I have to laugh at myself. I’ve been trying to assemble a Ryzen 7 PC build here at Chez Tittel. But I’ve been unable to get to the UEFI on the PC. Turns out it’s for a very, very good reason. Today’s post bears the title “RTFM Stymies New PC Build” to recognize a certain lack. Let me explain…

If RTFM Stymies New PC Build . . . Order Parts!

My chosen CPU is a Ryzen 5800X. It’s a gaming CPU. As such, it includes no inbuilt GPU capability. Instead, it assumes builders will pair it up with one or more presumably high-end graphics cards.

Sigh. Guess what’s missing from my Bill of Materials? Indeed, no GPU. So, I finally broke down and ordered an Nvidia 3070 Ti from Amazon for a whopping US$1,200 or thereabouts. I’ll actually install that in my son’s PC — he’s the gamer in the family — and take his old 1070 Ti into the new build instead.

About that RTFM Thing

I just sort of assumed that because my Asrock B550 Extreme4 motherboard had graphics outputs, I’d be able to make the build work sans external GPU. But for that to happen, the CPU must include GPU circuitry. The 5800X does not, so no wonder the BIOS wouldn’t post: it had no display to talk to.

You might be amazed to learn it took me hours to figure this out. Then again, you might not… But whatever that reaction might be, the fix is in the mail so to speak. I’ll get the card next Tuesday, and try again. I predict a successful Windows 11 install. I’ll be interested to see how the Ryzen CPU does with the latest flagship OS. I’m still hearing occasional rumblings of performance and other issues for AMD PCs in this realm. Soon, I hope to find out first hand. Stay tuned.

Woo hoo! I saw a notification from Feedback Hub when I logged into my X1 Carbon this morning. Indeed: “BackgroundTaskHost Feedback Hub Response Received” hardly does justice to my sense of vindication and delight. AFAIK, this is the first time one of my FB Hub posts has engendered a reply. And if you look at the text in the lead-in graphic you’ll see they plan to fix it “in a future build.” (Note: you may have to open the graphic by double-clicking to read the text because of how WordPress handles such images.)

Party Time: BackgroundTaskHost Feedback Hub Response Received

I’ve reported a sizable number of FB Hub items, but this is the first time I’ve seen such a response. It’s nice to know the mechanism is doing its job. MS developers and engineers need input on what’s working and what’s not, for sure. But it’s even nicer to get a response back, and to understand that doing one’s bit can actuallly result in changes. Hopefully, improvements even.

All I can say is: I’m jazzed. This is a great way to get my Friday off to a good start. Considering what I need to accomplish today, this may be just the lift-off I need to help me along the way. Not to mention a forthcoming second cup of coffee, too!

Added to a Collection, It Was…

The feedback item I submitted has been added to a collection of similar items. It’s entitled “Getting an Application Error dialog pop up in recent Dev Channel builds due to backgroundtaskhost.exe.” Funny thing in my case is that I never saw the pop-up: all I saw was copious errors in Reliability Monitor, as described in this January 24 post. But hey: I’ll take my responses and their notoriety where I can get ’em. Cheers!

Here’s one to ponder. On all of the PCs I upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, a Settings option is missing. I’m talking about Start → Settings → System → Recovery  →Advanced Startup. As you can see in the lead-in graphic above, it does not show up under Recovery options. That’s what has me solving Advanced Startup Windows 11 mystery. All this said, here’s what shows up on my only “native Windows 11” PC — the Lenovo Yoga 7i — which I received last October with Windows 11 pre-installed.

Look! On the Yoga7i the option appears (it’s missing in the lead-in graphic above). Go figure…

Solving Advanced Startup Windows 11 Mystery Means…?

As I started poking around, looking for fixes, I quickly realized this missing menu item is on nobody’s radar. When I asked Shawn Brink (the chief moderator and tutorial magnate at ElevenForum.com) he advised an in-place upgrade repair install to see if it would fix the problem. Other than that, I found no insight or wisdom online to lead toward a cure.

However, I did discover a bunch of workarounds, all of which still work:

• Anyplace you can get to the Restart option in Windows 11 (the various Power menus available from Start, the lock screen and so forth), if you hold down the Shift key while clicking or touching Restart, it will call up the Windows Recovery boot screen
• You can run a special version of the shutdown command in PowerShell, at the command line, or in Windows Terminal:
  shutdown /r /o /f /t 00

This has the same net effect as using Advanced Startup in the Settings/System/Recovery menu anyway. So even if the in-place update repair fails, I can still get where I need to be on the systems where the menu option is MIA. That repair is 90% complete right now on my X1 Carbon, so I’ll be able to report on results fairly soon.

And the verdict is…SUCCESS!

Needless to say, I awaited the results of the restart and further updates with more than usual interest. It took about 10 minutes to complete the GUI-based portion of the repair, and another 5 minutes to get back to the desktop, and another 3 minutes for the out-of-box (OOB) experience to complete. And when I did, my first move was to visit Settings → System → Recovery.

Bingo! There’s the missing menu item, complete with the “Restart now” button. Thanks a bunch, Brink. I’ve long known that the in-place repair install fixes many Windows ills. Now I know for sure that it fixes another Windows 11-specific malady. The mystery of the missing Advanced Startup menu item is now also solved.

Ouch! Take a look at the error list from one of my two Dev Channel PCs (for January 21). You can’t help but notice 6 of 7 errors relate to backgroundTaskHost.exe. Ditto for how lousy the experience index remains (under 4 all days showing). Indeed, Dev Channel Build 22535 throws regular backgroundTaskHost.exe failures on both of my test PCs. I’ve reported it to Feedback hub, and am hoping somebody’s looking into it.

What to Do When Build 22535 Throws Regular backgroundTaskHost.exe Failures

Looking around online, I don’t see much by way of relief for workarounds or registry hacks. Here’s some representative detail from Reliability Monitor, from which I’ll point out recurrent elements:

Detail on these errors from ReliMon is more alike than different

Common elements include:

• Exception Code: 0XC0000005
• Application path: C:\Windows\System32\backgroundTaskHost.exe
• Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\msvcrt.dll
• Faulting…full name: includes ContentDeliveryManager

Understanding the Error

The error code, often abbreviated 0X5, when checked in the MS Error Lookup Tool returns status value: ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED. The same thing comes up in the System Error Codes for values 0-499. According to the WikiFixes Ox5 page, this may be caused by a system component or application malfunction or corruption. In this case, I’m looking at backgroundTaskHost.exe and msvcrt.dll (part of the MS Visual C++ runtime and compiler) as potential culprits.

Having run both disk ... /restorehealth and SFC /scannow on the affected PCs, I don’t think the .exe or the .dll files are damaged or corrupted. My best guess is that something is off with the build itself, and that MS will have to find and fix the problem. Funny thing is, my 22535 builds appear to work well otherwise, and don’t manifest obvious runtime issues or problems. Interesting, eh?

Let’s see what happens when word of this gets out further. I’ll keep you posted as things change.

Recently, while troubleshooting an issue on Windows 10 where Zoom kept crashing unexepectedly, I observed something even more vexing. The cure for that specific issue is to turn Video Conference Mute off in PowerToys (on by default). But as soon as one does that, keyboard input slows to a crawl. Indeed, when self-inducing Windows 10 keyboard output delays that way, it can take seconds for a keystroke to appear on-screen. If you type even modestly fast (like me) that means you can finish a whole sentence before output shows up on screen. When you make occasional typos — as I sometimes do (1 in this sentence so far) — that’s immensely frustrating.

When Self-inducing Windows 10 Keyboard Output Delays, Easy Fix

At first, I tried restarting the Explorer task in Task Manager. That sometimes helps when such symptoms appear. Not this time. The next standard fix is a system restart. And indeed, that did the trick for me.

I know that PowerToys ties into Windows at a pretty deep level. I’m guessing that turning default settings off in the program may change low-level system behaviors. Apparently, the Video Conference Mute change is discombobulating enough to change the delay involved in keyboard echo (the time it takes for a keypress value to show up on screen).

Another “Interesting” Issue Caught and Killed

This happens only on Windows 10, though. I tried the same changes on Windows 11, and it didn’t affect keyboard output at all. On Windows 10, I first noticed it in the WordPress editor. But then, it showed up in Outlook and Word — and even, Notepad — so I assumed it was an across-the-board thing.

Thus, I’m glad that an old standby in whacking Windows weirdnesses — namely, a restart — fixed the issue on my production PC. I use that machine all day long, every day, and mostly enter text on a keyboard for a living. Thus, fixing anything that slows down text entry is of major importance — to me, at least.

Stay tuned. As things are always interesting with Windows in some odd way or another, this is a thread I’ll have no trouble adding to in my daily writing. As Roseanne Roseannadanna often said on SNL: “It’s always something!” Too true…