Issues following Windows 10 upgrade (from windows 7)

Upgrade itself went smoothly, but system was pretty much impossible to operate, as every several seconds my screen flickered.

I have found this issue described by various users as:

Top window losing focus

or

Taskbar refreshing every 5 seconds

or

explorer.exe crashing and restarting / explorer.exe crash loop

Essentially extremely annoying behaviour not only not allowing to write anything without having to click inside the window, but also closing some Windows 10 dialogues.

I went through a long investigation process and found out that for Dell Laptops migrating into Win10, you may end up with some legacy drivers left there (in my case without even front-end to uninstall them) which will still be called and will crash explorer.exe causing massive CPU usage spikes and in effect the issue described above.

The offending driver was: C:\WINDOWS\System32\IDTNC64.cpl which apparently is a sound driver.

I would suggest that prior to any changes you first check if  your system is safe and sound otherwise by running:

sfc /scannow

in console in Administrator mode (elevated mode), which you can do like this:

Hit CTRL+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager

Select File -> Create new task (from top menu)

and then:

And press OK.

Enter the
sfc /scannow
and wait....

If everything is fine, then close console window and proceed to Even Viewer:

Press Windows+R to open the Run dialog, enter eventvwr and hit OK

There under summary of Administrative events in Errors part look for the one with the highest number of errors.

You should find the reason of your problems there, by double clicking the line, choosing Administrative Events from the menu on the left and going through the list looking for Level: Error, Source: Application Error

For me it was:

Faulting application name: explorer.exe, version: 10.0.10586.0, time stamp: 0x5632d4c0
Faulting module name: IDTNC64.cpl, version: 1.0.6454.0, time stamp: 0x5110e190
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000001154
Faulting process id: 0x1170
Faulting application start time: 0x01d12064eb4ed614
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\IDTNC64.cpl
Report Id: f5071629-6146-48da-9c51-e31661b1596b
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

You SHOULD try and uninstall the driver normally first.

I couldn't so the only option for me is to (again in administrator mode) rename the file to IDTNC64.cpl.trash

And wait for an updated version of the driver from Dell.

New Old Dell

Since my old Dell served me so well for so many years, even though it was bought as an old box then I've decided to do exactly the same again, and look for a toy that'll have the best possible specs while not killing my pocket.

So for really moderate £220 I've acquired a refurbished Dell Latitude E6220.

So again I have a laptop that fits nicely in my bag with 12.5” HD LED display, sturdy built and with 2.8GHz i7 processor, and 8GB memory it will last me some time still :)

It shipped with windows 7 Pro, which upon receiving the option I have upgraded to 10 (meeting some resistance), and adding VirtualBox with CrunBang's successor: BunsenLabs Hydrogen.

on timeouts

I have a webpage (really a script in php) which is munching a lot of data and spits a nice report as a web-page.
Don't ask. It had to be done this way.

That data comes from a very slow source, so the script had to have all sorts of timeouts taken down:

set_time_limit($seconds); 

being the first one. Setting seconds to 0 turns off limits. Use with caution!

Make sure that  this actually will remove execution limit.
Usual setup for php is execution time of the scripts limited to 30 seconds.
If displaying

bool set_time_limit (0);
ini_get('max_execution_time');

What you get isn't 0, then you need to look into changing the php.ini file.
The easiest way to find the location of your php.ini file (if you have access to the console) is running in the command line:

> php --ini

if you don't have access to the shell, then you can always script it by displaying configuration information via:

phpinfo();

Now that you know where to look, locate max_execution_time in it and change to whatever you want it to be. It understands the numbers as seconds. I discourage setting 0 (which will turn it off).

If you can't change your php.ini you might want to create a .htaccess with the following line:

php_value max_execution_time 200

For my needs however I am using wget to actually save the contents of the website to my disk.

That's yet another timeout to take care of. Otherwise wget will timeout, and my script is going to run for minimum 4 hours.

To remove the timeout from wget you need to run it with this parameter timeout set to 0:

> wget --timeout=0