Tag: microsoft

Some Microsoft services are currently experiencing issues

I’ve been trying to cancel (or change) an order on Microsoft.com – unfortunately, their tech support system is not cooperating. Navigating to Microsoft’s support I’m presented with two options… The “Get Help” application, or staying inside the browser. It looks like the in-browser option and the Get Help Windows 10 application are essentially the same thing.

“I’m sorry, but I’m having a technical problem. Please use the options shown below to get in touch with Microsoft Customer Support.”

and

“Some Microsoft services are currently experiencing issues”

A few minutes later, the message has changed back to “I’m the Microsoft Virtual Agent. I’d love to help you. Please briefly describe your issue below.”

There’s no status page for support. I’m not sure what the technical issues were.

If you go searching for an answer, I bet this blog post is going to be your only result 🙂

KB4512941 and Surface Book 2

I’ve just applied “2019-08 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1903 for x64-based Systems”, aka KB4512941 to my Microsoft Windows Surface Book 2 – after my last attempt at updating the SB2 I have become very cautious about large updates to this hardware, even avoiding updating the video drivers.

Per the release notes, I don’t see anything related to any of the issues I’ve been having (e.g. screen flickering, and the Nvidia GPU being used for 3D apps even when I set it to use that GPU in the Nvidia control panel)

There are other issues that don’t seem to be mentioned in the patch notes. I’ll update this post further if/when I get any tangible results.

Please resolve before detaching on Surface Book 2

I got an error that says “Please resolve before detaching” when I try to detach the screen on my Surface Book 2 using the detach button.

TLDR; When I originally posted this in 2019, the only fix was to reinstall Windows, resetting to version 10.0.18362 (Build 18362). This fixed this issue. For various reasons in January 2020 I reset the Surface again to 1909 (OS build 18363.657) and the error message about SurfaceDTX.exe is back!

Original post below…

I’m currently running Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview, version 10.0.18950 Build 18950 on my Surface Book 2. When I try to detach the tablet/screen portion from the keyboard base, I frequently encounter a series of messages that prevent the detachment to be successful.

The first error message comes up in the system tray…

Error message displayed in the system tray on Windows when attempting to detach the screen from the keyboard on a Surface Book 2
Please resolve before detaching – The following may need to be closed in order to detach. Any unsaved changes will be lost – Additional User Sessions Active

I dismiss the error message by clicking the “Additional User Sessions Active”. Then, a dialog box will be displayed…

Surface DTX - additional user sessions active error dialog box
Surface DTX – Additional User Sessions Active – Someone else is still using this PC. If you continue, they could lose unsaved work.

After this, I’m prompted by User Access Control. Once I allow it, the screen will detach.

I’m going through the different logs in Event Viewer to diagnose the problem. Some quick Google searches reveal possible issues with the discreet GPU aka the “dGPU” – a thread on reddit from over ago is a dead end, too.

I’ve tried resetting the NVIDIA GPU’s settings to default, so the software will decide when and how to use the GPU.

Snappy Driver Installer still indicates that there’s a lot of potential drivers I could install, however I’m opting to only allow whatever Windows Update sends my way. SDI has been great on my desktop – it seems to cause nothing but problems with more specialized hardware like the Surface Book!

Windows 10 Chromecast debug info

It seems that there’s an edge case with Windows 10, Google Chrome browser, and the built-in tab Chromecast functionality that causes debugging info to get displayed on the television you’re casting to. I found a thread on reddit from a few months ago where someone was having the same problem. It doesn’t seem to be wide spread, which sucks, because not even Google knew what to tell me.

The specific problem is that if you select a tab in Chrome to cast from, you will see a small print out of the frame rate, screen resolution, and a timer in the lower right hand corner of your TV, over the tab’s stream.

There’s no menu in Chrome to enable or disable this debug stream info from being displayed.

I noticed this a few days ago. As of this post I’m running Chrome version 75.0.3770.142 (Official Build) (64-bit), which isn’t special – surprisingly I got into a chat with Google Chromecast support very quickly. Unfortunately the tech I spoke with had NO clue how or why this was happening. After being told to talk to Vizio support (Google said it must be a Vizio firmware problem, not a Google problem…) we determined it’s neither.

I’m using Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview, version 10.0.18945 Build 18945. Something about the combination of Windows, Chrome, and television is causing this issue. Google had nothing useful to say after I told them Vizio said my television’s firmware hadn’t been updated since May, so it wasn’t them.

The issue only seems to happen in Windows. Casting a tab from Chrome running on my MacBook didn’t show the debug info.

It only seems to show up when you cast an entire tab – YouTube videos cast to the TV display as expected.

Anyway, I’ll update this post if anything about this annoying situation changes.