Vocal Voices

clever guys what know--
what are the black squares that appear randomly appear on my laptop screen ?

I am wondering the same Vic and have just Googled to try and find out.
No luck yet.

When you say black squares, do you mean full sized windows? I.e. if you pressed winkey and R and typed cmd into the run dialog box, then press enter; is this the black square you are talking about?

When Windows, or another program under windows, wants to run a process, one of the older ways is to call a windows api called GetProcessA. When you call that process, it shows a command window unless you specifically tell it to hide. If it is a very short process, the command window will appear very quickly and then disappear. If, however, what has been run takes longer, then the window will sit there for a while and then vanish.

If this is it, then it might also be worth doing a full anti virus and malware scan as that is also the way that some malware attacks your system. However I see these from time to time and it is not malware. The last time I tracked this down it was the Windows Task Scheduler running a task which should have been hidden. However you see it most of the time when you are installing older software/drivers.

Thank you Suff

Suff has it, but for info...

Press Winkey + X keys Click on Run and type cmd in the box then OK.

The black rectangle appears. Get your cursor on the title bar and do a right click. In the menu click on properties and / or defaults and have a look through the tabs esp the Layout tab. Leave Screen Buffer Size alone, but you can play with the numbers in Window Size and Window Position but leave the Let System Position Window box ticked.

If you do anything do it in the properties menu as it will be a one-time change and the default will kick in next time cmd is used.

When things are installing the window can be any size the install app builder wanted - hence different sizes at different times.