I recently had the unpleasant experience that the AltGr key stopped working. After some googling and finding many pages that talked about it being caused by Remote Desktop (which I did not use), I finally found out that simultaneously pressing:

Shift – Caps Lock – AltGr

resolved the issue. I have no idea what the purpose of this shortcut is and it seems pretty stupid, but it is good to know about it if it happens again.

The page where I found the solution is:

https://superuser.com/questions/1149165/altgr-randomly-stops-working-on-windows-10

For some really inexplicable reason, there is no progress bar when doing a backup using the built-in backup feature in Windows 10. This is really annoying for me, since I do the backup to a NAS that I normally do not have turned on and I therefore need to know when I can turn it off. I also need to know when it is safe to turn off the computer running the backup.

There is a non-obvious trick however.

In the backup settings, click on “Go to backup and Restore (Windows 7)”:

This brings up a window where there is a progress bar showing the progress of the current backup (if any):

I have had a disturbing issue at work for a couple of days. Once every hour, a black window (probably a CMD window) would pop up for a fraction of a second on the screen and then disappear. I had no idea whether this was a virus, spyware, some other kind of malware or something benign.

Fortunately, a colleague of mine had the google skills to find the cause and the solution to the problem. It turned out this was caused by a scheduled task from Microsoft Office called OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration. By starting the Task Scheduler and drilling down to Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Office, this task is shown and it can be disabled by right clicking on it and selecting Disable:

Some more googling reveals that this is a bug Microsoft is aware of and that it probably will go away in some future update:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_win10/officebackgroundtaskhandlerregistration-flashes-a/2600497e-78e4-41a1-9040-461cd2c3ea13