Vista SP1 Blue Screen Problems

On my server (a quad core Q6600, 4 gigs RAM, Vista Premium 64 bit) I noticed that SP1 was ready to be installed, so I happily obliged. I was pleasantly surprised because the word was that the Service Pack 1 wasn't going to be released until March. Apparently the install takes place in several stages, and on Stage 3 (after the computer had restarted), boom- I get a "Memory_Management" BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). After hitting the reset button, the computer booted into the Windows, but before all the startup programs had fully loaded, boom- another Blue Screen O' Death of a different variety. I did another reset, and same thing.

So I booted in Safe Mode (using F8) with Networking. That worked fine, and the computer background showed that my Windows was now Vista SP1. I tried to run Windows Update, but nothing came up after I clicked on it. Perhaps Windows Update doesn't work under safe mode, but you'd think that they'd at least give you an error message about it.

Anyways I had to get the computer back up, so I did a System Restore and everything is working normal again. Man you'd think that they'd test these things more thoroughly before doing a mass release....

My Laptop, the HP DV9000t, is running Vista Ultimate x64, but I've been unable to download SP1 so far- it keeps failing at 10%. Apparently there's an onslaught of Vista SP1 downloads. I'm eager to get SP1 on the notebook because boy does it need a performance boost. There are reports indicating that SP1 reduces the frequency of hard disk activity which slowed down the computer a lot. I'll provide another update once I'm able to install it.

Convert IDE to AHCI for Vista

I have a server with the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R. When I installed Vista on it I didn't realize that by default, the Gigabyte DS3R BIOS sets the SATA ports to IDE mode. A few weeks later I realized this, and, wanting to use the faster native SATA mode for my SATA drives (which includes my boot drive), switched the disk mode setting to ACHI from IDE in the BIOS. What I got was a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)- an inaccessible boot device error 0x0000007B, so I had to switch back to IDE mode. After doing some research online I found that you would have to re-install Vista in while the BIOS as the SATA ports set to ACHI mode in order to get it to work, so I said "Nah forget it." I was not going to spend the time reinstalling Windows Vista and all the apps.

Apparently now there is a new, quick and easy way to fix this. Basically you use REGEDIT, go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci, modify the key that says "Start" and change the value from "4" to "0". Reboot, then before Windows Vista starts up go to the BIOS and switch to ACHI, and Voila! I had to reboot one more time after time but it worked great afterwards.

The details are located here in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Windows Vista Speed Tip for Your Hard Drive

I found this by accident actually when I was trying to find out why the WDC 250 Gig HDD (WD2500JB-00GVA0) connected to my Sil0680 IDE card is so slooooooow. It turns out that it's running in Programmed I/O mode 0 (PIO mode 0). Oddly enough the other drive connected to the controller, a Samsung Spinpoint 160 gig HDD, is running in Ultra DMA mode. But once I hooked up the WDC drive to its own IDE channel (both were hooked up to the same cable w/ cable select setting), it's working like a charm in DMA 5 mode.

Anyways I noticed that if you go to the Properties window for a hard drive, and click on the Policies tab, there's a check box called "Enable advanced performance" which is not check by default. The text there says that you should enable use the feature if you have a backup power supply (UPS), which I do. This feature likely takes delayed write caching to a new level to further increase disk performance.

So if you have a UPS connected to your system, or you're running a laptop with a good battery, I recommend enabling this feature under Vista to help make your drive a little more speedy.

Restore a previous version of a document in Vista

I was working on an Excel spreadsheet when to my horror I had accidentally pasted new data OVER some existing data. I did the usual CTRL-Z to undo, but unfortunately I had worked on the spreadsheet too much already that the undo levels did not reach all the way back to before the destructive paste. I quickly looked for a backup copy in my backup, but without going to details, I couldn't retrieve the file from backup.

I then recalled something I've noticed in the past when I was looking at the Properties screen for a file. In Windows Vista there is a tab called "Previous Versions". And when I did it for this Excel file I was able to find a version that was saved 3 months ago and retrieve it. Amazing!

I did some research on this Windows Vista feature and apparently you must have "System Protection" turned on, which by default should be already be on. Windows will then make "shadow copies"/previous versions of your files that could be restored.

I may not be all that impressed overall with Windows Vista, but this is just an awesome feature that I had to share with everyone. It really saved my day.