• Whole Taskbar turns red or blue

    From micky@21:1/5 to All on Fri Jun 28 22:02:33 2024
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red,
    except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except
    for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped. Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if
    you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to
    leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to
    find it again. But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring
    the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of
    windows will be a boy or a girl?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to micky on Sat Jun 29 01:06:39 2024
    On 6/28/2024 10:02 PM, micky wrote:
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red,
    except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except
    for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped. Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if
    you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to
    leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to
    find it again. But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring
    the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of windows will be a boy or a girl?


    Pictures or it didn't happen.

    Get a Direct Link from here, after you upload a JPG or whatever.
    To take a screenshot, you can use "snippingtool.exe" and "Save as".

    https://postimages.org/

    You can edit pictures with GIMP. An older version, you can use "Save as"
    to change file extension (Later versions insist on Export and this is an annoying interface design).

    https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.6/windows/

    Between "Accessibility" and "Themes", you can do some pretty serious
    coloration and intensity damage. If there was a master reset for
    Themes, maybe it could be fixed that way.

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From micky@21:1/5 to nospam@needed.invalid on Sat Jun 29 23:43:13 2024
    In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Sat, 29 Jun 2024 01:06:39 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

    On 6/28/2024 10:02 PM, micky wrote:
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red,
    except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except
    for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped. Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if
    you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to
    leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to
    find it again. But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always
    highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring
    the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of
    windows will be a boy or a girl?


    Pictures or it didn't happen.

    Can't do pictures. Helpful advice snipped.

    Between "Accessibility" and "Themes", you can do some pretty serious

    It's not a theme or a color setting. It's temporary and will go away,
    then come back later. Does it mean I'm running out of a resource?

    Now it's red all the way to the right border, including the day/date
    area.

    coloration and intensity damage. If there was a master reset for
    Themes, maybe it could be fixed that way.

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to micky on Sun Jun 30 00:31:50 2024
    On 6/29/2024 11:43 PM, micky wrote:


    Between "Accessibility" and "Themes", you can do some pretty serious

    It's not a theme or a color setting. It's temporary and will go away,
    then come back later. Does it mean I'm running out of a resource?

    Now it's red all the way to the right border, including the day/date
    area.

    coloration and intensity damage. If there was a master reset for
    Themes, maybe it could be fixed that way.

    Resource starvation does not manifest that way.

    1) On massive RAM grab, DWM can be kinda frozen in a redraw. The
    screen is still lit, but is mostly useless. I did this to myself yesterday,
    by running Prime95 on my replacement CPU.

    2) On a "lighter" version of RAM starvation, the icons on the
    Task bar start dancing around. You cannot reliably click on an
    icon, because of the ninja-dancing-icons. Only alt-F4 and a restart
    will rescue you from your folly.

    Those are two examples.

    Color shifts don't normally manifest from System RAM problems.
    Even if a video card had internal starvation, I doubt color would
    be part of the story. It could be failure of a third party
    gamma plugin (I was inadvertently running one of those years ago,
    and did not realize it). But your entire screen is not off-color, it's
    only specific bits of it.

    On Windows 11, in Settings : System : Display, I have "Night Light"
    and "HDR". I don't have an HDR capable screen and the software knows this.
    The "Night Light" is turned off. The Night Light is a gamma table.
    Your system time clock will likely contribute to the Night Light settings (which change as the hours pass). You are allowed plenty of blue light
    when the sun is up.

    for the next day or two, make a text file with

    hour of day colors seen, elements it is seen on

    and see if there is a strict correspondence, from one day to the next.

    If you have several things screwing with Gamma, I'm pretty sure the
    results will not look all that good.

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Ed Cryer@21:1/5 to micky on Sun Jun 30 11:08:33 2024
    micky wrote:
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red,
    except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except
    for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped. Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if
    you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to
    leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to
    find it again. But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring
    the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of windows will be a boy or a girl?

    It sounds very much as though it's shifting colour in coordination with
    the general background colour changes; from light to dark, or something similar.

    Turn transparency effects on or off; turn light/dark settings on or off;
    make sure you don't have some third-party software running that might be
    doing it.

    Ed

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From =?UTF-8?B?8J+YjiBNaWdodHkgV2FubmFiZ@21:1/5 to Ed Cryer on Sun Jun 30 06:34:09 2024
    Ed Cryer wrote on 6/30/2024 6:08 AM:
    micky wrote:
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red,
    except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except
    for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped.  Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if
    you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to
    leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to
    find it again.  But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always
    highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring
    the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of
    windows will be a boy or a girl?

    It sounds very much as though it's shifting colour in coordination
    with the general background colour changes; from light to dark, or
    something similar.

    Turn transparency effects on or off; turn light/dark settings on or
    off; make sure you don't have some third-party software running that
    might be doing it.

    Ed



    My guess is that his hard drive is corrupted. Should do a  "Properties >
    Tools > Check" on Drive C.

    Other than that, should use some disk cleaning software to eliminate
    garbage and some persistent malware embedded in the user data cache.

    Try this portable version of "Wise Disk Cleaner":

    https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/wise-disk-cleaner-portable

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jun 30 09:20:50 2024
    On 6/30/2024 6:34 AM, 😎 Mighty Wannabe ✅ wrote:
    Ed Cryer wrote on 6/30/2024 6:08 AM:
    micky wrote:
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red,
    except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except >>> for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped.  Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if
    you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to
    leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to >>> find it again.  But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always
    highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring >>> the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of
    windows will be a boy or a girl?

    It sounds very much as though it's shifting colour in coordination with the general background colour changes; from light to dark, or something similar.

    Turn transparency effects on or off; turn light/dark settings on or off; make sure you don't have some third-party software running that might be doing it.

    Ed



    My guess is that his hard drive is corrupted. Should do a  "Properties > Tools > Check" on Drive C.

    Other than that, should use some disk cleaning software to eliminate garbage and some persistent malware embedded in the user data cache.

    Try this portable version of "Wise Disk Cleaner":

    https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/wise-disk-cleaner-portable

    ??? Que ?

    And where is the user data cache ?

    This sounds like an all-important development.

    Windows has a System Read Cache. It uses RAM. The RAM is not booked.
    Cached material is ejected when there is any sort of memory pressure.
    Just about every OS has one of those by the way.

    Windows has a System Write Cache. It uses RAM. The RAM is booked.
    You can watch in Task Manager as it deflates when data makes it to disk.
    There is a limit to how much of the RAM it is allowed to use.

    These both start clean, every time you boot the machine.

    At shutdown, the System Write Cache is flushed, and any remaining clusters
    go out to disk.

    Neither of those is a "user data cache".

    Both of those are System functions, enjoyed by anything that runs on the computer.

    NTFS has the "Robust NTFS feature", which is background checking that
    the file system is in good shape. This is why, an attempt to select
    Checking of a partition in Properties, results in a message telling you
    "we don't think anything is wrong, but we'll check for you anyway".
    That's because the file system is checked as a background process.
    The algorithmic details were never published as far as I know, just
    the name of the feature was announced.

    The OS checks for the dirty bit at startup, and can check the file systems marked as such, automatically. You will see a status on the screen. The
    dirty bit tends to be set by Linux, after GParted resizes partitions,
    moves partitions, clones or copies partitions. The OS itself, likely only
    uses the dirty bit if the OS "does an unclean shutdown".

    The design of the system is relatively well covered.
    Snake oil cleaners are not needed.

    If you want to clean some materials on your disk, the OS provides "cleanmgr.exe" . You should review the options offered carefully, before
    using them. For example, if you attempt to clean %temp%, cleanmgr.exe isn't aggressive enough. You can go into %temp% your own self, and attempt to
    throw it all out. Anything that is "locked" you can skip.

    But generally speaking, the only cleaning you should be doing, is cleaning
    you researched yourself. You need to be informed about what the consequences
    of screwing around are. A browser cache can be cleaned. But, if you were
    that clever, by now you would have switched the browser cache to "running in RAM",
    and then, never again would you need to clean the disk cache it used to use. Once reconfigured, the problem is permanently fixed. No more snake oil
    needed for that one. Not that the browser cache had any side effects to speak of in the first place. If you dial down the size of the cache, that can
    quite frequently be sufficient to reduce any "mess".

    I don't have any Snake Oil Cleaners on my disk drive here as samples.
    I will not even scan them with an AV for you. Because they're simply
    not fit for human consumption.

    The Registry does not need cleaning. If you look at the size of the
    files, they are quite modest these days. They are also doubly journaled,
    for your protection. Mostly gone are the days of registry corruption.
    It takes a malware to foul them up now (an outright attempt to ruin them).

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From =?UTF-8?B?8J+YjiBNaWdodHkgV2FubmFiZ@21:1/5 to Paul on Sun Jun 30 12:31:22 2024
    Paul wrote on 6/30/2024 9:20 AM:
    On 6/30/2024 6:34 AM, 😎 Mighty Wannabe ✅ wrote:
    Ed Cryer wrote on 6/30/2024 6:08 AM:
    micky wrote:
    My taskbar background, win10 Home, fully updated, has turned pink/red, >>>> except for the task that has focus (which is white or cream), and except >>>> for the day/date section on the right, and ever thing to the right of
    that (which is still grey).

    Sometimes -- I haven't figured out when -- it turns baby blue.

    What does all this mean?


    For years the background had no color iirc, although a long time
    complaint has been that early on, the task with focus was clearly a
    different color from all the others and 10 years ago or more, that
    stopped.  Most tasks can be identified by what's on the screen but if >>>> you have more than one window of Firefox, for example, and you want to >>>> leave Firefox or whatever browser and come back to the same window
    later, you want to be able to see which of the tasks you're in first, to >>>> find it again.  But that has usually not been possible for years.

    So MS went from coloring the taskbar informatively, to no longer always >>>> highlighting the task in focus (coloribg them all the same), to coloring >>>> the taskbar pink, or maybe blue. Does this mean the next generation of >>>> windows will be a boy or a girl?
    It sounds very much as though it's shifting colour in coordination with the general background colour changes; from light to dark, or something similar.

    Turn transparency effects on or off; turn light/dark settings on or off; make sure you don't have some third-party software running that might be doing it.

    Ed


    My guess is that his hard drive is corrupted. Should do a  "Properties > Tools > Check" on Drive C.

    Other than that, should use some disk cleaning software to eliminate garbage and some persistent malware embedded in the user data cache.

    Try this portable version of "Wise Disk Cleaner":

    https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/wise-disk-cleaner-portable
    ??? Que ?

    And where is the user data cache ?

    I have stepped up to Windows11. In my Windows11, the Firefox cache is in:

    (You have to enable Windows11 to show hidden files by clicking: View >
    Show > Hidden items)

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

    I mainly use Firefox and Microsoft Edge. In my Windows11, the Microsoft
    Edge cache is in:

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Edge

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge

    Your computer may be different. Just look under   C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\   to find everything there. Don't forget to enable
    Windows to show hidden files, because "AppData" is a hidden folder Under C:\Users\(Your user name).



    This sounds like an all-important development.

    Windows has a System Read Cache. It uses RAM. The RAM is not booked.
    Cached material is ejected when there is any sort of memory pressure.
    Just about every OS has one of those by the way.

    Windows has a System Write Cache. It uses RAM. The RAM is booked.
    You can watch in Task Manager as it deflates when data makes it to disk. There is a limit to how much of the RAM it is allowed to use.

    These both start clean, every time you boot the machine.

    At shutdown, the System Write Cache is flushed, and any remaining clusters
    go out to disk.

    Neither of those is a "user data cache".

    Both of those are System functions, enjoyed by anything that runs on the computer.

    NTFS has the "Robust NTFS feature", which is background checking that
    the file system is in good shape. This is why, an attempt to select
    Checking of a partition in Properties, results in a message telling you
    "we don't think anything is wrong, but we'll check for you anyway".
    That's because the file system is checked as a background process.
    The algorithmic details were never published as far as I know, just
    the name of the feature was announced.

    The OS checks for the dirty bit at startup, and can check the file systems marked as such, automatically. You will see a status on the screen. The
    dirty bit tends to be set by Linux, after GParted resizes partitions,
    moves partitions, clones or copies partitions. The OS itself, likely only uses the dirty bit if the OS "does an unclean shutdown".

    The design of the system is relatively well covered.
    Snake oil cleaners are not needed.

    If you want to clean some materials on your disk, the OS provides "cleanmgr.exe" . You should review the options offered carefully, before using them. For example, if you attempt to clean %temp%, cleanmgr.exe isn't aggressive enough. You can go into %temp% your own self, and attempt to
    throw it all out. Anything that is "locked" you can skip.

    But generally speaking, the only cleaning you should be doing, is cleaning you researched yourself. You need to be informed about what the consequences of screwing around are. A browser cache can be cleaned. But, if you were
    that clever, by now you would have switched the browser cache to "running in RAM",
    and then, never again would you need to clean the disk cache it used to use. Once reconfigured, the problem is permanently fixed. No more snake oil
    needed for that one. Not that the browser cache had any side effects to speak of in the first place. If you dial down the size of the cache, that can
    quite frequently be sufficient to reduce any "mess".

    I don't have any Snake Oil Cleaners on my disk drive here as samples.
    I will not even scan them with an AV for you. Because they're simply
    not fit for human consumption.

    The Registry does not need cleaning. If you look at the size of the
    files, they are quite modest these days. They are also doubly journaled,
    for your protection. Mostly gone are the days of registry corruption.
    It takes a malware to foul them up now (an outright attempt to ruin them).

    Paul



    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jun 30 17:12:13 2024
    On 6/30/2024 12:31 PM, 😎 Mighty Wannabe ✅ wrote:
    Paul wrote on 6/30/2024 9:20 AM:

    And where is the user data cache ?

    I have stepped up to Windows11. In my Windows11, the Firefox cache is in:

    (You have to enable Windows11 to show hidden files by clicking: View > Show > Hidden items)

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

    I mainly use Firefox and Microsoft Edge. In my Windows11, the Microsoft Edge cache is in:

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Edge

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge

    Your computer may be different. Just look under   C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\   to find everything there. Don't forget to enable Windows to show hidden files, because "AppData" is a hidden folder Under C:\Users\(Your user name).


    Look into setting up Firefox with the RAM cache option.

    https://smallbusiness.chron.com/set-ram-cache-firefox-41282.html

    browser.cache.disk.enable FALSE

    browser.cache.memory.enable TRUE

    browser.cache.memory.capacity 131072 KB (128MB)

    As you would expect, the Chrome answer is a mess. The first link
    indicates that perhaps Chrome does not give a fuck about how you
    want to configure things.

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44596937/chrome-memory-cache-vs-disk-cache

    Whether this works or not, who knows. At least it doesn't sound
    like it's storing the entire profile in your RAMDisk.

    https://superuser.com/questions/866016/moving-chrome-cache-folder

    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"
    --disk-cache-dir=r:\chrome_cache (assuming r: is your ramdisk)

    I've done the Firefox one. It seems to work. I didn't find any files
    any more in cache2 area.

    If you want to learn about cleaning things, a package called Bleachbit
    has scripts for cleaning. I don't run the scripts themselves, but I
    do look at the scripts when I need hints on how to clean something.
    The scripts can give you a rough idea where the data folders might
    be located.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BleachBit

    Paul

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From micky@21:1/5 to nospam@needed.invalid on Tue Jul 2 00:05:22 2024
    In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Sun, 30 Jun 2024 17:12:13 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

    On 6/30/2024 12:31 PM, ? Mighty Wannabe ? wrote:
    Paul wrote on 6/30/2024 9:20 AM:

    And where is the user data cache ?

    I have stepped up to Windows11. In my Windows11, the Firefox cache is in:

    (You have to enable Windows11 to show hidden files by clicking: View > Show > Hidden items)

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

    I mainly use Firefox and Microsoft Edge. In my Windows11, the Microsoft Edge cache is in:

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Edge

    C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge

    Your computer may be different. Just look under C:\Users\(Your user name)\AppData\ to find everything there. Don't forget to enable Windows to show hidden files, because "AppData" is a hidden folder Under C:\Users\(Your user name).


    Look into setting up Firefox with the RAM cache option.

    https://smallbusiness.chron.com/set-ram-cache-firefox-41282.html

    browser.cache.disk.enable FALSE

    browser.cache.memory.enable TRUE

    browser.cache.memory.capacity 131072 KB (128MB)

    As you would expect, the Chrome answer is a mess. The first link
    indicates that perhaps Chrome does not give a fuck about how you
    want to configure things.

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44596937/chrome-memory-cache-vs-disk-cache

    Whether this works or not, who knows. At least it doesn't sound
    like it's storing the entire profile in your RAMDisk.

    https://superuser.com/questions/866016/moving-chrome-cache-folder

    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"
    --disk-cache-dir=r:\chrome_cache (assuming r: is your ramdisk)

    I've done the Firefox one. It seems to work. I didn't find any files
    any more in cache2 area.

    If you want to learn about cleaning things, a package called Bleachbit
    has scripts for cleaning. I don't run the scripts themselves, but I
    do look at the scripts when I need hints on how to clean something.
    The scripts can give you a rough idea where the data folders might
    be located.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BleachBit

    Paul

    It's back to blue now.

    It has no correlation with the colors on the rest of the screen, and as
    you predicted, no correlation with the amount of resources in use, and
    it scanning the harddrive (SSD) showed no problems, so if I can't use it
    as an early warning about resources, or for any other useful purpose,
    I'm just going to forget about it

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to micky on Tue Jul 2 02:12:34 2024
    On 7/2/2024 12:05 AM, micky wrote:

    It's back to blue now.

    It has no correlation with the colors on the rest of the screen, and as
    you predicted, no correlation with the amount of resources in use, and
    it scanning the harddrive (SSD) showed no problems, so if I can't use it
    as an early warning about resources, or for any other useful purpose,
    I'm just going to forget about it


    If we consult the Oracle At Delphi:

    CoPilot Question:

    For windows 10 what does it mean if "Whole Taskbar turns red or blue", with no constant color as normally associated with a themed taskbar ?

    CoPilot Answer:

    The **taskbar** in Windows 10 can indeed change color, and the behavior you're experiencing might have a specific cause. Let's explore a few possibilities:

    1. **Accent Color Change**:
    - By default, Windows 10 allows you to customize the **accent color** of various interface elements, including the taskbar.
    - If your taskbar is turning red or blue, it's likely due to the **accent color** setting.
    - You can manually set the accent color to your preference. Here's how:
    1. Open the **Settings** app by pressing **Windows + I** on your keyboard.
    2. Click on **Personalization**.
    3. In the left sidebar, select **Colors**.
    4. Under **Choose your color**, click the drop-down menu and select **Custom**.
    5. Below that, choose a color from the grid of colored squares or click **Custom Color** to pick a custom color.
    6. To apply the color to the taskbar, make sure to check **"Start, taskbar, and action center"**.
    7. Optionally, you can also check **"Title bars and window borders"** to apply the color to window title bars⁸.

    2. **Automatic Accent Color from Background**:
    - Windows can automatically pick an accent color based on your desktop wallpaper.
    - If you have **"Automatically pick an accent color from my background"** enabled, the taskbar color may change to match the dominant color in your wallpaper.
    - To manually select a color, uncheck this option and choose a color from the grid⁸.

    3. **Taskbar Notifications**:
    - Sometimes, the taskbar color may change temporarily due to notifications or system alerts.
    - For example, an orange dot on the taskbar indicates that there are updates that need to be installed².
    - Check if there are any notifications or updates pending.

    4. **Third-Party Software or Themes**:
    - If you've installed third-party themes or customization software, they might alter the taskbar color.
    - Verify if any such software is affecting the taskbar appearance.

    Remember that the taskbar color can vary based on your settings, system notifications, and any customizations
    you've made. If you prefer a consistent color, follow the steps above to set a specific accent color
    for your taskbar.

    Source: Conversation with Copilot, 7/2/2024
    (1) How to Change the Taskbar Color in Windows 10 - How-To Geek. https://www.howtogeek.com/799390/how-to-change-the-taskbar-color-in-windows-10/
    (2) Windows Update Icons & Their Meanings - System Admin in MT-403. https://www.uab.edu/medicine/dopm/images/Computer_Tip_of_the_Week_34.pdf
    (3) A tour of the Windows 10 taskbar and what its icons do. https://www.windowscentral.com/tour-windows-10-taskbar-and-what-its-icons-do
    (4) Coloured bar under windows in taskbar? - Windows 10 Forums. https://www.tenforums.com/general-support/15260-coloured-bar-under-windows-taskbar.html
    (5) windows 10 - why are my icons red? - Super User. https://superuser.com/questions/1072165/why-are-my-icons-red
    (6) How to Change Taskbar Color on Windows 10?. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXm0cZ-EZ2o
    (7) How to Change Taskbar Color in Windows 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aryg9mudki8
    (8) How to Change Taskbar Color in Windows 10 [Tutorial]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO7YldgenbY
    (9) How to Change the Taskbar Color in Windows 10 - Lifewire. https://bing.com/search?q=Windows+10+taskbar+color+change+to+red+or+blue
    (10) What is the default Windows taskbar color?. https://www.colorwithleo.com/what-is-the-default-windows-taskbar-color/
    (11) How to change the accent color only in the taskbar on Windows 10. https://www.windowscentral.com/how-change-color-only-taskbar-windows-10
    (12) Taskbar is till blue - can't change colors - Microsoft Community. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/taskbar-is-till-blue-cant-change-colors/6288a6bb-3ea3-4ab6-9cf4-de23d74f4091

    *******

    I suspect (2) in the CoPilot answer, is the only thing that is remotely close. But, it would require a wallpaper animation, to "make it go". The answer in (1) is entirely too static, and (2) would be static as well if the background on your desktop never changes. My background is a solid color, in order that screenshots taken with SnippingTool, be represent-able with a minimum of bytes.

    If you have an animated background for your computer, that would interact with (2).

    The Windows 11 Taskbar is translucent, and any advertising you slide under the Taskbar,
    affects the color of that area. Which you would of course figure out on your own.

    The Taskbar can also be made to automatically retract, like you were using
    an Apple Computer. That's good if you need maximum screen real estate, but
    bad if you use the Taskbar to hide advertising.

    Paul

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