Month: March 2023

Windows 11 | Snipping tool “Recording stopped”

On By windows7bugsIn Windows, Windows 119 Comments

Update on 15th August 2024

It looks like one of the parties, either Intel or Microsoft (must be intel, because disabling the intel display adaptor helped earlier) has fixed the issue & screen recording works as expected even on multiple displays. Enjoy!

Updated on 20th December 2023. Yesterday, I came across Intel forum discussion, about a particular decoder issue strongly tied to Intel UHD. It was quite a discussion and I noticed that the user was able to get stuffs work when he was using “Microsoft Basic Display Adapter” instead of Intel UHD drivers. So, I wanted to see whether it is the case with Snipping tool recording also. I kept removing the display drivers until the device manager shown “Microsoft Basic Display Adapter” for me. I started the screen recording and, yes, it worked! Let us check out a small video now, that was captured using Snipping Tool. Unfortunately, as soon the drivers were reinstalled, I lost this privilege and the only solution “working” for me was as discussed below.

Updated on 3rd December 2023. It looks like, many people were able to get the snipping tool working finally by setting graphics to High Performance GPU. For me, the only option that works as on date is disabling the Intel UHD from devices panel. I think, it is a device specific issue & not many others are affected the way I am. Anyway, cheers guys. We have a working workaround now!

Disable the Intel Graphics. Snipping tool works, or worked for me through multiple hot and cold restarts after this hack.

If it fails, will update this thread with further information.

I will keep this as an open thread as, while the above hack works every time it has some adverse effects. Once I disable the Intel UHD graphics, my box cannot “Project” anymore! That means my multiple monitors setup goes for a toast. To get it back, I must enable the Intel UHD graphics once after the screen recording, feels awkward.

My HP laptop is more than 4 years old & the BIOS does not support selecting NVIDIA as default GPU, instead it is either the low power or hybrid mode. NVidia control panel is not of much help as Windows 11 handles such settings itself.

So for the time being, whenever you want to record screen using snipping tool, just disable the Intel UHD graphics and turn it on immediately after that in order to get back the multiple monitors support. If you are not using multiple monitors, then you can leave the changes as it is.

Hack for a small size USB flash disk

On By windows7bugsIn Gadgets, Hacks for Practical life, HardwareLeave a comment

I’ve one ONKYO entry level AVR HT-S3800 and it has a front USB port, mostly for playing audio files. This port has issues reading USB drives that exceed certain size limits. Say, if you plug a 16GB drive, there are high possibilities that this unit “may not” read it & I came across such a situation recently. To be quite truthful, I hardly ever tested this USB port & while repositioning the unit, I decided to give it a try.

After some deep scavenging I found an APACER Handy Steno, 512MB USB Flash drive from my collection of antiques, that I bought around 2004-2005. My AVR happily started playing from it, while it dissed my 16GB USB stick. So I thought of all possible solutions like ordering a 2GB USB stick online, getting one USB micro sd card reader etc etc.

After couple of days, at work I came up with a vicious idea. Got hold of my 16GB USB stick, removed the volume and created a 2GB volume, formatted with FAT32 and copied my audio files and took it home and connected to the AVR.

My unit started playing from the USB stick happily and no more hours long scanning or dissing the disk! The hack was fooling the unit to “think” the disk has only 2GB storage. The only downside of this hack is losing the balance storage. Who knows, this hack could be applied to other legacy devices as well, especially for car stereo head units that are few years old.

Fix for Windows 10, 11 virtual machine slowness on VirtualBox

On By windows7bugsIn Oracle VirtualBox, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 112 Comments

I’ve been using Oracle VirtualBox for last many years and ever since I moved to Windows 10, experienced some unexplainable stuttering and lags with Windows 10, 11 virtual machines. I think finally I made a breakthrough for myself. I am not sure whether this approach is helpful for everyone as virtual machines behave differently on different hardware setups. I’ve gone through many VirtualBox forum posts discussing issues with same nature, particularly with NVidia graphic chips/cards & all my boxes have NVidia graphic chips or cards.

My work laptop configuration.

and has one NVMe ssd for the OS and 2TB SSD for data on which I have all my virtual machines. Regardless, with the amount of hardware resources, my Windows 10 virtual machine stuttered, and the experience was horrible, compared to the Windows XP VM that I had. I never had issues with Linux VMs either. I tried almost every trick in the book and always ended with gaining very little.

Couple of weeks back, for one of the Oracle labs exercises I started the Windows 10 VM and for some unknown reasons found the virtual machine was not automatically resizing display. I managed to fix this problem earlier by changing the graphics controller from VBoxSVGA to VBoxVGA, force auto resize & switching graphics controller back to VBoxSVGA. For that exercise I disabled the 3D acceleration, basically landing on a solution unknowingly. I repeated the same exercise and found my Windows 10 virtual machine snappier than ever! To confirm, I switched back to 3D acceleration & managed to reproduce the same choppy, stuttering experience with the same virtual machine once again.

Let us see what happens with we enable 3D acceleration for the graphics controller.

VirtuaBox allows a maximum of 256MB memory for Video & check the below image to see what happens when we enable 3D acceleration.

half of the video memory is consumed by the 3D acceleration! OS like Windows 10, 11 have pretty heavy graphic elements and obviously the limited video memory makes the OS stuttering and lagging whole the way (or this is what I assume from my experiments).

As I mentioned in the beginning, disabling the 3D acceleration works for me on three different machines & different Windows OS virtual machines. Hope this helps few others out there.

How to hide Powershell background window

On By windows7bugsIn PowerShell, WindowsLeave a comment

I’ve changed from Windows batch files to Powershell for almost every other repeated tasks & one of the scripts that I use to connect to our IKEv2 VPN script has a shortcut on my desktop. This script helps me to connect and disconnect from the VPN network just by double clicking the shortcut. You can checkout the script here

I had multiple iterations for the script and kept on deleting and recreating the shortcut and noticed that a black window started appearing when I executed script from the shortcut.

All I could remember was, not changing any settings for the Powershell & couldn’t find a “solution” (that was mere eyesore to my rigid expectations). Interestingly, my semi desktop/server class box didn’t have this “issue”, whenever I executed the script from the shortcut, all I was provided was the “Connected” or “Disconnected” message boxes.

After sometime, I decided to check the shortcut properties on my desktop & noticed that the “Run” option was selected as “Minimized”

Powershell provides many switches & one of the switches is “WindowStyle” that supports Normal, Minimized, Maximized and Hidden styles for the Window. Well, the style “Minimized” just hid the entire window, including the message popups that had prompts.

Quickly I moved to my laptop and changed the Run to “Minimized” and that was it. No more annoying black window behind my script message boxes! No more script outputs shown on the screen. So, if you reached here seeking a how to hide those annoying black windows, give this a try.