Windows Solutions

If you are like me and like to work on a computer at night, or, just work with the lights off, then dark mode is for you. I find dark mode helps with eye strain. In addition, many sources also report that a dark color scheme helps conserve battery power on mobile devices.

With build 1809, you can now set Windows 10 to a dark color scheme. Previous builds offered this option as well, but 1809 was the first version that also adopted this color scheme in File Explorer.

The process to enable dark mode is super easy. It only takes 5 clicks and one scroll of the mouse wheel.

Let’s get started!

Enabling Dark Mode in Windows 10

To enable dark mode in Windows 10, click the Start button and then Settings.

This will launch the Windows Settings page. Click Personalization.

From the Personalization page, select the Colors tab on the left side.

From the Colors page scroll to the bottom of the page. Under Choose your default app mode select Dark.

After installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (Build 1709) on my PC, all my network connections–whether wired or wireless–were broken. When I checked the device manager I had an exclamation mark against all but one network device. The only device excluded from error was the “Check Point Virtual Network Adapter”.

Going into the properties of one of these devices gave equally cryptic errors. All devices reported the same thing.

Windows is still setting up the class configuration for this device. (Code 56)

A couple of extra reboots did not resolve the odd error either.

A quick search on the internet revealed forum postings that identified the CheckPoint VPN as the culprit (credit SOHIC for the answer). This made sense as the version of the CheckPoint software I had made no mention that it was supported on Windows 10. My bad!

But this was the key. When I uninstalled the software and rebooted, all my network connections came back to life. 

When installing the Fitbit app on Windows Phone 10 you may receive an error. When you click the See Details link, it details that something unexpected happened and provides error code 0x8007000B. The error also instructs that waiting a bit or restarting your device might help. Unfortunately, neither of these recommendations will solve your problem.

The error code is a result of how you have configured your Windows phone to store applications. If your phone has an SD Card and you have configured this as your default location for application installs then this is your problem. The Fitbit app will only install to your phone’s internal storage.

In this article, we explore how to install your FitBit to internal storage. Let’s get started.

Recently I was trying to change the primary email address on my Skype account. The challenge? When I tried to change the primary email address I kept getting an invalid password prompt.

Oops, that wasn’t the right password. Try again.

I spent an hour going round in circles with Skype Live Chat support. Eventually, I was told that because it was linked to my Microsoft account I could not change my primary email address. I was told that the only option was to delete and recreate my Skype account.

The challenge with that option is that I would lose my Skype number (which was also on my business cards). Support informed me that a Skype number could not be transferred between accounts.

I was in a quandary. On the one hand, my old email was going away. If Skype would not let me change my primary email address, then I now had a security problem should anyone else pick up that email address. If I did recreate my account, then I had the challenge of potentially losing my business phone number.

I scoured the Skype community forums. Luckily, I found this great solution from community contributor Sunqan.

I normally don’t write blog posts about hardware. But this particular problem seemed blog-worthy.

The issue was around my wife’s PC. Her PC is almost 5 years old–it still performs incredibly well. That is one of the benefits of building a custom PC.

Tip: When you build a custom PC it’s not about saving money but getting more bang for your buck. If I were to give a PC manufacturer $1000 versus what I could do with $1000 myself the difference would be night and day. You’d think an economy of scale would kick in somewhere, but it doesn’t. If you can build your own, I recommend it.

With her PC still running Windows 7, it was time for an upgrade. I knew I wanted to take her to Windows 8.1. I figured if I was going to do a full reload, why not upgrade to a solid-state drive at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone. So I did.

The Problem

Everything went well enough at first. The BIOS recognized the new drive. I threw in my Windows 8.1 DVD and the OS installed like a charm.

But then I started to encounter peculiar symptoms. The PC would randomly reboot every few hours.

I checked the Event Logs. Sadly, they were devoid of any real clues. Aside from the Unexpected Shutdown messages, there was nothing else that would lead me in the right direction.

I quickly found no dumps were being created either. This was not good.

I disabled the automatic restart and received the following error the next time it occurred.

CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED

Based on my research it seemed this error is fairly generic. To make matters worse the blue screen never got past 0%.

If you are missing the pictures of the icons in Remote Desktop Services Web Access, but you can still see the icon text, then it is a compatibility issue with Internet Explorer 10.

While there appears to be no actual fix there is a very easy workaround. Simply switch your RDS Web Access portal page into compatibility mode.

You can do this by clicking the icon of the torn page in Internet Explorer’s Address Bar. The page will reload in compatibility mode and you should now have matching pictures to go with the text descriptions. As long as you don’t clear your browser cache, Internet Explorer will remember the compatibility mode setting.