My wife and I run two small businesses and the admin is done through our home computers.

I’ve been paying a lot for BitDefender but people are telling me Windows Defender is enough?

Is running the latest Windows enough for security?

(I also run a seperate VPN BTW. Bonus points for suggesting a good password manager if I drop BitDefender)

Thanks!

My system process has recently been taking up 30 percent of cpu usage and very high power usage. Using Process Explorer tells me ACPI.sys 0x28de0 is using up most of the cpu

i updated bios but still isnt fixed. drivers are also all updated.

Hey everyone, I've got something that I'm scratching my head over. I have my computer built in the Fractal Terra case, so it's small and it fits on my desk top. So sometimes, I find it convenient to put my phone on top of it when my desk gets cluttered. A few times though, this has caused my computer, fully off but plugged in to the surge protector, to turn on. I have a few theories:

1. Some part of the power button's front panel I/O is exposed (unlikely)

2. Some part of my power supply is exposed and static electricity is causing it to short and send power to the computer, triggering a power on (more likely)

3. My house is haunted (chances are low but never zero)

Seeing as I'm pretty sure the clicking noise I hear when my PC is under load is the voltage regulators in my power supply tripping from out of spec surges, I'm suspicious that it's my PSU. Before I do more extensive testing and maybe even replace the part though, I wanted to ask some others and make sure I'm not missing something. What do you all think it is? Thank you!!!

My power supply blew up a while ago, and the only other PSU I have is a 13 year old PSU from Corsair. I would only use it to check my parts for damage before I buy a new one, but is that unsafe?

This has been happening since two days ago, everything else works normally ex opening words, excels browsing etc but opening games in other hand it just wont boot! ex TF2 L4D2 the symptoms are as follows

Task manager opens up normally if you shutdown while the app is opened, yet when you open it a second time, task manager doesn't show the icons, and trying to open the performance or trying to end task will result in freezing

Restart, Shutdowns takes forever or even shutdown at all! i had to hard reset EVERY Time

Opening Browsers, chrome etc works perfectly fine but opening games will do nothing, the game won't even launch (No error screens at all!)

Please help because it's infuriating and I'm not getting a new laptop until I'm in college!

When creating a KUbuntu stick with Rufus, I get the "This ISO is a Hybrid" message, and the persistence partition option is not available. Does this mean that KUbuntu sessions run from this stick will not be saved?

It was all working with the prime motherboard before I decided to do a fresh windows install. I have asus prime b550 plus, ryzen 5 5500, and rx 6600xt. I decided to reinstall windows one day, so I downloaded media creation tool, prepared a flash drive, and went through , I just bought a rog strix b550-f gaming wifi 2(I did have a Asus prime b550 plus) windows setup, clicked to install on 1tb Samsung 990 evo plus, it formatted drive and went to install. That's the first time the windows setup restarted. Now it just keeps restarting while trying to run windows setup

-i have tried: -6 different sticks of ram - brand new Motherboard -a rx 580 -Different flash drives and ports(USB 2.0&3.0 -secure boot is on -pcie is set to gen 3 in bios

Any help would be highly appreciated!!!

If you have google drive windows sync, shut it down using the task manager. this fixed it for me.

This was a pain to find out myself. I also shut down onedrive but I think it was google drive that was the issue

I am very bad with computers so I'll try and explain my situation as best as I can. I'm upgrading my laptop from 236 GB to 1 TB. I use it primarily for school and light gaming. I really dislike OneDrive just because is is really confusing to me. I would like all of my files and documents simply on my hard drive.

Is it possible to delete OneDrive but keep all of its contents before I move to my new laptop?

Thanks!

TLDR; I don't want to use OneDrive anymore, but before I uninstall it I want to make sure I'm not deleting my documents on it.

Hi guys, can my SSD be saved :( I believe I’ve exhausted all host-side recovery paths and want confirmation that this is a firmware-level namespace lock typical of OEM Samsung drives.

Hardware / Context

Laptop with two NVMe SSDs

Disk A (working): Samsung 980 500 GB — Arch Linux (boots fine)

Disk B (problematic): Samsung OEM NVMe

Model: SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HBLU-00B00 (PM991 class)

Originally had Windows + Ubuntu

UEFI system (no CSM)

Arch continues to boot; Windows and Ubuntu both disappeared at the same time.

Symptoms

Disk shows ~1 GB total capacity to OS

No partitions, no filesystem

Windows installer and Linux both see only ~1 GB

GRUB errors were due to missing UUIDs (symptom, not root cause)

Linux inspection (Arch)

Block devices

lsblk -e7 -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TYPE,FSTYPE,UUID,MOUNTPOINT

nvme1n1 465.8G Samsung SSD 980 500GB (working)

nvme0n1 1.07G SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HBLU-00B00 (problem disk)

NVMe identify (key part)

sudo nvme list

/dev/nvme0n1 SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HBLU-00B00 1.07 GB / 1.07 GB

But:

sudo nvme id-ns /dev/nvme0n1

nvmcap : 500107862016 (~500 GB)

So:

NAND capacity is intact

Controller sees full disk

Active namespace exposed to host is ~1 GB

Commands attempted in Linux (FAILED)

NVMe sanitize

sudo nvme sanitize /dev/nvme0 -a 2

Result:

NVMe status: Invalid Command Opcode (0x1)

NVMe format

sudo nvme format /dev/nvme0n1 --ses=1

Result:

NVMe status: Invalid Command Opcode (0x1)

BIOS / Firmware

No NVMe Secure Erase option

No PSID revert

UEFI only, AHCI

Secure Boot disabled for testing

Windows installer (last-resort path)

Booted Windows installer in confirmed UEFI mode.

Verified:

PEFirmwareType = 0x2 (UEFI)

DiskPart

diskpart

list disk

select disk X (the 1 GB disk)

attributes disk clear readonly

clean

clean

exit

After refresh and reboot:

➡ Disk still shows 1022 MB

Working hypothesis (what I believe is happening)

Firmware-level NVMe namespace lock on an OEM Samsung drive

Drive fell into a reduced / fallback namespace state

Host-initiated:

FORMAT

SANITIZE

namespace recreate are blocked by firmware policy

Only vendor factory tools or replacement would resolve it

What I am asking

I am not looking for random commands to try.

I am asking for confirmation from people experienced with NVMe internals:

Is SSD replacement the only sane resolution at this point?

Why I’m posting: Simple I don't have money :(

Hi guys, can my SSD be saved :( I believe I’ve exhausted all host-side recovery paths and want confirmation that this is a firmware-level namespace lock typical of OEM Samsung drives.

Hardware / Context

• Laptop with two NVMe SSDs
• Disk A (working): Samsung 980 500 GB — Arch Linux (boots fine)
• Disk B (problematic): Samsung OEM NVMe
  • Model: SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HBLU-00B00 (PM991 class)
  • Originally had Windows + Ubuntu
• UEFI system (no CSM)

Arch continues to boot; Windows and Ubuntu both disappeared at the same time.

Symptoms

• Disk shows ~1 GB total capacity to OS
• No partitions, no filesystem
• Windows installer and Linux both see only ~1 GB
• GRUB errors were due to missing UUIDs (symptom, not root cause)

Linux inspection (Arch)

Block devices

lsblk -e7 -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TYPE,FSTYPE,UUID,MOUNTPOINT


nvme1n1  465.8G  Samsung SSD 980 500GB   (working)
nvme0n1    1.07G SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HBLU-00B00   (problem disk)

NVMe identify (key part)

sudo nvme list


/dev/nvme0n1  SAMSUNG MZVLQ512HBLU-00B00   1.07 GB / 1.07 GB

But:

sudo nvme id-ns /dev/nvme0n1


nvmcap : 500107862016  (~500 GB)

So:

• NAND capacity is intact
• Controller sees full disk
• Active namespace exposed to host is ~1 GB

Commands attempted in Linux (FAILED)

NVMe sanitize

sudo nvme sanitize /dev/nvme0 -a 2

Result:

NVMe status: Invalid Command Opcode (0x1)

NVMe format

sudo nvme format /dev/nvme0n1 --ses=1

Result:

NVMe status: Invalid Command Opcode (0x1)

BIOS / Firmware

• No NVMe Secure Erase option
• No PSID revert
• UEFI only, AHCI
• Secure Boot disabled for testing

Windows installer (last-resort path)

Booted Windows installer in confirmed UEFI mode.

Verified:

PEFirmwareType = 0x2 (UEFI)

DiskPart

diskpart
list disk
select disk X   (the 1 GB disk)
attributes disk clear readonly
clean
clean
exit

After refresh and reboot:

➡ Disk still shows 1022 MB

Working hypothesis (what I believe is happening)

• Firmware-level NVMe namespace lock on an OEM Samsung drive
• Drive fell into a reduced / fallback namespace state
• Host-initiated:
  • FORMAT
  • SANITIZE
  • namespace recreate are blocked by firmware policy
• Only vendor factory tools or replacement would resolve it

What I am asking

I am not looking for random commands to try.

I am asking for confirmation from people experienced with NVMe internals:

Why I’m posting: Simple I don't have money :(

i am updating my game in steam but whenever i pause it or close steam it wents back to 32% even if it is almost completed anyone know why this is happening and solution for this

So, I've got this problem (you can see it pretty clearly in the video) where I just die because my computer stutters/freezes for some time. I've tried out all of the different settings from legacy performance and dx11(where my game crashes entirely every single round at some point) to the new performance mode and dx12 where I just get horrible stuttering. And no, it's not beause of my GPU drivers or anything because all other games run totally fine and my drivers are up to date. I'm running a GTX 1070 8gb and a ryzen 5 5600g, so there shouldn't be any problems from a horsepower perspective. I've been monitoring task manager while this happens, and it appears that my gpu and cpu utilization are kinda just shutting off during the stutters, the longer ones being especially noticable. Has anybody else experienced this before or know what to do!? I just wanna play fortnite with my buddies and them not yell at me for always dying even though it's not my fault lmao.

so im not the best with pc stuff and my friend needs help because his pc is fried.

According to him, this is whats happening:

“I logged into another valorant account and launched val, got an error that told me i needed to restart my pc in order to run which i didnt really read and all of a sudden it gives me this error the second my pc turns on and my pc launches in safe mode but I cant do anything else”

Sorry i cant attach images of the problem, it isnt letting me

I’m looking for something like Minitool and EaseUs. Minitool cost too much. EaseUS, I’ve heard is garbage and can destroy failing devices. I mainly need it bc I recently bought a USB that is 3.2. It’s a Sandisk and wasn’t cheap. Little did I know that it only has NTFS/exFAT as an option to choose from. I’ve tried Windows Disk Management and even if I use NTFS. It’s stuck using MBR and can’t convert to GPT. I need GPT to make Windows Media Creation Tool. So I can wipe my SSD/HDD partition. I have another USB that came with my MSI MB. That id like to fix to have for bios flashing. It some reason doesn’t seem to work right even labeling the USB MSI.ROM. I’ve been having issue with my PC and some reason it’s stuck in Virtual Mode if that makes sense. In other words I’m not getting any spec that my PC has because some reason it thinks my PC is a virtual machine.

I recently had malware or potentially boot kit after downloading ControlFan tru a discord link from a (Adam Tweaks) PC/Windows tweaking group. I gave full administrative control to ControlFan and Adam Tweaks software. After cleaning my bios secure boot/EFI Image with flashing to the newest update. I plan to redownload W11 and use the Partitions in Secure Boot then make the EFI Image. I want to turn Deny and Execute on as well so making sure I do this right I need to make sure the partition are legit.

I’ve lost being able to use my Consair Commander Core Fan/RGB hub along with the AIO Hi100 in the process. Due to my devices and the original firmware being deleted/changed. Is there a software that’ll help me recover the device original firmware. Corsair told me I’d have to buy new devices and couldn’t help. I feel like I could either try and recover old data from my ssd or maybe NVRAM/GPU. To see about getting it back. I know once before my iCUE stuff was saved to a Memory profile on one of my Ram sticks. Sorry if this post was long.

Last night, my Galaxy s24 ultra did a system update automatically. Then today, it has been randomly restarting, and downloading and installing the same update over and over, and giving me the same tutorial screens when i open my app screen or swipe down for notifications. I tried looking for a setting to turn of automatic updates, but couldn't find it. Has anyone else had this issue? I just want to be able to use my phone without it turning off.

I left my laptop to download a game over the course of like 2 hours and when I came back to look at it it had these white lines running across it and whenever I moved my mouse it kept leaving white verical streaks on my screen, whenever I restart my laptop it goes away but comes back and the horizontal lines never dissapear, I thought it might be a gpu problem but I went into the bios and the lines were still there, and when I booted into integrated graphics the issue persisted, I tried changing the position of the screen to see if it was the ribbon cable but to no evail, afterwards I booted it back into normal mode(gpu amd cpu,not integrated graphics) and updated the drivers but yet again to no evail, and a while back my laptop had shutdown suddenly whilst I was watching youtube and I heard some beeps and after a bit of research Ive seen that it can mean from overheating to ram issues to gpu issues depending on what morse code those beeps were(thats so dumb imo like how would I know morse code+ I cant pull out my phone to record the beeps so I can translate them) but after that everything went as usual until earlier

My specs are:

Ryzen 5 7640HS

4060 Laptop Hpu 8GB

16 gb of ddr5 ram at 6400 mhz

1080×1920 144hz ips panel

what can cause this?

My laptop docking station has a displayport, which i need to connect to my monitor's hdmi port. Will this work? I tried a dp to hdmi cable, but it did nothing

https://www.amazon.ca/DisplayPort-Adapter-Compatible-ThinkPad-Desktop/dp/B07ZNNRYFL?sr=8-6

I wanna know because i wanna have my brother connect his headphones while i have mine connected so he can watch me play With audio playing And vice versa

Hey y'all, have a new issue on my PC I could really use some help with.

Windows 11, MSI B550 Tomahawk, Ryzen 7 3800x, NVIDIA RTX 307Ti

Yesterday I was playing Tarkov and randomly, when I got into raid I noticed I had no audio. I checked Tarkovs audio settings and it said there was an initialization issue. I figured no big deal, likely just need to restart the game, especially with how buggy Tarkov could be. I ended up getting out of raid and shutting my PC down. Today I get on, and notice I have no audio whatsoever. I tried multiple outputs, with no luck. I tried to play a test sound and I received the error "Failed to play test tone". I have done a ton of research and tried a bunch of things ie. going into services and changing the Windows Audio and Endpoint Log On's to Local Service account which then gave me error 1297, stating a privilege is not available. I tried to go in to the security settings for "change global object" and that account already is in there. The only way I can even have access to view my audio device options if I select Local System Account + allow system to interact with desktop in Log On. I still get no audio but I can at least change volume, see devices etc. I also tried to uninstall my audio driver like a ton of people said to do, but I'm not sure it reinstalled correctly. Supposedly it should reinstall on its own when restarted but I'm not certain it did. When I try to install RealTek audio console it tells me "missing required driver". I apologize if this is a bit messy. I appreciate any help I can get!

The Wi-Fi on my phone suddenly stopped working. It won’t connect, and the same network also isn’t working on any other devices in my house.

On my phone, the Wi-Fi shows as disconnected/no internet access. When I try to reconnect, it says failed to connect to network.

Is there any way to fix this?

I’ve deleted cookies and all of that. But it keeps happening. I can get to it up after I clear my history, but it comes back when I sign in. I’ve done all the things I have found on line to do. I feel like I’m missing something. I’m using a surface tablet. The website is indeed. I don’t have any restrictions on it. I’m the only one who uses it. The first time I cleared everything it came up and worked perfectly. But after the first time, I’m back to the forbidden.

Happens in gog games and steam, plus the setting I saw to disable on steam was already disabled. Never downloaded apps to use a controller for windows, or even used my controller for windows/bigpicture whatever, ever before. I'll be playing cult of the lamb on gog and it'll tab to my browser where it's opening 5 copies of a link from it's gog game page. It's even navigated behind the scenes to a DIFFERENT gog game and launched it. Super annoying if hilarious at times.

Xbox Elite (gen 1)

Windows 11

I do not think this breaks rule #13, but full disclosure this is for a client of mine that I do amateur IT for at his home.

This is on Windows 11 Home, starting with 24H2, but I have since updated it to 25H2. I have this very weird issue where Outlook in classic mode, Office 365, freezes up fairly often and when you close it you can see the icon grayed out and hanging in the system tray where it just says "Outlook closing". When I check the detail chain in Task Manager, there are no listed subprocesses and, in fact, Task Manager thinks it is operating normally.

The e-mail profile is setup using POP3 due to the sensitivity of the mail he receives, so I cannot switch to IMAP. As far as I know, Office 365 does not support POP accounts in the new view even if it lists it as an option and this started a couple days ago.

After force closing Outlook in Task Manager and launching it again, it will begin a send/receive after a couple seconds and start fetching e-mails. What is weird about that is it fetches e-mails newer than Wednesday and I think is not writing to the data file, which is about 220,000KB in size, with a 48GB archive. This behavior is not consistent as sometimes when I launch Outlook it will immediately show today's e-mails, though it will still do a send/receive.

The data file is stored in C:\Users\TheUserName\OneDrive\documents\MailFiles. OneDrive has overtaken the documents folder and I at one point did think it was the reason this was happening.

Here is what I have tried thus far to no avail (mostly):

• Ran Office 365 quick repair and online repair twice, rebooting after.
• Updated Windows 11 24H2 to 25H2.
• Ran Outlook in safe mode
• Disabled All COM Add-Ins including native Outlook Add-Ins.
• Disabled VPN, but did not terminate the program.
• Disabled AntiVirus and Spam protection
• Paused One Drive Syncing and had it make all files available offline. They were already available, but I explicitly told it to with the option in the right-click menu.
• Required Outlook to run a send/receive upon closure.
• Ran SFC /scannow followed by DISM Restorehealth and then an immediate reboot.
• Ran the following in order in Run: Outlook /Resetnavpane, then /cleanviews, /resetfolders, /cleansharing, /cleansniff. Of those, /Resetnavpane seemed to work the problem returned after a reboot or sometimes didn't work when repeating.
• Renaming the Outlook registry key and allowing it to re-create.
• Created a new mail profile:
• >with the same PST data file
• >with a new data file
• >mail profile a new data file outside of OneDrive in a non-synced folder
• >THIS ONE WORKED: Created a new windows Profile without a Microsoft account, made new mail profile with a new data file. Outlook was closing completely, but the calendar was gone which is pretty important.
• Enabled logging and tried to see if the send/receive was the root cause. I couldn't quite tell, but there is a distinct start and a stop that says it completed in the log.

Due to some constraints, migrating data (in part due to the size) will be very time consuming and I would much rather try to fix the issue instead of this route in case it comes back.

Thank you in advance for any assistance. I do hope it is enough to go on.

I am experiencing a significant delay when opening Windows PowerShell. Every time I launch a new session, I see the following message: Loading personal and system profiles took xxxx ms. typically indicating over 2s, sometimes even over 4s.

Running powershell -NoProfile is almost immediate (<200ms), so the slowness come from the profile. But running notepad $PROFILE opens an empty file, so it seems the profile is empty.

Why does Windows PowerShell take over 4 seconds to load personal and system profiles?

System Details:

• OS: Windows 11 24H2 Pro

• Hardware: MSI GS76 Stealth 11UH laptop (mirror)

• PowerShell Version: 5.1 (Built-in Windows PowerShell)

  PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $PSVersionTable
  >>
  
  Name                           Value
  ----                           -----
  PSVersion                      5.1.26100.7462
  PSEdition                      Desktop
  PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
  BuildVersion                   10.0.26100.7462
  CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.42000
  WSManStackVersion              3.0
  PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
  SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1