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2008-02-17

Vista - Cannot Open Control Panel (Fixed)

World of Warcraft was giving me headache yesterday. FPS near Ogri'la was only 4fps, although lag was not too bad (~150-200ms). So I decided to disable addons, defrag HD blah blah. I was also using procmon from sysinternals to see if there was anything hogging Vista...

I noticed SearchIndexer was a bit troublesome and stopped the service. While there, I went thru the list and disabled a couple of other that did not seem useful/applicable. One of them was "Software Licensing".

Software Licensing Service Description:
Enables the download, installation and enforcement of digital licenses for Windows and Windows applications. If the service is disabled, the operating system and licensed applications may run in a reduced function mode.

Apparently, if you disable this service you cannot open Control Panel. It looks like it's coming up but then disappears immediately. Enabling/starting service fixes the issue...

2008-02-09

Vista - Still Bluescreens

After installing Vista SP1 RC1 and moving Page file to a different hard drive, I was finally not able to get rid of BSODs when computer was idle...

After a coupel of weeks, unfortunately freezes and BSODs came back. The last one I had said something like:

Win32k.sys

Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area
STOP 0x00000050 (0xFFC000000,all zeros,0x964E0FB3, All Zeros)...

Apparently, Microsoft has a hotfix for this. There is an article titled "Error message when you start a Windows Vista-based computer: "STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 )

However, this article mentioned issues during startup, which was not really my case. I kept on looking and found another KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 about STOP: 0x00000050.

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617 I get the feeling that one of the drivers is not playing well with vista. I ran c:\windows\system32\verifier.exe to see if it will be able to help me pinpoint the issue.