Dell Alienware Laptop Freezes

 The hand-me-down laptop from my son is randomly freezing for several seconds. The Dell community recons that the culprit is the Dell Support Assist. So to solve this problem: stop the SupportAssistAgent service in Task Manager, or better still, remove the SupportAssist altogether. However, after doing the above I found that the problem still persists. So I stopped a few more services:

• DDVDataCollector - Dell Data Vault Collector
• DDVRulesProcessor - Dell Data Vault Processor
• DDVCollectorSvcApi - Dell Data Vault Service API

That seems to have solved my problem. Basically stop everything from Dell!

This problem really reflects badly on Dell - such basic problem yet happens on so many  machines. Also, the Alienware laptop has very flimsy keys and buttons on its keyboard and touchpad. Five of the keys are broken for far. Such disappointment. 

External Microphone Problem with Realtek HD Audio

One day, my 12-year-old son’s MSI GT70 laptop simply would not detect external microphone (on the headset) any more. I tried to update Realtek audio drivers, looked up any online forums but nothing worked.

I noticed that if I hover my mouse over the microphone jack (the pink one in below diagram (although on mine it shows black)) the text says ‘Center & Subwoofer’ instead of microphone. I thought it might be driver or hardware problem.

But my son thought differently. He reckoned that there must be something wrong at the configuration, and it turned out that it is simply the Speaker Configuration (combo box / drop down list) in the below diagram.

If you choose more than 4 speakers, the microphone jack will be used for audio output for the center speaker instead of for microphone input. So the solution is as simple as changing the Speaker Configuration to quad… or less and that will free up the pink jack for microphone.

After fixing that problem, the mic worked fine on Windows 10’s Voice Recorder, but the volume was too faint on Skype. To fix that, my son unchecked the ‘let application have exclusive control’ option of the sound device from Windows Control Panel.

So now the headset is fully functional. Next time anyone ask me to fix their computer or phone, I will outsource them to my son!

The Flip Side of uTP

The uTorrent transport protocol (uTP) was designed to make bitTorrent more ISP friendly by controlling the P2P traffic bandwidth. However, it may cause your router/modem to lose internet connectivity for your device, especially earlier models of the router.

I have seen quite a few people complaining about lost of connectivity after bitTorrent starts (especially after upgrading to latest versions of the clients) either immediately or after a while. People have been blaming it on firewalls, anti-virus or even NAT overflow, but to no avail.  The solution may be very simple – just turn off uTP Bandwidth Management in your bitTorrent client.

Samsung Remote Control Problem

The day before Easter Friday, I was prompted to upgrade my Samsung S3 software and I complied. The download (400MB+) and installation took a while but it eventually completed. Just when I was delighted about some new features introduced by the firmware and software upgrade such as more languages support on Samsung keyboard and Text To Speech, I soon discovered that the upgrade came with a deadly problem: every time I used the phone, I ended up with a frozen device sooner (less than a minute) or later (less than 30 minutes).

At first I thought it was just a glitch and would pass, but I was wrong. The problem persisted for a couple of days to a point that it rendered my phone useless. Out of frustration, I started investigating the problem by elimination – going through all the running processes and try to figure out which could be the culprit. I saw a process called Remote Control that I had never seen before the upgrade. On the Configuration menu, it says that the Remote Control allows the owner of the phone to remotely shutdown the phone if it’s stolen. I swiftly turned it off. Hey presto, problem fixed. And now I make sure I always kill the Remote Control app after any reboot.

Here is a message to Samsung: make sure you test your software thoroughly before releasing them.

Attachment Manager

For several days, I had been unable to download any files using web browsers (IE and Chrome). This included web mail, any file downloads from web pages, etc. On IE the download occurred, but the file simply disappeared after download finished. IE did not give any error messages. It was really annoying. I then tried the same on Chrome. Chrome did the same, the file simply disappeared after downloading. However, it provided a vital clue – it showed an error saying that the file virus check failed, and provided URL to Microsoft Attachment Manager description.

It turned out that the MS Attachment Manager tried to notify anti-virus software (happened to be Trend Micro’s OfficeScan) after downloading. However, this notification somehow failed. Since I don’t have permission to change anything in OfficeScan (it was installed by our IT department) the simplest way is for me to disable this notification because OfficeScan automatically checks any new files any way.

I changed the Windows Registry key from 3 (On) into 1 (Off):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments

BF3 Freezing Problem

There are many complaints about BF3 freezing after a few minutes, usually during loading/saving or in the middle of a mission.

I have not seen any solution posted any where. There were suggestions that RemoveWAT used on Windows 7 may be the culprit. But that does not apply to this problem.

Actually, the solution is very simple. In BF3, just go to Options –> Game Play and disable PunkBuster. That’s it!