TOPIC: CONTROL PANEL
One way to fix slow CyberGhost VPN connections on Windows 10
31st January 2020Due to a need to access websites with country blocking, I have decided to give CyberGhost a go, and it also will come in handy when connecting devices to other Wi-Fi connections. What I have got is the three-year subscription package and all went well on the first day of use. However, things became unusable on the second and a reboot did not sort it.
Since the problem seemed to affect a phone running Android too, I even got to suspect my router and broadband provider. Even terminating the subscription came to mind, but it did not come to that. Instead, I did a bit more research and tried changing the maximum transition unit (MTU) for the connection to 1300 as suggested in a CyberGhost help article. Because using the Control Panel meant that it was resetting to 1500 on my Windows 10 machine, I then turned to a command line-based solution.
To accomplish that, I started PowerShell in administrator mode from the context menu produced by right-clicking on the Start Menu icon on the taskbar. Then, I entered the following command to see what connections I had and what the MTU settings were:
netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces
From looking through the Settings and Control Panel applications, I already had worked out what network interface belonged to the CyberGhost connection. Seeing that the MTU setting was 1500, I then issued a command like the following to change that to 1300.
netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "<name of ethernet interface>" mtu=1300 store=persistent
Here, <name of ethernet interface> gets replaced by the name of your connection and the string is quoted to avoid spaces in the name causing problems with executing the command. Once that second command had been run, the first one was issued again and the output checked to ensure that the MTU setting was as expected.
While this was done when the VPN connection was inactive, it may work also with an active connection. After making the change, I again reconnected to the VPN and all has been as expected since then, and I found a better connection for my Android phone too.
Getting rid of Windows 10 notifications about disabling start-up applications
20th May 2016On several Windows 10 machines, I have been seeing messages appearing in its Action Centre pane with the heading Disable apps to help improve performance. It appeared again recently, so I decided to look further into the matter.
What I found was that the solution first involves opening up the Control Panel, which takes a little finding in Windows 10. You could use Cortana to get to it or right-clicking on the Start Menu and left-clicking on the Control Panel menu. Using the Windows key + X will produce the same menu, and choosing the same entry will have the same effect.
Once the Control Panel is open, it makes life a little easier if you change to the Large icons view using the drop-down menu under the Search Control Panel box on the right-hand side. Then, what you need to do is click on the Security and Maintenance icon.
Once in that Security and Maintenance section, you are presented with two subheadings, one for Security and one for Maintenance. So long as you have not dismissed the message in the action centre, you will see a corresponding entry under the Maintenance section. At the bottom of that entry, there will be a link that turns off these messages permanently, and clicking on this will have the desired effect.
More thoughts on Windows 10
11th August 2015Now that I have left Windows 8.x behind me and there are a number of my machines running Windows 10, I have decided to revisit my impressions of the operating system. The first Technical Preview was something that I installed in a virtual machine, and I have been keeping an eye on how things have developed since then and intend to retain a Windows Insider installation to see what might be heading our way as Windows 10 evolves as now expected.
After elaborating on the all important upgrade process earlier, I am now moving onto other topics. While the Start Menu is a big item, there are others, as you will see below.
Start Menu
Let's start with an admission: the prototype Start Menu that we got in the initial Windows 10 Technical Preview was more to my liking. Unpinning all the tiles allowed the menu to collapse back to the sort of width that anyone familiar with Windows 7 would have liked. If there was a setting to expunge all tiles at once and produce this state, I would have been well happy.
It was later that we got to learn that Microsoft was not about to consign the Windows 8 Modern interface entirely to history, as many would have wanted. Some elements remain with us, such as a Start Menu with a mandatory area for tiles and the ability to have it display full screen. Some are live, only for this can be turned off on a tile by tile basis and unneeded ones can be removed altogether. It is even possible to uninstall most apps by right-clicking on a tile or other Start Menu entry and selecting the required option from the resulting context menu. For others, there is a command line alternative that uses PowerShell to do removals. After this pruning, things were left in such a state that I have not been moved to restore Classic Shell so far.
While the Start Menu settings used to be in the same place as those for the taskbar, they are found now in the new Settings tool. Some are in the Personalisation section, and it has its own Start subsection for setting full screen mode or highlighting of new apps, among other things. The equivalent Colours subsection is where you find other settings like assigning background colours based on those in a desktop background image, which itself is assigned in it own subsection in the Personalisation area.
Virtual Desktops
Initially, I failed to see the point in how Microsoft implemented these and favoured VirtuaWin instead. My main complaint was the taskbar showed buttons for all open apps regardless of the screen in which they are opened. However, that was changed, so your taskbar shows different buttons for each virtual desktop, just like the way that Linux and UNIX do things. Switching between desktops may not be as smooth as those yet, but the default setting is a move in the right direction, and you can change it if you like.
Cortana
Though this was presented to the world as a voice operated personal assistant like Apple's Siri, I cannot say that I am keen on such things, so I decided to work as I usually do instead. Keyboard interaction works fine, and I have neutered things to leave off web searches on Bing to use the thing much in the same way as the search box on the Windows 7 Start Menu. While it may be able to do more than that, I am more than happy to keep my workflow unchanged for now. Cortana's settings are available via its pop-up menu. Collapsing the search box to an icon to save space for your pinned and open applications is available from the Search section of the taskbar context menu (right-clicking the taskbar produces this).
Settings
In Windows 8.x, the Control Panel was not the only area for settings but remained feature complete. However, the same is not the case for Windows 10 where the new Settings panel is starting to take over from it. Though the two co-exist for now, it seems clear that Settings is where everything is headed.
Though the Personalisation section of the tool has been mentioned in relation to the Start Menu, there are plenty of others. For instance, the Privacy one is one that definitely needs reviewing, and I found myself changing a lot of the default settings in there. Naturally, there are some other sections in Settings that hardly need any attention from most of us and these include Ease of Access (accessibility), Time & language, Devices and Network & Internet. The System section has a few settings like tablet mode that may need review, while the Update & security one has backup and recovery subsections that may be of interest. The latter of these is where you find the tools for refreshing the state of the system following instability or returning to a previous Windows version (7 or 8.x) within thirty days of the upgrade.