Posted on 08/30/2019 4:19:33 PM PDT by fireman15
What's Wrong Drawing inspiration from the other world-famous Washingtonian product, the Boeing 737 MAX airplane, Microsoft introduced Windows 10 1903 with a boatload of insufficiently-documented under-the-hood changes. Some of these changes affect Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) tick-rate, causing spikes in DPC latency, affecting the audio pipeline.
Focusrite beautifully summarized DPC affecting audio: DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) is the operation that Windows uses to assign a priority to processes/drivers that run simultaneously in the same system. If processes that are involved in streaming audio aren't assigned high enough priority then various issues can occur since the audio will not be streamed correctly in 'real-time'. These can include pops/clicks, "glitchy" audio and device disconnections.
It goes on to postulate that outdated drivers for audio devices that have gone EOL (end of life) that aren't ready for dynamic DPC could effectively render your otherwise physically-perfect discrete sound cards unusable. "A common cause for DPC latency is out of date device drivers and Windows processes that are not optimized correctly. Many processes/drivers are involved in streaming audio and many other processes/drivers can cause interruptions in the audio stream."
First Public Acknowledgment by Microsoft Pete Brown, among other things, heads client-segment audio hardware user-experience at Microsoft, and Tweeted the first acknowledgment by Microsoft that it screwed up:
In the above Tweet, Pete posted a link to an Update applicable to Windows 1903 chronicled under KB4505903. This update was touted to fix audio glitches, and would go on to be part of the August Patch Tuesday rollout (you can separately download it here).
Did the Patch Work? No. At least not in case of my sound cards.
(Excerpt) Read more at techpowerup.com ...
“Linux Mint.”
Bingo. I finally gave up on Windows 6 months ago, and haven’t looked back.
A corrupted file that prevented loading Mint. Ran it from a USB drive and repaired the corrupted files in a few minutes.
“See my posts just below yours.”
I know one thing... I am so glad you talked me into that. :)
Wow, a glitch in the medium transfer write then? I have yet to have that one happen, so far flawless one time installs. But one thing I am having an issue with, and I’m curious if you are too? Is a slight diagonal screen tearing when I scroll too fast. Only slightly annoying but I’m used to it because it really doesn’t bother anything. But I dug into it yesterday and there is a simple cure for it. Will give it a shot tomorrow and see if it does the job.
Did you go with the Cinnamon bundle? Cool desktop bundle loaded with just about everything you will need as an average user. I’m going on two years into Mint now myself. Absolutely digging it. :)
Hers one for your knowledge base. I am on a new install on an old HP as of two days ago. But HP locked me out of the “boot from USB” option because it didn’t see it as windows, and the Bios did have the option. So I had to use a simple bootloader script to bypass it. But what I found was cool is that after linux installed it overrode all boot software including that bootloader. Good... Didn’t need them to get in the way anyways. It worked well. :)
Bios did NOT have the option....
I had to change the boot bios to Legacy boot to get it to boot from the USB and install.
No, my screen scrolls fine.
Good to hear it didn’t affect you, I have been reading that it is a known problem on just a few certain make machines, especially laptops. This HP is one of those I guess.
At work we had many people calling in these past few weeks to report their pc would not boot up after an update. A rarity then all of a sudden many calls.
They have to send the pc in for re-image as system restore had been disable due to company policy.....
We have been running 1903 on all of our Windows 10 computers for the past couple of months. The initial upgrade actually fixed a couple of issues that I was having on one of them and gave me a little trouble on another. The update that borked my laptop the other day was intended to be a minor fix to 1903. The difficulties that it is causing people seems to be related to its replacing some drivers to generic Microsoft versions from drivers that were released by parts manufacturers. This was no doubt to address incompatibilities that some people were experiencing with 1903.
Many times later versions of drivers even the ones released by manufacturers are not as good as the earlier versions. This is because the cheapest way to eliminate a problem people are having is to take away the feature that is being complained about rather than fixing it.
One example is one of the drivers that this update replaced on my laptop, the Synaptics touchpad driver. Synaptics took away many of the options available in earlier versions of the drivers for my laptop. I do not know the reason why but it likely was in response to customers who were having difficulties and generating call volume and complaints at support centers. The easiest way to eliminate this is to just take away many of the options that were once available.
In the current situation with the 1903 update Microsoft has gotten a lot of criticism over problems people have been having. Many of the complaint were likely determined to be due to drivers which had incompatibilities. Microsoft's solution appears to have been to “update” people's drivers with generic versions that do not have the options available that may have been causing issues for some people. In other words they chose the big hammer to "fix" the problem.
It seemed like a miracle when I finally worked out all the issues that were plaguing my new laptop when I woke up the other morning. It is amazing that Microsoft is able to create so much mischief with a device that is supposedly sleeping. All I wanted was to just get it back to running the way that it had been the day before. I had created recent restore points but I had not made an image of the system. The irony was that trying to use system restore is what actually caused the startup files to become corrupted and the tools on the recovery media that are supposedly there to help to rewrite those files would not work. I spent much of the day trying to get past the “access denied” errors that I was receiving.
I have to admit that I felt a sense of accomplishment when I finally navigated through all of the road blocks that it felt like Microsoft had intentionally placed in my path. But I also marveled at what felt like the mediocrity of the situation. Windows 10 is now a mature and polished operating system but somehow the company that has spent billions of dollars developing it still manages to regularly screw things up. How is this even possible?
I know the answer of course and it is certainly not completely Microsoft's fault even though they make an excellent punching bag. Windows 10 is compatible with such a wide array of hardware and software that is constantly changing. Apple has a very tiny subset of hardware by comparison and people who use various versions of Linux tend to pick and choose the hardware and software that they use largely based on compatibility issues and solutions other people have found work. Only Microsoft is basically expected to work on such a wide array of hardware. And most of the time they do a pretty good job.
Have you ever watched the British comedy, the IT Crowd it played from 2006 - 2013. It is free to watch with Amazon Prime and other ways as well. It has basically nothing to do with the computers, but they do show quite a bit of vintage hardware. And it reminds me a little of the work I did long before working at a community college in the computer lab and helping with the college's administrative computers. This was a little before Windows with DOS 6.1, Word Perfect 5, , Lotus 123 and other programs of that generation. The hardware and software change but the basic challenges remain similar, minus the automatic updates from Microsoft. That is partially what makes the goofball English humor funny to me.
#34 The computer equipment you saw in the tv show “IT Crowd” was the latest that the British use. They still have rationing in England due to the war..... : )
That would not surprise me much because we have had friends in England.
I just realized that the “IT Crowd” is on Netflix and not free with Amazon Prime.
Yes. It is a pretty good desktop. I added a few things, but overall, I couldn’t be more pleased.
I have been using Unix since the mid-80s, and have tried to drop Windows for years, and always had to switch back for one reason or another. Now, I don’t anticipate going back.
Same here, Found other stuff I wanted to add on of course, but it was a great starter desktop and software bundle for me coming from Win 7 and refusing to use Win 10. It came with the important replacement for MS office ,Libreoffice, and it works fine and didn’t take but a couple days to get used to.
You should be able to install Group policy editor in windows 10 https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/group_policy_editor_for_windows_10_home_edition.html
That has been my experience also.
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