Archive for category Windows Vista

Problems with nVidia cooling over long term?

Posted by eric in Hardware, Miscellaneous, Windows Vista on June 15th, 2009

I’m an avid SETI@home cruncher have been for years. My bragging note is that I recently passed 3,000,000 credits on SETI@home and part of that is thanks to the SETI@home CUDA enabled client they released which enables GPU crunching of SETI@home work units!

I’m currently running the CUDA client on two machines that have video cards that support the CUDA API. My home GeForce 8800GTX and my work Quadro FX 4600. From what I’ve read in specs and reviews, they’re basically the same card. So although this issue isn’t TECHNICALLY apples to apples, there might be a connection.

I noticed after a month or so of running the CUDA client on my home GeForce 8800GTX, my Vista machine started to become unstable. Blue Screening (BSOD) or rebooting randomly. It struck me as odd because I had not changed anything and for the most part, the system had just been sitting idle crunching work units.

Your GPU running SETI@home CUDA Client

Your GPU running SETI@home CUDA Client

After some basic trouble shooting I was able to determine that the instability was due to my video card overheating! This struck me as strange, because I know nVidia uses variable speed fans on the 8800GTX, so you’d think that if the system was reaching an unsafe operating level, that the fan would kick on, right? Wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Out with the XP, in with the Windows 2008 Server!

Posted by eric in Miscellaneous, Opinion, Reviews, Virtualization, Windows Vista on July 1st, 2008

Last year I wrote a blog entry about how I was done with Windows Vista as a desktop operating system and thusly downgrading to Windows XP Professional. Things over the last year have changed though and it seem more and more applications and drivers are being released and updated for Vista (or newer ;) , hah! ). I decided to take a look at my current options being that Windows Vista SP1 was released not so long ago.

Through my research and experiences at work, I actually decided that I would take a stab at running Windows 2008 Enterprise Server as my desktop operating system. In my research I happened across this blog on MSDN by Vijayshinva Karnure which documented the step by step instructions of taking a standard Windows 2008 Server installation and convert it to a Windows Vista like desktop.

I also settled on the 64-bit version of Windows 2008 Server Enterprise because it would allow me to run it in hypervisor mode with Hyper-V enabled, thus allowing me to migrate my Virtual PC VM’s to Hyper-V. Couple this with Hyper-V recently being RTM and I now have a virtualization ready desktop with the latest support for everything Vista! :)

So far over the past week I haven’t had any issues or concerns while doing development with source control Virtual Machine running a Windows 2003 VM with Team Foundation Server installed running in the background under Hyper-V.

All in all, I’m very happy with this option of operating system. It allows me the convenience of XP (such as running as Administrator with no UNC) as well as the newer features and benefits of Vista (such as DirectX 10, latest drivers and technology). Virtualization is a must have for any developer these days because it gets rid of the need for a test lab of computers. Or even for the home user, it gives an option to perhaps run the Microsoft Zune host service under a Windows XP Virtual Machine to stream music from your NAS to your XBox 360 :)

Hope my experiences and findings are able to help someone else out in the decision on what to do about Vista and their next choice of a desktop Operating System!

Cheers! :)

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After a year with Windows Vista, I’m ready to switch back to Windows XP

Posted by eric in General Software, Windows Vista on December 2nd, 2007

This isn’t a blog entry where I’m going to analyze the technical differences between the two operating systems or give a list of pros and cons why you should or shouldn’t run Windows Vista. What I am to do here is catalog MY experience with Windows Vista and MY reasons why I’ve decided to return to running Windows XP.

Well, I should actually say I:

“[...]decided to upgrade to an older, more familiar experience.” ;)

Apple Commercial

Last December I purchased a Dell 9200 desktop. Decent specs:

  • Intel Core 2 Duo 6400
  • 4GB DDR2-800
  • 2x SATA Drives (WD 300GB, Seagate 750GB)
  • XFX GeForce 8800GTX

I decided to run Vista Ultimate edition because, well, because I wanted the Ultimate Edition ;) Who wants second best, right? :)

Anyways, things took some getting used to and it took nVidia a while to release some STABLE video drivers for the 8xxx series that supported DirectX 10. Once they got their shit in line my system was fairly stable during gaming. While running Vista I played several DX10 games as well as some non-DirectX10 games such as Guild Wars.

Overall, I didn’t find Vista unstable. To the contrary, I never had a major crash while running it. So kudos to Microsoft and their WHQL program for checking drivers and making sure they won’t threaten a systems stability.

I think the tide started to turn in the favor of Windows XP while working on development projects. The laptop my company provided me came with XP already installed and our company VPN client only worked with XP. So it was only natural that when at home, even when just fiddling away on the internet, I’d be using my company laptop. Whenever I’d use my desktop, it would feel like I was using someone else’s computer.

So after living with Vista for a year, I decided this weekend to switch back to XP so my personal computer and work environment would match up in case of emergency.

I can say that after using XP on the same machine that I’ve been running Vista on for a year, that XP is way, way faster and is a more pleasurable user experience than Vista. Basically, I feel like Windows Vista is an OS with training wheels you just can’t take off. It’s protecting the computer user “AT ALL COSTS!” Pop up confirmation Windows, IE7 being anal retentive, being locked out from certain folders on my computer (like trying to save a file to the root directory on C: in a program I forgot to start as Administrator).

One thing I’ve defiantly noticed is that file browsing is amazingly fast. I have several folders on my local computer as well as my NAS that have several thousand files and folders. XP seems to handle these folders in Windows Exporer without any slowness, unlike what I encountered with Vista.

So where do I stand on XP vs. Vista? I think you have to look back to the first year Windows XP was released. There was a lot of push back from the professional community because it was new and handled things a little differently than Windows 2000. In fact, a lot of companies didn’t even consider running Windows XP until AFTER Service Pack 2 was released (which was three years after the release of XP).

Now take that, and compare it to Windows Vista where the differences between XP and Vista are far, far greater than that of 2K vs. XP. I think adoption of Vista in a professional environment will be slow, if at all.

In the end, I believe Vista is a great OS for the beginner to novice home user. It protects them from any mistake they may make (by running a Trojan, visiting a malicious site, etc., etc.) . For the advanced users, I think they’re going to end up sticking with XP.

Personally, I don’t need the extra security enhancements Vista has to offer. In my fifteen years of computer use, I’ve never had to install a firewall, virus scanner or use a Spyware cleanup tool. I’ve somehow avoided these nuisances by exercising common sense. As for DirectX 10? Well, when there’s a compelling reason to run it (other than “because”), I’ll take a look at it again. So far the performance comparisons ran by the guys over at HardOCP have shown negligible performance gains, and in some cases, even slowness when running DirectX10 vs. DirectX9.

I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts :)

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World in Conflict is really cool.. if it didn’t crash all the god damned time!!!

Posted by eric in Gaming, General Software, Windows Vista on October 16th, 2007

I recently purchased World in Conflict hoping that it would live up to the 9.3 rating that IGN gave it in the review. I recently had to go back and re-read the review hoping there was some nugget of information in there that would perhaps shed some light on how to run this game for more than 5 minutes without it crashing!!

First off, for those of you coming in from a search engine or wherever else, I am highly competent with computers. I’ve been a programmer for over 10 years and I do electrical engineering and small circuit projects as a hobby. My system specs are:

  • Dell Dimension 9200
  • Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 (2.13Ghz, 2MB L2)
  • 4GB DDR2-800 Memory (Crucial)
  • nVidia GeForce8 8800GTX 768MB
  • Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

So let’s just go ahead and throw out the “zomg, noob” and “your system is teh suck, upgrade” comments right now.

I’m currently running the latest WHQL nVidia Graphics Driver (163.69) and have updated World in Conflict with the latest 1.001 patch.

When launching World of Conflict, there aren’t any issues with the opening videos. Those all play through to completion without issue. As soon as a rendered screen comes up (Main Menu, Campaign, Multi-Player, etc., etc.), that’s when the proverbial stability dice are rolled. Sometimes I get a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s really random when World of Conflict decides to crash.

I find that when I have DirectX10 rendering mode enabled, windows is able to recover from the error with “Your video drivers have stopped responding and the device has recovered.” message which pops up in the system tray. World in Conflict then says it’s “Reloading Resources” which takes usually 10 seconds when in the Main Menu but takes -for ever- while in game.

However, when DirectX9 rendering is enabled, the game just crashes out and generates a standard Windows application crash report. So it seems the issue is clearly a driver issue.

I’m currently in the process of downloading the latest beta Graphics Driver from nVidia (163.75), but I don’t hold up much hope for them. I read the release notes for this version and nowhere in the documentation is World in Conflict mentioned as a ‘fixed game’.

I’ll report back with my findings here. Please, if you’ve experienced the issue, let me know what’s happening to you and we can compare notes. Try and figure out perhaps if it’s a settings issue.

UPDATE: So, I upgraded to the latest nVidia Graphics Drivers (163.75) and rebooted my PC. I started up World in Conflict in DirectX9 mode and it seemed to run fine. I started the first campaign and it played for about 5 minutes. I then received a “Out of Memory” error. A window then informed me that I was out of memory and would need to close some programs in order to run World of Conflict. What the crap?!

I don’t have the display settings in the game cranked through the roof, or beyond a reasonable point for my hardware. 4xAA, 8xAF at 1680×1050. You’d think an 8800GTX could handle it??

I’m going to fiddle with the settings some more and figure out what’s causing World in Conflict to gobble up memory and system resources.

UPDATE 2: It seems I’ve found the right mix of updates, fixes and whatnot to finally get World in Conflict running stable. I now have the following installed and the game seems stable after playing through the first mission in campaign in DirectX10 mode:

I was actually lead to the KB940105 patch while researching the “Out of Memory” error. To sum up the issue, here’s a blurb from the Knowledge Base article:

“A modern graphics processing unit (GPU) can have 512 MB or more of video memory. Applications that try to take advantage of such large amounts of video memory can use a large proportion of their virtual address space for an in-memory copy of their video resources. On 32-bit systems, such applications may consume all the available virtual address space.”

and also:

“To address this problem, Microsoft is changing the way that the video memory manager maintains the content of video memory resources. This change is being made so that a permanent virtual address range does not have to be used for each virtualized allocation. With the new approach, only allocations that are created as “lockable” consume space in the virtual address space of the application. Allocations that are not created as “lockable” do not consume space. This approach significantly reduces the virtual address space that is used. Therefore, the application can run on large video memory configurations without reaching the limits.”

So basically the issue was a combination of Video Driver issues and then the way Windows Vista handles memory addressing for Video Cards with large amounts of Video Memory in 32-bit mode. Although the issue could show itself in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, it seems more likely to show itself on the 32-bit versions due to the limitations in addressable memory.

I hope this is able to help anyone else running World of Conflict in Windows Vista resolve their issues!

Cheers! :)

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How to run your C# Application as Administrator in Windows Vista?

Posted by eric in C# Programming, General Programming, General Software, Windows Vista on August 26th, 2007

To have your C# (or any .NET program) run as Administrator in Windows, you'll have to create a manifest for it. What is a manifest file? I think Microsoft explains it best:

Every assembly, whether static or dynamic, contains a collection of data that describes how the elements in the assembly relate to each other. The assembly manifest contains this assembly metadata. An assembly manifest contains all the metadata needed to specify the assembly's version requirements and security identity, and all metadata needed to define the scope of the assembly and resolve references to resources and classes. The assembly manifest can be stored in either a PE file (an .exe or .dll) with Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) code or in a standalone PE file that contains only assembly manifest information. (link to the entire MSDN article)

With a Manifest you're able to tell Windows Vista that your C# program wants to run as Administrator. This will cause the Vista confirmation window to pop up asking the user to grant the program access. Running as Administrator in Vista is required, for example, if your program is trying to create a WCF endpoint.

The following manifest XML tells the .NET Framework to run the Assembly that you specify as Administrator within Windows Vista:

PLAIN TEXT
XML:
  1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  2. <assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
  3. <assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0"
  4. processorArchitecture="X86"
  5. name="someExecName"
  6. type="win32" />
  7. <description>Your Program Description</description>
  8. <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3"><security>
  9. <requestedPrivileges>
  10. <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" />
  11. </requestedPrivileges>
  12. </security>
  13. </trustInfo></assembly>

Now, there are two ways to make your program use this Manifest:

  1. Rename it to (YourEXEName).manifest. The .NET Framework when executing the file will see the Manifest and handle its contents.
  2. Embed the .manifest file into you EXE. This can be done by executing the following command line:
    • mt -manifest YourProgram.exe.manifest -outputresource:YourProgram.exe
    • If your assembly is strong named, you will be unable to embed the manifest into it as it would invalidate the strong naming.

Now your own C# application will prompt to run as Administrator in Windows Vista!

Cheers!

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How to install a Linksys WMP54G in Windows Vista

Posted by eric in Hardware, Windows Vista on June 18th, 2007

Recently I moved my computer upstairs to make room in the downstairs office. I decided to just install a spare Linksys WMP54G PCI Wireless card that I had laying around in my "bin o' hardware". This was a fairly new card, as the hardware revision of it was v4.0 and the latest listed on Linksys.com was v4.1. I was running Windows Vista Ultimate so I figured Vista would have no problem auto-detecting and installing the card.
I downloaded and installed the only drivers Linksys had listed on their site for this card. It seemed to work, but not well. I couldn't detect the SSID of my wireless network and even when I tried to manually configure it, the card would still refuse to connect. I did some research and it seems that only the WMP54G v4.1 has a Vista Certified driver from Linksys and it would not work with the v4.0 hardware. On the Linksys Vista Support page, I noticed this text at the bottom:

*If your Linksys product does not appear on any of these three lists, there is no plan to support the product with Windows Vista.

Thanks for the proverbial "dick in the ass" Linksys! Your ability to bend your customers over and give it to them hard never, ever ceases to amaze me.
After some frustrated Googling I found a couple blog entries that described the best way to install the drivers for this card: Let Windows search for an appropriate driver automatically and download it from Windows Update.

The only way I was able to do this was to put my computer back on the LAN by running a very, very long Ethernet cable to the closest access point. Once my machine was online wired, I went into the device manager and selected "Uninstall Device" and also checked the "Delete Drivers for this Device", which would force Windows Vista to search for new drivers and allow it to search Windows Update.

It seems that even though Linksys refuses to release a Windows Driver for the v4.0 hardware of the WMP54G Wireless PCI Card, at least Microsoft realized that PERHAPS they should provide the drivers for a fairly common Wireless Card that many of their users may still be using.

Big Thanks to Microsoft! A Big "Get Bent" to Linksys!

Cheers!

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Adobe Lightroom Import Compatibility Work-Around for Windows Vista

Posted by eric in Windows Vista on March 12th, 2007

This last weekend I installed Adobe Lightroom on my Windows Vista PC. For the past few months I had been beta testing Lightroom on my Apple G4 PowerBook and decided I would run the full version on my much more powerful PC.

After hooking up my Canon Digital Rebel XT 350D digital camera, I immediately noticed that Adobe Lightroom would fail every attempt at importing the images. I attempted this again from multiple sources, which included manually copying the files off the camera to a folder on my hard drive.

After a bit of research it seems that Windows Vista does not take kindly to forward slashed in the file pathing Lightroom uses by default. For example, when selecting to import pictures from yesterday Lightroom would list the library path the files would be saved to as "2007/03-11/". By double clicking on this path (to modify it) and changing the forward slashes to back slashes (i.e.: "2007\03-11\"), Adobe Lightroom was able to import the images without issue.

This might not solve everyone's issue but it did solve mine!

Cheers!

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Windows Vista missing files written to “Program Files” folder?

Posted by eric in Windows Vista on February 25th, 2007

While working on WWWinamp, I ran into an issue that had me baffled for a few hours. I'm writing this blog entry as an attempt to reach out to those who may have a deeper understanding of what is happening as well as trying to give my two cents for those looking for an answer.

WinAmp has an IPC titled IPC_WRITEPLAYLIST which writes the currently in-use playlist to "winamp.m3u" and places it into the folder WinAmp is currently installed in (which is traditionally C:\Program Files\WinAmp\). Well, starting with WinAmp 5.33, WinAmp seemed to no longer save the file to this location (only) under Windows Vista.

I had also noticed starting with WinAmp 5.32, after upgrading to Windows Vista, that the Media Library would no longer be saved after it had been scanned/created.

Well, after a few hours of pulling out my hair trying to understand why everything worked fine on my file server running Windows XP, yet nothing seemed to work under Vista, I discovered that Windows Vista by default does not allow writing to the "Program Files" folder by default.

Any files that may be written to this directory by an application running from within seems to be redirected to "C:\Users\(USER NAME)\AppData\Roaming\".

This means you may run into some application compatibility issues when running Windows Vista due to files being saved now to a different physical location.

I can understand why this was done, and it makes sense. If I am logged in and I generate my media library, any other user who logs into the computer and starts WinAmp under their user name will not be able to see the Media Library that was generated and saved under my user name.

It also just creates another issue for developers, because now I'm forced to detect the OS version in my application before reading information which may have been generated to the "Program Files" folder.

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