ItsGeekToMe.co

Q:  Recently, I had no access to my Windows (10) start button, it was “grayed-out” and I was not able to see my tiles, etc. The only remedy was to restore to an earlier date, but my question is, why did this happen and is there another way to remedy this?

 Also, I think it would be helpful if you had in your contact info that this is a browser address not email. I had to research how to contact you, thinking this was an email address but it was not accepted.

– Kathy D.
Niceville, Florida

A:  There are several things that can cause the Start button to appear grayed-out, Kathy.  The correct remedy depends on knowing the cause, so I don’t believe there is a simple answer to the first half of your question.  The Restore feature of Windows is not the panacea that so many people think it is, and too many people try to use it without knowing the full impact of what they are doing, then resort to asking me for assistance only after they’ve already made sweeping unalterable changes to their system.  That makes it a little more difficult on me, since the restore operation may have wiped out evidence of what caused the problem without actually fixing it.  In your case, what probably happened was that an update was partially installed, and was waiting for a full reboot to complete its installation.  Restoring to an earlier date made the problem appear to go away by effectively removing the update.  While the problem may have gone away, it may also return if the system downloads the same update, and the same condition recurs.  Of course, I could be totally wrong, and your menu may have been greyed-out because someone enabled “Tablet Mode” in the Action Center, or some other obscure issue.

Regarding the second half of your question, I’m not sure what contact info you’re referencing.  If you’re talking about the tag line that usually appears at the end of each issue, in my defense, it does say you should “visit ItsGeekToMe.co” and that strongly implies a web site, as one cannot “visit” an e-mail address.  By the same token, all e-mail addresses take the form of Username@domain, and since there is no ‘@’ in ItsGeekToMe.co, it should be an immediate indication that it is a URL.  In writing some 460 issues of this column over the course of nearly nine years I’ve come to realize that it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time, so I must do what I feel is most appropriate for the largest number of readers.  I am well-aware that my column is read by people of all knowledge levels, but I have to make at least a few basic assumptions of what computer owners using the Internet do and don’t know. 

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Q: I have an HP pavilion laptop, probably around 4 years old.  I just upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 yesterday. The install went excellent. It took several hours but went very easily.  Now that I have Windows 10, my laptop keeps locking up as in the mouse doesn’t move or respond, never more than 3 to 6 seconds but it really slows me down and is very annoying. It doesn’t seem to matter whether on Internet or just shuffling my photos. What if anything, can I do about it?

– Tony B.
Knoxville, Tennessee

A:  Your PC has an outdated driver, Tony.  If a simple visit to the Windows Update site doesn’t solve this for you, the challenge is going to be figuring out which driver (or drivers) need updating.  You might start with easy to access things like your touchpad and your Wi-Fi card.  Disable one of them, and if the problem goes away, there’s your culprit.  Other devices can be disabled for such testing, but it’s not as easy since there’s not a switch or key combination like there is for the first two I mentioned.  To disable other devices, you need to get into the Device Manager by right-clicking on the “Computer” icon (formerly “My Computer”) and selecting “Manage”.  You’ll find Device Manager in the tree control on the left, and selecting it will display another tree full of your system’s devices.  For any given device, you can double-click it and get a Properties dialog.  On the “Driver” tab of this dialog is a selection to disable the device.  Be sure you don’t disable something that makes your system unusable!