It's been seven days plus and since I disabled sleep mode, I've had zero errors until two days ago when I downloaded a house from the Sims gallery, which caused my game to crash and registered as an error. As I no longer had a clean reliable history folder, I decided to experiment.

I set my computer to allow sleep mode after twenty minutes, rebooted and began using my computer. A day later and it crashed - CPU fault led on the motherboard. It seems pretty obvious that my computer does not like sleep mode. I continued to leave it and the next day, after rebooting, another CPU error. I am now using the Ultimate Power option which does not permit sleep mode, I wonder why this option has this and why is it hidden? Probably to try and save the planet because there is no way to ban all the gas and diesel powered vehicles? 

(I am getting sick of the grammar correcting software in use here. These words work better with a hyphen? I don't think so.)

In any case, no more sleep mode and I will just shut off my PC when I retire for the evening. This still seems to be an issue with AMD computers as my older i5 has no issues except that Microsoft defender throws up a caution when it can't update in sleep mode. I turned my pc on this morning and there have been no errors all day. We'll see....

Windows 11 Reliability History - My Solution

No, don't install Linux, unless you want to open a whole new can of worms. This is about solving the apparent reliability issues that seems to happen on Windows 11 regardless of how diligent you are with maintenance, installing programs and web surfing practices.

First off, let's look at the issues I have had with my computer:

CPU error causing the computer to lock up and requiring the reset button to be pushed which registers only as Windows not properly shut down. When this happens, the video card turns off and registers as a CPU fault on the MB.
Svchost stopped working.
Failed Windows update for a video card driver which Windows isn't supposed to be addressing.
Windows Image Acquisition stopped working.
Security Intelligence update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus - Failed Windows update.
Numerous "Hardware" issues - not identified.

The three main parts that seemed to be the issue are: Ryzen 7 2700 running at stock speeds, B450 Carbon Pro MSI mb - overkill for CPU but couldn't resist the price, and an AMD (from HP) RX 580X 8GB running at stock, with standard fan curve and using Radeon "Chill". What might have been involved as well is One TB  NVMe Kingston SNVS1000G, and 32 GB of Corsair Ram but these show no errors on testing. This is not a high - end system but when running good keeps me happy.

All the above - mentioned faults happened within a 10 day period after performing a fresh install of Windows 11. On day 11, I said, "Enough is enough".

My Solution to all this nonsense:

Use DDU in safe mode to uninstall all AMD video card drivers and remnants after Windows decided to take over. Instead of using the AMD tool, which insisted that I download the developer's optional driver, I downloaded Adrenalin 22.5.1 Recommended (WHQL) and installed it, still running after ten days, as there is no update yet.

Once installed and running, I ran SFC and DISM, can't remember the exact commands so google for more info. Even though this was a fresh install ten days prior, these steps showed numerous issues, so either the install corrupted itself or the install was faulty to begin with. Prior to the fresh reinstall, SFC and DISM showed no errors on testing but Reliability History showed lots of errors, hence the reinstall.

Last, I went into power and set "put computer to sleep", to never. The monitor is set to five minutes. This is a desktop system so I wanted to try and see how reliable my computer was without sleep mode. I may try and allow my PC to sleep after ten minutes but I think there is an issue with the sleep mode for the monitor as sometimes it comes right back on without sleeping.

It's been 10 days and there are no issues recorded at all in Reliability History, no CPU faults on the MB and no sudden unexplained stops of WMI and svchost. I do perform a restart every day and sometimes after performing tasks requiring a lot of memory. 

The only conclusion I can make, is that there is a serious issue with Windows 11, perhaps the last version, 22H2. I'm running 22H2 Windows 10 on an older system but the CPU is an intel i5 and the video card is an old GTX 750 so that might play a part in this drama as well. In any case, my pc that I use most of the time is running now without issues and that's all I wanted in the first place.

Short and Sweet

 Not going to say a lot today, just one sentence. I really wish that when I buy something new it would work as expected without any issues. Sorry, I guess that's two, no, three sentences.

New RGB Software

After my last post on RGB, you would think I was cured of all this RGB nonsense and would move on. Not so fast, buttercup! I have a Corsair T220 blah blah case with a glass panel just built to show off your RGB nightmare. With no RGB going on, you would think I would be happy? Nope, I found the entire situation boring. It's because of that glass panel. It kind of makes a statement. Look at me! See what I got!

Anyways, as if I didn't have enough issues with RGB, I needed (I didn't really need, but it sounded like a good excuse) more ram and so I bought a 2-channel kit of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (2x16) DDR4 2933 (PC4 23400). Yeah, more RGB.

In any case, After the ram was in, I set the iCUE software on the ram and fans to the watercolor effect, but because Mystic Light doesn't offer any effects even close, other than one of the rainbow effects which I find too garish for my taste, I had that set to something close, using the CPU temperature effect. This was rather pointless as my CPU never gets up to the minimum temp of 50°C and as there is no way to lower this minimum, the colours never change.

After looking at this for a few days, I decided to blow away Mystic light and the entire MSI BS of crap they want installed in MSI Center, and I installed openRGB. I also ended up blowing away iCUE because openRGB does so much more with the effects plugin. This was easier to set up than what I thought it would be and I even made my own profile design using the iCUE water colour as an inspiration. The nice thing with openRGB is that I can get the MSI RGB and the Wraith Spire RGB to sync with the Corsair RGB. While it's not perfect, it looks far superior to what I could accomplish with what is supposed to be "professionally" made software.

So, the RGB is back and looking great and much better than what I could accomplish with the software provided by Corsair and MSI.

The End of RGB

Oh yeah, another rant, well sort of. Last year in November, after numerous attempts at getting my HP computer to run quieter and cooler (Not possible at the same time) I decided to make a change. I'm old and grumpy and I decided a few years back that if something wasn't working the way I liked, it should be changed. So, I ordered a new computer case and as HP stuff doesn't work in something generic, a new motherboard and power supply.

Now I wasn't particular about RGB or it's use, nor that familiar, I ordered a Corsair case that uses iCUE to control the case RGB and an MSI motherboard that uses mystic light to control it's RGB. While I may have ordered the case thinking "Yeah, I bet the RGB fans will look pretty cool," the bottom line was I wanted a good airflow case at a good price. Same with the motherboard, not being aware that there are many different RGB setups "out there". The power supply was also a good price (More on that on another day) and didn't have RGB as it fits inside a shroud, rendering RGB pointless.

So, I assembled my computer with my new parts, as well as those salvaged from my poor HP computer (CPU, ram, video card and NVMe drive) and turned it on. The system posted (Yah!) and booted into Windows (Yah!) but no RGB. My computer stayed unresponsively dark. No matter, a bit of Googling later and I downloaded the software for both my case and motherboard. AS I had and still have nothing else with RGB, I was all set.

I installed iCUE (OMG, what hell is this? It's so bright! And purdy! I think?) So I discovered I could have different presets up as long as iCUE was running but different and not as nice a setup when "off". On with the Mystic Light setup. I was not impressed, this gives the user such a poor selection over iCUE and eventually I ended up with some sort of rainbow effect on both. This lasted for about an hour until it drove me crazy and I set it to static white (Which is really a sort of blue).

Over the past months, I've been playing with different settings, never quite satisfied until finally last night (Aug 30,22). I gave it one last go and found it was causing issues with performance and even though it had such a small footprint, I gave it the heave ho. My RGB is finally in sync and all it took was to turn it all off. Now iCUE and Mystic Light live in RGB heaven, in perfect harmony and I have completely purged all RGB software and will eventually remove the lighting Node core and perhaps replace the fans with quieter Arctic air 140 mm non RGB fans in the front and Arctic air 120 mm non RGB fan in the rear and possibly top. Ahhh, darkness.

More Issues

 One of the most unreliable pieces of crapware is the Bing Desktop Wallpaper Manager. While having a new desktop to look forward to sometime during the day, even with the ugly Bing watermark, this piece of crap crashed or failed to respond at least once on any given day. I was going to give it a week to straighten out gut yesterday, I'd had enough and it ended up in the trash. There are tons of programs out there that do the same thing, I mean manage desktop wallpaper without the incessant crashes and to be honest, all I need to do is do a search and come up with tons of images I can use and find a new one everyday without relying on a program to do so. Short rant today as I am hungry so bye for now.

Reliability History

 Joke of the day: If Reliability History is supposed to show how reliable my computer is, why is it that all the errors point to Windows 11 errors? 99 percent of the errors are related to something in Windows that f**ked up during the normal course of operations and the last percent is because of other software f**king up due to poor coding. That, to me, does not indicate a problem with my computer, that points to a problem with piss poor coding.

One of the biggest issues is with a piece of crapware called StiSvc which is used to connect to scanners and cameras. I rarely do either but there are days when this registers an error causing my computer's reliability index to drop ten percent. Why this should be gauged as a computer reliability issue and not a Windows reliability issue is beyond me. It can't even be considered user error as this user did nothing to cause it to f**k up.

Trying to solve this issue is another matter. According to the "experts" that troll the MS help pages, one should run SFC and a host of other nonsenseware that doesn't find any problems but you should run it because Windows tends to go for a shit after running for so many months. Maybe they meant minutes because this has happened shortly after a fresh install. Well, we all know that MS likes to point the finger outward indicating that there's a problem with the hardware or the user and never looking inward to see that they f**ked up.

Oh Well, more fodder for the bishing .