Category: Windows 10

Windows 10 Best Free Video Screen Capture Open Broadcaster Software Install Tutorial

This video demonstrates how to use Open Broadcaster Software for capturing your desktop into a record-able video. OBS is free software that you can also use to record your gaming sessions to never miss that moment during your computer game. Here is a good post on Reddit.com describing how to set up OBS for capturing your game with a 20 second “buffer” so you can show your frags on youtube or convert them to a gif. But for now, below I put together a tutorial on how to setup OBS to record your desktop screen and audio to make videos like the one here:

 

How to Setup User Account for Child on Windows 10 Tutorial

This video shows you how to setup a user account for your kid/child without creating an email address. Windows 10 wants you to use an email address to create a user account. When you try to setup an account, it asks you to use an existing email and if not, it tries to force you to sign up for an outlook.com account. This video shows you how to bypass the Windows User account setup and use Computer Management to create a normal/local user account on Windows 10 Pro version for your kids.

Solved – Dell Optiplex 790 2nd HDD disk drive not found in Windows 10 Disk Management but BIOS sees the drive

disk

I have a Dell Optiplex I’m putting together for an IP Camera security system. The security cameras use a lot of disk space, so I connected a 2nd Seagate 2TB drive to the black SATA port labeled SATA1. The BIOS sees the drive, but when I logged into Windows 10 and looked in Disk Management, the drive wasn’t found. If the new hard drive isn’t in Disk Management, but the BIOS does see the drive, there’s something wrong with either the BIOS / SATA / RAID configuration, or there’s something wrong with the drive itself. I attempted to Scan for Hardware Changes in the Device Manager – no luck. I also went into Disk Management -> Action -> Rescan Disks -> no luck.

Here is the SATA Port layout:

SATA 0 (Blue) – Primary HDD 500GB Seagate ST3500413AS

SATA 1 (Black) – Secondary  HDD 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164

SATA 2 (White) – CD / DVD

SATA 3 (White) – empty

I went to Dell’s support website, ran the System Detect (for some reason entering the Service Tag didn’t work) and then went to look at the available drivers. I was thinking of updating the BIOS from A09 to A18, but then noticed under Serial ATA there is a Seagate Firmware update named B765JC49.zip – unpacked is 2 folders, DOS and Windows, in the Windows folder is the file B7032100.exe – this is the file I installed. During the setup, the computer is restarted, and like most firmware utilities (I love these), you get a nice old-school 8-bit text interface with a resounding SUCCESS in big blue letters when it’s done.

So this was really all I did, and after flashing the Seagate Firmware, and logging into windows, immediately the drive was detected and prompted me to initialize and format the disk. So I did just that; initialized the drive as MBR, then changed the CD-ROM to drive letter E:, and formatted the new drive as NTFS on drive letter D: labelled as “Data”. Life is good again. Hopefully this post will be found by someone else having difficulty when their computer doesn’t see the new 2nd disk drive and save them a little time and frustration in the process.

 

How to create and shrink partitions in Windows 10 – video

I’ve posted a new video here that demonstrates how to shrink an existing partition with Disk Management and then create a new partition with the empty space in Windows 10.

Sometimes you’d like to have a separate partition for data or scratch drives to keep your data safe when you run backups or re-install an operating system or software. Other times you create new partitions to install a different operating system and do a “Dual Boot” with the extra partition. Let me know if you’d like to see a video or a post about dual-booting Windows 10 and Linux/Debian/Ubuntu.