Random Black Screens with nVidia Graphics Card and Windows 7

For several months, I had dealt with an increasingly frustrating issue with my monitor’s screen suddenly going to sleep. Nothing I could do, aside from unplug it from the desktop and plug it back in, could get it to wake up. It certainly wasn’t a monitor issue (though I had those too), as swapping the monitor resulted in the same behavior. It wasn’t a cable issue, nor was it an issue with Windows power settings. I had narrowed it down to single point of failure – driver issues. My NVIDIA driver kept crashing and its frequency was increasing. It went from only happening in games to happening in Office and general browsing.

I had taken some steps to fix this – reverting to old drivers, installing new drivers from a completely clean slate. Nothing worked. Then I found this thread on the EVGA forums. The thread included details that matches my symptoms, down to the event log. According to that thread, it was an issue between the driver series and Windows 7. Even reverting to old drivers didn’t work as I simply hadn’t gone back long enough, as this issue has plagued the driver series for months.

So, I did what any sane person would do – I upgraded to Windows 10.

It has been two weeks now and not a single crash or blip in the event logs about a driver crash.

Now if you are having a similar issue, what do you do? Upgrading to Windows 10 for free ends December 31st, so after that you will need to pay a hefty sum for a license. I wish I can say I have a fix for users still on Windows 7 (aside from going back long enough on the driver history to avoid the bad drivers), but perhaps the thread above will.

Firewall unable to turn on (Windows Error code 0x80070422)

An odd issue, Windows Firewall was automatically off. This impacted a user who had numerous issues with their computer. The issue wasn’t hard to fix, but was certainly not easy to find a fix for.

A co-worker approached me asking for help to troubleshoot the firewall issue. We employ GPO for the firewall, but to my knowledge we do not disable the firewall.

After looking, it was obvious that this was no GPO that disabled the firewall. However, when we went to enable it we got an error code that the firewall could not be re-enabled, with error code 0x80070422.

 

After some digging, we discovered that the firewall was disabled automatically via Services. We simply had to choose “Automatic” for startup, then start the firewall through Services.

 

Once that was done, we checked back on the firewall. Sure enough, the Firewall was re-enabled. We restarted the computer to ensure that the firewall would automatically start, which it did.

Keep in mind, you must be an administrator to make changes to services.

File Explorer Crashes When Searching

One day I was servicing a client when they mentioned that searching for files on the file share drive was causing File Explorer to crash. I’ve never heard of that so I asked for them to show me. Sure enough, after digging deep enough into their file structure, they start a search and File Explorer would crash. This was occurring after a Windows 10 upgrade, so I wondered if maybe Windows 10 was suffering from corruption of some kind.

After some work we were still no closer to the solution.

Finally, I researched the issue for some time and found a solution.

Browse to the drive folder, then click on the View Tab. Click Options, then click the View Tab again inside the window. Under files and Folders, check the box that says “Always show icons, never thumbnails” and click apply. After that, the crashes stopped.

Mac Freezes when Connected to Wi-Fi

One peculiar issue I have run into in the past was when a Mac would freeze when a user would try to join it to their company’s internal Wi-Fi network. After trying different things for some time, I decided to do a little research.

I discovered that there were cases that Mac’s would freeze when connected to certain networks via Wi-Fi. What could be causing such an odd behavior? The answer is IPv6. Mac’s don’t always play nice with IPv6. Thankfully there is an easy fix, though it does need the use of the Terminal (Located under Utilities, which is in of itself located under Applications in the Finder).

Inside the terminal, simply run this command to disable IPv6 (Note: Only applies to OSX 10.7.x and up):

Networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi

To re-enable IPv6, run this command:

Networksetup -setv6automatic Wi-Fi

Still experiencing freezing issues on your Mac when connecting to a network, or have any other tips? Leave a comment below!

Input signal out of range when trying to install windows 10

I had an interesting yet frustrating issue pop up after buying a refurbished dell desktop. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows 10 on the machine so I hooked it all up. The computer I bought only had integrated intel graphics so that is what I plugged my Dell 2412M (1920 x 1200) monitor into. The computer booted up and I could view the bios just fine, but when I booted to the USB drive to install windows, I ran into a problem.

The windows logo would show and then the dots would circle, then the screen would go black and I would get the error message: “Input Signal Out of Range”. Puzzled, I restarted the computer. I again could see the BIOS followed by the windows logo with the rotating dots. Yet again the monitor went dark and displays the same message as before. (Honesty check: the dell displays a different message than input signal out of range, but my second monitor had that message instead).

So I ran downstairs and grab a spare lower resolution monitor sitting in my garage. I brought it up and plugged it in and into the computer. Same message. Weird. So it isn’t the monitor – it’s the computer. Googling the issue brought me to others having this issue, even trying the steps outlined here: https://www.infopackets.com/news/9901/how-fix-windows-10-display-not-compatible-when-upgrading.

Yet the only real fix I could find was to get a graphics card and hope that solves the issue. This was an unacceptable solution as I had a 24-hour turnaround on this build and I wasn’t in the mood to shop at several stores to try to find a low-wattage low profile graphics card that wouldn’t be sold at rip off prices.

The fix ended up being pretty simple though – when I plugged in the second monitor I didn’t bother to restart the computer – I just did a straight swap. So this time I turned off the computer, swapped the screens, and turned the computer back on. Voila. Success.

This might not fix your problem, after all who else has multiple monitors just sitting around? But maybe there is someone out there who this helps.

ESET showing blank screen

Came across this issue the other day – ESET Endpoint Antivirus suddenly decided it didn’t want to work anymore. Opening it up would show a blank window and nothing else. Right clicking the green check mark in the upper right corner would bring up some options, but the didn’t respond when clicking them.

The fix? Well you can uninstall and then reinstall it, though that ended up resulting in needing to manually finish the uninstall. The other option, and a much easier and quicker option to boot, is to go into services and restart (or in this case, start) the ESET service(s). Once the services has restarted, then everything started working normally.

The Mysterious Case of the iPhone Battery Dying

One day my wife mentioned that her iPhone was dying halfway through the day. It was odd because she wasn’t using it during work, but by lunch the battery was dead. This wasn’t the case before, as she would usually have 80% or more by the time she would get home.

So I checked her settings, went through all the typical steps such as disabling background app refresh, disabling location settings, and so on. Yet none of that worked – her iPhone was still dying after only five hours. I then took the iPhone to the Apple store where the Genius staff took a look. Unfortunately, they said the battery was healthy so it must be something else draining the battery. I had already gone through all the steps they recommended to preserve the battery life to no avail days before even going, so they too were at a loss of what the issue could be.

At the same time, news was coming out of the Facebook app killing iPhone battery life due to media still playing even after the app was closed. Eureka! At least so I thought. I removed the app immediately from her phone and was pleased that we found the issue. Except that wasn’t the issue and the battery continued to die in hours.

I then recalled a separate issue where my wife had her e-mail entered into the phone twice. This had been that way for some time due to the difficulty in fixing it but never caused an issue. Yet I began to wonder if there was a change that resulted in the e-mail account causing a data loop.

Now why was the issue a difficult one in fixing? Simply remove the duplicate entry, right? Well the problem was that removing one of the duplicate e-mails would remove all of her contacts from the phone – a very frustrating problem since they are the same e-mail account. It did not even matter which one was removed, all the contacts would disappear either way. When re-adding the email back into the phone the contacts would remain gone, so even though they were attached to the e-mail account, it was not actually syncing to that account. Ever see what happens when you lose over two hundred of your spouse’s contacts? Many hours were lost having to keep restoring the phone from an iCloud backup.

Despite the duplicate e-mail never having been an issue before, I decided it was time to fix this issue. After all, I was strongly suspecting that it was now causing an issue with the battery dying so quickly.

First I made sure her contacts were synced to her Gmail account on the phone. But when I logged into her Gmail account on her laptop, I could see that her contacts were not actually synced with Gmail at all. Why they were synced locally and not to the cloud remains a mystery, but I had to figure something out and I sure wasn’t going to go through and manually add over two hundred contacts to Gmail. After some quick digging, I had found and downloaded an app which took all of her contacts in the phone and exported into a CSV file. I then e-mailed that file to herself. Once I had the file on her laptop, I imported the file into her Gmail contacts.

With that done, I was then able to remove both entries of the duplicate e-mail address and then re-add the account. Success! All her contacts were there (all two hundred-plus of them) and now her phone just had the single Gmail e-mail.

A couple of days since doing that, it became clear that my theory of a data loop was correct – her battery life went back to lasting an entire day. She would come home from work and still have over 80% of her battery life.

It was an odd case for sure, but I’m glad (and so is my wife) that I was able to take care of it AND keep her contacts intact.

SMTP Scan to Email failing

This issue perplexed me for far longer than it should have. Being a rookie in the ways of the network world, I had yet to learn of all the paths one can take to solve an issue quickly. After all, solving issues can be hard if you don’t know where to look to begin with.

A client was having issues with their SMTP server and Scan to E-mail. The first issue involved large documents being split into several e-mails. The second issue would be that the client would not always receive the scans in their inbox at all, without any errors, though this issue was very intermittent, so most scans were making it to their destinations.

The printer vendors swore that it was not their problem (which is true), so I was tasked to help solve it. After trouble shooting and looking at settings, I was scratching my head as to what exactly could be causing the problems. Being an intermittent issue, it was hard to say why some were making it through and others were not. The printer settings were correct, split large files was disabled, and the spam filters were set to allow all e-mails from the printers to everyone’s inbox.

Now we did narrow it down to the SMTP server itself as using a test Gmail account for their SMTP worked just fine. But what exactly was happening on that server?

After spending well over a month and the issue escalating to critical, I was able to get help from one of the senior staff.

We poked around in the SMTP server. Lo and behold, the SMTP server was set to split large files. The SMTP server has the power to override any setting on the printers. Increasing allowed file size meant that the scans were no longer being split into different e-mails. Finally, the first issue was solved.

Now what could be causing the scans to not always go to the user’s inbox? After digging around further, I discovered the .BAD logs. Opening them in notepad revealed undeliverable headers with the reasons why the e-mails were failing.

Before I say why, during the course of trying to find some sort of logs that could point to why these issues were happening I found that the SMTP server utilized several IP addresses to send the e-mails. So when I found the undeliverable headers, they showed just a single IP address as being blocked. Now this makes sense! Because the IP addresses used were mostly random, several would work just fine. That is until the blocked IP was used.

So who was blocking the IP? Microsoft.

So the client contacted Microsoft to have that IP delisted from the blocked list and everyone lived happily ever after.

It is just a shame it took me so long to figure all this out. However it was certainly a learning experience.

Shadow Play not turning on

I tend to record games now and then, mostly for friends, using nVidia Shadow Play. It had been some time since I had used it, but when I went to turn it on the program in nVidia GeForce Experience, the program would freeze before crashing completely. A restart did not fix the issue nor did a driver update.

Thankfully, the next fix was pretty simple: Uninstall and reinstall GeForce Experience. That fixed my problem.

Others had reported different issues in the past. One possible fix, should the above not work, is to boot into safe mode (Restart and spam F8) and uninstall all nVidia software. Then reinstall it and it should work.

Still doesn’t work, or you have a fix that worked for you? Leave a comment below!