Database Users

HTC Shift and Vista SP1

At first sight it looks like SP1 is not going down well on the Shift. The ShagCtrl (Shift Control Center) application (who for god's sake invented that shortname ShagCtrl??) exits with an eventID 1000 error and there seem to be some overall stability issues ....

Because of the intregration between vista and snavue I am afraid we will have to wait for htc updates. This weekday I ran windows update and the graphic card driver was updated. As result I only could work on 800x600. Higher res was disabled so I ve to undo the update....
Dani

Wow- I thought SP1 would be the least of problems... I thought about getting one but guess I'll hold off a bit until some of these problems have been sorted out. SP1 is something I wouldn't want to be witout... doesn't have major new 'things' in it, but the summary of all the little fixes is really nice.
What is your general perception of the device so far? Is the battery life too constricting? I was looking for a machine that would allow me to do some 'heavy' email (filing / writing) while on the road in Outlook / Vista and do a quick check / sorting of emails when I just have 5 minutes or so where booting up a machine wouldn't make the most sense... does it seem to do this (provided we get a better email client on CE (Flexview for example) installed on the machine?
What are our chances of getting more storage to the WM6 part? the 256MB RAM on board don't quite do it for me... and apparently the SD card or HD cannot be accessed...?
Thanks!

SP1 is fine on my shift!
P

Does the Shift Control Center start properly at boot and is it active in the tray?

Yup, everything works perfectly.
First thing I did was put RTM SP1 on, Office 2k7 SP1 and a few other bits n bobs, and it's all good.
P

odd ... I will give i a new try then ...

Strange. The second install of SP1 ended up not giving any headaches at all ... all applications work smoothly ... (even though it was exactly the same SP1 installer)

Hi. Do you see any improvement on SP1? Should I update?

SP1 may not show earth-shattering improvements, but it does improve significantly on file transfers, both to disk and through LAN/WAN so I would say yes.

what is your overall thougts about the Shift ? have you found anything annoying on it ?
what about the origami 2.0 experience? on videos, it seems that it was slow to launch... what about using it all day ? headaches, eyes closing, eyes pain?
thanks for sharing your experience

I absolutely love it but I am saying this from a professional perspective ... In real life I actually sell innovation in the end-user workspace, so it is my job to sell flexibility and mobility .... from that perspective the Shift is a perfect match. I have decided (as a testcase) to stick to the Shift for the next 2 weeks and leave my laptop locked away. (Just to see how well the Shift performs in real life). Over the next few weeks I will only be carrying the Shift, the dongle and power supply, as well as my ThinkOutside BT keyboard and mouse. To top that off I will only be carrying a biometric access stick into our company's Virtual Desktop environment.
(Mind you, I do have a few points of criticism though ... One of them for instance is the fact that the Shift has a UK keyboard instead of an (international) US one. Also the fact that one cannot set the SnapVue part to display in the 24h format)
Aside from that, people should not forget that they can't expect the Shift to deliver Core Duo performance. That simply is not it's purpose. The Stealy A110 Performance however is more than acceptable for the function I described above.

Solution found
Wiz said:
At first sight it looks like SP1 is not going down well on the Shift. The ShagCtrl (Shift Control Center) application (who for god's sake invented that shortname ShagCtrl??) exits with an eventID 1000 error and there seem to be some overall stability issues ....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
After installing of SP1 stopped working Shift Control Center and Audio driver on my Shift too. Solution of this problem is installing Control Center again. Run setup.exe located in directory C:\Program Files\HTC\control\ . After restart everything works well.
.... but, after running well for a few hour, problem is back...... sorry for wrong suggestion

One of the benefits of SP1 is actually related to Readyboost... if you enable it (in another thread under this topic) without SP1, the encryption key is 'lost' when going into sleep / hybernation. This means that after a wakeup the data will have to be reloaded. This is fixed in SP1 so you should see a better performance after resuming from sleep / hybernation.
As already mentioned, the copy performance is also drastically improved. The battery time should see a boost of maybe 2 - 5% (very subjectively depending on your workload) as the CPU is now allowed more often than not to enter sleep-mode (there will be off course no difference whatsoever when using mediaplayer or other parts that keep the CPU busy).
For more tips, check out
http://origamiproject.com/forums/thread/19843.aspx

Hi guys, may I ask you where you get your SP1? is it through the automatic windows update? or is it just a release you download from the internet?

It's available to download direct from Microsoft for MSDN members.
Copies can be found in the usual places.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb738089.aspx

Pantaloonie said:
It's available to download direct from Microsoft for MSDN members.
Copies can be found in the usual places.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb738089.aspx
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thanks, in this case i think i will prefer to wait for the automatic update....

I have problems with my usb tool, can it be because of the sp1?
Concludig, is it better with it or wothout it (sp1 I mean)?

[Q] Freezes, Metro Crashing

so a month after upgrading to windows 8 50% of the time when I try to open an app from the start screen it will open, not load, crash and kick me back to the regular desktop and the taskbar will be a solid color and then all of the items will come back. I think all of explorer is crashing and its getting on my nerves.
Also, my computer has started to lock up forcing a forced shutdown, but what's extra weird about this is when I boot back up it boots up faster than normal and everything is still loaded on my computer.
So I've decided the only thing I can do now is to clean refresh so I guess my question is which option of refreshing should I choose? I know the full one creates a windows.old file to recover the stuff I need but I was wondering if it'd be safe to use the keep my files option or if I shouldn't even risk it? Or if anyone knows of a fix (probably not going to happen)?

It sounds like your so-called "forced shutdowns" are actually putting the computer in sleep mode.
Make sure your system is fully up to date. There have been some performance, stability, and reliability updates for Win8 already. You don't need Metro to run Windows Update.
It's fine to try Refresh first, and if that doesn't fix things, go for a Reset. Generally, Refresh would work fine.

p2kmafia said:
so a month after upgrading to windows 8 50% of the time when I try to open an app from the start screen it will open, not load, crash and kick me back to the regular desktop and the taskbar will be a solid color and then all of the items will come back. I think all of explorer is crashing and its getting on my nerves.
Also, my computer has started to lock up forcing a forced shutdown, but what's extra weird about this is when I boot back up it boots up faster than normal and everything is still loaded on my computer.
So I've decided the only thing I can do now is to clean refresh so I guess my question is which option of refreshing should I choose? I know the full one creates a windows.old file to recover the stuff I need but I was wondering if it'd be safe to use the keep my files option or if I shouldn't even risk it? Or if anyone knows of a fix (probably not going to happen)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had something like this, and a refresh didn't do it. I had to reset the laptop. I haven't put much on the laptop, so I deleted all files.
I attempted refresh, but after afterwards I couldn't access the internet from within the metro apps. It seemed to start with the most recent auto update, but after the reset I did the updates and everything is fine. What happened was that I was unable to run any metro apps at all. I could get to the desktop, but the metro side would be unavailable until I saw the taskbar flash a solid color. Then I could briefly go to the metro side, for about 10 seconds.
Sent from my IdeaTabA2109A using xda premium

I'm getting this on one of my computers, interestingly it also has hdcp issues, im writing this up as a potential graphics issue, there are reports to back this up but nothing confirmed, if it is todo with graphics its not related to a single driver version, its almost completely random, this might suggest there is some conflict with driver, gpu, and whatever windows has built in for copy protection
Sent from my Samsung Focus S using XDA Windows Phone 7 App

thanks for the replies guys. it's definitely a weird problem as its only gotten progressively worse (stopped these last two days, no problems...don't know what happened haha) but I've got all my updated drivers from the sony website minus the BIOS cuz that slowed the hell out of my computer running windows 7 so I'm just avoiding sony drivers as much as possible

so turns out problem not gone. jinxed it, updated some things that weren't updated but something wont update correctly and idk why but I've got a final tomorrow so I'll figure it out another time

windows 8 and schedueled tasks

This has been driving me nutts and insane.
Windows 8 has the tendency to run all sort of tasks at certain time interval for the sake of Maintenance.
While this is perfectly ok on my desktop with its huge dual core 3 Ghz CPU, the same can not be said about my laptop with I3.
Whenever windows decides to do something, the temperatures spike close to the operational maximum.
So far, I've identified and neturalized some of the following tasks:
Idle maintenance: this is a pain in the ass to disable!
Scheduled maintenance: really annoying, if you happen to be doing something at that time, you're screwed big time (put it at 4 AM, no computer wake up-> took me a while to realize why my laptop started at random times during the night)
The following are things I've discovered by supervising the new task manager
The antivirus apparently decided at completely random times to scan something. I am ok with that (real time protection yada yada yada).
Apparently, some SQL server for windows NT process also starts at random times (no clue what it is and what it does)
Application hosts (network restricted -> I suppose this is some sort of .net Host) also runs at random times, even when PC is idle.
Disk defrag decides it's time to do its job: ofc, at random times,
I can't find any scheduled tasks to disable anymore!
Is this supposed to be the default behavior of windows 8, or is my installation corrupt?

mcosmin222 said:
The antivirus apparently decided at completely random times to scan something. I am ok with that (real time protection yada yada yada).
Apparently, some SQL server for windows NT process also starts at random times (no clue what it is and what it does)
Application hosts (network restricted -> I suppose this is some sort of .net Host) also runs at random times, even when PC is idle.
Disk defrag decides it's time to do its job: ofc, at random times,
I can't find any scheduled tasks to disable anymore!
Is this supposed to be the default behavior of windows 8, or is my installation corrupt?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What anti virus are you using because if its anything other than the built in suite then the issue is nothing to do with windows 8 and you should be consulting the software vendor. I dont have a problem with the built in software which only seems to use a significant amount of CPU time when the machine is otherwise idle, otherwise it takes a back seat, its still there but not making a huge difference.
SQL server should not be enabled by default. Its a database software. You can go into control panel>Add remove programs>enable/disable windows features, its in there somewhere. It should also be taking a back seat unless there is an active connection, chances are if you have no idea what it is then you never configured it to even have a port to listen on or a database to manage so it should in theory be doing absolutely nothing.
Application hosts is required, cannot be shut down without causing some problems.
Disk defrag should only run when the system is idle, always has done since vista.

SixSixSevenSeven said:
What anti virus are you using because if its anything other than the built in suite then the issue is nothing to do with windows 8 and you should be consulting the software vendor. I dont have a problem with the built in software which only seems to use a significant amount of CPU time when the machine is otherwise idle, otherwise it takes a back seat, its still there but not making a huge difference.
SQL server should not be enabled by default. Its a database software. You can go into control panel>Add remove programs>enable/disable windows features, its in there somewhere. It should also be taking a back seat unless there is an active connection, chances are if you have no idea what it is then you never configured it to even have a port to listen on or a database to manage so it should in theory be doing absolutely nothing.
Application hosts is required, cannot be shut down without causing some problems.
Disk defrag should only run when the system is idle, always has done since vista.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Antivirus is windows defender.
So, judging by your answer, my win8 installation is corrupt. Fine, I just reinstalled it. Let's see if it works better now^^

ASUS PC is acting weird

Guys,
I know that my question might be kind of off-topic in this section, but I'm desperate and it is still has to do with Windows 8, so:
I've got 3 year old ASUS K52Jc (i5 2.52GhZ, 4GB RAM, 600GB HDD, nVidia GeForce 310m + Intell HD Graphics) and as you see, it is a good mid-range machine even nowadays. I always took a good care of it.
So, lately (since the first time I installed Windows 8) it has strange behavior. It tragicly slowed down and started to heat, sometimes it's just blocks while I listening to music even on Windows 2.95 (very lightweight player) with no progs running. First I thought that it's happening because of Windows 8 drivers compatibility, so I decided to format and install Windows 7 again, but nothing changed. It is very strange because it blocks when I do normal stuff (internet, listen to music, watching movies, etc.) but when I edit movies (in After Effects CS5.5 and Premiere CS 5.5) and while I'm running heavy programms/games, my laptop performs great.
Lately, I've installed Windows 8.1 and problem is still there. I did chkdsk, ccleaner maintense, defragmented with defraggler, I've got good antivirus, and I did latest BIOS update, nothing changed. I've got services and startup programs well configurated.
This is very strange behavior and it's annoying. Is there any chance that someone in XDA could identify the problem and tell me solution?
P.S. Last month I cleaned fans and changed the thermo-paste. No luck, it's slow, has lags, has heating, it freezes randomly. And the worse of all is that any diagnostic I do tells me that there is no problem in software and hardware.
:crying::crying:
Any solution for me?

Most likely problem is the disk; did you do a thorough scan or just a file system scan? Another possibility is the RAM, but that's unlikely. Also, have you actually checked the CPU and GPU temperatures?
Also, for the record, 4GB of RAM is really marginal for a PC these days; I've got a 5-year-old tablet with that much. Normally I'd suggest increasing that to fix perf issues, but it sounds like that's *probably* not the problem. Keep an eye on utilization just in case.

Antique_Angel said:
Guys,
I know that my question might be kind of off-topic in this section, but I'm desperate and it is still has to do with Windows 8, so:
I've got 3 year old ASUS K52Jc (i5 2.52GhZ, 4GB RAM, 600GB HDD, nVidia GeForce 310m + Intell HD Graphics) and as you see, it is a good mid-range machine even nowadays. I always took a good care of it.
So, lately (since the first time I installed Windows 8) it has strange behavior. It tragicly slowed down and started to heat, sometimes it's just blocks while I listening to music even on Windows 2.95 (very lightweight player) with no progs running. First I thought that it's happening because of Windows 8 drivers compatibility, so I decided to format and install Windows 7 again, but nothing changed. It is very strange because it blocks when I do normal stuff (internet, listen to music, watching movies, etc.) but when I edit movies (in After Effects CS5.5 and Premiere CS 5.5) and while I'm running heavy programms/games, my laptop performs great.
Lately, I've installed Windows 8.1 and problem is still there. I did chkdsk, ccleaner maintense, defragmented with defraggler, I've got good antivirus, and I did latest BIOS update, nothing changed. I've got services and startup programs well configurated.
This is very strange behavior and it's annoying. Is there any chance that someone in XDA could identify the problem and tell me solution?
P.S. Last month I cleaned fans and changed the thermo-paste. No luck, it's slow, has lags, has heating, it freezes randomly. And the worse of all is that any diagnostic I do tells me that there is no problem in software and hardware.
:crying::crying:
Any solution for me?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If it's acting up and there's no hints in even Task Manager of something chewing up resources, CPU could be running at base speed (SpeedStep). I had this problem in my wife's BRAND NEW i7-3770k box that I built and it turned out to be faulty RAM and possibly bad mobo. (I never re-tested mobo after I yanked it.)
So my suggestion - if you can try RAM one stick at a time. Also consider testing for several runs under MemTest. See if that helps confirm a RAM issue. If laptop is still under warranty, consider getting it looked at and make sure mobo isn't on it's way out.

garwynn said:
If it's acting up and there's no hints in even Task Manager of something chewing up resources, CPU could be running at base speed (SpeedStep). I had this problem in my wife's BRAND NEW i7-3770k box that I built and it turned out to be faulty RAM and possibly bad mobo. (I never re-tested mobo after I yanked it.)
So my suggestion - if you can try RAM one stick at a time. Also consider testing for several runs under MemTest. See if that helps confirm a RAM issue. If laptop is still under warranty, consider getting it looked at and make sure mobo isn't on it's way out.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll try to test it with new RAM. Thanks a lot!

Chromebook better than a PC?

Hi there.
I'm doing this thread to once & for all find the ultimate answers to my PC "issues".
Before i bought my Lenovo Yoga 8 laptop i was thinking of buying a Google Chromebook. Specs might not be as high-end as a Windows PC but it loads a lot faster (having no such apps or enough background process to load in the background), apps load a lot faster, updates come automatically (and no need to download/intall like a PC), straighforward OS and no complicated hundreds of settings to tinker with unlike a PC. And besides a Chromebook is virus and malware-free forever.
I also happen to come from a Macbook Air and i found my PC that slow. Downloading & installing apps takes a lot longer, opening or closing an app or browser or tasks also takes longer. But in the course i have made some research to improve the speed & performanc of my Windows laptop mainly:
1. Turned off bluetooth
2. Set Windows Update to automatic
3. Updated Windows Defender
4. Defrafgging my gard drive monthly
5. Choose Selective Startup (under msconfig) and made sure no apps are enabled under Startup, selected apps are running under Services, choose a higher number under Processors and maximum memory set to at least half of what my Lenovo is capable of (under Boot)
6. Set performance to High Performance. (And being plugged in the mains)
What else have i missed?
Also i noticed when i look at Task Manager there are background processes that i do not understand and i'm not sure whether to disable them or not although it shows 0% affecting the RAM, etc.
If i don't get satisfied with this "complicated" WIndows 8.1 OS i might as well sell it and get a Chromebook as i use most of their services anyway on my Android phone.
To put things into certain context you see the most "intensve" task i will be doing in my computer will be downloading torrents 10 tabs/files at a time (it could be an .mp3 album or a standard .mp4 HD movie), wireless printing hundreds of pages from an assignmnt or work project, transferring hi-quality files (Flac or .mkv) to my Android tablet or doing an "intermediate-level" photo editing of my photos for upload to Twitter, Facebook, etc. My computer stays at home 99.99% of the time and IS online 100% of the time.
What you think guys?

I am not exactly sure what you bought, cause I can't find any Lenovo Yoga 8 running windows 8.
If you find windows 8 slow, you either bought something very low end, or something broken inside.
And no, a chrome book is not better than a PC. A PC has this thing called "reliability", which the chrome book lacks when you no longer have an internet connection.
Unless you are ready to pay a hefty monthly subscription to some mobile operator for unlimited data connection (which isn't really unlimited, after around 4GB, your connection will be slowed down automatically in many cases), and are ready to face the consequences of not having said data connection service whereever you go.
Even if windows PCs are more "expensive", which they are not, you can find a much more powerful computing machine at the same price of a chrome book (haswel i3s are really cheap now), you know you can do anything you want, whenever you want, and not relay on your internet connection to do more than checking the time.

Sorry...
I have bought Lenovo Yoga 2 11-inch Windows PC.
The MacBook Air I had before my Lenovo one stayed at home 100% of the time and is connected to the web 100% of the time. My fibre broadband is at least 70MB downloads speeds. With this respect a Chromebook would be suitable for me.
The PC I bought isn't low-end by any means. It is of the higher mid-range ones based on the specs itself. As I said I have done my own research, looked at Youtube videos on tip & tricks. The 8.1 update itself took me almost 5 hours even with that good specs. After that it is still slow. You can set up a Chromebook in 5-ish minutes, takes under 10 seconds to boot up from no power or sleep and apps start almost instantly. Because of probably all these background processes going on in Windows 8.1 it is still slow. Have shut and stopped some of them but still no significant change.
WIndows 8.1 isn't the lightweight, smooth OS I was hoping for. It is still "complicated" compared to a Mac and a Chromebook. Having it owned and used for 4 weeks I think that was enough for me to realise that perhaps....maybe next time.

Your PC is VERY low end. It has a Celeron/Pentium processor which is basically a higher clocked intel atom.
Upper mid range is core i3, not celeron my friend.
A MacBook has a core i5 processor, among other things, like a SSD for storage.
You traded a lot of mobility in the yoga for lower specs. This is why you paid so much. You can easily get a haswel i5 for this money, which is almost 10 times faster than this. You didn't research properly, I am affraid. This ain't no notebook for keeping around the house. this is a mobility oriented product.

Well, anyway i have returned the Yoga 2 back to the store and got myself an Acer C720 Chromebook. First impressions? Positive. Solid keyboard (could do with a backlit one), good sounding speakers, solid build quality and that's it so far. It's barely 24 hours so its too early to say as i haven't tried it that much yet.

IMO the best thing to improve general "feel" of a computer, especially things like how fast applications start up, is get an SSD. I don't what your Yoga had, but if it was one of the ones with the 5,400 rpm drives, it'll be slow.
If all you need is Chrome, then a Chromebook has the advantage being cheaper. Whilst a 10 second boot that Google claim for Chromebooks is quick, I wouldn't call Windows PCs slow, so long as you don't cripple them with a slow hard disk. My low end Asus T100 boots in 12 seconds (my Android Nexus 7 2013 takes 30 seconds). I don't see why web apps would load slower or things take longer to download on Chrome under Windows, than on a Chromebook - has this been tested (on equivalent hardware and network)?
"updates come automatically (and no need to download/intall like a PC)"
But you still have to download them on a Chromebook, and it happens automatically on Windows...
Never had a virus on Windows, and virus checking is built in and in the background now. There is more of a risk, but then it's like saying you're better off with a £10 dumb phone, because it's impossible to get a virus on it

Chromebook has everything you need? Then well, go ahead. Cause it is cheap and maybe simple to use.
Just make sure one day if you come up with something that you want to do but can be done only on a real computer (like using certain software or playing certain games), you can't. At the end of the day, you pay for what you get.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

A Chromebook and a PC serve different purposes. A Chromebook is like a motorcycle, lightweight, efficient and it will get you to from point A to B on the internet. A PC is like a truck,it can do a lot more but needs a bit more hardware to run on. If you can get by with a Chromebook do ahead. But I want full desktop programs, hardware driver support, etc. Thats why I got a Toshiba Encore tablet that runs 8.1. Windows still feels kind of weird on a tablet, but having a full desktop OS in a device that portable is awesome and those Bay Trail Atoms are a hell of a lot better than previous Atoms.

The Lenovo Yoga laptop i got is a quad-core Haswell-powered computer. Yet, it took me 4 hours to update it to 8.1 whilst my Chromebook took 4 minutes (even less) to set-up. My quad-core Yoga took 30 seconds (or less) to startup whilst my Chromebook took 7-8 seconds maximum.
Since having an Android phone and tablet for the past 4-5 years i feel i am tied up to Google and its various services. I can still avail and enjoy some of the MS services like OneCloud and OneOffice via its web app versions so for me that's still ok.

Gino76ph said:
The Lenovo Yoga laptop i got is a quad-core Haswell-powered computer. Yet, it took me 4 hours to update it to 8.1 whilst my Chromebook took 4 minutes (even less) to set-up. My quad-core Yoga took 30 seconds (or less) to startup whilst my Chromebook took 7-8 seconds maximum.
Since having an Android phone and tablet for the past 4-5 years i feel i am tied up to Google and its various services. I can still avail and enjoy some of the MS services like OneCloud and OneOffice via its web app versions so for me that's still ok.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your yoga wasn't a haswell...

According to Lenovo it was.