Category: Registry

Windows resizing and moving on dual monitors

Crystal ORourkeLeave a comment

I had two users come to me with an interesting issue. Every time they would go to lunch, or leave their desks for a period of time- they would come back and their windows that were open would shift to the other screen or resize. I had others report the issue sometime later, but this one had me stumped for a bit, and the fix is… well, less than ideal but so far it has been the only thing I could find to work.

When I began researching the issue, there were suggestions of downloading programs that served as placeholders for icons and windows. Naturally, in this environment- I am not going to do that simply because I do not place trust in such a program/executable. I am a firm believer in that there is almost always a way to fix things on your own, sometimes you just have to dig deep.

First thing I looked at was sleep settings. Both of these users were set to never sleep. I double checked the power plans on both. The more I read about the issue, the more people were pointing to display/graphics drivers. The machines themselves are HP G2 260 minis, with HP P223 monitors. One using VGA the other HDMI. I had a hard time believing this was a driver issue, but figured what the hell. May as well rule it out. I proceeded to uninstall and reinstall the drivers for monitors and the video card for the PC. Neither made a difference in the issue. I had also attempted swapping cords, just in case, and of course that was not the issue either.

So, I start leaning back towards power and sleep settings again, figuring there HAS to be SOMETHING I am missing. After several coffees, and digging into multiple articles, I read about a power setting, “console lock display off timeout.” But, the crazy thing was, it was not listed as an option from within my control panel. It was supposed to be nested under display settings.

power

So, I had to figure out how to get this setting. I started digging for that answer, I figured it had to be a registry or command, something. I found my answer in the registry settings. To get the option of console lock display timeout, it must first be enabled in the registry.

As always, back up your registry first in case you make a mistake.

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99\8EC4B3A5-6868-48c2-BE75-4F3044BE88A7

Once there, change the attributes value to 2.

reg pow

Now, the setting will appear in the power options within the control panel.

contrl

As you can see here, I changed it to 180 minutes. Perhaps a little bit over kill. So what this setting does is prevent the display from sleeping on the lock screen. Once I changed this for the two users, they did not experience further issues. This was a few months ago, and frankly I haven’t revisited the issue, since this worked. Since then I have had others report the same issue, so I built a package in PDQ deploy to automate the process. The first step is a powershell to enable the registry setting, and the second step is a command line to change the console lock setting in the power configurations.

Powershell to change the registry key:

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99\8EC4B3A5-6868-48c2-BE75-4F3044BE88A7 -Name Attributes -Value 2

Command line to change the power settings: 

powercfg.exe /setacvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_VIDEO VIDEOCONLOCK 10800

This made for easy deployment. I hope you found this useful!

 

Number pad not working on logon

Crystal ORourkeLeave a comment

Imagine my frustration trying to quickly type my password (which includes a variety of numbers) just to find out the numlock was not turned on! It was happening every time I logged on in the morning, and shutting again when swapping between regular and admin accounts.

So what’s the big deal? It’s just an extra keystroke. It’s a convenience thing really, but there were a few other users griping about it as well. Hey, anything I can do to make their job easier and mine- I am all for. Keep tech working, and people are kept happy- amiright?

I began researching the issue, and naturally people pointed to the BIOS. This is a windows 10 environment, so it is UEFI now.  You can get into it one of two ways. The first being holding down the shift key while rebooting, or you can go in through settings> update and security> recovery> advanced startup> restart now. Once the system reboots, select Troubleshoot> advanced options> UEFI firmware settings> and the PC will boot into BIOS. You can check out this link for pictures if you like.

**IMPORTANT!!**

Take great care when making any changes here, as you can do some serious damage to your computer.

Once you have entered the BIOS, you will see this screen:

20190227_140604

Select F10 here, or whatever the key is on your system.

next, this will appear. Using your arrow keys, navigate to advanced, and then select device options. As you can see here, the num lock state at power on was already enabled. If for some reason it is not enabled for you, enable it, and hit F10 for accept.

20190227_140659

Next, we need to exit. Go back to the file menu. You have options here to save changes and exit, ignore and exit, or reset to default. Because I did not make any changes, I am choosing to ignore and exit.

20190227_140721

As it turns out, this was not my issue. Where does that leave me? Where else but the registry. Something I was terrified to make changes in for awhile, tbh. But now, I figure to heck with it. Back it up and forge ahead. We’re going to find our answer one way or another!

You can edit the keyboard setting for the current user, but why do that when you can do it for all users and be done with it? Open up a run dialog and punch in regedit. Navigate to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard. the key we need to change is InitialKeyboardIndicators. the value you see here will likely be 2147483648. It needs to be changed to 2147483650.

regedddd

Once this is set, you should be good. Now, if you are just changing the current user only for some reason, navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard. The same InitialKeyboardIndicators will be found here, but this time the value is 2.

reg2

And there you have it! Note the registry can only be edited in Administrative mode. Pat yourself on the back, you’ve made yourself (and possible other users) happy campers! Have a coffee and march on!