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[ WINDOWS ] Explorer crashes when I right-click
I have two laptops — one of which is new — and both are running Windows 10. Both have the same problem: when I right-click an item in File Explorer, Windows will momentarily freeze and then File Explorer crashes and restarts. It’s not consistent — it occurs around 50% of the time, and it doesn’t happen when right-clicking within an application. Any ideas?
[ PETER HOAREA ]
Alex Cox replies: This is usually linked to a third-party program adding an option to the context menu that appears when you rightclick a file, folder or drive. We told Peter to use CCleaner ( www.piriform.com) to view what items were currently present in the context menu by heading to ‘Tools > Startup > Context Menu’. Here, you’ll see a list of entries linked to directories (folders), drives and files — and one or more of these will be causing the crash. Start by selecting them all, then click Disable (some entries may be blocked, ignore these). You should find the right-click menu works correctly, enabling you to start re-enabling items until you encounter the crash. Peter used this technique to trace the problem to the entries related to Dropbox — as he didn’t need the extra features, simply leaving these disabled fixed his problem.
[ HARDWARE ] Why am I getting pictures, not sound?
Recently, I connected my laptop to the television via HDMI to watch something on the big screen, but can only get pictures — not sound. Everything was fine up until this point — I’m running Windows 10 on a HP laptop and have verified that the HDMI cable is working correctly.
[ ANDREA CHRISTOU ]
Rob Mead-Green replies: These days, both laptop and desktop PCs offer multiple sound outputs, and if you have the wrong one selected as the default, it means you can appear to lose all sound. To solve this problem, start by clicking the ‘^’ button in the Taskbar Notification area. Look for a white volume icon, right-click it and then choose Playback devices. One will clearly be marked as the default — our guess is that it’s not the correct one, so right-click each device in turn and choose Test. When you hear sound again, select the device in question and then click the Set Default button to make it the default from now on.
Going forward, when you connect your HDMI cable between your laptop and your TV again, you may need to return here and switch the sound output to the HDMI port temporarily to hear sounds coming through your television.
[ MAC ] Broken PDF attachments in Apple Mail
I normally check my mail first on my iPhone, where I haven’t experienced problems viewing PDF attachments. However, when I read the same messages on my MacBook Pro, I often get errors that its PDF attachments are missing, or may be damaged and unreadable. What’s causing this, and how can I fix it?
[ NICK COOK ]
Ian Sleightholm replies: This might result from the settings in the copy of Mail on your MacBook Pro. Open its preferences, select the Accounts tab, and then for each of your accounts go to the Advanced tab and try the following: Ensure there’s a check mark next to ‘Automatically download all attachments’. Next, go to the Viewing tab and ensure ‘Load remote content in messages’ is also checked. These should guarantee all PDF attachments are properly downloaded to your Mac. If the issue persists despite those settings being correct, next try to rebuild any affected mailbox(es). Select one on the left and choose ‘Mailbox > Rebuild’, then repeat for additional problematic mailboxes. If you still can’t reliably access PDFs sent to you, the best workaround is to try saving them and then opening the saved files. A few people seem to suffer from this as a more persistent problem, though the majority don’t.
[ INTERNET ] Grey screen in web browser
Every time I launch Opera, it opens to a grey screen. And if I open Chrome, I get the same grey screen plus a list of messages about add-ons crashing on startup. I can’t access settings, extensions or find any way to relaunch either with extensions disabled. What can I do?
[ BILL GRAHAM ]
Nick Peers replies: We traced Bill’s problem to the Chromium sandbox, which is present in both Chrome and Opera. Pressing ‘Win-R’ and typing “chrome -no-sandbox” or “opera -no-sandbox” enabled us to launch a working version of either browser (Chrome warned us about the flag we’d invoked, while Opera simply functioned as normal).
Most sandbox-related problems are often traced back to security software. Bill was running Norton Internet Security and Malwarebytes Premium. We instructed him to temporarily disable Norton’s auto-protect feature, to no effect, but after he’d disabled all four layers of Malwarebyte’s real-time protection, Bill’s browser problem disappeared. He then re-enabled them one at a time, and the problem resurfaced only when Malwarebytes’ Exploit Protection module was switched back on. We checked the Malwarebytes forums ( forums.
malwarebytes.com) where a number of other users reported the same problem. This is likely to be resolved in a future fix, but for a temporary workaround, switch Exploit Protection back on under ‘Settings > Protection’, then click ‘Manage Protected Applications’ to disable Exploit Protection for both Opera and Chrome, both of which should be listed. This will allow you to run them with the sandboxing features enabled.