Today my laptop's Control Panel link in Right click Start Menu quit working!
Took 5 or 6 clicks on the shortcut to get it to open the Control Panel. Coincidentally I received this email:
Win10 Start/taskbar right-click–menu problems
"I recently upgraded from Win7 to Win10. I love the new OS for the most part, especially after someone at your site helped me with a Fast-Start problem. However, some Win10 features don't seem to be working.
"After reading a recent article about right-clicking the Start icon, I realized I was missing something.
"Of the 18 or so choices that typically appear when you right-click Start, only Run and Search work for me.
"An online technician said that some of my programs were causing conflicts with Windows commands. After I allowed him to remotely access my system, he started deleting programs.
"About two hours and three reboots later, he'd deleted 21 programs. He triggered another reboot but then never came back online. I'm not sure what all he did, but Start's right-click context menu still won't work! Talk about frustration.
"I did a complete system restore using a backup I'd fortunately saved the night before, but the right-click/Start menu functionality still is missing.
"Obviously something is not right, but I have no idea what it is. Help!"
Changes to Win10's Start menu and taskbar can result in broken context menus, if the menus contain third-party add-ons. Here are some solutions.
The failures appear to be caused by conflicts with third-party software that adds itself to Windows' default context menus. These incompatibilities can make the menus malfunction or not work at all.
The volume of online posts about this issue also appears to be growing, probably due to Microsoft's new, fast-paced release of interim Win10 updates. In effect, Win10 is now a moving target for third-party developers, some of whom are having trouble keeping up. As a result, if and when Microsoft slipstreams a tweak to Win10's internals, non-Microsoft software that works fine one day might have conflicts the next.
The article suggests the following solutions (Windows Secrets sent me paid content not available free online):
Option 1: The easiest fix is to uninstall third-party software that's conflicting with Windows (the approach the online tech tried on Harris' PC).
Start by identifying third-party software that has added items to the right-click context menus — 7-Zip and Dropbox, for example. Be sure to right-click various targets: Start, taskbar icons, desktop icons, the drives and folders in File Explorer, and so on. If you have trouble identifying a particular context-menu add-in/add-on, use the tools described below in Option 2.
Option 2: Instead of taking the drastic step of completely uninstalling software, you can try to directly disable or remove the third-party, context-menu add-ons themselves.
If you don't know what software has altered Windows' menus, or if the software you identified has no built-in option to disable its menu add-ons, you can use a specialized tool such as CCleaner (free/paid; site) to clean up the menus.
In CCleaner, click Tools and Startup, then click the Context Menu tab (see Figure 1) in the Startup list to see what third-party software has appended itself to Windows' default menus. Select one or more listed items and use the offered options for disabling or deleting those items.
I chose the second option to see how it might help by DISABLING some seldom used or duplicate listings:
There were many duplicates so I disabled the second or most likely NEWER entry!
I also checked the Scheduled items listed in the Startup folder and found some OLD PC tuneup applications:
Scrolling to the right I found some OLD FRIENDS I thought I had REMOVED previously like
ParetoLogic:
I also found a command line using
PCALUA to do something so I looked that up.
pcalua.exe is the Program Compatibility Assistant. "The Program Compatibility Assistant is an automatic feature ofWindows that runs when it detects an older program has a compatibility problem."
What does PCALUA.EXE do?
Option 3. If the simpler options don't work (and they didn't for me), the almost-certain way to restore proper context-menus operation is to use Win10's built-in Reset/Keep my files option. In fact, that's how Fred Langa got his system working properly again.
After making a full system backup, click Start/Settings/Update & security/Recovery. Next, click the Get started button under "Reset this PC" and then choose Keep my files. This'll reinstall Win10 but keep your user files intact. It also removes third-party desktop apps and any drivers you installed, returning the system to its default settings. This almost always restores normal context-menu operation.
The Reset/Keep my files option places a list of all removed apps on your desktop; you'll also get links to the websites of any apps Windows knows about. Using these links can greatly speed and simplify your reinstallation of the removed apps, and it also helps ensure that you have the latest-available versions. Any listed apps that don't include links must be restored the way you originally installed them.
I do NOT recommend option 3 as it removes most of your programs!
Users abandon sinking Microsoft browser ship at record clip
In the last six months alone, IE -- a bucket into which Net Applications also throws in Windows 10's Edge -- has lost 11.4 percentage points, an unprecedented decline for any browser at any point in the last 11 years.
As recently as November 2015, IE accounted for more than half of the global browser user share.
At the same time, Google's Chrome reaped what Microsoft sowed, as the relative upstart -- Chrome debuted eight years ago -- added 3.9 percentage points to its share to close out May with 45.6%, within sniffing distance of the majority milestone.
Failing a turn-around, Firefox's user share will slide to just 5% in little more than a year, slumping to the same level now held by Apple's Mac-only Safari.
The introduction of Windows 10 was another contributor to IE's fall, as the new operating system demoted IE to a legacy role and promoted Edge as the replacement. But Windows 10 users, who now make up nearly 20% of all PC owners, have been hesitant, increasingly so, to adopt Edge: In May, fewer than three in every 10 Windows 10 users chose Edge. That number has been slowly declining -- it was two out of three in October -- since Windows 10's launch last year.
Edge also recently took over opening PDF files on my W10 laptop off of PDF Xchange Viewer!
Chrome also has a PDF viewer that now only works with web pages...
SQL Server 2016 is generally available today (have credit card ready)
SQL Server 2016 has ground-breaking performance optimizations and efficiencies, leading to new levels of performance and scale. Modern servers can support a large number of cores with sophisticated vector instructions, can hold terabytes of memory, and provide very high I/O bandwidth with local flash storage. Optimizing for the concurrency and parallelism inherent within such servers can provide dramatic speedups at scale, and often outperform large distributed databases.
No word on compatibility with older versions...