joddle

I had seen that page and tried those recently - but now today the icon is not moving anymore - but I have no idea why ! I will keep an eye on it and see what happens. So strange!!!!

Hi Ken - I tried that but don't want the icons to auto organise so turned that feature off again. Also I have tried changing the icon size but the "My PC" shortcut icon still keeps moving to a free space on the left after every shutdown. None of the other icons move apart from one other which is the shortcut for the control panel! Its really weird and does not seem to happen on any other pc . If I reposition the icon then press refresh it then jumps back to the left hand side again - exactly as if I had rebooted.

When I reboot - just one icon keeps changing place on the desktop - its the shortcut to "My PC" I keep repositioning it but every time I reboot it reverts to a different place. I have tried: A - changing the options on view for the desktop B - Refreshing the changed positions on the desktop C - and even deleted the icon .DB file from my local app settings in the hope it would then remember the new positions D - deleted the shortcut and made a new one But whatever I do this one icon always changes place on reboot and seems to want to go towards a free space in the top left hand corner. Other icons can be moved just fine and stay where they are put! Any ideas please!!

Thanks Ken - I had thought of doing that but then decided to read more about the bios setup and eventually found there is a toggle between UFEI with or without legacy ROMs - turning that off seems to have sorted the problem and the machine does now boot a lot faster and with only once splash screen - I have not noticed any disadvantages but of course can always reverse the setting if need be.

The bios is set to UFEI and the M2 drive is the only once it has in the boot sequence. If I press F12 and select a one time boot on the M2 drive, the Dell splash logo only comes up once. If booting from cold then it still comes up twice with a small pause between!

I have a Dell 7040 but when it is booting, the splash screen with the Dell logo comes up twice before W10 loads which I thought was a bit odd. The latest bios was installed when I first got the PC. The pc now has a 1tb M2 drive on the motherboard where the OS resides plus two mechanical sata HDDs and one sata SSD The sata SSD is where the OS was before I installed the M2 drive but it has since been reformatted and is now used simply as another drive. The PC is pretty quick to boot up to W10 (17 seconds) but not as fast as when I first had it (around 10 seconds) as now it seems to be trying to do something twice each time! I have not changed anything in the BIOS yet as I don't want to make things worse but any ideas what may be happening here please??

If you don't expect to increase your likely storage you can simply keep everything on the SSD then back it all up to the HDD. However I had a machine with almost the same spec as yours and found the SSD soon became full so I put in a M2 drive of 1tb and transferred to OS to that - now I have the old SSD as a files drive and the HDD as a backup for everything although my HDD is 2Tb not 500Gb. - Using the M2 and SSD for all the main work makes the machine pretty fast!

Maybe I'm tempting fate but since my last post there has been no repeat of the BSoD!!! The last thing I did was install the Dell SSD driver and this seems to have worked. Also I have now installed a new 1TB M2 drive and all is working fine. For 2 weeks the machine was on 24-7 with no problems at all. Fingers crossed :)

Further to above: - Last night I ran the complete Dell diagnostics including memory checking and it ran though with no errors or problems found.

Hi - I did in fact update the bios as I thought that might have been part of the issue but it made no difference. One thing that I noticed on the Dell website is a driver for SSD sata drives which I have now downloaded and installed - I am wondering if that might have been something to do with the issue - so I am waiting to see! Currently a little reluctant to reset the bios to factory setting in case I can't then boot up as the OS is on the SSD in the 2.5 rack and not on the 3.5 drive! maybe I am worried about nothing ?

Well it has happened again although as yet I have not removed the wifi or graphcs card but did remove my old webcam and am now connected to the on board graphics. However, using a debug reader I find the culprit on every occasion is the same - and is flagged as ntoskrnl.exe - The output is below What is this and what do I need to do? I am thinking of stripping the machine again and taking out the wifi and video cards to start with - and reinstalling from scratch the latest W10 then installing the Dell drivers again and working from there. However if there is a better way I would be please to hear about it. I note from the web that overclocking can cause this but how do I know if my machine is overclocked? I had also though of using a 500gb M2 ssd and installing the OS there as there is a slot currently unused and the current system ssd is only 128gb although I do have a 2tb 3,5 drive as well for backing up data etc which was transplanted from my old system. The 3.5 drive has no system files only data.. 021220-6140-01.dmp 12/02/2020 14:28:00 DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE 0x0000009f 00000000`00000003 ffff9b04`f6d7b7f0 ffffdb8a`7927f7b0 ffff9b05`01b8f9a0 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+1c14e0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 10.0.18362.657 (WinBuild.160101.0800) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+1c14e0 C:\Windows\Minidump\021220-6140-01.dmp 8 15 18362 1,194,540 12/02/2020 14:29:13

I have started to use the onboard graphics card and can see no real difference between that and the add on one. I am working in 1600x900 which for me on my 24" monitor seems about right as the print on many things on the high res setting is too small for me. But what differences should I observe using the Nvida card? I am not into gaming so speed is not an issue. To me for the moment, the less hanging on the machine narrows down the possible culprits! I have also disconnected my very aged Logitec orbit webcam in case that was having issues as there are no modern drivers for it from Logitec. I will at some point remove the wifi card as I really don't need that anyway.

Again a BSOD so I think I am going to do a complete reinstall of the PC. This is what I intend to do but please correct me if I need to change everything. 1) remove graphics card 2) remove wifi card 3) remove 2nd hdd leaving only the SSD in the 2.5 bay 4) download latest W10 iso 5) download all drivers for this PC's service tag 6) reformat ssd 7) load W10 8) load Dell drivers 9) then use the PC for a week without further SW to see if issues re-occur Have I left anything out?

Have done that now so will wait and see if that helps :) The previous owner recommended uninstalling the Nvida drivers and letting Windows deal with the display card but I don't know how to uninstall those. ~ I may consider removing the graphics card and the wifi card as really I don't need either of them

I can see the minidump files but it says I dont have access to them although I am the only administrator on the machine I will try uninstalling the mouse and reinstalling or update it and see if that helps.

I have now downloaded all the driver from dell and installed them. Thinking about the issue I realised this always happens when I move the mouse - i.e. a movement of the mouse seems to trigger the BSOD - is there any way the mini dumps can identify more what is happening?

Agg - it was going so well and tonight it happened again - this time I can verify the message is "Driver Power State Failure" ? I think I will download all the dell drivers and try installing them again to see if I missed anything first time around.

So far so good :)

Thanks - worth a try :)

Many thanks KenB - I think that was the BSOD message. No yellow exclamation fags against hardware but I did check the wi fi driver as suggested and it downloaded a new driver. BSOD has not happened since so fingers crossed it is sorted. I also used Dell's own driver checker and it downloaded and installed three more updated drivers which may also help - we will see!!!! All this make me think about in what order I should do driver checks when installing an W10 on a new disk - I tend to do this once a HDD gets old rather that have loads of old junk lying around but of course in doing that I don't then have the original drivers around - so is there a proper sequence to a new install? I assume load the OS then check for drivers??

Further to the above - I have tried to look at the mini dumps but the machine says I don't have access although I am the only administrator on the machine who is the only one user - i.e. me! I presume there must be someway of using the dmp files to fathom out the actual error!

I recently bought a second hand Dell 7040 and although it runs nice and fast every week I get a BSOD but the screen only lasts a few moment so I never get to read the error properly but its something like driver power error/ I have downloaded all the drivers from the Dell site and also installed the Nvida drivers for the graphics card but I still get the error which always happens when I actually do something e.g move something on screen or change from window to another with the mouse or swap something - how can I find out exactly what is wrong as otherwise the machine is really great? I am running W10 pro 64bit from a SSD with a normal drive for file storage and have 16gb Ram.

Many years ago I bought a video grabber from Lidl (the make is "Silvercrest") and on my XP machines is seemed to work OK although I only used it once or twice. Now I have found a load of old camcorder tapes and so want to save them to digital format and had hoped the grabber would work but it alas does not work well. The old software does not function and so I tried Debut Video Capture from NCH which if free and although it sometimes sees the grabber it won't take in the sound only a pretty ropey image. I am using the old camcorders as a source and when played though the TV direct via the Red White and Yellow phono leads, the images and sound on the TV are perfect. I don't mind buying another grabber either as a card or a USB plug in if I can find one known to work well with W10 64 bit machines - I note loads on ebay look exactly like the one I already have so even though they say W10 compatible, I want to be sure - so any recommendations or ideas ??please…..

Some research on the web shows I may have been barking up the wrong tree! (see here Mbps to MB/s Converter (Megabit per second to Megabyte per second)). The issue appears to be that 1 Megabit/s = 0.125 Megabytes/sec. and that the TP link spec for my AV500 setup is 300 megabits per second. This would give a theoretical max transfer rate of 37 megabytes per second so maybe my powerlines are not preforming so badly after all! Using the same logic an AV2000 rated at 2000 Megabits per second should give me a max transfer rate of round 250 megabytes per second so allowing for losses I may get around 180 to 200 which would be much faster than I have now - but they are far more expensive.

Thanks Ken - but even when next to each other on the same double wall socket I don't ever get above 30 according to the Ookla tests. It seems to be the about the max they can do in reality and its the same in all the three systems I have!. Will have to do more research into this .