. It was enough to cause me to do a few cursory searches on Google, but they were to no avail. The problem continued to worsen over the next few days, and it was to the point where I had to find the problem, or I was going to reinstall the computer!
Keep in mind the original install date on my desktop is January 1, 2011. That was the last time I performed a fresh install of Windows 7 on that machine. The OS has been so stable, and problem-free that I actually decided to try doing an upgrade install of Windows 10, which is something I never do. I’ve never once been happy with an upgrade install of any Windows OS. I’ve always done fresh installs. However, I have to say that the Windows 10 upgrade was flawless, and has actually improved the performance of the machine in most respects (especially once I disabled OneDrive, turned off Cortana, and disabled anything that by default reached out to the internet for content). Long story short, I’ve been trying to keep from performing a clean install of Windows 10. After this much time, I have so many programs installed, and the settings just the way I like them, I don’t want to start over!
So back to the problem. The busy cursor was constantly flashing, and since we tend to look wherever we are moving the cursor, it was absolutely distracting and had to end! It was awful. Most searches of the issue showed results pointing to some piece of HP specific software for HP computers, while a few talked about some similar Asus software on Asus computers. We’re talking about pre-installed software here, which most PC vendors still do because it “improves” the performance, or the security, or some other aspect of the computer. Most of this type of software is utterly useless, and get immediately uninstalled whenever I have to deal with such a PC. Since my desktop is one I built myself, which I’ve done since my second PC, those solutions didn’t apply. However, nothing else was showing itself.
So I continued to noodle on it, and wasn’t having a whole lot of luck. Eventually my “solution” was to just switch out the default busy cursor with the default cursor, so both the default cursor and the busy cursor were the same cursor. This had the desired effect, and let me actually do some work, but it wasn’t an actual solution. After a couple days I came back to the issue when I had some time, and thought about it. Suddenly, I had an epiphany! I suddenly remembered having just this problem way back in the early days of Windows XP. I remembered then that the solution was to upgrade the firmware on my CD drive. Honestly, that fixed it and it never happened again, which is why it didn’t come immediately to mind!
So I set about finding and installing the latest firmware for my BD-R drive and my DVD-RW drive. This was not terribly difficult, and they both did have firmware upgrades. After installing the latest firmware, and rebooting the machine, lo and behold the flashing cursor had stopped (and yes, I had already swapped the default cursor back to the busy cursor!), and I think I must have sat there for 20 minutes or so just watching to see if it came back. It’s been more than a week now, and my solution still seems to be working. I even went to a Microsoft page pertaining to the problem and made a post about my solution (http://bit.ly/1SkuYMs).
So there it is. Hopefully this helps someone like it has me! I can now focus on working (or playing) again without being completely distracted by the blinking cursor!
RIP Winamp…
Well, one of the most venerable media players ever has now given up the ghost. The website and streaming services will go down on Dec 20, 2013, and downloads will no longer be available. This is not so much distressing news as it is just sad. It’s only sad because of the way that AOL mismanaged what could possibly have been what iTunes has become. AOL mismanaged just about everything regarding Winamp, and right from its acquisition in 1999.
What really made Winamp the best media player out there (and I still use it today, and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future) is that it was designed from the ground up with the intention of being simple to use, so non-technical people could use it and it made sense. But not only that, it was also an application that technical minded people could really dig into and get a very robust experience. It had management capabilities, you could edit the tag information of your MP3 files, it had visualizations (the best out there IMHO, especially after they integrated the MilkDrop visualizer), streaming services, and so much more.
While Winamp won’t be leaving my desktop any time soon, and will always manage to find a place on my Windows machines, it will now be a piece of software that younger generations don’t even know about, and likely won’t know about. This is about the last nail in the coffin of Web 1.0. Goodbye Winamp.
Windows 7 Firewall
The other day I was working on a new Windows 7 Pro workstation, getting it ready to put into production. I was about to install the last piece of software when I noticed a red X in the Action Center taskbar icon. I figured it was one of the usual notifications, like backups weren’t set up, and that I would be able to just disable it. However, it turned out to be a notification that Windows Firewall was not enabled. When I tried to enable the service, it would not start. Natch!
I’ve run into this before with Windows 7, and nearly everywhere you go on the net will have you try several things, but then the eventual and only fixes available seem to be one of two things. You can either install a third party firewall, or you can reinstall Windows. The first option is not very appealing when talking about a corporate network environment administration viewpoint. I was nearly at the point of resigning myself to reinstalling the machine, when I found the answer on this page. The answer is provided by a member of that forum named rap2pac, and it worked perfectly.
Here is the solution provided by rap2pac:
- In Registry Editor, browse to the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess - Right click SharedAccess, and click Permissions.
- Click Add.
- In the “Enter the object names to select†field, type “NT SERVICE\mpssvcâ€. Then click Check Names. The name should change to MpsSvc
- Click OK.
- Select Full Control in the Allow column.
- Click OK.
This solution works for Windows Vista and Windows 7, and probably for Windows 8, even though the page doesn’t say anything about Windows 8. The solution is simple, easy to do, and just works!
Weird Windows Issue
So I have a buddy who experienced something like this a while back, where he restarted a MS Windows Server machine, and it would not get to the actual login prompt. It would just sit there spinning as if it were doing something, but nothing was actually happening. When he called me to ask if I’d ever heard of something like that, my response was a definite no. Neither of us could find anything that might point the way to a solution. He decided he’d go work on it a bit and get back to me.
When he called me back, he said he’d figured it out… or at least the solution. The cause is still a mystery to this day. The fix was to simply unplug the network cable from the network interface of the computer. This allowed it to get past whatever in the boot process was preventing it from completing the boot process and bringing up the login prompt. Fortunately for me, his issue occurred recently enough to still be in my memory, because today I experienced a very similar event on my Windows 7 Ultimate computer at home.
So I was sitting down with my son to play some games with him (he loves doing this), but the game he wanted to play wouldn’t start up for some reason. In fact, nothing was acting right on the machine. As it is Windows, and things like this do happen with Windows, I decided to reboot the machine. It took its time shutting down, and took an equally long time starting up. But it didn’t complete the process. It sat there with that annoying spinning circle, never bringing up the login prompt at all. We sat here watching and waiting for a good 10 minutes, with no login prompt in site. Time for a hard boot.
I turned off the power, unplugged the machine long enough for all capacitors to completely drain. Plugged it back in and started it up. Windows got to the same point in the boot process. No login screen. I then booted to safe mode and looked at the event logs, but there really was nothing that stood out as odd. There were a couple warnings, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Windows machine that didn’t at least have some warnings. I then rebooted to safe mode with networking enabled. This is when it hit me, because it did the same thing in safe mode. I couldn’t get to safe mode! Before shutting it down, I unplugged the network cable, and lo and behold… a login prompt!
So after a reboot to normal Windows with the network cable unplugged, I was able to get to a login prompt. I plugged the cable back in at this point, and logged in, and everything is just fine. I’ve run several deep malware scans that all have found nothing at all, so I’m relatively convinced there is nothing really wrong here. I’ve had Windows installed since 1/8/2011, so it’s possible that I’m just a little closer to needing to reinstall, as this is a record install length for my personal computers. I’ve never been able to have Windows installed for this long without requiring a reinstall prior to Windows 7, which really speaks volumes for the efficacy of this OS.
So this is just something to keep in mind if you ever have a PC with Windows installed that is just not getting to a login prompt. Try unplugging the network. I still don’t know what the cause is, since there’s really nothing in the event logs, but at least there’s a solution.
IIS Tricks
Have you ever had trouble in IIS7+ getting http redirects working just the way you want them to? In particular, redirecting http to https using httpRedirect can be problematic at times, and ensuring that all traffic goes through the same URL (enforcing www in the URL) at the same time can cause heartburn!
I was able to find the perfect working solution to make both desires work exactly and in harmony. First, the answer lies in the Microsoft URL Rewrite module (link) available on iis.net. The first part of the solution can be found in an article on sslshopper.com titled “IIS7 Redirect HTTP to HTTPS (link)” which will guide you through creating a URL Rewrite module rule to redirect the site to the https version. Follow method 1 in that article, and your site will be perfectly and smoothly redirecting from http to https.
The second part of the solution is creating another rule to force the user to the www version of the site. The easiest way to create the rule is to edit the web.config for your site. You can follow the article titled “Rewriting Non WWW to WWW URL (IIS7 Servers Only)Â (link)” found at nextmill.net. As I said this is the quick and easy way, but if you prefer to use the URL Rewrite GUI, read on.
First, we’ll create the redirect to https rule. Browse to the site in IIS for which you wish to create the redirect rules, then open the URL Rewrite module. This assumes you have installed the module. You can find the module at the link above.
On the ‘Actions’ menu on the right side of the IIS Manager, click ‘Add Rule(s)’. Choose ‘Blank Rule’ and click OK.
You are now presented with a form. First, give the rule a name (i.e. Redirect to https). In the ‘Match URL’ section, select ‘Matches the Pattern’ for the ‘Requested URL:’ dropdown. Then choose ‘Regular Expressions’ for the ‘Using:’ dropdown. Then type the pattern (.*) and check the box for ‘Ignore Case’.
Click on the ‘Conditions’ line to expand that section. Click the add button. For the ‘Condition input:’ type {HTTPS}. For the ‘Check if input string:’ dropdown, choose ‘Matches the Pattern’. In the ‘Pattern:’ textbox, type off. Select the checkbox for ‘Ignore case’.
Skip the ‘Server Variables’ section. In the ‘Action’ section, choose ‘Redirect’ as the ‘Action type:’ On the ‘Redirect URL:’ line type ‘https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}’. Check the ‘Append query string’ box, and choose the ‘Permanent (301)’ as the ‘Redirect type:’.
At this point, your site will automatically redirect to the https. So when a user enters www.yoursite.com in the address bar of their browser, your server will automatically forward them to the https://www.yoursite.com version of your site. However, at this point, when a user enters yoursite.com in the address bar or their browser, your server will also automatically forward them to https://yoursite.com (non-WWW URL). So we still need to make another rule to take care of redirecting to the WWW URL. This rule will follow mostly the same pattern as the other. The difference is the conditions and redirect URL.
First, choose a name for the rule (i.e. WWW Redirect). Enter the same data in the ‘Match URL’ section as you entered for the https redirect rule. Now in the conditions section, add a condition, and enter the following information. Set the ‘Condition input:’ line to {HTTP_HOST}. Set the ‘Check if input string:’ dropdown to ‘Does Not Match the Pattern’. Enter the following in the ‘Pattern:’ line ^www\.([.a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ and then check the ‘Ignore case’ checkbox.
Again, ignore the ‘Server Variables’ section. In the ‘Action’ section, choose ‘Redirect’, enter ‘http://www.{HTTP_HOST}/{R:0}’ in the ‘Redirect URL:’ line, check the ‘Append query string’ checkbox, and choose ‘Permanent (301)’ as the ‘Redirect type:’.
This will have your IIS7+ site redirecting its visitors to the https://www.yoursite.com version of your site. It will also properly redirect a visitor who types a sub-page directly into their browser address bar, such as yoursite.com/subpage.aspx. A visitor who types that into their address bar will be smoothly and properly redirected to https://www.yoursite.com/subpage.aspx. Hope this helps someone!