Microsoft Windows/Workarounds and Fixes

From Personal Wiki


Storage

Unable to Remove a Busy Volume

When you try to safely remove a mass storage device, and you get a dialog box stating that the device is busy, you can either wait till any pending writes finish, or you can see which process is holding it up.

Bring up the Run Dialog with Windows Key + R, then type "resmon". Press enter, Go to the CPU tab, and expand the section titled "Associated Handles". In the search box, type in the drive letter of the mass storage device, to reveal which process is holding it up. You can then choose to end the process with Task Manager.

Printers

Authentication Issues when trying to Access a Shared Printer

In recent version of Windows 11, user authentication is required for printer sharing, and the account used to authenticate with must exist on the clients as well. Follow these steps (taken from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1168568/error-credentials-supplied-are-not-sufficient-when, by user Don Baker):

I was struggling with the same issue. I tried everything. Turning off password protected printing, modifying registry keys etc. Everything the Internet had to offer.

  1. On the Windows 11 computer where the printer is shared, create a local user (lusrmgr.msc) I created a user named "printer" and gave it a password.
  2. On the Windows 10/11 computer you are trying to print from, open Control Panel > User Accounts > Windows Credentials. Select Windows Credentials, then select Add Windows Credential.
  3. Fill out the fields (server name, user name, password) and click OK.

Now you should be able to add a printer without being prompted for credentials.

Note that this is more for PC's belonging to the same workgroup. With an domain controller, this issue may not occur.