Weird eSIM issue with Apple iPhone XS Max and Verizon Wireless + Simple Mobile

When Apple announced that their new iPhone XS Max was going to have dual-sim capability I was ecstatic.  I finally moved my business line which is on Verizon to the eSIM.  Last night I purchased a Simple Mobile SIM card from Best Buy and setup a personal line.  I didn’t have much problems other than the activation taking a few hours.

Here is the issue I am having.  I have two phone numbers which are VOIP lines that, after X amount of rings, forward the call to my Verizon phone number.  I noticed this morning I was receiving voicemails with no missed calls.  I immediately figured it was related to the dual-sim.  I can fix this temporarily by either turning on airplane mode and then turning it off and or going into cellular settings and disabling my personal line and then turning it back on.  This will fix the problem temporarily but will eventually start blocking calls that are forwarded from this VOIP line that I own.

I am assuming it is some kind of bug and hope it is not by design.  The fact that I can fix it by disabling the line and re-enabling it leads me to believe that this is a bug and not by design.

Windows 10 Photos app printing problem: Your printer has experienced an unexpected configuration problem. 0x800706b5

I ran into this problem with a client’s computer.  A brand new Dell OptiPlex 7050 with a NVMe solid state drive.  Trying to print a simple .jpg picture would allow the default printer to come up in the settings box but trying to select a secondary printer would cause this error to come up.  I tried uninstalling the printer and reinstalling it.  The only time I had success was by utilizing the PS driver for the printer.  The printer in question is a Ricoh C3003 MFP.  After uninstalling and reinstalling it a third time it resulted in ALL printers just saying Connecting…  Restarting the print spooler service and changing the driver did not help.  I finally found something on Google that said it’s easier to just right click the .jpg and click on print as it will bring up an entirely different program to print the picture.  Windows 10 and its what I call “tablet” apps aren’t the greatest.  I find them to be extremely buggy and more often than not, I never find an actual fix for the problem.  I always have to find a workaround, which, unfortunately, is quite sad.

Windows 10 domain joined computer cannot use Microsoft Account sync

For quite some time I enjoyed the feature of Windows 10 account sync. I could sync I favorites, wallpaper, I believe certain passwords, and app settings. I also found that I could sync these same settings with a computer joined to an Active Directory domain.  It appears that you no longer can do this.

It wasn’t until maybe a few months ago that I realized my syncing stopped working. I had to do a clean install on my home workstation, and as soon as I got Windows reinstalled, Windows asked me to sign in with a Microsoft account or a Work account. I signed in with my Work account thinking I’d be able to continue then syncing everything from my home workstation to my office workstation. I soon found out that it is not possible anymore. You have to completely avoid using a Work account if you plan to use Microsoft’s sync feature. Why? I don’t know. In my honest opinion, Microsoft loves to give their business customers the middle finger when it comes to these kinds of things. I wish more companies would blur the line between business and customer features. Alternatively, give it to us both! It worked once before, and I’m not sure why they stopped it.

Another thing that pains me is the way they make a distinction between a “Microsoft Account” and a “Work Account aka Office 365 account”, what’s the difference? One’s free from Microsoft, and the other is an account WE PAY FOR! We’re giving Microsoft money, and they decide to take features AWAY from us or punish us for using a certain type of account!

Western Digital 10TB External Easystore Hard Drive on sale at Best Buy (Early Black Friday Deal)!

On top of getting a 10 TB external drive that normally costs $289.99 you also get a 32 GB thumb drive.  One more thing, people have been shucking this drive and according to reports it’s a white label drive with 256 MB of cache.  It is not a WD Red drive.  However, people have also been reporting that they’ve had no problems installing it into their storage servers/NAS devices.  No 3.3 mod was required to get the drive to show up and work properly.  It’s plug and play.  If you click the picture above it’ll take you right to the Black Friday special.

Free transform in Adobe Photoshop CC 2019

So Adobe took it upon themselves to change the way you free transform in Photoshop CC 2019.  Before you’d hold shift and drag and it would keep its aspect ratio instead of having your text look too tall or too thin or too wide and out of aspect ratio.

I finally figured out what they did. The aspect ratio lock is on by default now.  If you hold shift it’s the reverse of what you would expect in past Photoshop versions.  I honestly don’t understand why they would do this as it’s been one way all these past years and versions and I am talking years!

Windows 10 – No network connection upon every reboot temporarily

Since the very first version of Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise, I’ve had this issue whereupon a reboot and logging back in for the first time my network connection is not available.  There network icon in the system tray near the time is also disconnected.  I’ve been able to get around the issue by giving myself a static IP address but that’s very annoying and that should not be required to have a valid Internet/network connection upon a reboot.

The symptoms are basically NO network connection, LAN or WAN.  Upon first logging into Windows, I immediately see the X on the network icon and upon opening a CMD window and doing an ipconfig command I see that I do not have an assigned IP address.

My first theory is that because I have an SSD, Windows restarts and logs me in so quickly that the DHCP service doesn’t get a chance to grab an IP address.  But that seems absurd that DHCP wouldn’t be able to either sustain or grab an IP as soon as the service is started.  I’ll continue investigating and posting my findings.

Windows 10 random computer and mouse stuttering

System specs:

ASUS Rampage V Extreme 3.1
Corsair Dominator Platinum 2400MHz 64GB kit
Intel Core i7-5820K CPU not overclocked
EVGA nVidia 1070
Seasonic PSU (don’t know the exact model off hand)
Samsung EVO 870 NVME PCIe 500GB SSD
Samsung 850 500GB x2 in RAID0 using Intel RAID Controller
SanDisk 960GB SSD plugged into Intel Controller
Corsair K95 RGB keyboard with Cherry-MX Red switches
Logitech G700s using Logitech Gaming Software version 9.2

I have been fighting with trying to find the root cause of this issue where my mouse cursor will suddenly start stuttering and lagging as you move it around the screen.  The entire computer starts to lag as well including watching video and audio.  I thought I had it narrowed down to either some kind of USB issue with my motherboard (ASUS Rampage V Extreme.  I’m not so sure now.  When it starts is completely random.  I can get task manager to open, but there isn’t any process that can be seen using up system resources to the point that it would make my system lag.

It just happened about five minutes ago while I was browsing Outlook and also Google Chrome.  I had a ton of stuff open, but I have 64 GB of memory and an NVME Samsung EVO PCIe SSD.  I opened task manager and could not see anything out of the ordinary except for Google Chrome 64-Bit using around 4 GB of memory.  But again, I have 64 GB, and 4 GB shouldn’t even make a dent on that amount of available memory plus the added PCIe NVME SSD.

I started to ALT+F4 all the windows that were open and surprisingly after I got through all the windows the mouse lag/stutter stopped.  I can’t say for sure which program that was closed caused it to stop the stuttering.  The next time it happens, I will try to go slower and kill each window one by one until the mouse stutter stops.

I also have a Logitech mouse and have seen this weird issue when you use Windows faster user switching and have two people logged, and the lcore.exe process is running within two user’s accounts.  But I don’t think it’s related to the lcore.exe process because I’ve had a hotkey to kill the process while it was happening and it did not cause the stuttering to stop.

Feel free to comment below if you have the same problem.

11/06/2018 Update:

I seem to have narrowed it down to possibly being VMWare Workstation’s USB driver that is causing this to occur.  I can’t say 100% certainty, but I’m very close.  I’ll keep working on this and will update the post as time goes on.

11/07/2018 Update:

Doesn’t appear to be related to VMWare Workstation.  Tonight I found that my workstation at my office is doing the same thing.  It seems like it happens after the computer has been on for a few days with no reboot.  I could easily reproduce the issue by opening task manager while Chrome was open.  I did this at home and left it while I went out for a bit and came back, and the mouse was still lagging/stuttering/freezing/jumping around the screen.

I’m not any closer to fixing this, but I did go ahead and disable pretty much everything that isn’t necessary and am trying to reproduce the issue again.  I might have to wait a few days before it shows itself again which is infuriating.

11/8/2018 Update:

I disable the vast majority of the software that starts on my computer and started opening up hundreds of tabs within Chrome.  I’ve got Chrome using up around 5GB of memory right now.  Another thing I did uninstall completely was Grammarly.  Grammarly latches on to everything as it tries to check your grammar so it makes sense that it might cause a lot of problems like this, but I can’t find anyone else online or through my Google-Fu that had a similar problem, so it’s likely not that.

I won’t know until I probably leave the computer on for a few days as it appears to clear up after a reboot.

4/8/2019 Update:

Unfortunately, I am still fighting with this issue. I have tried so many things to no avail. Just today, things started to freeze up completely, and it would unfreeze every few minutes. I tried opening up Task Manager and tried killing processes, but that did not help either. I thought for a while that it was related to my SSD setup and I might be getting closer to figuring this thing out. I have a new Samsung 970 EVO NVMe 500 GB drive that I installed and disconnected all other SATA SSD hard drives. For a time, things were OK. Not completely fixed, but not as bad. I attributed that to my SATA SSD hard drives failing or at least one of them that were connected. I cannot do a diagnostic on them as they’re both NFR OEM/enterprise SSD drives and Samsung Magic does not recognize them.

In any case, I am a bit bothered by how crappy my system performed. It was top of the line for when it was purchased, and I have never gone above all programs using more than fifty percent of my available memory, which is 64 GB worth.

At this point, I am thinking about buying a new motherboard, PSU and CPU and re-using my memory and video card. If that doesn’t fix it, then I guess I may be pushing my system to its limits, which I highly doubt.

This problem typically rears its head when I have had a ton of programs open along with the uptime being anywhere from one to five days without a reboot.

Within the past two weeks, I have started to experience weird freezing that occurs for a minute or two and then releases the computer, and I can do whatever it is I was doing. I have opened up the Task Manager and could see my network process using up 200+Mbps. I updated my NIC’s driver and sure enough, it sort of fixed the issue.

As of 4/8, I have once again, disabled any unnecessary startup items and disabled all non-Microsoft services to try and see how long it will take before the problem returns.

I will keep you posted.

Team Viewer remote printing from PC back to Mac DOES NOT WORK!

I have a client who has an end user who uses a Mac at home and remotes into their office to a PC.  They need something to be able to consistently and reliably print from the PC side back to an HP printer attached to their Mac.  I researched and reached out to Team Viewer and they said that they could print from PC back to Mac, not a problem.

I had my client purchase two licenses for Team Viewer’s Premium license and come to find out that it’s a half-baked solution that does not even work right.  First of all, they don’t tell you that you need to purchase, yes, purchase an XPS Viewer (they blamed this on Microsoft).  Initially, they said to get any XPS Viewer and it’ll work.  They don’t even have documentation on why you need this XPS Viewer on their website.  When you try to enable remote printing without the XPS Viewer installed on your Mac you get a vague message indicating you need an XPS Reader or Viewer.  That’s it.  When you Google and check Team Viewer’s documentation there were one or two forum posts with NO answers from any of their staff.  You’re basically made to figure this out on your own.

You need an XPS Viewer because you are NEVER going to be able to print from a PC back to  Mac.  They shouldn’t even call it remote printing.  They should call it TRANSFERRING YOUR FILES BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN COMPUTERS TO PRINT on your Mac, maybe, might work, not entirely sure and because of legalese we cannot guarantee that it will work.

Not only that but they’ll continue to tell you just get whatever free one you can find on the App Store.  So I get the one free one available in the App store.  You go to try and print, it opens a window up saying to send a document to Mac and it opens in the XPS Viewer program.  BUT, the free version has a limitation of only showing you like 10 lines before you have to PURCHASE the premium version!  Yes, after spending $2000+ for two licenses you have to spend another couple of dollars.  You might be thinking well what’s a few more dollars when you already spent $2000… that’s not the point.  You shouldn’t have to do this if you’re paying $2000!  Team Viewer should have just said they can’t do remote printing from PC back to Mac!

If you’re trying to print remotely from a PC back to a Mac, do not use Team Viewer as it does not work.  You’ll be sorely disappointed.