Oddball Vista windows 0x0000007b stop error at crcdisk.sys

I plugged in a cheapo USB hub into my Windows Vista Ultimate desktop and everything froze. I waited for 5 minutes and the screen was still frozen, and there was no disk activity. So I proceeded to reboot the machine via the reset button, and boom I got a blue screen of death (BSOD):

0x0000007b stop error

I then tried Safe Mode and got the same BSOD it seemed like when it was loading or right after it loaded:

crcdisk.sys

So I thought perhaps my BIOS setting got messed up but they looked fine. I had switched from IDE mode to AHCI in the last few months, and so I theorized that perhaps Windows got messed up and thought I was still running IDE. So I went into the BIOS and disabled native SATA and switched to legacy IDE mode, but still no go, so I switched back to SATA. Frustrated I had to take a phone call so I turned off the machine. And wouldn't you know it when I turned it back on Windows Vista booted back up fine again. WTF???

And here's a tip for you guys- before you plug in any USB device, make sure to save all your open files first! I have a bad habit of jotting down notes in Windows Notepad and then not saving until I needed to reboot. So I did lose some notes there which was annoying. Maybe I should just starting using Vim in Windows to replace Notepad....

Windows Vista SP1 Blue Screen Problems, Part Deux

I was way ahead of myself when I thought the "new" Vista SP1 from March 23rd didn't have any Blue Screen problems I had earlier with the SP1 from February. Here are some of the ones I've been getting. This first Blue Screen one was when Windows was coming up after a reboot, when SpeedFan (a utility I use to monitor system temperature) was loading:

page_fault_in_non_paged_area 0x00000050

I then upgraded SpeedFan to a newer version, 4.32 to 4.33. And then things seemed to run okay. But then I came home to another Blue Screen:

system_service_exception STOP 0x0000003B

dxgkrnl.sys

Oookay- I think that may have been trigger by a Media Center recording taking place because upon reboot it started to record a show in progress, but then I had error messages about Windows Update terminating and then the Media Center terminating.

I left the computer and then about a couple hours later I got the irq_not_less_or_equal Blue Screen. And I knew it was time to do a System Restore once again.... So no SP1 for me for now on this machine. If anyone with a similar hardware configuration is having a similar problem I'd like to hear about it. My machine is as follows:

-Windows Vista Premium 64bit
-Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R with Q6600
-4 gigs of RAM (2 x 2 gigs)
-Nvidia 8600 card

The tough part is that the blue screens are of various variety and seemed random, so it's hard to pinpoint the cause. Under regular Vista non SP1 the system is rock solid.

No sound in Windows Vista SP1

I just found out that for some reason I wasn't getting sound after installing Vista SP1. I am using the motherboard's built-in sound card (Realtek High Definition Audio). The odd thing is that all the drivers seemed to be work as there are no exclamation marks next to anything. Then I discoverd in the Mixer that it was set to a different audio device. I have a Linksys CIT300 VOIP phone which shows up as an audio device in Windows. So I went to the control panel, clicked on Sound, and set the default back to the Realtek sound chip and voila- all is well again.

Basically for some unknown reason Vista had switched the default sound device during the SP1 install- it's likely a bug that Microsoft needs to look into....

Vista SP1 Working - No Blue Screens - For Now

Several weeks ago I blogged about how an "inadvertent" release version of Windows Vista SP1 update gave my desktop computer (Q6600, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard, 64bit Vista Premium) all sorts of blue screens. I say "inadvertent" because it turned out that Microsoft said that they had released it "by accident" (errrrrr- sure). It sounded to me like a test-run to see how it will work for the guinea pigs like me who downloaded it. Anyways I noticed that it was once again available in Windows Update, so I decided to try it again. This time everything seems very stable thus far.

One thing I've noticed is that there is far less disk activity. Normally even if I'm not using the computer the hard drives would be churning often times. Also thumbnails for pictures and video seem to be loading much faster.

On my HP DV9000t laptop, which is running Windows Vista Ultimate 64, unfortunately the update is not available yet. I'd definitely want to install it on the notebook ASAP to boost its performance.

HP DV9000T 3GB RAM Limit

To improve the speed of my sluggish HP DV9000t under Windows Vista Ultimate, I decided to upgrade the RAM from 2 to 4 gigs via 2 x 2GB SODIMMs. Everything went smoothly and the BIOS detected 4 gigs. My first impression was that wow the extra 2 gigs did make a solid difference in Vista. When I went to System properties, however, I discovered that Windows was only showing 3070MB of memory. Huh? I thought the laptop wouldn't have the infamous 3GB maximum limit that 32 bit Windows have since I'm running Vista 64 bit Ultimate.

So I did some research and apparently there are DV9000t owners out there with the same problem. HP apparently blames it on the northbridge of the Intel 945M chipset. But oddly enough on the Intel website it says that the 945M chpset DOES support 4 Gigs of RAM max.

So I'm left here hoping that perhaps one day HP will release a BIOS that could eradicate this silly hardware-based 3GB memory addressing limit. I'm running the latest BIOS, version F.29, BTW....

Fedora Core 4 Daylight Savings Fix

I was wondering why my Fedora Core 4 server wasn't using the new daylight saving rules. Apparently it needed a patch for the tzdata (timezone data) file. You can download the newest version via this link. Afterwards make create a soft link to /etc/localtime from /usr/share/zoneinfo/, e.g.:

ln –fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

And that'll fix it!