Nvidia gpu not being recognized in device manager and PCI express slot shows yellow exclamation mark. Solved

Windows 7 x64 bit
Dell 3458 with Nvidia 920m

Recently I found my Nvidia drivers disappeared from my system
- no nvidia option in right click
- not in device manager under display
- a yellow exclamation mark / error was there on device manager under system devices pci express slot 5

Since I was new to this, I checked for solutions and thought I had to open up the laptop and take off the dust. I hoped this was not the case.

What I tried before
- System restore to earlier dates, didn't work

Solution:
The problem is mostly because old nvidia drivers were not uninstalled before new ones are installed. A solution is here http://www.overclock.net/t/1150443/how-to-remove-your-nvidia-gpu-drivers-new-2016

However, I only had to do the following, open programs in control panel and I saw 2 installs of the same version, removed one (uninstall) and restarted system. Now when opening Geforce, it recognizes the card and the device manager shows the card without any pci express port / slot error.

___

UPDATE:

reinstalling after uninstalling 'all versions' does not help after a while, it seems that the release is buggy itself.  Will post new updates.

UPDATE 2:

Dell customer support says the drivers won't work unless you have windows 8 or above / or windows 7 latest service pack. I believe I don't have the win 7 latest Sp and yet to find out if this is an add on installation or a complete new installation.


Hope this works for you, let me know if you have any inputs, etc.

Right click not responding on desktop / taking too much time (solved)

Windows 7 x64 bit

Right click on desktop just stops responding, right clicking on files still worked.

After some searching, this helped me.
- Download shellviewer (small file, check online, title: shexview-x64 (zip))
- Run it (directly from zip is ok)
- use the columns to sort all those shells that are not from microsoft corporation (some may be above this in alphabetical order and others below)
- select all and right click and disable
- Try if right click works now (it worked for me)
- select those again and enable it

Additional:
What to do when the mouse freezes after right click?
- ctrl + shift + esc --> opens task manager --> go to windows explorer (if mouse works here, or using keyboard)
- right click and end this task
- windows + r (if this works) or file option in task manager and new task
- type explorer.exe and enter
- Now the mouse and windows explorer are refreshed and you can try the above solution

Feel free to comment if you have better solutions or need help.

Windows 7 64 bit slow down fix for dell vostro 3458 4 gb ram

Go to task manager and close waves Maxx audio

Better solution: update your video drivers. After updating nvidia drivers which were already running on some version (using geforce experience) the problem seems to be solved.

This solution may not be permanent. Will try to update if any new info

UPDATE
My laptop isn't able to install the video drivers after a particular update from nvidia. Still the laptop runs smoothly. I did face some issues with Trojans and AVs that affected speed. Check my other post for more.

Cannot edit Google sheets, only cells are being selected?

If you are using a laptop press the function (fn) key and it should release the problem.

You may have thought it was about the ctrl button but that didn't work for me.

Feel free to message if you still have this issue.

What to do if you don't have any experience in your resume?

Write:
Blog

Teach:
Chess?

Volunteer:
NGOs

Other:
Test new things
Check spelling at wikihow articles

How to make sure you take regular breaks and give your eyes some rest at work

We are all working tirelessly and we know it's important for us to give our eyes a break. Sometimes we only realize how good it feels once you actually take the break.

20-20-20 rule

A simple rule is to give your eyes a 20 second break every 20 minutes by focusing on something 20 feet away.

How do you remember to do this?

Let your work remind you.. I'm guessing you work with computers and browsers.. Open protectyourvision.org and set it up to pop up a reminder to take a short eye break.

I personally like to take few more seconds and just keep my eyes closed.

Finally you can also set up a 5 minute break every 60 minutes rule or try a customized one.

Keep this tab open in a new window if you use Chrome browser and already have several other tabs open because Chrome like to refresh the tab in such cases. A new window dedicated to a site prevents that.

How to send emails using Gmail with your work ID

With over 1b people using Gmail, I'm guessing a ton of people use the platform to send work mails. You can buy Google for work and get a yourname@yourcompany.com address but this is for connecting your ID to Gmail without any purchases and send emails using your work ID.

When I joined a start-up, we made this default after setting it up for a couple of ourselves.

To make this useful we wanted to achieve 2 goals
1. Get emails to sent to our work ID come into our Gmail inbox
2. To be able to send emails from Gmail with the sender showing your work ID.

Steps:
1. Get emails to sent to our work ID come into our Gmail inbox
- Open your work email inbox. This depends from provider to provider.
- Find general options or forwarding options
- Find an option 'Add a forwarding email address' or similar.
- Enter your Gmail ID and save.

2. To be able to send emails from Gmail with the sender showing your work ID.
- Go to your Gmail and click on the settings icon on the top right usually.
- Under accounts and import option choose 'Add another email address you own'.
- Add your work ID and follow the steps. I have unchecked 'treat as an alias' option during the set up. Anyone knows more about this?
- You will be asked to verify the address and after that you must save the settings.

Result:
Now you get your work emails inside your Gmail inbox + can send mails to other people from your work ID once again without leaving Gmail. Neat.

Testing it:
1. Ask someone to mail to your work ID, you should receive it in Gmail.
2. Send a mail from Gmail with your work ID, you can choose this ID in the compose window. Check if the person receives it the way you wanted it to be.

Let me know if you have anything to add or need help.

Also you may come across line spacing issues, check out my other post.

Gmail formatting issues with line spacing

I send a lot of emails using Gmail and while it's probably one of the best email services out there, I came across a small but really annoying issue.

People who use MS word can relate... When you just can't figure out what's causing a particular change in the format of text size or spacing and you want to burn the house down.

When pasting text from another app and adding new lines (using bullets or enter), sometimes you notice an inconsistency with the line spacing between the pasted text (or text from an out-of-gmail source) and the text typed out inside of Gmail, and while you may try to use the formatting options in the email client but it doesn't help.

Here's a small thing that did after a lot of different things: It's to paste with a supposedly no formatting option.

You can do this using the shift command while pasting text. Shift+ctrl+v and not just a ctrl+v.

This works similar to the plain text option inside Gmail in one way. Atleast I found the line spacing was consistent.

Anything else works?

How to reduce lag in Nexus 7 2012 Lollipop

When I first started to use the Nexus 7 2012 tablet with Android 4.x / Kitkat, it was buttery smooth, I recall, opening and switching seamlessly from Facebook to Youtube and Games.

The biggest WTF moments came after I upgraded to Lollipop 5.x and other subsequent versions of it (currently 5.1.1). The updates made the tablet unusable. Opening apps took several seconds (10+ sometimes), and you could barely do anything at all. It became a clock, not even for alarms. This is a pretty good reason to write a SHFU post.

After searching the internet, I was not so surprised that tons of people suffered the same thing, but surprised the issue hasn't been fixed from the developers, or so I cannot find.

Good news is, with the help of so many others trying fixes, several minor changes can be made to make the tablet useful again with respectable performance.

Here is a set of things that might work:

1. Clearing the cache partition:

See how here: http://goo.gl/75jxHS

It might be worth mentioning to notice this comment while trying the fix: http://goo.gl/agvRr5

2. Tweaking the settings:

A range of settings can be dialed down to make the tablet snappy. The complete list here: https://goo.gl/oEufMM

The list is long but here are the best tweaks that have made great improvement:

• Suggest words in gesture typing - OFF (under keyboard section) - read this elsewhere as well and it works amazingly well
• Cloud Printing - OFF (under settings)
• (New update) disable the google plus app (this did wonders)

This can be coupled with (1) for best results

3. Downgrade to Kitkat:

Honestly, I feel the Nexus 7 2012 just isn't built for Lollipop; it was a blast on Kitkat so here is a youtube video on how to do it. There may be more ways, but this is just one.

https://goo.gl/VjOSRx

___

See my other post on how to solve lag issues on the Nexus 5 2013 http://goo.gl/iOGDlk

Credits to the several people who found and shared the fixes.

How to save file names for multiple files as text quickly

Recently I had a set of photos whose file names I needed as a list.

Since there were several hundred of them, it would be tedious to select each filename and paste the name onto some notepad or word file.

Fortunately there is a much easier way to get this done.

1. Select all files you want to get file names for
2. Press shift and right click
3. You will see a copy path option, click that option
4. Open a notepad file and paste

Now you have all the file paths and file names in a single file.

If you want only the file names then you can paste this in excel and proceed to break the text into parts.

How to take notes quickly when at work?

Hey,

Most of us today spend a lot of time on the internet for work and its not uncommon for us to have to make a list or jot down some reminders or paste paragraphs.

What's an easy way to do this?

We could use any text program like notepad or word but then for those who spend a lot of time using a browser it is inconvenient to switch between apps (yes even with keyboard shortcuts).

A very simple and amazing tool I've come across is actually a web clipboard. 

Open in a new tab "Zenpen.io".

You will get a very clean and user friendly online notepad. You can do more than the windows notepad in this.

Notes:

Text is stored in your cache so be careful, you may lose this if you clear the same. Just in case you may want to ctrl a + c (select all and copy) then save the text in a notepad file in your computer 

Or go a step ahead and keep that file synced to the cloud.

Nexus 5 2013 lagging - Solved

Hey, if you own a Nexus 5 and if you feel your phone has suddenly started to lag in any or all of these

• opening apps (eg. Whatsapp)
• swiping through home screens
• just about anything that it never was slow for earlier

Then, this might be the cause:

Certain apps are making it slow.

Along with the frustrating lag, it also drains battery quickly. My nexus conservatively gave a 17-hour battery back-up but with the lag, I was getting about 10-12 hours only.

Fix:

• Start by recalling when the phone was last working without the horrible lag then open up the list of apps in your phone
• proceed to uninstall the latest apps which you have installed, you do not need to follow the exact order but apps that are not by known developers or low rated (and also very high rated apps - who might have gotten there through dummy ratings) should be removed
• check usage for few hours - 1 day, if it shows improvement, then you have found it

The same may be applied to recently changed settings as well.

For me, the app that caused the lag was 'Twilight', although it was useful, I removed it (note: it might be early to conclude if that exactly was it but this can be tested over time).

___

The above fix can be tried on any Android phone I believe, no surprise why people disable or remove bloatware as soon as they buy a new phone.

Upon reading about such issues, it seems the best way is to have an 'image' of the phone backed up. Something that I am not familiar with, Nandroid? If anyone knows about it, do comment and help out. 


___

New update:

Now even with a lot more apps, it seems the phone slows down every some weeks, just restarting helps get back to normal. I still don't keep the full version of Facebook though. Maybe this is the RAM drain issue everyone keeps talking about. ___

Check out how to improve performance of Nexus 7 2012 with Lollipop. http://goo.gl/krgNLA