Windows 8.1 - Files In Strange Characters When Opened With Notepad
Apr 28, 2014
Windows 8.1 64b
Some files, when open with notepad, can be easily read in English. For other ones, I get characters. How could I read these characters, is there any online translator for this? or I should learn basic C++ or other means?
I have a lot of files who are stored into folders (~ 2-3K worth of folders with 2-20 files in each folder) and I need to search in each one to see if there are any files that are similar in name. None will be exactly the same so I need to only compare the first 10 characters and if there are 2 files that have the same characters, then I need to have them displayed so I can decide if I should delete one. The problem with commercial duplicate detectors is they match the entire name or the CRC of a file which in this case will be different.
I have restarted my windows 8 pc and when i came back i saw that the windows password screen has strange shapes that i have never see before. I entered my password but it doesn't working. Something strange characters similar to other shapes seen.
I cannot switch to safe mode cause when i hard boot the machine and trying to press f8, machine is beeping very loudly and doesn't work.
Windows 8 has been having very strange rendering errors, the desktop still works fine but the rest is all strange blurred with black boxes. What the problem is it just suddenly showed up as that.
System Specs are: Intel Core i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (Quad) 16GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Windows 8 64-Bit (Downloaded from DreamSpark)
I reformatted my Windows 8 partition this week and reinstalled Windows 8 and then Windows 8.1 beta due to a no sound and unexpected shutdown issue I had been having. All is well now with the new install, I have sound and it is no longer shutting down randomly. However, when the desktop view is first accessed after boot (whether from the desktop tile or by starting "control panel") I get 8 separate instances of Notepad that pop up, each with a dialog box containing a little yellow triangle with an exclamation mark and proclaiming "Access denied".
All instances of Notepad are blank, and once I dismiss the 8 dialog boxes and close the 8 Notepad windows, I can freely go back and forth between the metro and desktop interfaces without them launching again.
Full disclosure, during the reinstall of Windows 8, the machine still experienced unexpected shutdowns (3 or 4 times) during the early stages of getting updates. Once a certain point was passed in the update process, it has been rock solid, and has run continuously for the past 48 hours. The unexpected shutdowns could have certainly introduced some problems as above, but I don't know where to look.
This is a homebuilt AMD quadcore desktop dual booting Windows 7. No problems whatsoever on the Win 7 side.
I'm trying to set up a miner for a cryptocurrency and to do so I have to start a .cmd file. However, instead of running in command prompt, it only opens in notepad. I already tried this: Default File Associations - Restore in Windows 8 and I get the message that some keys are open by the system blah blah or I have insufficient privileges (I am the only user on my computer).
I also tried going into regedit and deleting any extension associates (not sure if correct name), but there was not one of .cmd, and when I tried creating one and pasting the cmd reg file I downloaded into it, it didn't let me.
I also going through set associations in control panel and setting command prompt to being the default program, but it just says "The program you have selected cannot be associated with this file type. Please choose another program."
I have a number of special fonts (all are .ttf) that I installed, and some that came with software for use with the programs. All of these fonts worked fine when installed on my Windows 7 64-bit computer.
I have installed all of these fonts on my Windows 8 64-bit computer, and some of the characters on the fonts do not show. Windows has substituted other characters in place of these.
Yet when I open the font in a third party program like Font Creator, all of the characters on the font appear true.
Is there a setting in Windows 8 that I need to adjust so the characters will show as they are supposed to?
I recently upgraded my W7 Home premium to a genuine copy of 8 Pro that I got through school and now every time it boots, note pad opens up and has a smaller window saying "Access denied." I don't see anything funny looking in the start up section of task manager and everything in 7 seemed to be good and virus free before the upgrade.
I like to use a few ASCII characters in emails and letters. Like registered trade mark or cent symbol, etc. Sometimes even the happy face. Using Win XP I would use the Alt key plus a number. Now when I do that, nothing happens. How do I access these characters using Win 8.1?
I am using a Dell laptop with Windows 8 Home. The file Properties show strange symbol-type characters where there should be numbers etc. See Screenshot...
It's been like this for a while and I have probably installed half a dozen programs etc. so I don't know what did it. I don't want to upgrade to v.8.1 as it took me ages to get a 3rd party Start button set up and 8.1 over-writes it I rolled back to a previous image of v.8.0 (True Image not System Restore).
I am using a hotmail account for an account, but it is 8 character password, and I would like it to be shorter than that so that i can use it pretty conveniently. how can i do this?
In windows 7 there was a key command to see all the oppened applications in your computer that command was so useful and i dont know that command in windows 8
I notice that starting when I upgraded from Windows 8 to 8.1, if I open a Windows App (such as the Store), the app will IMMEDIATELY minimize to the taskbar. This does not happen with applications such as IE, but it happens with BOTH Windows and non-Windows apps. This was not happening before the upgrade. I have run Windows Update but it still happens.
I used to have Vista, when I had multiple windows open in an application (and they were combined in the taskbar) the number of windows used to be displayed next to the icon. Now I have Windows 8.1, this feature seems to have disappeared and the only way I can see how many windows are open is to manually count them one-by-one. The only difference when the application combines the windows is that is looks to have 3 windows combined on the right hand side of the application in the taskbar.
Is there any way to get this number back? I think this feature may have been removed from 8.1, but if it has is there a workaround?
Windows 8 Mail seems to have many problems. When I connect my Hotmail account, I only see unread counts on the Inbox - not for any of my folders until I actually open them in Mail. Is this expected behavior??? Sure makes someone with a lot of folders unhappy when first setting up Mail... Will it sync and update the unread counts as new message come in?
Microsoft Mail simply won't import Gmail calendar and contacts -
And speaking of GMail - many folders just don't import. I set the import setting for back to the end of time - but they don't import. Same issues as with Hotmail - unread counts are not updated until a folder is opened - so if a folder name is not imported and thus can't be opened...then...
Also, I delete messages in Windows 8 - and the Deleted folder - but they don't get deleted from the GMail server. If afterwards I execute a sync in Windows 8 Mail - the messages come back! All told, it makes this mail client unusable.
Just recently I've been having some issues with my Control Panel. When I open it, it is completely blank. I've let it be for at least 9 hours, and the same thing persisted.
I mentioned not so long back that the chrome browser was closing after being opened and then getting a report that Chrome did not close properly! So after many weeks of this, I decided to return to firefox, in spite of the so called spyware.
Just now, I opened Firefox to do a Google search for somewhere, and - it shut down. When I reopened it, it opened on the page that had crashed. Google search.
So, it either not just chrome, or its a google thing?
When CPU usage is just high (50% to 60%) and I open Task Manager, it's usually McAfee on access scanner at work because I've just clicked an emoticon or something like that. Other examples are service host -- some long winded process I can't always find in the TM list to get the name right.
But when it's 100% and this has happened consecutively for over half a dozen attempts to find what spikes this, I'm dead serious: CPU usage has dropped immediately to under 3%. Yesterday and today I've "caught" this thing 2 times. CPU usage drops so fast you can't see what spiked it.
There are 2 Google Ads that pop in right about here but don't show up when I edit the post. These do not work, find hundreds of non-existent "errors" so that you'll buy the program and then when you run it you might get less than half a dozen errors fixed. Don't trust these programs, I don't. I have no control over what Google Ads does but I'd call it anything but "Adsense" to be honest.
I had Norton trial as the default AV when I first fired up and set up the laptop but I'm a McAfee person so set this up and removed Norton during the McAfee setup process. So it's not likely this is an infection. I apply all updates as soon as I see them, if I'm working and can't quit at the time an Update notice comes through then it's no more than overnight that these are applied.
Opening a folder in file explorer often shows it empty when I know it isn't! Also if I try to delete the "empty" folder, explorer reports it has found x number of files and is preparing to delete! If I quit that and look in the folder there are the files.
I also have issues with file explorer opening a folder and apparently scanning the contents - a green bar very slowly creeps across regardless of how frequently I've looked in the folder earlier in the day.
I have six drives mostly pretty full with a mixture of thousands of small files and thousands of very large images. Windows 8 file explorer seems to have problems coping.
Every game I open has a separate red and blue 3D appearance. I will attach a pic. The warning in corner is new, tried turning shadows off, no luck also tried a different monitor and different resolutions = same results.