After a lot of backlash about choosing the default Windows browser, Microsoft has officially backed up and brought back a one-click browser change into Windows 11. For anyone who is not aware, when Windows 11 was released if you wanted to switch to another browser you had to go into the settings app and choose the default browser for different types of file extensions like HTML, HTM, PDF for opening on the web, etc. Of course, this was completely unnecessary and it was not well received by users. So after some time, Microsoft backpedaled to standard one click, choose your default browser solution that existed in the previous version of Windows OS. Altho sometimes Microsoft knows how to irritate its users base, it is good to know that they can also listen and fix things that are required.

I often switch between my desktop speakers and headphones and because of this I very often use the volume adjustment bar to adjust sound levels so it is not too loud and each time when I set it I get annoying BEEP at the end. Now personally this might not bother you and you might want to leave it since it can be a useful feature to tell you how much volume is loud but if you are adjusting multiple times volume during the say it can become really frustrating to hear it each time, especially when switching to headphones and it beeps into your ears. In this guide, I will show you how to remove the beep so it is not heard anymore when you adjust the volume. Please know that beep is part of the Windows sound scheme and you can either remove specific sound with a completely silent wave or just turn off all windows alert sounds.

• Open Windows settings and go to system > sound
• in system sound, go to the right part of the screen and click on the sound control panel
• In the sound control panel click on the Sounds tab
• In the sounds, tab click on the drop-down menu under the sound scheme and choose no sounds.

There you go! You have successfully removed annoying BEEP each time you adjust the volume in Windows 10

SMB which stands for “Server Message Block”, is a protocol used for file sharing. It provides the Read and Writes operating on network devices. Thus, it is why it is widely used when accessing a server-based in Linux. Its latest version is the SMB2 which follows after SMB1. The SMB2 contains more fixes to vulnerabilities that were found in SMB1. The predecessor was vulnerable since it served as a gateway to various modern ransomware which is why Microsoft disabled it by default starting with Windows 10 v1709. When you try to share a file, you will get the following error message:

“Microsoft Windows Network: You can’t connect to the file share because it is not secure. This share requires the obsolete SMB1 protocol, which is unsafe and could expose your system to attack. Your system requires SMB2 or higher.”

In this post, you will be guided on how to check if the SMB2.0 version can be installed on your Windows 10 computer. To get started, follow the steps below. Step 1: Tap the Win + X keys to open the Device Manager. Step 2: After that, click on the Windows PowerShell (Admin) option. Step 3: In the Windows PowerShell window, type the following command and hit Enter:

Get-SmbServerConfiguration | Select EnableSMB2Protocol

Note: After entering the command, you will see the following content on your screen which means that your Windows 10 computer is now capable of running the SMB2 protocol Now all that’s left for you to do is to enable the SMB 2 protocol on your Windows computer by enabling the SMB 1 protocol first and then upgrading it to SMB 2 afterward. Refer to the steps below for more details. Step 1: Tap the Win + I keys to open the Settings app. Step 2: Then type in “control panel” in the search area and click on Control Panel from the search results. Step 3: After opening Control Panel, click on Programs. From there, select the “Turn Windows features on or off” option under the larger menu of Programs and Features. Step 4: After that, Windows Features will appear on your screen. And from there, make sure that you select SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support and then click on OK. Step 5: Now let it install all the required files and then restart your computer to apply the changes made successfully. After your computer has restarted, the SMB 2 protocol should now be supported on your Windows 10 computer. Note: On the other hand, you can also enter the following command in the Windows PowerShell window. Just make sure you have admin rights to enable it.

Set-SmbServerConfiguration –EnableSMB2Protocol $true

A lot of things can go wrong even when you’re only doing some simple operations or tasks on your computer and this is due to the fact that there are various small operations make up in order to perform the larger operations on your computer. So if any of these smaller operations are not properly working, it crashes the operation as a whole and it throws an error code instead. And one of these error codes is Error 0x800701e3. This particular error pops up when an error has occurred in the File Explorer when a transfer is initiated from one disk to another in your Windows 10 computer. When you encounter this error, you will get the following error message:

“Error 0x800701e3: The request failed due to a fatal hardware error.”

There are several methods you can check out to fix this error – you can try to run System Restore or Check Disk or format the destination drive or check the SMART attribute of the drive. For more details, refer to each one of the following options.

Option 1 – Try to run System Restore

Error 0x800701e3 might be due to some adjustments you’ve made in your computer’s settings. Thus, to fix this error, you can try undoing those changes using System Restore. How? Refer to these steps:

• Tap the Win + R keys to open the Run dialog box.
• After that, type in “sysdm.cpl” in the field and tap Enter.
• Next, go to the System Protection tab then click the System Restore button. This will open a new window where you have to select your preferred System Restore point.
• After that, follow the on-screen instructions to finish the process and then restart your computer and then check if your mouse is now back to its normal state.

Option 2 – Try running the Check Disk utility

You can also run the Check Disk utility in fixing Error 0x800701e3.

• In the Windows Search box, type “command prompt” and from the search results, right-click on Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator”.
• After opening Command Prompt, type this command and tap Enter: chkdsk <Partition Letter>: /f /r /x /b
• The command you entered will start to check for errors and fix them automatically. Else, it will throw an error message saying, “Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like the schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)”.
• Tap the Y key to schedule Disk Check the next time your computer restarts.

Option 3 – Try to format the destination drive

Formatting the destination drive could also help you resolve error 0x800701e3. To format your drive, follow these steps:

• First, open File Explorer and then right-click on the drive where you encountered the error.
• Next, select Format from the context menu. This will open a new mini window.
• Then select the NTFS option from the drop-down menu for the File System menu.
• After that, check the box labeled as Quick Format.
• Now click on Start. Keep in mind that doing so will remove all the contents of your storage device.

Option 4 – Verify the hard drive using SMART attributes

In case you don’t know, Windows has a built-in feature of SMART analysis which analyzes the hard drive/SSD and checks all the parameters by performing some minor operations. To use it, follow these steps:

• Tap the Win + S keys and type “command prompt” in the field then right-click on the related search result and select the “Run as administrator” option.
• After opening Command Prompt as admin, type the “wmic diskdrive get status” command and hit Enter.
• You should get a result after that, and if you see that it’s “normal”, proceed to the next option below

Windows Vista had in it animated wallpapers on desktop but sadly how they were heavy on system resources Microsoft abandoned the idea. Moving forward a couple of years later we have Windows 10 but still, we do not have live animated wallpapers. Since I am the kind of person who does not want to wait on Microsoft and now it is time to bring animated wallpapers back I am going to make one all by myself and you are welcome to join the ride and do the same for you as well. Enough talk, let's dive into how we can make animated wallpaper for our Windows 10.

Choosing the application

First, we will need some form of application which can we look at our animated wallpapers and since they are animations it means video, so we will need a video player and what better choice than a VLC player, an open-source light weighs all-format player. Get a VLC player from here and install it.

Finding video source

The next thing is to of course have some looping video that we will use as background. There are many sites and ways to get seamless loop videos, I use this youtube channel for my backgrounds. Altho you can use any video footage you want it is recommended that it is not too long, that it is hi-resolution so we do not have pixels on-screen, and if you can, get it as seamless since we do not want to see stutter when the video is lopped from the beginning. So hopefully you have desired video and VLC player installed.

Putting it all together

Copy the following code and paste it into your search bar in Windows to open the Startup folder, or navigate to the Startup folder yourself via file explorer if you know where it is. %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup Now, next thing is to copy and past the VLC shortcut into this folder so it is started when Windows is first time booted. Right-click on the shortcut and in the edit field paste this: "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --video-wallpaper --qt-start-minimized --no-qt-fs-controller --repeat --no-video-title-show --qt-notification=0 "C:\videopath\filename.mp4" where "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" is the path where VLC is installed, point this to where you have installed it "C:\videopath\filename.mp4" is the path where you have your video that you wish to use as animated wallpaper. Please note also that in my case there is mp4 as an extension but it does not need to be mp4, just use any extension VLC can open and play.

Conclusion

And that's it, you have successfully made an animated background or live wallpaper on your Windows 10 computer. You can change your wallpaper anytime by editing shortcut and giving it a new path to a new video or simply overwrite the existing one with a new baring same name.

There are a lot of online services and a lot of ways to get your public IP address. One of them being typing whats my IP in Google search and you will get immediate results. But there is a way to get the same information inside Windows 10 which could be very useful if for any reason you can not connect to mentioned services. By checking public IP directly inside your windows you can make sure that the issue for not being able to open some websites is not due to your public IP. In order to use this Windows feature, we will be checking our public IP using Windows PowerShell. To open Power Shell in Windows first press ⊞ WINDOWS + R to open the run dialog Inside run dialog type Powershell and press ENTER In the Powershell type in the following command and press ENTER

(Invoke-WebRequest -uri "http://ifconfig.me/ip").Content

When the command finishes you will see what is your public IP address, if you wish to know more about your connection type in and press ENTER:

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri ('https://ipinfo.io/')

This command will provide you with further information like city, region, country, and others.

During Windows 10 installation, you will see all the beautiful user interfaces, however, what’s more, important are the drivers, your processor, and free storage disk in order for the installation to be successfully completed. So if you are getting the CompareExchange128 error during the installation of Windows 10, this means that the CPU lacks a very important instruction known as “CMPXCHG16B”. Thus, if you don’t have CMPXCHG16B, then it will result in the CompareExchange128 error when you install Windows 10. In fact, CMPXCHG16B, PrefetchW as well as LAHF/SAHF is a criterion for you to be able to use Windows 10 64-bit version when upgrading from an earlier version of Windows. So what exactly is the CMPXCHG16B instruction? The CMPXCHG16B instruction is the one that performs an atomic compare-and-exchange on 16-byte values. This instruction can also be referred to as “CompareExchange128”. The atomic compare-and-exchange means that the CPU compares the contents of a memory location with a given value. So if the values are the same, it modifies the contents of that memory location to a new given value. Note that this kind of issue only happens to the 64-bit Windows 10 version and the only way to resolve it is by getting an update on the hardware level from the OEM. On the other hand, if nothing really works, it’s maybe time for you to get a new CPU but before you resort to that, in the meantime, you can try following the options given below to fix the CompareExchange128 error during the installation of Windows 10.

Option 1 – Try to update the BIOS and Chipset Drivers

One of the best things you can do to fix the CompareExchange128 error is by updating the BIOS and chipset drivers which is why you need to check if your OEM has an update available for your computer’s BIOS as well as the related chipset drivers. But before that, you need to first check the BIOS version. To do so, follow these steps:

• Type “msinfo32” in the search bar and hit Enter to open the System Information Tools.
• After opening the System Information Tools, check the BIOS version.
• Then take note of that BIOS version. You also need to use the BIOS utility that came with your computer and use it for the upgrade. Note that it is different for every computer and if you don’t have it, you can just go to the OEM website and see if there is an option to download it there.

Option 2 – Try to downgrade to the 32-bit Windows 10 version

If option 1 didn’t work as the BIOS update is not available, you can also try downgrading to the 32-bit version of Windows 10. Keep in mind that this will bring restrictions on the amount of RAM installed and other places but that won’t be a problem as you can still switch.

Option 3 – Try buying a new hardware

If none of the first two options didn’t work for some reason then maybe it’s time for you to purchase new hardware especially if your computer is way too old. In such cases, it’s better to buy new hardware or better yet, a new computer that can keep up for the next couple of years.

How to Fix Error Code 0xC004C003 When Installing Windows 10

What is Error Code 0xC004C003?

Error code 0xC004C003 has to do with activating Windows 10 after a clean install. This problem has been a frequent nuisance to users trying to update from Windows 7 or 8.1 following the invite path they got from Microsoft.

Solution

Error Causes

There are several problems that may have caused error code 0xC004C003. The most common of them are:

• The product key entered was invalid, and cannot be used to activate the new OS.
• The user followed the proper installation procedure, but the Windows update servers were too busy to handle the activation at that moment.
• The free upgrade invitation was followed but after the reinstallation, the copy of Windows 10 was still not activated.
• The user tried to perform a full clean install of Windows 10 instead of upgrading from Windows to Windows 10

Further Information and Manual Repair

A lot of solving error code 0xC004C003 has to do with the method in which the user has tried to update the system. If one decided to try and update the program before being invited to do so by the update manager, he must wait. Unfortunately, if one chooses to do it on his own and download a clean install, he was never given a product code to authenticate the process. There are two options to address error code 0xC004C003 — either restore to the previous Windows Operating System or call Microsoft (or visit their Website) and purchase a product key. The Windows update servers are very busy. There are lots of Microsoft users around the world, and the servers are doing their best to get to each and every one of the users as fast as possible, but they can only move at a certain speed. Your best bet is to sit back and wait a while. But what if you were invited, and properly downloaded Windows 10, then decided to do a clean install? It is advised that one do not try to enter Windows 7 or 8.1 serial code as this will not work. However, unlike the problem above, these users will NOT need to purchase a product key. According to Microsoft Support Staff, the installation servers are also very jammed because of the high numbers of installations going on right now. No matter what posts you may read, the key IS genuine, and it is NOT blocked, broken, or invalid. To check if Windows has been properly activated, open the Command Window. Make sure you are logged into an administrator profile; otherwise this check will not work. Type in “slmgr.vbs/ato” and click Enter and then wait. While waiting, the command will check on the status of the activation. Windows Script Host will open and show whether or not it is activated. A lot of users have reported that the activation did not work for the first few times. However they later reported after some more attempts, no issue was found in the way the operating system updated and that the activation process went smoothly. This is most likely due to the overload on the Windows Update servers, so bear with Microsoft. Users have reported that when trying to correct error code 0xC004C003, they have followed the upgrade path and then been told by Microsoft that the key was invalid and they had to purchase a new one. If the upgrade path provided by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is correctly followed then there is nothing to worry about Just wait a while and try it again. If there are prolonged issues, speak with a technician by visiting the Microsoft website and contacting the help center by calling the number provided. Give them all relevant information and they will be sure to help accordingly. The best solution to fix error code 0xC004C003 is to wait. In essence, the user will be waiting to reenter the same product key. According to Microsoft, and many user posts found online, it is recommended to wait a while and then try to activate again. This seemed to be an answer to most users' problems, and seem to work just fine. If the problem persists, take it to a windows repair technician to have it sorted out. If that does not work, use a powerful automated tool to fix the problem.

Brave browser has gained popularity very rapidly and many websites have gone into the territory of recommending it. Sadly although the browser kind of offered better performance, it seems that so much advertised privacy and security was a lie. Several months ago, Brave was involved in a “scandal”. Unfortunately, this incident did not get much media attention, and it’s hard to search for and discover as of today. There is an article on the Android police website explaining this issue in detail, you can check it here: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caught-adding-its-own-referral-codes-to-some-cryptcurrency-trading-sites/ But to sum things up and keep them short if you do not want to go through the full article, Brave had been injecting their affiliate codes into popular crypto-currency websites. This means that they had been intercepting your traffic, which they promised was secure by the way, and modifying it. This means Brave Software has access to all of your information on those crypto-currency sites as well. They can see your payments/purchases, and your activity on the websites (through affiliate statistics). Now some people might point out that they are not interested in crypto or have been visiting some of the sites but the issue still remains and that is they did all of this, without telling the user. They intentionally didn’t tell the user because they knew it would cause backlash and disruption. They knew one hundred percent what they were doing, and they knew it was unethical. And the point remains if something like this was already done, who knows what will come up in the future. Personal recommendation is to avoid Brave and go back to other browsers.

How to Fix Error Code 0x80240001 on Your PC

Error Code 0x80240001- What is it?

Error Code 0x80240001 usually occurs in Windows 10 and is specific to the process of updating your system. It is similar to an error code found in previous versions of the software during the update process. There are a number of steps that can be taken to solve this error code, most of which are fairly easy for the average user to undertake.

Common symptoms for this particular error code include:

• Inability to complete the updating process of your Windows 10 system
• A notice that the Windows Update Agent is not able to provide appropriate services through the update module.

While it can be frustrating to have this message appear during the update process, users can resolve the error in a number of ways. However, if you are not confident in your ability to follow the steps below or if the methods listed fail to resolve the problem, contact a certified Windows 10 repair technician to assist you in the process.

Solution

Error Causes

Error Code 0x80240001 occurs when the Windows Update tool is unable to complete its service successfully. This error occurs most often when users attempt to update to Windows 10 from older versions of the software, including Windows 7, 8, or 8.1.

This particular error code can also occur when your system has not been updated in a regular fashion. Stacked updates make it more likely for Error Code 0x80240001 to occur.

In most cases, when Error Code 0x80240001 appears on your screen, the update process will be halted. Sometimes, the screen may display a single color background, removing the appearance of all other windows and applications.

Fortunately, there are several methods that you can use to attempt to circumvent the problem and see the update process through to completion.

Further Information and Manual Repair

While it can be frustrating to deal with an error when you attempt to update your Windows software, there are several ways that you can seek to resolve the issue that causes Error Code 0x80240001. These steps are relatively simple to complete and do not require advanced techniques to be used. However, if you are not confident in your ability to complete the steps listed below, enlist the aid of a qualified Windows technician to help you.

Here are the most common ways that Error Code 0x80240001 can be resolved for Windows 10:

Method One:  Download and Use the Windows Repair Tool

From the Windows website, you can download the Windows Repair tool, if it is not already installed on your computer. While there are other tools available through outside sites that claim that they can resolve this error, in many cases, they can be a carrier for viruses and other kinds of malware, so it is inadvisable to use non-Windows tools to fix this particular error code.

Once you have successfully added the Windows Repair tool to your computer, open it up and look for the option to run “Repair Windows Update.” Using this process, your system can search for and resolve the error, allowing you to successfully run the update tool through to completion.

Method Two:  Uninstall Recently Added Software

In some cases, software that has been recently added to a non-updated computer can cause the update process to experience issues. If you believe that this may have occurred in your case, simply uninstall the software in question, then attempt to run the Windows 10 Update process again.

The best way to prevent this error from reoccurring when you seek to update your Windows 10 system is to apply updates within a short period of time from their release date. It is recommended that users update regularly, which can allow them to avoid a number of issues that are common to the update process.

If you have any difficulty in resolving Error Code 0x80240001 after you have attempted these steps, you may need to enlist the help of a qualified technician who is familiar with the specific errors related to the Windows 10 Update process. This can especially be helpful if you have recently installed a number of new kinds of software and are unsure of whether or not any specific one may be causing your issues. If you wish to always have at your disposal a utility tool to fix these Windows 10 and other related issues when they do arise, download and install a powerful automated tool.