Cosmos IV issues with MS account usage

[Scottyboy99]

having owned the laptop nearly 3 weeks there is a horrible problem. Don't know whether to blame MS or it's something to do with the build setup as this issue has niggled since day 1.

We have the cosmos laptop and another PC specialist desktop in our family. Both win 10 and family accounts setup with myself as head of family/admin. The setup is identical for both our machines. On our desktop everything is fine. But the cosmos laptop has a real weird issue. Every 24 hours on all (verified) user accounts we have major issues using any MS account related stuff. Logging in is quick but if we go to Cortana interests show as unavailable, ms store is very slow to load, settings - family account will show red text and unavailable right now, using IE11 or edge to login to outlook.com can take ages just to look at email, films and tv app reports can't sign in etc. And it has this problem for all of us, as if this ms stuff does not think we are connected to the Internet - but we are and in this time we can use the various browsers and happily use internet just fine unless it relates to an ms login! It's real frustrating but if I leave the laptop alone anywhere from 10-30 minutes the problem will go away and all will be fine until another 24 hours pass and it happens again. It makes me wonder if some background reconciliation happens with MS every 24 hours and I am hitting real lousy server at MS. I am at a total loss as to why this is happening and as mentioned our desktop exhibits no such issue. Both machines have very similar software on them (if anything the desktop has more such as games etc).
the issue is worst for our son who has to wait a long time for IE or edge to become useable for any site. Presumably as family tracking is trying to kick in and the browsers cannot reach MS server easily. He has to use Mozilla which functions fine whilst he waits! i have deleted the user accounts and recreated them several times but this issue persists so it shows the user accounts themselves are not corrupted. When we recreate a user account and go into settings to verify it is quite slow to respond to this and allow us to kick off the code being sent. I have stripped back on all non essential services but it makes no difference.

it seems to me the MS servers my laptop is locked into are just plain unreliable. But I wonder if other cosmos users have run into same issue and it's a configuration issue based on PC specialist setup. Or even the seagate momentous to blame - bad caching that is unsuited to handling multiple ms accounts. When the ms related stuff works normally the laptop is pretty great. Zips along nicely but this issue is eroding our enjoyment

Thanks, Wayne

 

[dalchina]

Hi, as it's periodic, think scheduled task. Could be the app update task, or sync settings?

 

[Scottyboy99]

Scheduled Tasks

Hi, as it's periodic, think scheduled task. Could be the app update task, or sync settings?

You might be right. I think something is trying to run and causing the glitch. Trying to pin down what it is will be pretty tough.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Do you have a lot of stuff in your live drive? This can cause slowness until everything is synced properly.

When it happens again, open up process explorer and have a look at network and ram utilisation sorting by app usage.

 

[Scottyboy99]

Cosmos IV issues with MS accounts

Do you have a lot of stuff in your live drive? This can cause slowness until everything is synced properly.

When it happens again, open up process explorer and have a look at network and ram utilisation sorting by app usage.

I will try as you suggested. I don't think much of anything is going on when this starts. I have 8gadget pack installed and have cpu meter on my desktop. When the problems occur the cpu usage is always low, bobbing around at 1% to 5% at most. I will take a closer look at the RAM use though. It doesn't feel like the laptop is being slowed as using normal software is rapid and fast during this period. As for live drive, well I don't even use it. I store all my media and documents locally and back them on NAS drives so I guess that rules that out. It's sounds like it could be a scheduled task responsible but trying to find it and also know what's safe to disable is tricky. There are absolutely loads of MS related ones floating about in task scheduler. I guess I did notice user_feed-synchronization as being fairly common, the one that stands out relates to DESKTOP-QT5xxxx. When I got the laptop a few weeks ago I think that was the default PC name, I promptly renamed it to wayne-cosmos but I wonder what this runs/achieves and why it refers to the old computer name. Google Update is a fairly common task, should I disable that? Trouble is I want Chrome to remain updated. If I disable it can I still get Chrome to update from within the browser if I manually kick it off. I suspect Google update isn't at fault though as I have it on my desktop which has no problems.

So many things turning over in my mind. Is the Hybrid SSHD to blame - ie the caching mechanism at drive level is not playing nice with Windows 10? Could faststart be to blame? Is a scheduled task to blame? Is a service to blame (although I've trimmed these right back)? It's a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. I don't think faststart is to blame because if a force a proper restart rather than simply shutting down it doesn't clear the problem. I still need to wait it out on the desktop for all the MS account related functions to spring into life. I have been told to try and in-place upgrade / repair but I wanted to avoid as a last resort as I don't want to risk all of the effort I've put into the laptop (game installations, iTunes, general setup) and a reset of windows is something I really, really want to avoid as I know I will lose all that stuff and have to start over which will take ages, time I haven't got an awful lot to spare.

It really feels like an MS server issue but the fact that my desktop (with similar software) doesn't exhibit the same problems kind of contradicts that. I would restore an image I took soon after getting the laptop but I think the problem was there from day one so I this glitch will exist in that image. I wonder if all the faffing about with language settings and downloading the packs has had a detrimental effect. I know Windows 10 is finicky. I wish it would download the UK packs by default. I'm at a slight loss on how to progress at the moment. I'm guessing a cumulative update for windows 10 is close at hand what with next week being patch Tuesday. Maybe see what that brings. If no better off then I'll try and look much closer at the scheduled tasks and after that consider a repair/in-place upgrade.