Gigabyte Easytune 6 and Vista
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.
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Calum said,
Wrote on October 5, 2008 @ 11:11 am
Agreed. The EasyTune 5 software was horrendous, though ET6 is better. It still bugs me for UAC each time the computer boots which is unacceptable. Also no way to control fan from BIOS. Will never buy Gigaybyte again.