Windows 10 Missing Start Menu

Windows 10 has been around since July last year and is being heavily - not to mention heavy-handedly - pushed by Microsoft. Windows 10 is also decidedly flakey.

It's biggest problem at present is a tendency to fall over just after the monthly Windows update.

The commonest symptom I see is that clicking on the Start button (the Windows symbol bottom-left of the screen) does nothing. Then you realise that the search box next to it does nothing either. Then you find a variety of other symptoms which either stop or heavily interfere with your use of the computer. Then you curse Microsoft.

The trouble is that it looks as though that Start button is just a general weak link - a symptom which doesn't tell you much about its cause. Kind of like a headache can be anything from lack of sleep to an alien invader about to burst out of your brain (at least in theory).

So I thought I'd try to keep a record of a few fixes which have worked for me. Usual disclaimers: just because something worked for me doesn't mean it'll work for you; don't try doing technical stuff to your computer unless you know what you are doing; if it all goes wrong it is your responsibility - even if an alien chews it way out.

1. The best place to start, IMHO, is with a check disk. Windows 10 doesn't like you doing these, for some reason, so you have to persuade it (at your own risk - see above). Open an Administrator level command window (if right-clicking the Start button still works the option is in there, otherwise right-click the taskbar and choose Task Manager; from there choose File/Run new task, type in CMD, tick the 'administrative privileges' box, and click OK). Once the black command window is open type into it (after making sure all your other programs are closed, as it will reboot):

   chkdsk /f C:
   shutdown -r -t 5

   As the computer restarts it should check drive C: for dodgy indexes and file links. When it returns to Windows see if the Start button is fixed.
   
   
2. If that doesn't work, try getting Windows 10 to fix itself. Open that administrator command prompt again and this time type in:

   sfc /scannow

   This will take a while to run. At the end it will either tell you it has succeeded or failed; either way it might be lying, so reboot and see if anything has changed.
   
   
3. If there is still no improvement, try this more comprehensive version. Open that administrator command prompt again and this time type in:

   dism /online /cleanup-image /scanhealth
   dism /online /cleanup-image /checkhealth
   dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
   sfc /scannow

   One of those first two lines is probably unnecessary, but the second is very quick, so you might just as well do both. These will take ages to run. At the end it will still either tell you it has succeeded or failed; either way it still might be lying, so reboot and see if anything has changed.
   
   
4. Finally, for now, a combination of Dropbox and a Windows update can horribly break the Registry. When I came across this it had the additional symptom of popping up a box when you click on the Start button telling you there is a critical error which it will try to fix next time you log in. Of course it fails.
   
   I did two things to fix this: a system restore back to before the latest Windows Update, then I uninstalled Dropbox, rebooted, and it all worked again. I have no idea whether the system restore was necessary, but that's what I tried first.
   
   For those interested in technical details, it seems that somehow the Dropbox had corrupted the user classes segment of the registry, such that it failed to load in the general classes when you log in (so in Regedit, under HKCU/SOFTWARE/Classes you just end up with a few Dropbox classes and very little else). It seems that Windows 10 assumes everything is present in this part of the registry when it runs, so if the general system-level classes are missing it fails in weird ways. When you uninstall Dropbox it undoes the damage to the user classes so Windows 10 can load in the system classes again.

Somehow I get the feeling this problem is going to run and run, so I'll add extra fixes as I find them. If you have found a different fix for this which worked for you, please add it as a comment so that others can learn from your experience.

How To Remove The 'Get Windows 10' Icon

A quick techie post for anyone who, like me, objects to Microsoft sticking advertising for its next operating system in their notification area and all over their Windows Update screen.

If you have Windows 7 or 8 and have suddenly had an icon appear in the notification area which says 'Get Windows 10' when you hover over it then, as far as I can tell, this has appeared because of a 'recommended' windows update KB3035583. I got rid of it (and an associated splash screen in Windows Update itself) by uninstalling that update and then hiding it.

Do note that whilst this worked for me, you should use due diligence on your own computer. I take no responsibility for anything which may go wrong.

Edit: Somewhat annoyingly, KB3035583 appears to have unhidden itself and installed as part of July's patch-fest. I've uninstalled and hidden it again ... so far, so good. I'll have to watch August's patches more carefully.

Defragmenting Windows 7

I'm a big fan of Windows 7, more so than any other version of Windows since Windows 2000, and far more so than Linux and the like. I find the user interface easy to use for everyday computer work, yet flexible and easy to drill down in when there is a problem or I want to do something more complex. However, as Windows 7 gets older it is starting to develop a couple of bad habits.

One problem has been a tendency to corrupt its own user login, leading to the dreaded "User profile cannot be loaded" message when you try to sign into Windows. This is discussed by Microsoft here, although their solutions are somewhat incomplete, I think. I haven't seen this problem recently, so with a bit of luck Microsoft have corrected it in one of the enormous number of recent fixes they have put out.

The other problem is the old bugbear of disk fragmentation. This is where files are held on the disk drive as several different pieces, which Windows then reassembles as it reads them. This can slow things down a lot because it takes several disk accesses to get one file, because it undermines various read-ahead strategies used to speed things up, and because it uses up processor power doing the reassembly.

Important: for SSD drives, disk fragmentation doesn't affect performance as much, but defragmenting an SSD can significantly reduce its life expectancy. Don't do it.

'Defragging' used to be one of those things which 'everybody knew' was needed to speed up your PC, although by Windows XP disk fragmentation was unlikely to be the main cause of slow PC performance. Fragmentation came out of the cold with Vista, where the built-in defragmenter is supposed to run automatically, but often doesn't, and where the interface heavily discourages manual defragging. Windows 7 was supposed to have sorted this, though, by making automatic defragmentation more effective, and by making manual defragmentation at least a little more visible and easy to run. For several years I thought this was working well.

At Christmas I got a copy of the game Dragon Age Inquisition. It is an enormous game, which takes an age to set up, and is very slow to load. Even given the game's size though, I was getting level load times of around two and a half minutes, which is simply ridiculous.

Pretty much the first thing I checked was disk fragmentation: the Windows defragmenter had run a few days before and reported a fragmentation level of zero. So I checked various other things, to no effect, then went online to see if anyone else had this problem. A few people did, and it was clear that my load times for changing level/area were way over the top. One common factor in other people's problems seemed to be disk fragmentation.

The Windows 7 defragmenter doesn't show the pretty picture of where everything is on the disk, colour coded according to how fragmented files are in each disk area. Defraggler does, so I downloaded it and had a look.

According to Defraggler, the disk defragmentation level was something like 33%, most of the occupied drive showed up red, and when I looked at individual files there was a whole stack of Dragon Age files all with multiple fragments. It seems that the Windows 7 defragmenter has a different definition of fragmentation from Defraggler (and from me).

So I ran a Quick Defrag from Defraggler - it made no difference. Then I tried a Full Defrag - it took forever and made little difference. It looks as though the built in Windows defragmenter doesn't report fragmentation which can't easily be dealt with.

When I looked at the details of what was fragmented, it turned out to be mostly System Restore files. Windows 7 has massively increased the amount of stuff it puts into system restore: it uses it for file level 'old versions' as well, so that is probably why fragmentation is suddenly becoming important again.

On another PC I have looked at, with Norton 360 on, there was also a pile of hard-to-defrag Norton files, and Norton's own defragmenter also failed to either defrag or report on fragmentation it couldn't fix.

Defraggler lets me defrag individual files, so I manually defragged everything I could. Then I went to 'Disk Cleanup' and chose 'Clean up system files' when it came up. As well as (partially) emptying temporary files, this also gives the option (on the 'More Options' tab) of removing all but the lastest System Restore files. NB: this should not be done lightly. I made sure my backups were good before I did this.

For the computer with Norton 360 I then went to Safe mode and manually defragged the Norton files in Defraggler.

Then the full defragment worked a lot better, as there were fewer immovable files present.

Then I created a fresh set of System Restore files, in the less-fragmented space now available, and went around the cycle of cleaning up old System Restore files and defragmenting again. Finally I had fragmentation on that disk down to about 2%, which is good.

After all of this Dragon Age Inquisition loads levels/areas in just under a minute, typically. Since I am playing it a lot, and moving between areas is a big part of the game, I consider all of the effort spent defragging well worth it (especially since I was able to apply the knowledge gained to massively improve the responsiveness of a customer's PC shortly afterwards).