Curiosities Blog

It has been a long time

It has been a long time since i last posted anything here. I guess I got caught up in my personal life.

I will try to come back and post more.

Is anyone running Windows Vista? I have it running on my computer but it seems Vista is a memory hungry monster. I have 2GB of RAM installed and getting 2GB more. I hope that will decrease all the paging and unnecessary hard disk reading which I hate so much.

Add comment April 3rd, 2007

Norton System Works 2006 and Nvidia Drivers

A few weeks ago I upgraded my system to a MSI K8N Neo4 motherboard, a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ Processor and a Geforce 6800 video card. I couldn’t be more happy with what promised to be a lightning fast computer.

As with every major hardware upgrade, I decided to reinstall Windows XP and every piece of software. I have used Norton Ghost in the past because believe it or not, Windows XP system restore is the most unreliable piece of software ever written for pc, they should just remove it so at least people would know for sure they have to look for a third party solution. System Restore has never ever worked for me in all those occasions I needed it most.

Anyways, I decided to give a try to the trial version of Norton System Works 2006, specifically the Norton Ghost that came inside it.

Everything was working, my Windows would boot before the first progress bar was completed, all happy. Suddenly I start experiencing unusual delays while booting, like 25 secs or more. Everytime I booted Windows, the 2nd graphic loading screen would just sit there and disk activity would stop for like 10 seconds, resume for 5 seconds more, and stop again for like 15 seconds and then finally get the login screen.

The first thing I thought was that my hard drive was failing, but after a complete disk check I couldnt find the cause of the problem. Also it didnt help that Windows Event Viewer was reporting some warnings:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation
and the error:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D

Ok, if Windows says there is a paging error, there must an error in the drive somewhere, right?…… WRONG!

I put my sata hard drive in another computer and ran Maxtor Powermax on it just to make sure there were no physical error… none!

I forgot to add that everytime I did some disk intensive operation, I would get the Blue Screen of Death with some info about nvata.sys and nvraid.sys failing.

So I decided to just clean boot Windows. That means using msconfig and removing all services but the ones from Microsoft and also removing everything from the startup.

Guess what? Windows booted like it used to, in less than 5 seconds.

As it was a clean Windows installation, I decided to reformat the drive, reinstall Windows and double check everything after every program installed.

I usually install my system in this order:
1.- Windows XP
2.- Network Drivers
3.- Windows critical updates
4.- Norton Internet Security (Norton Firewall + Norton Antivirus)
5.- More Windows Updates and the rest of drivers
6.- Microsoft Office
7.- Office Updates
8.- MSN Messenger
9.- Nero
10.- Norton Ghost

Right after I installed the version of Norton Ghost that came in the trial version of Norton System Works, my Windows was again spending 30 seconds to boot and the warning in the event viewer was back! aha!

So I uninstalled Norton System Works and the problem persisted. Decided to remove Norton Internet Security an the error was gone! Reinstalled Norton Internet Security and the error didnt come back.

The conclusion is, there is something inside Norton System Works 2006 that is not compatible at all with my configuration and specially with Nvidia nForce drivers. I dont know if this problem spams to other versions of Nvidia nForce but I will sure stay away from Norton System Works 2006 until these problems are fixed by Symantec, Nvidia, Maxtor or MSI, whoever fault it is.

Add comment February 26th, 2006