Replies

Belkin N150 router

I’m not familiar with that unit, so I just Googled it. From what I can see, it doesn’t have Gigabit Ethernet ports. That strongly suggests that the unit is simply too slow to handle the full speed that is available to you from your ISP.

Methinks that a faster router will help. Asus has some really decent units for not that much money.

dwayne

I’m coming late to this thread. Nonetheless . . .

Live TV requires more bandwidth than Ethernet can currently provide.cheers, Paul

I must respectfully disagree with the above statement. Modern TV and Video works well on Cat5 Ethernet cable and Cat6 is not much more expensive, so run that instead.

Do be sure to run *both* quad-shield RG6 *and* Cat6 to your TV location if you can. Also run an extra Cat5 cable for use as audio (you get 4 balanced pairs) and, again, it’s inexpensive.

FWIW – Our local Telco is delivering multiple simultaneous channels of HD TV over DSL at speeds significantly LESS than what Cat5 can handle. The interconnect cable between modem and cable boxes is Cat5 cable.

dwayne

Oh geeez, a big OOPS from me… Sorwy, geeesh

Yes, 64-bit needs 4GB RAM.

I’m not sure of that. I *did* have Windows 8 x64 installed and running on this machine. This was the initial install of Windows 8.0 installed from the USB key that I loaded when I purchased the software from MS.

Note that I had *not* done any updates of any sort at that point in time – the box was not yet connected to my router. But the box was certainly running fine, with no issues. And, I as I had mentioned in an earlier post, it actually seemed quite responsive.

I have no idea what might have happened when I tried to upgrade to 8.1.

dwayne

Many thanks for all the suggestions.

I did resolve my problem, but in a completely different way. It turns out that I had ordered the optional physical media when I had purchased one of my Windows 8 upgrade keys. This was one of those little ‘niggles’ in the back of my mind and I followed up on it – and found the package. I hadn’t needed it until now, so had forgotten that I had it.

Inside the package are two discs: one each for 32-bit and 64-bit.

The 32-bit OS installed very nicely as a clean install over top of the 64-bit version that I had installed from the download.

Not quite the solution I was looking for but it worked!

dwayne

Many thanks, JC & Drew. I’m going to play tonight to see what what services are currently running and what I can dispense with.

I do have a couple of other questions.

1) Given that I have only 2GB RAM, should I be running the 32-bit or 64-bit version? I initially had the machine on 64-bit and it seemed quite responsive. But I had this bee stuck in my head that 32-bit would be better because of the limited RAM, so I installed the 32-bit version as a clean install over top of the 64-bit version.

What is your best guess as to what will perform the best? I don’t have any of the file server stuff loaded up yet, so I do have the freedom to change back to 64-bit if that is a better option.

2) When I bring up the Win 8 Modern UI, I see a whole bunch of apps that are automatically updating. Can you tell me what controls that behavior? Do those apps still consume resources even if I unpin them from the desktop?

This is only my second Win 8 machine and I don’t have anywhere near the expertise with it as I do the previous versions of Windows. I really appreciate the guidance.

Thanks again!

dwayne

Hi there.

Its a Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB drive, 7200RPM, 64MB cache. System is configured for AHCI as opposed to regular IDE mode – I went with AHCI for the hot-swap capability on the SATA ports. The drive was initialized completely on this computer using the built-in Windows 7 tools (the disk management snapin).

Things just didn’t seem right, so I went right back to the beginning. Re-ran the Win 7 disk defrag – this took somewhere between 24 & 48 hours but didn’t help. Then I carefully looked at the setup for CloneDVD2 and found a definite problem: the temporary folder that holds the ripped files prior to them being packaged up as an ISO had somehow, mysteriously, started using the temporary folder on drive E rather than drive D. I know from experience this causes slow disk performance – it takes a lot of time to move the drive heads between different folder locations of the drive and these are big files. And I don’t know how it got changed – I’ve done some routine maintenance on this machine over the past couple of weeks (disk image and such) but nothing that should have affected the settings in ColneDVD2.

Bottom line: I changed the temporary folder location back to drive D and things are *much* better – I’m now seeing ISO creation times of a couple of minutes instead of almost 30 minutes. Its also faster than the old hard drive – that was a WD “green” 2TB drive running at about 5400 RPM.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions and thanks also for the pointer to the old version of HD Tune – I’ll go and grab it while I’m thinking about it.

dwayne

This sounds familiar – I’ve run into this several times in the past. My memory is failing me and I don’t have a step-by-step procedure for you but its pretty simple. You need to bring up the Disk Management snapin (Control panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management. You will see the new drive listed there but off-line.

If I recall correctly, there in an option in the left pane right next to the new drive that allows you to bring the drive online.

That should be all that you need to do.

dwayne

Yeah – about the only thing that I’ve done that actually works is to use a wide piece of tape (duct tape) to secure the connector to the bottom of the netbook. Actually works quite well.

dwayne

I’m assuming that this is in Windows 7.

Go to the Control Panel and select the ‘Sound’ icon. Note – I have my Control Panel set up displaying Small Icons – the Sound icon may be hidden inside one of the categories if you have Category view selected.

Anyway, the Sound icon opens up to a window that allows you to specify your default playback and recording devices. The Playback tab is first – you should see several devices listed. One will be your headset and will have a green checkmark showing that is the current default. Find the device that corresponds to your computer speakers (on my system, that’s the Realtek High Definition Audio device). Right-click on that device and select “Set as default device”.

You should be good to go.

dwayne

The first thing to do is to see if check disk will run against the bad partition

Well, I must be tired or something – it never even occurred to me to run chkdsk. I left the drive connected to my IDE / SATA – USB adapter and did just that. Chkdsk did make the drive bootable after finding several thousand lost fragments. There is sufficient damage that I don’t want to even try to recover from this, given that I have a known-good image to fall back upon.

But – it let me at least document what had been installed since I took the last image more than a year ago. Not all that much, actually. I just made a list of all applications installed after the date of the most recent image and saved it to the “D” partition.

Acronis has just now finished restoring that year-old image and everything looks good. Now I’m off to install all of the intervening Windows updates.

And, of course, I’ll take a new image when I’m finished.

Thanks for the suggestions!

dwayne

Don’t try to repair it in a USB enclosure because these units hide the disk from repair tools.

OK – I can install the drive in one of my desktop machines. But: what repair tools are available? Names, URLs greatly appreciated.

dwayne

In my experience dealing with Vista since it came out on many machines, when what you are saying happens:

1) Your boot block is bad. In this case a boot from a Vista disk and repairing boot will fix it.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think that its a boot block problem. Reason: I can get into Vista’s Repair Console. I don’t think that would be possible if the boot block was bad.

2) A USB item connected to the computer is stopping it from booting. Disconnect all USB items and try booting again.

This is a laptop and there are no external USB devices attached.

3) It has gone into hibernation and as it is a laptop, either crashed or the battery died while in hibernation if on battery only. You need to delete the hibernation file and boot again. I recommend taking the drive out and attaching it to another computer, get rid of that hibernation file and putting it back.

I may try this. I currently have Win 7 running on the machine right now but I’m curious. It doesn’t take Acronis True Image all that long to restore partitions.

4) You have a rootkit that has gone crazy. You need to go over it with a GOOD antivirus. Everyone has their favourite. In my constant checks and rechecks, AVG free comes in second and Sophos first but Sophos is costly if you have only ONE computer as the price normally includes 3 licences. After checking it with your favourite antivirus, have Malwarebytes anti Malware on your clean system with laptop drive connected to it and check with that for any nasties.

Nope – I think the drive is clean. The very first thing I did was pull the drive and attach it to one of my desktops. Both Eset’s NOD32 and AVG Online say the drive is clean.

5) You have a ram chip that is partially working. Easy to check if you have one dud ram chip and I guess you know how so I wont go on about it.

Good suggestion. However, that was either the 2nd or 3rd thing I checked out. I left the memory test run overnight and it made several passes without any errors shown.

6) As others have said, a driver problem, one that is either your graphics chip or not. You can do yourself a favour, here and attach an external monitor while booting. While this rarely helps, on occasion it has given me the answer because SOMETHING has gone wrong in the graphics display and it didnt turn up until an external monitor was attached. You can also try moving the mouse off the borders of the screen. If it goes out of site and out the window next your computer and frightens your cat in the yard, then there is a fair chance that you have an extended display and that you are seeing only part of it.

I didn’t think to try this because the hotkey to select an external monitor behaved as I expected it to. I will try this when I put the original (broken) image back onto the drive.

7) Your user profile is history. Can you boot safe mode with a monitor also attached? You may be able to get in that way or if the profile is hashed, you may be able to logon as Admin and fix it. If you dont have the admin password, you can always boot from a CD from an Ophcrack ISO and get the password that way. Actually, try booting from that anyway. If it works fine it answers some questions for you straight away.

There was absolutely no difference between booting normally or booting into Safe Mode. Same result: black screen with movable white mouse pointer.

8) You have a physically damaged sector on your hard drive. Easily fixed by doing a full (5 level) check of the laptop hard drive while attached to another computer. Actually, in some cases like yours with Vista, this is the first thing I have done and all worked as it should after that.

I have Spinrite 6 and did run it on the drive for a day. No errors found.

This was a brand-new drive last fall – that’s why I had re-installed the OS from scratch. The user used the machine constantly for 5 or 6 weeks before this problem manifested itself.

9) When all that fails, I always go with a repair from a boot CD or depending on who made the laptop it is sometimes possible to restore Windows to factory condition without killing off any data by booting from the restore partition.

Yeah – I would have been able to do that if I had installed the restore partition on the new drive. I had planned to do so and even left space for it – but the owner needed the machine before that got done.

I also normally take an image of the boot partition and save it to the data (D:) partition – but again, did not have time. C’est La Vie.

10) When all else fails, I find a sledge hammer cures all! ;-}

Yeah – reformat and reinstall .

Thanks for the suggestions!

dwayne

I think that I will take your advice. I tried installing a retail Win 7 Home Premium Upgrade disc and everything seems to work well. I used the Vista TouchPad and Bluetooth drivers but downloaded the most recent Win 7 video and audio drivers from ATI and Realtek respectively.

It all seems to be working well. I’ll take another image of the boot partition, then install the LG utilities that the owner has asked for. I suspect they will also work OK.

Thanks for the suggestion!

dwayne

See if How to fix Vista Black Screen of Death[/url] helps.

Joe

Many thanks for that link. I truly had NO idea how wide-spread this problem was!

I’ve spent the past couple of days trying many of the things listed on that page as well as some of the things suggested on pages linked to that page.

These include: creating a new Logs directory, running the PrevX utility (which is supposed to check and correct something like 10 or so possible causes of the problem), check the Shell setting in the registry, many other things that I can’t recall right this instant.

I’ve spoken with the owner of the machine and she asked if there was any way that I could install either XP or Win7 on the machine. I just checked the LG website and they do show full driver support for Windows XP, so I think that is the way I’m going to go. The machine’s owner has never liked Vista anyway and now sees this as a golden opportunity to get rid of it.

The worry that I have is that even if I fix this particular problem, who’s to say that it won’t happen again. All those millions of hits in Google when searching out “vista black screen” make me (and her) extremely wary. An OS change seems like a good idea to me as well.

I will take an image of the boot partition before I wipe it, though. That does give me the opportunity to tackle it again sometime in the future.

I truly appreciate all the suggestions that everyone has made. Even though I didn’t fix the problem, your support made it easier and less frustrating.

Many thanks!

dwayne

One of the first things I checked was to make sure that the machine was not set to use an external display. Hitting the hot-key combo (Fn + F7) causes the display to blank very momentarily, then return to what it was doing before (mouse pointer on black screen).

Booting into Safe mode has exactly the same results as booting normally: no login screen; movable mouse pointer on black screen.

I was hoping that someone might have a suggestion in terms of connecting the hard drive to one of my other computers, then using a registry editor of some sort that would mount and open the registry on the affected drive so that I could look at key registry values.

Many thanks!

dwayne