Windows Tips

Infopackets Reader Jill H. writes: " Dear Dennis, I purchased several uninterrupted power supply units dirt cheap for my home office (model APC 1500 SMX1500RM2U ). They work great - 1500VA @ 48 volts and a nice digital display. I downloaded ... PowerChute Business Edition which uses ' pbeagent.exe ' executable which is responsible for communicating between the UPS and my PC so that the PC can shut down safely during a power outage. The issue I'm having is that every so often the pbeagent.exe crashes and causes high cpu usage . When this happens, my computer's CPU fan is noticeably louder, and ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Jay P. writes: " Dear Dennis, I'm running Windows 11 on the latest version of Chrome. I watch a decent amount of YouTube and have been using the uBlock Origin ad blocker extension for years, but it's no longer supported with the ... latest release of Chrome. Now when I visited Youtube.com I'm seeing an overlay that says: Video player will be blocked after 3 videos It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled. Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide. You can go ad-free with ... (view more)

What's one of the best one-stop video/image quality enhancement and editing software available for Windows? Answer: Digiarty's VideoProc Converter AI! From the makers of WinX DVD Ripper and WinX Video Converter comes VideoProc Converter: a ... multi-award winning software program that is a one-stop video/image processing program that allows you to restore and enhance video image quality in 1 click, convert video/audio, rip DVDs, edit video, download videos, video to GIF maker ... plus much more! The latest version of VideoProc Converter AI includes the ability to restore blurry faces, colorize ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Dennis J. writes: " Dear Dennis, What happens when Windows 10 reaches end of life after October 14, 2025? My computer isn't compatible with upgrading to Windows 11. Will I still be able to operate using Windows 10 safely? I have ... MalwareBytes but I don't understand these things. I'm retired, and just shy of 80, and can't afford a new computer this year. I'd appreciate your advice thank you. " My response: Thanks for your question. As you mentioned, after October 14, 2025 your Windows 10 PC will no longer receive security updates. One option is to pay Microsoft for Extended ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Jarold K. writes: " Dear Dennis, I own a small business and have eight PCs running Windows 10, including an already unsupported Windows Server 2012 machine. I had a tech that managed this for us but he's moved on, so I am looking ... for someone else to manage this for us and came across one of your older articles. At any rate, we keep receiving messages that Windows 10 will reach 'end of life' in October 2025 and will no longer receive security updates . I ran the 'PC Health Check' app, and none of the devices are able to upgrade to Windows 11. I understand upgrading is ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Mike D. writes: " Dear Dennis, I just purchased an AMD Ryzen 9700x (8 core, 16 threat, 65 watt TDP, 4nm) and MSI MAG B650M Mortar WiFi motherboard. The processor is a beast and can handle just about everything I throw at it - plus ... it stays nice and cool. Unfortunately, I have an audio lag issue when playing videos . When I click to start a video, it plays the video straight away, but the audio won't start playing until a few seconds later. To be clear, this is not an 'audio out of sync' issue - the audio is muted for a few seconds whenever I start playing a video. The same ... (view more)

Dear Infopackets Readers, Last Friday I posted an article detailing ideas for a new Infopackets YouTube pilot program. The videos posted on the new YouTube channel will highlight Microsoft Windows-related remote desktop technical support (provided ... by yours truly) whereby you email me an issue you're having through our website, I call you to discuss the issue, then I connect to your computer to resolve the problem for you. The phone call and video will be recorded, edited, and then uploaded to our future YouTube channel which currently does not exist . Below is an update to that announcement. ... (view more)

Dear Infopackets Readers, I would like to introduce the launch of an exciting, new video-based tech support Q ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Calli P. writes: " Dear Dennis, We are running one of our virtual machines on Virtualbox, but the performance is extremely lackluster and is very slow to respond, especially over a remote desktop session. I have read reports ... online that suggest VMware Workstation has nearly double the performance of Virtualbox and would like to migrate. After reading a few articles online, I tried exporting the Virtualbox VM to .OVA format (open virtualization format) in hopes of importing the single .OVA file into VMware Workstation, however, I get an error on VMware Workstation that says ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader William B. writes: " Dear Dennis, I am running a server virtual machine inside of Virtualbox and it's been quite slow. I've read that VMware Workstation has twice the performance (roughly). Out of curiosity, I tried to export my ... current virtual machine in Virtualbox using the Open Virtualization Format (.OVF or .OVA) but I get an error every time I try to export: ' Could not create the exported medium Server-disk001.vmdk (VERR_IO_CRC) .' I am not sure what to do and would like to export this virtual machine off of Virtualbox so I can give VMware Workstation a try. " My ... (view more)