Your questions answered
Expert solutions for everday problems.
Which VPN Option?
I’m considering ditching my monthly-fee VPN service for my own home-brewed VPN. While I have no doubt there are internet how-to guides and APC tutorials, what is the short answer? I have a TP-Link Safestream VPN router collecting dust, or my current router supports easy setup using OpenVPN, so are these two relatively easy viable alternatives? Does a secure VPN require serious hardware, or is there a poor man’s alternative to pay services?
Ryan Pitts
Your question has given the team an idea, and we’ll be revisiting this subject in greater detail in a future issue. For now, remember that third-party VPN providers offer a different service from a VPN server sitting at home. A home-brewed VPN server is best for allowing you to “dial” into your home network securely when out and about. It creates a secure, encrypted tunnel that extends your local network to specific devices on the road, allowing them to access services as if you were at home.
Fee-based VPN providers work differently – their encrypted tunnels are designed to connect your devices securely (and anonymously) to the Internet itself. While you can configure a home VPN server to provide an encrypted tunnel to the Internet for extra security, your home’s public IP address (the one that identifies you on the internet) isn’t masked.
Long story short: If remaining anonymous or accessing georestricted content are your reasons for using a VPN, you need to stick with a third-party provider. If your budget is stretched, consider looking at Windscribe ( https:// windscribe.com). Its free tier offers a choice of 10 locations, as well as 10GB of free monthly bandwidth, adequate for most moderate-use cases.
Sluggish File Explorer
Last year, I upgraded my system to an AMD Threadripper 2950X from a quad-core Intel CPU, and I expected a big performance increase, which did not happen. My system runs reliably, but it’s s-l-o-w. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds to open Windows
Explorer. Everything is slow. I read a lot about how picky Threadripper is concerning RAM, and I purchased memory that was on the Gigabyte memory compatibility list, but I’m wondering if the RAM is slowing everything down.
Windows is running off an M.2 boot drive (Samsung 950 Pro, 512GB), with five internal traditional spinning-platter disks offering a total capacity of 31TB. I’m hoping you can tell me if I have components that are not optimal, or some possible reason the system is so slow, and/or what I might do to increase the performance. I’m not overclocking it. The CPU stays cool with the liquid cooling system.
I use the system mostly for software development and often have one or two virtual machines running, but even with no VMs it’s still very slow.
Hal Endresen
You’re not going to notice a stellar increase in the day-to-day performance of your PC when upgrading from an older quad-core chip to a Threadripper – basic Windows usage benefits most from a faster hard drive, which you’ve already got in place in the form of the M.2 drive.
That said, things certainly shouldn’t run slower than before – you don’t mention if your latest incremental upgrade was accompanied by a fresh Windows install, which is a must when swapping out motherboard, CPU, and RAM. If this isn’t the case, perform a clean reinstall to see if the problem clears (image your current setup first, then roll back if the problem persists).
We suspect you’ve already performed this step, in which case we suspect your sluggish performance is related to File Explorer’s slow opening times. There are literally dozens of potential causes – and solutions – to wade through, but our hunch is that this is a problem with the Windows Search index, linked to the gargantuan amount of storage
attached to your PC. Windows Search can end up consuming vast amounts of CPU cycles and RAM attempting to index large folders, and the problem can be exacerbated by a corrupt index.
One symptom of this? File Explorer takes an age to open.
To see if you can resolve this, type “index” into the Search box to open Indexing Options. Click “Modify” to check the current indexing options. Try removing large folders from this list, then click “OK” followed by “Advanced” to click “Rebuild” and flush and rebuild the index. Hopefully, you’ll immediately feel the benefit.
If not, use a free tool like HDDScan ( https://hddscan.com) to check your drives’ physical health and SMART status, then run a full series of health checks on the drives and Windows itself—start with a disk check on each drive. Open an elevated Command Prompt and use “chkdsk c: /f/r” to schedule a boot check when prompted, then repeat the command for every other drive. After rebooting, if Windows finds and fixes errors, you’ll almost certainly see improvements.
Still having problems? One more thing to try: If File Explorer opens to the “Quick Access” folder rather than “This PC,” a shortcut to a currently inaccessible folder – typically an unconnected network drive – could be holding things up. Try removing this or switch to the File Explorer ribbon’s “View” tab and choose “Options > Change folder and search options” to set “This PC” as the default to bypass the problem.
Wake-Up Conundrum
My desktop PC has been randomly waking itself up in the night for some time now. This wouldn’t be much of a problem except it doesn’t go back to sleep on its own despite normally sleeping perfectly. I’ve used my nine years of reading experience to troubleshoot, making sure no backup is scheduled, not participating in any reporting, and so on. “Powercfg -lastwake” finally yielded the culprit: a nightly Windows Media Center wake timer. What?! I upgraded to Windows 10 years ago and have shaken my fist many times at Microsoft for taking that beloved software from me. I’ve deleted the offending task, so hopefully it cures my PC’s insomnia, but are there whisperings of WMC being brought back, or is this a perfect example of why you recommend clean installs every now and then? Thanks! James Breen
Congrats on performing a textbook diagnosis of your problem. There is little chance Microsoft will resurrect Windows Media Center (if you’ve not already done so, install Kodi – www.kodi.tv), so the offending task does not foretell its return.
Ultimately, you’ve answered your own question: If you’ve never reinstalled Windows from scratch since upgrading to Win 10, this is almost certainly a leftover from your Win 7 install. We suspect it may have been waking your PC every night since you upgraded, but it’s only recently something has prevented it from going back to sleep again – it may, for example, be related to the sleep-related problems reported (among many other glitches) with the recent KB4535996 optional Windows update.
We recommend you bite the bullet and perform that clean reinstall; most Windows installs need clearing out every two or three years – particularly now Windows insists on six-monthly refreshes. Not only will you banish gremlins like this, but you’ll end up with a leaner, faster system.
You’re not going to notice a stellar increase in the day-to-day performance of your PC when upgrading from an older quad-core chip to a Threadripper.
Safe or Scam?
Do you have any information about a program called Advanced System Repair Pro? I’ve seen various reports that it is a “scam,” doesn’t work as advertised, and corrupts hard drives, but others say it works as advertised.
Mike Becker
We clicked the link Mike sent us, and it was blocked by Malwarebytes on the grounds of it being a “Potentially Unwanted Program.” The Doc then visited the site on a sandboxed PC and saw it was simply another in a long line of system maintenance apps promising a collection of miraculous optimisation, repair and malwarecleaning tools. The Doc is naturally suspicious of all such programs, so stay away from this – and indeed any all-in-one tool with components like Registry cleaners that have at best a placebo effect and at worst the ability to screw up your Windows installation.
Mouse Startup Glitch
When I power up my computer, the mouse isn’t recognized, but unplugging it from the USB port and plugging it back in makes it work. What’s strange is that it happens only about once in every four boots, and there’s no pattern to its behavior.
The mouse is a Corsair M65 RGB and I’m running a Ryzen 5 2600X on an MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon, with 32GB HyperX Predator RAM, and an M.2 NVMe Samsung 970 Pro as the boot drive. My motherboard drivers are all up to date and I’m running Corsair’s iCUE for the mouse (firmware v 3.02). Thanks for the help!
Isaac Peterson
This is a known issue with the Corsair M65 RGB. It appears Corsair’s iCUE software is to blame – try reflashing the firmware. Unplug the mouse, then hold down the left and right mouse buttons before plugging it in. iCUE should prompt you to update the firmware.