heavy cpu usage svchost windows10

Google brings up a complete bag of results when you search for “svchost high cpu” as it’s been a well documented issue with the Windows Update service across the last couple of Windows versions (way back to XP as it happens!) so it was little surprise to find that the instance of svchost.exe that was eating CPU cycles was the one that was hosting the Windows Update service.

Dipping into the Settings screens of Windows 10, I got to the Windows Update section, only for it to show that it was on “Downloading Updates 0%” and remained at this point for a couple of hours without moving. I couldn’t remember the process for fixing this issue in Windows 8 (as I have had it on another PC in the past), hence the need for Google.

"Something went wrong" - Creating users on Windows 10

On a fresh install of Windows 10, I found I was unable to add a second user to the system (via All Settings) and constantly got the “Something went wrong” screen. I tried a few reboots but to no avail. A quick google found that a lot of people with laptops were having this problem, and removing the battery and running on AC power only appeared to resolve their problem, but I’m on a desktop… i.e. no battery.

Sending email via SMTP on Outlook 2013

Recently I’ve noticed that I’ve not been able to send emails in Outlook 2013 on the desktop computer. It’s been working fine on my laptop, but the desktop no such luck.

The error I was getting was “Error 0x800CCC13 Cannot connect to the network”. I tried a few different things, but to no avail.

After researching online, I found that doing the following fixes it:

• Close Outlook before continuing.
• Run a command prompt as administrator
• Run sfc /scannow and allow to complete.

Reload Outlook now, and try sending an email.

McAfee Mobile Security

About a fortnight ago, I changed to an android handset after having iPhones for the last 4 years. I had decided on an LG G3 which turns out to come preinstalled with McAfee Mobile Security… Which is fine… Or would be if it worked properly.

I use an app for my online banking. When I load it up, it complains that there is no security product installed. If I open up McAfee manually, and go back into my banking app, it doesn’t complain. So maybe it does work?!

Access services on VirtualBox VM

In my current job I use a lot of virtual machines due to the variety of applications we support and the demand for them to work on many versions of Windows. As a result, we do have web services that I’d run on a VM, but it’s not possible to bridge the adapters (to allow external access to the VM) due to security guidelines at work, so I have to try something else.

Dell XPS 15 9530 sluggish performance

This morning, I noticed that my Dell XPS 15 9530 felt a little sluggish, so did some investigation and found the CPU clock had capped at a lower speed. I did a full reboot of Windows 10, and luckily this was sufficient to shake things back into life. But a quick read online suggested that some people aren’t quite as lucky in this situation.

So if a reboot doesn’t resolve the issue, what next?

Minecraft Pocket Edition - Invisible mobs/monsters

My son recently bought an Acer A3-A10 tablet with some money he had saved. It’s a great tablet for the £135 it cost at Argos and even sweeter with the £10 voucher with which he was able to get a Google Play voucher :) Anyway, to the point of this post. When I play Minecraft Pocket Edition against him, I found the mobs were invisible and I couldn’t even hear any creepers or spiders, I just got exploded or bit by them silently. I thought this was a little odd, and after searching for information at the time, I was unable to find anything about it. Until now.

Boot Booster (EFI) Partition on an Asus EeePC 1005P

We have an Asus EeePC 1005P netbook which comes with the Intel Atom N450 CPU. The BIOS provides a “Boot Booster” option which caches POST information in a special partition on the hard drive to speed up the boot process. Unfortunately, as part of removing all the partitions from the hard drive, this “special” partition has been lost and I needed to recreate it.

You will need:

• Windows installation media
• Linux live media (I’m using a Lubuntu CD)
• Plenty of time (it is an Atom CPU afterall!)

I’ve cleared the disk of all partitions using GParted (using the Lubuntu CD), and I’ve installed Windows 7. As part of installing Windows, I’ve selected a “Custom Installation” and specified a 60Gb (61440Mb) partition for it to be installed to. The Windows installation process adds an additional partition of 100Mb (containing boot information for Windows).

XPS 15 Update

I’ve had the XPS 15 for a few weeks now (well, actually it’s only a fortnight off 2 months!), and I’m still very impressed with it as a full package. The build quality is excellent, it doesn’t flex at all if you hold it by a corner when it’s open. The keyboard took a little getting used to, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly and my typing speed is increasing every time I use it. The adaptive resolution that Windows 8 introduced (so you get a decent sized text on additional screens even if different sizes/resolutions) is good, but a little frustrating. I use 1080p on a 15.6" Dell laptop at work and I think the high resolution of the XPS meant I was losing screen real estate which is a big no-no in my eyes. I’ve since disabled it and set it to 125% scaling across the board which increases the sizes sufficiently to see (although the font on the Wordpress post edit box is a bit on the small size), but gives me the real estate boost I was hoping for. All in all, I couldn’t be happier. As nice as they are, a MacBook Pro wouldn’t have satisfied my needs (I wanted native Windows for Visual Studio). And the hardware is exactly what I was after (a 4th generation i7, 8Gb+ RAM, 256Gb+ SSD, 1080p+ resolution, around 2kg in weight) at a very similar price to an equivalent* MBP.

Ribbon in .NET 4.5 using WPF and MVVM

I’ve been spending some time recently to learn WPF a bit better including the MVVM pattern to encourage the separation of concerns between the view and the logic behind it.

It’s been a steep learning curve (to say the least!) but today I spent a bit of time looking into getting an Office-esque ribbon bar onto the main window of my dummy application. At first I wasn’t too sure, but I soon realised it’s not too dissimilar to any other button.