Digitalopia

I have a short list of things I like about Vista and a growing list of frustrating things. I added another one of the frustrated list when I recently installed Gigabyte Easytune 6. Gigabyte Easytune is a way to make overclock adjustments to a Gigabyte motherboard. I was having no joy with NVIDIA nTune, and wanted to try something different.

I downloaded the latest version of Easytune 6 that included Vista 64-bit support (I am installing on an AMD FX). It installed fine and requested a re-boot. After the reboot Vista would blue-screen during the loading Vista screen. After trying a few times I decided it was time for Safe Mode. I rebooted into Safe Mode to uninstall Gigabyte Easytune. I tried to uninstall it through Control Panel -> Programs and Features, but it would complain about not being able to find the uninstaller file. Now what ? It looked like I will need to manually delete the installed files.

If it was blue-screening on bootup, then Easytune had introduced something into the bootup process. I first thought this was a new Windows service, but after looking through all of the services, there were no services for Easytune. This is where the msconfig tool comes in very handy. This is not available through the default Vista menus but it can be run from the command line or from the Start -> Search box. This tools allows finer-grained control of boot settings (effectively updating the boot.ini file), and also controlling UAC and Windows Services. This is where you can find the services that are not displayed through Control Panel -> Services. The Gigabyte Easytune service was set to start at bootup, so I disabled it and rebooted. Vista now booted smoothly, and I then had to manually removed all of the Easytune components, both from the file system and the registry. Note that searching the registry for related keys and deleting them can potentially break Vista, so please be very careful.

Now all seems fine, but I will definitely not be installing any Gigabyte tools in the future.

I recently went through the fun (and the pain) of re-building my main Windows desktop with Vista 64-bit. It was previously used as a ‘jack of all trades’ desktop (as my primary desktop is a Mac), running XP, Vista and Linux. However, it was time I put it to a more stable use, so I decided to re-install Vista and use it as my main gaming and Windows desktop. Also, as some of its components were used to build my new Media Center (I will be writing about that build in another story), it was a good time for a full re-build with some updated parts (I also removed over 3TB of storage !)

As I had removed the memory for my Media Center build, I needed to replace it with some more. With 4GB previously, the performance of Vista was very good, but as memory pricing has reduced significantly over the last year and I wanted to start using VMware more, I decided to go for 8GB. For full support of more than 8GB, Vista 64-bit is required. Also, the AMD FX-62 chip I was using is 64-bit. Now the fun begins …

When attempting to install Vista with my original 64-bit install disk, the install would blue screen when it was completing the installation. After some google’ing, I found it was a known problem where Vista would not install with more than 3GB of memory. It seems that a patch is required to allow the Vista kernel to boot with more than 3GB RAM. I have previously only installed Vista on 2GB machines, so the error had not occurred before. Considering I have 4 x 2GB SIMMS (dual channel) it was not possible for me to only install 2GB. I could remove 2GB from another computer, install Vista and the patch and then re-install the 8GB. However, this is less than satisfactory, so I looked for an alternative.

As this issue is fixed in Vista Service Pack 1, I decided to look at creating a SP1 install disk. This required me to slipstream the Vista install disk with SP1 and burn a new disk. I will be including details of this process in another article. It is interesting that such a fundamental flaw would have been present in the official release of Vista. With Vista 64-bit, its primary use is for users with more than 3GB of RAM. As Vista it cannot be installed on these computers (without first patching the install) it seems a very big omission by Microsoft.

Vista SP1 64-bit installed with the full 8GB and so far (fingers-crossed) I have had no problems.