Bloggit's Journal - Vista and iBuyPower Strike Again!

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Vista and iBuyPower Strike Again!

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Bloggit's Journal started as an experiment, but has since morphed into a window into Bloggit's technical addiction. And honestly, I had no idea I was so unbalanced. So enjoy the fruits of my condition.

April 2008

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Vista and iBuyPower Strike Again!	Jan. 12th, 2008 @ 04:55 pm

As I mentioned a few months ago, I bought a new quad-core PC from iBuyPower through Costco around Thanksgiving. It came, despite my misgivings, with Vista.

The good news is that this box is fast. Even with Vista, it boots fast enough that I can tolerate it.

The bad news is, it boots frequently. It blue screens a lot! Often when not doing anything in particular. Certainly compared to all my other systems. And the messages with the BSOD (blue screen) seem random. Today I got the win32k.sys error, so I decided to try to track it down. This most reportedly is associated with either flakey memory or bad NVidia drivers... but this is Corsair memory and passes both the Everest system stability tests and a full hard-core 90-minute MemTest-86 sweep, on top of which the NVidia drivers were provided with the P.C. But both could conceivably be issues.

Rebooting has been problematic once before. Rather than booting, the system went through the POST (Power On Self Test) fine, and then stopped when it should be loading Windows, instead displaying about ten characters of gibberish. This took quite a while to figure out, and today was quite persistent. I'm still not certain I've soused the problem, but my guess is this...

Asus defaults to a boot sequence of "Removable Drive", "CD-ROM", "Hard Drive". The iPod is seen as a removable drive. And mine must have just enough of a pseudo-boot-record to really confuse the BIOS.

This would be consistent with the boot failure being a very sporadic issue, because I don't hook the iPod up much. What would be nicer would be for the BSOD to be sporadic, rather than a constant companion, too. But I think XP is my only way around that. As I said, none of our other XP boxes have this issue, nor do our Server 2003 servers. And my new Mac Book is pretty solid, even running XP in Parallels. My wife's iMac 24" has only BSOD'd a few times, all seemingly related to putting it to sleep while running FinalCut. So either iBuyPower's commodity hardware really sucks or Vista is, at least pushed the way I push it, a terrible dog. Since the PC passes the tests I through at it, I suspect the latter.

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