Raise The Dead...Fragbox

I mentioned last week that Win7 on my My fragbox 2 came down with a BSOD and I could not boot from C: drive anymore. Then worse happened and my fragbox 2 stopped powering up all together.

I contacted Falcon Northwest Technical Support by sending them an e-mail and leaving a couple of Voice Mails. Falcon keep their support in US (a great plus!). They are in PST time zone which works out fine for me as I can work with them when I get home.

Anyway, a support engineer called me back and I described my problem. Then we scheduled a call when I get home. I had pretty tried everything other than resetting CMOs. So, he went over the steps he wanted to try:

• Keep computer connected to power switch but turn off the switch so there is no power but machine is grounded
• Remove Graphics Card, for which I had to remove the fan over it
• Reseat RAM sticks
• Reseat power switches for CPU etc.
• Disconnect power cord
• Clear CMOS, which means moving a jumper as per ASUS P5E-VM DO documentation
• Wait for a couple of minutes
• Put the jumper back
• Connect Graphics Card
• Put everything else back
• Just connect Keyboard, Monitor Cable and Power
• Power Up

Fragbox is a small box. Everything is neatly placed and as the support engineer put it, "they do not expect things to go wrong", so it is not build to be very easy to remove parts. I am used to taking machines apart so I was able to follow instructions.... and it powered up just fine.

We went into BIOS to set the correct settings for my set up. Falcon Northwest documentation is great. They had sent each and every change they had done to BIOS defaults. Plus, support engineer had the settings as well. So, we set them, saved them and rebooted.

I was pretty convinced my had HD gone bad and unfortunately I was right. We ended up where we started: BSOD with "Unmountable_boot_volume". We kept on troubleshooting... He sent me an e-mail with links to Seagate's SeaTools HD Diagnostic page and instructions on what he needed.

I ran them and SeaTools confirmed that my D: drive was healthy but my C: drive had Electical Issues. Log went like this:
Started Short DST 4/7/2010 @7:44.14

DST -- FAILED - Electrical Element

Short DST FAILED 4/7/2010 @7.44.21 

I ran the long test as well but it simply confirmed the issue. I powered down the PC, sent an e-mail to Falcon Northwest support about results and left for work in the morning.

I got an e-mail back later in the day that confirmed drive was bad and mentioned that Seagate might still have my disk under warranty. It had links to check if I was covered. Good news was, yes I was covered. I started the RMA process but at some point realized that I did not have the 'CODE' they were asking. Apparently, there was a newer version of the tool (2.17) than I had downloaded (2.16) which was returning this code.

I downloaded the new software from Seagate; burn the image into a CD and booted from it. I got the code they needed and finished the RMA process. When I read their documentation, which is a subject of another blog post probably, I realized that they will not give me a new HD but replace it with a refurbished one :(

Anyway, there is more to story actually. When I came back, my power up issue was back as well. I had hoped that clearing CMOS would fix it but apparently it had not.

Here is how it goes:

1. I click power button
2. I hear fan noise 1 sec, it stops
3. 2 secs of silence, fan noise again for power up for 1 sec and it stops
4. same as above...
5. 15mins later...
6. fan does not stop this time and computer boots up

 I felt like this was either a Mobo or PSU (possibly capacitor) issue and descibed this in an e-mail to Falcon Northwest support. I got a call back and we discussed what needs to be done and I tried to remove the Hard drive but as I mentioned above it's not really build so that you can easily remove parts. In fact, I realized that there is no way for me to remove the hard disk without 'breaking' something.

At this point, support engineer told me that he will talk to his supervisor to see if my machine would be covered, what will be the warranty situation and give me a call back tomorrow. I am kinda stuck because I cannot take out the HD anyway and I do not know at this point if the power up issues I have been having ever since I got the Mobo replaced last summer are at all relevant to this HD or not (my guess - NOT!).

I checked Falcon Northwest site and they have 3 years warranty on Fragboxes but it seems that mine had only a year :(  My previous Mobo change was covered under warranty but I kept on having issues since then as well and it got worse and worse with power. So I do not know if they will stand behind their product or not at this point. We will find out tomorrow. Hopefully, I will post good news!

Shopping for a new (gaming) PC

Now that my lovely fragbox is dead :( I wondered what's the latest out there in terms hardware. My Fragbox 2 cost me about  $2K in Aug 2008 and came with

• nVidia 8800 GTS 512MB PCIe 
• Intel Core 2 duo E8500 - 3.16 GHz 1333FSB
• Crucial 2x2GB DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz

So, 1.5 yrs later, my nVidia card is about 3-4 tiers down from today's top graphics cards as per this recent article from Tom's Hardware Guide - Graphics Hierarchy Chart.

Similarly, Tom's Hardware Guide - CPU Hierarchy Chart of March 2010, puts my then top of the line CPU as a third tier CPU now.

These are great articles to help understand where technology is now compared to my current gear. I will keep on adding links here while researching.

More Fragbox Issues

My "fragbox" is causing me so much frustration these days. I feel like I am done with it and although I loved it when it's running , at this point I feel like a new (gaming) rig is in order. So, how did this happen? Unfortunately, it kept on going worse over time...

At some point in the last 6 months, when it went into sleep mode, it would not come back and I had to power off, power on again (here is one of my previous blog posts about this).. So, I disabled all sleep modes to keep it up and running. Then again, I did not want to waste so much energy, so I started powering my pc off at night. For the last couple of months, when I power it off, it would take me an hour to power it up. It's the most puzzling thing I have ever seen...

• Phase 0) I connect the power cable, see the motherboard light up and nothing happens when power button is pressed...
• Phase 1) At some it powers up, I see fans spinning but it only does that for a sec and then stop.
• Phase 2) I keep on pressing power and reset buttons and disconnect/reconnect power cord, in that 1 sec period when fans are spinning and they keep on spinning, but when I take my fingers off of the buttons, the stop again.
• Phase 3) Finally, when I take my fingers off, fans keep on spinning, HD spins up and pc starts running just fine.

I kinda got used to the frustrating routine. Power outages are not common so I kept my pc running. I still had to go thru this every other months for some brief power outage (winter has been harsher this year). Unfortunately, it got worse...

Yesterday, all of a sudden pc crashed. Windows 7 has been rock solid for me, so I was surprised and immediately started thinking about any recent updates I made to it... Could it be the nVidia driver update that was supposed to fix overheating issues?

My question was answered when I tried to recycle and see the ugly face of real problem:

• 0x000000DE Unmountable_Boot_Volume

I had noticed (especially when playing wow) that my computer would freeze for a sec, as if it's trying to read a sector but cannot do it immediately and I would hear ticking sound of my hard drive.

I also recalled seeing some Ubuntu event logs sometime ago that suggested something was not right with the hard drive.

I tried hitting F8 to bring up boot options to see if Safe mode would work but none of the options worked. Even trying to boot with Win7 CD failed (I ended up in a black screen with mouse only). So, I gave up on the hard drive, which really did not have anything other than OS and a couple of settings (Google Picasa, WoW addons etc) I would want to keep.

Enter Ubuntu Live CD (v8.04). I booted using the live CD to see if I could access my drives and move data to my Qnap NAS. 

I was able to access Qnap, my D drive but C drive (boot drive) was not accessible. I started google'ing and saw a nice article that basically was suggesting the exact same steps. The step I had forgotten was to create a temp folder to mount C:

sudo su -
mkdir /media/disk
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force

I got a warning but it worked, I was able to access C drive. Unfortunately, I could not copy everything I wanted off to NAS as it gave me 'read source' errors time to time but got most of it.

Then I used the following command  to mark my C drive as 'dirty' for Windows to pick up and fix (at least that's the theory).

ntfsfix /media/disk

I wanted to give Win7 cd another try at this point. The good news was that it worked this time and brought me to the install screen. The bad news, however, was that it no longer detected my primary hard disk where previous installation was.

I went ahead and installed Windows 7. All went fine.... until I came back in the morning to notice that PC was somehow shutdown and I was back to Phase 0. My searches for Asus P5E-VM DO returned nothing about why could this be happening and at this point it seemed that I have to talk to Falcon Northwest support to get this shipped and fixed over there...again (see RIP - My Falcon Fragbox 2). 

SIDs

Mark Russinovich wrote about "The Machine SID Duplication Myth" on his blog last year where he explained why he had retired a utility called "NewSID" that he had written more than a decade ago.

Today, I saw an e-mail that referenced to this article. And while reading the discussion, I started to wonder if there was a way to list SIDs of users using PowerShell instead of other well-known tools like SysInternals utility PSGetSID.


I was almost sure that it would be somewhere in WMI but obvious first question with WMI is how to find it. I remembered seeing Jeff Snover's blog on 'Exploring WMI' which gave me an idea about how to look. I had to start somewhere to search for SIDs so I started searching for WMI classes that included keyword 'account':

PS C:\> gwmi -list *account* |ft -auto


NameSpace: ROOT\cimv2

Name                Methods  Properties
----                -------  ----------
MSFT_NetBadAccount  {}       {SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR, TIME_CREATED}
Win32_Account       {}       {Caption, Description, Domain, InstallDate...}
Win32_UserAccount   {Rename} {AccountType, Caption, Description, Disabled...}
Win32_SystemAccount {}       {Caption, Description, Domain, InstallDate...}
Win32_AccountSID    {}       {Element, Setting}

Win32_AccountSID seemed like the best match but it turned out a bit more difficult to read than I expected:

PS C:\> gwmi win32_accountsid |select element,setting |ft -auto

element                                                                                  setting
-------                                                                                  -------
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Administrators"                        \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-544"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Distributed COM Users"                 \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-562"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Event Log Readers"                     \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-573"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="Guests"                                \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-546"
\\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_Group.Domain="AHFB",Name="IIS_IUSRS"                             \\AHFB\root\cimv2:Win32_SID.SID="S-1-5-32-568"
...

Simply using Win32_UserAccount showed me the user accounts & their SIDS in a cleaner way:

PS C:\> gwmi win32_useraccount |select name,sid |ft -auto

name            sid
----            ---
Adil Hindistan  S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1000
Administrator   S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-500
Bezen           S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1002
Guest           S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-501
HomeGroupUser$  S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1013
__vmware_user__ S-1-5-21-2019936553-3113866535-3325437445-1012

Similarly, Win32_SystemAccount can be used to display SIDs of System accounts or Win32_Account can display both user and system account info.

Popular Science Archive Available Online

All 137 years of Popular Science magazine has been digitalized and is available here .... courtesy of Google Books!

Resolving Office 2010 Beta Activation Issues

My Office 2010 Beta installation has been working fine for the most part but apparently activation kept failing. Here is the step by step fix posted at MSDN Social. If you are getting 0x8007232B or similar errors when trying to activate Office 2010 Beta, give it a try.

Yes, I want to empy deleted items folder

It looks like I hit another annoying bug with Outlook 2010 Beta. Every time I exit outlook, I get the following prompt:

Do you want to permanently delete all the items and subfolders in the "deleted items" folder for all accounts.

Under Outlook Options > Advanced > Start and Exit, I have the following option checked off:
"Empty deleted items folders when exiting outlook"

Problem is that even if  there is nothing in the deleted items, I still get the prompt. It is possible to stop this by unchecking the option above but that would mean deleted items will need to be purged manually.

In 2007, there was an option that read "do not prompt when emptying deleted items". This option is no longer available...

I found a discussion about this on MS social but no solution as of yet.

Outlook 2010 Beta - Issue with smtp

I downloaded 2010 Beta bits from MSDN yesterday and installed over Office 2007. Upgrade was successful. The new Outlook interface is neat! I know there are several new features and by default it now sorts by Conversation & Date, which is how I prefer to read my e-mails, especially at work. It helps me to see the whole thread on a subject.

The only problem I have had was when receiving the e-mail. By default, Outlook 2007 used the following ports
POP3: 995 (SSL)
SMTP: 587 (TLS)
as per Gmail documentation

Outlook timed out sending e-mails with these settings. I tried a couple of times but I kept on getting  time-out messages with an error:

Task 'smtp server name - Sending and Receiving' reported error (0x8004210): 'The operation timed out waiting for a response from the sending (SMTP) server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

Message seems a bit generic as Microsoft listed this as an issue message for Outlook 2002. Anywho, problem is solved now but I am not clear what did the trick. Here is what I did:

Changed SMTP to : 465 SSL
After e-mail was successfully sent, I changed SMTP back to 587 (TLS). It is still working. Go figure!

How should I solve 'backup' issue?

My Western Digital MyBook Pro died a couple of months ago and when I took it apart (it was really painful) I realized that I did not have a TB drive in it. Instead, it was 2 x 500GB Western Digital HDs. Apparently, they were using JBOD technology to offer 1TB space.

So either I had to find a similar card or forget  about recovering backup data on the HDs and think about getting a new external backup system. I have an 4 year old HP XW6000 sitting idle with 2x750Gig drives in it. So, I thought I could try freeNAS. I installed it on a 64KB usb stick. It was able to detect my drives but sharing them proved to be quite challenging for whatever reason.

I started looking at other alternatives and one of my friends suggested I take a look at Drobo. So I did. It's simply impressive although there are  several horror stories about it. It's using a proprietary technology to mix and match different size hard drives and that was the biggest reason I was sold. I have several healthy HDs that I did not want throw away.

So, I ordered it ($350) from Amazon the other day with two 1.5 GB HDs (2 x $120). 1 from Seagate and 1 from Western Digital. A common mistake is that people just go and buy 2 (or 4 ) of the same make/model hard drive and they usually fail at times close to each other (yeah happened to me in an earlier life).

With 200MB/min HD video clips of my two year old and thousands of pics a month, soon the drives at my Fragbox2 will not be enough and I know I will have to move some stuff to Drobo. That defeats the purpose though. Using Drobo as storage would mean, I need to back up drobo somewhere else as one should NEVER have data in a single drive (or location or...)...

While doing the research though, I fell in love with real-deal NAS solutions. Especially QNAP & Synology have terrific feature-sets for such solutions. My friend gave me a great idea: Use one of these NAS solutions as your primary/secondary data storage area on network, then connect drobo to it and use the 1-button backup on these NAS solutions to back them up! I loved the idea.

Right now I am eyeing QNAP TS-410 Turbo (~$450). TS-439 Pro with its 1GB DDRII RAM and 1.6GHz Intel processor looks sexy but is double the price. 4x1.5TB HDs will cost around another $500. Such solutions are not cheap.

Cloud is another way to go for backup. Prices came down and $50 to $60 a year does not seem a bad price to pay for back-up. It has the advantage of reaching your data from anywhere as well.

By the way, while I was doing research, I re-discovered a neat feature of Google: www.google.com/Products. It's very useful to find all kinds of information, including price, about a product.

Also when using Google to search for recent reviews, you can simply put the product name and add +October +2009 then expand "Show Options" and choose reviews from left hand side menu.

Hippo File Update Checker

I had mentioned FileHippo.com when I was posting about links to download offline install version of Google Chrome. LifeHacker mentioned their Hippo File Update Checker as a way to keep up with the latest updates to the  software you have on your PC. I tried it and looks pretty decent!

Home (The Movie)

This is a must-see documentary about Earth and how we change it.

What's new in PowerShell 2.0

I find myself going back to to this great blog entry on Huddled Masses by Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett, so I am going to add an entry here for it.
Here is also a PowerShell blogs pipe that I shamelessly cloned from his original one and customized a bit.

Google Wave Invitation

Yay! I got my Google Wave invitation and have 8 invites to send out *grin*. If you are reading this, chances are you are eager to get one... Hmm, read on.

When I started bloggin in 2004, my second post was about how I was trying to get a gmail invite and how someone sent me one. It made me happy then and I want to make a fellow netizen happy.

I need your e-mail address to send an invite but I would not want you to be an easy target for spammers so be creative when you are leaving it...

(For example: if your e-mail address is johnny_boy@hotmail.com,  before@johnny_boy after@hotmail.com)

I will collect the requests tonight and send one to a random person.

Google Chrome Offline (Standalone) Installer

I had a post on how to download full Google Chrome earlier this year. Ghacks has a recent post on how to download the offline version:

All that these users need to do is to append the parameter standalone=1 to the website where Google Chrome can be downloaded. Here are the two download links for the latest official and latest beta version of the Google browser:

Latest official: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?standalone=1
Latest beta: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=betachannel&standalone=1
Latest Test: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=devchannel&standalone=1

They warn that this version may not auto-update, but that may be exactly what you want in your environment if you would like to deliver versions in a controlled manner.

Unfortunately, when I tried this I kept on downloading the same version (172.28) as Prod only. According to Google Chrome Release Blog, QA is in v3 and Dev channel is in v4 right now.

I searched thru Google Chrome Forums and found a link to download full executable for every single release: http://www.filehippo.com/download_google_chrome/
and yet another one here:
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Google-Chrome-Download-108166.html

Double-clicking Logitech

As if I do not have enough issues with my computers these days, apparently my Logitech G7 mouse died. Yes, I said "apparently" because it works just fine except a little annoyance: 7 out of 10 times when I simply left click, it treats it as a double click.

I noticed this a couple of days ago and it got worse. I played with every mouse setting to no avail. Then, googled it to see if this was a reported Windows 7 issue and it turned out that this is a "common" case with mouse brands today that "microdrive" fails. From what I read, some people claim that Logitech mouses are especially notorious & exhibit this problem after a year or so. Although my case would certainly fall into that category, I doubt that there is a systematic problem with Logitech mouses.

A couple of months ago, this would be a perfect excuse to buy a Razer, who by the way created a new mouse - called "Naga" - that seems to be specifically targeting World of Warcraft players [17 buttons & custom interface for WoW = drool]. I still can't get myself pay $130 for a mouse though. So no "mamba" for me.

CPU Fan Error Thriller - The Saga Continues

After my post about the error "CPU Fan Error!", I had two days without any issues but today error is back. I had left my computer on for a couple of hours and apparently it went into deep sleep mode (S3). I came back and moved the mouse - nothing happened! O_o
Then, I hit the keyboard, knowing it would not help... I had one option left, Power button to wake up the PC.

It did wake up but really like an annoyed person coming back from deep sleep. Fans roared full speed for 15 secs; then a brief silence as if power went off... Finally a blinking cursor on the screen and BIOS messages showing up. Unfortunately, BIOS messages stopped at some point as before and after 20 secs of silence I saw the familiar message printed on the screen:
"CPU Fan Error!
Press F1 to continue.

I hit F1 and loaded Win7 but I knew what was coming: 'computer freeze every other second'...

So, I rebooted and decided to disable Q-Fan again but I failed to hit "del" key to go into BIOS on time and noticed a new message:
Overclocking Failed! Please enter Setup to re-configure your system

In fact, these two messages seems to be related. My system has arrived overclocked from Falcon Northwest; I know that because they mentioned every single BIOS change they made in their documentation (kudos). When a system is overclocked, it may generate more heat; again referring to incapacity of the fan to do its job...

The reason I had bought the system was WoW but I quit WoW a couple of months ago. So I turned overclocking off as I do not need the every piece of cpu cycle these days.

Of course, it is still bothering me that this is happening; and I am not totally convinced that this is a hardware story. It could very well be that Win7 has something to do with this. I am, for example, noticing some other "System" errors in Event Log like
"The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has reported an invalid current state 32"
There was a report in nVidia forum today that problem was resolved after installing latest Win7 beta drivers. I have not however seen the same issues reported there.

At this point, I thought I should switch to something more productive and do some investigation with PowerShell, like when did these messages appear and how many of them were in system log:

get-eventlog system -entry error  |where {$_.message -match "nvidia"} |ft -auto
Index Time         EntryType Source                  InstanceID Message
----- ----         --------- ------                  ---------- -------
74903 Sep 26 19:04 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74614 Sep 25 00:03 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74456 Sep 24 23:07 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74343 Sep 24 23:04 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74198 Sep 24 22:57 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
74037 Sep 24 22:31 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73887 Sep 24 22:02 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73758 Sep 24 21:58 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73399 Sep 22 00:06 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...
73164 Sep 21 00:02 Error     Service Control Manager 3221232488 The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has report...

So, apparently this nVidia problem is also a recent phenomenon. I checked Microsoft's documentation on event id and did not see anything to worry me. So, I went back to PowerShell and started playing with it a bit more...

How many errors did my system have in System Log?

(get-eventlog system -entry error).count
39

Some people actually doing that in a different way. First get the events from log & then count them:

$events=get-eventlog -logname system -entryType error # I used the long notation here
$events.count
39

I actually like that "(something).property" way of getting properties but assigning it to a variable first is much more useful if you will re-use the object. For example, if I wanted to find out what sources generated these errors (i.e. group them):

$events |group source |FT count,name -auto #It centered the output without -auto

Count Name
----- ----
   20 DCOM
   11 Service Control Manager
    3 HECI
    3 EventLog
    2 Serial

Or if I wanted to see only certain fields:

$events |ft TimeGenerated, Source, Message -Auto

TimeGenerated         Source                  Message
-------------         ------                  -------
9/26/2009 7:10:33 PM  DCOM                    The description for Event ID '-1073731808' in Source 'DCOM' cannot be ...
9/26/2009 7:04:13 PM  Service Control Manager The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has reported an invalid curr...
9/26/2009 7:03:31 PM  HECI                    HECI driver has failed to perform handshake with the Firmware.
9/26/2009 7:03:40 PM  EventLog                The previous system shutdown at 5:09:01 PM on ?9/?26/?2009 was unexpec...
9/26/2009 2:39:20 PM  DCOM                    The description for Event ID '-1073731808' in Source 'DCOM' cannot be ...
9/25/2009 12:03:26 AM Service Control Manager The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service has reported an invalid curr...
...

Btw, did you also notice that in the first example I only typed "entry" instead of "entryType", that's because you can type the minimum number of chars sufficient enough for PowerShell to identify which parameter you meant.

I also tend to skip default parameter names. For example, default parameter for "get-eventlog" is of course EventLog name which is represented by "-logname string" parameter. You can skip -logname if nobody else will read your code:

get-eventlog system

As usual to get list of event logs simply type:

get-eventlog -list

  Max(K) Retain OverflowAction        Entries Log
  ------ ------ --------------        ------- ---
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded       1,142 Application
  15,168      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 DFS Replication
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 HardwareEvents
     512      7 OverwriteOlder              0 Internet Explorer
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 Key Management Service
   8,192      0 OverwriteAsNeeded         127 Media Center
  16,384      0 OverwriteAsNeeded           0 ODiag
  16,384      0 OverwriteAsNeeded         263 OSession
                                              Security
  20,480      0 OverwriteAsNeeded       4,321 System
     512      7 OverwriteOlder            415 Windows PowerShell

help get-eventlog -examples

has several examples for common scenarios.
Fin!

CPU Fan error thriller

If you read my "RIP: My Falcon Fragbox2" story, you know that I own one of these beasts.. Since I got it back from Falcon, it was working fine all these months and I love it.

Recently though, I upgraded my Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium Edition from MSDN. I know, I know it is early and many vendors do not have drivers etc etc but I love Windows 7 and could not wait!

All went well and I have been running it fine for the last month or so. Recently though, I started to see some weird behaviour from “sleep mode” again. I dont remember what setting it had originally but at some point it would not go to sleep. I mentioned that story below and I thought it was a software issue. Unfortunately it came back and the final solution I found was to change BIOS setting for sleep from S1 to S3. That had put and end to it. So, I went back and checked the setting to see if it somehow got reset. It was still in S3.

It would go to “sleep” fine; then sometime later it, fan wakes up with full ferocity and does not stop running. This kept on happening so I started to shutdown the machine instead of putting it into Sleep. I started to notice another weird behaviour though. Windows would come up fine but after I logged in, it would suddenly start to act up. Basically it was running for 2secs and freezing for 2secs. I could see this behaviour clearly by simply moving the mouse around. It was quite weird and I had no idea what was causing it as I had not installed any software (I did inplace upgrade) recently. I was annoyed but figured out that rebooting system would clear this issue.

The worst happened today though. I cold booted the system and noticed an error:
CPU fan error!
Press F1 to continue.

I was freaking out at this point and immediately opened the case only to find out that all fans were plugged properly and firmly, and they were all running just fine. So, I started to research this and found out that other people with Asus Motherboard had seen this issue. They suggested to “disable” Q-fan, which was set to “silence” mode. I tested this and it did clear the error. However, I thought this would be a risky thing to do; so kept on checking Asus site. Apparently they have a BIOS update 0902 (mine was 0802) but instructions were not too clear to me. I downloaded a utility from their site, which is supposed to allow saving bios and updating it from Windows.

When I ran it; it displayed a message which told me to remove Memory from A* banks. I checked the motherboard documentation and found out which one was A1 (I have 2 Gig at A1 and 2 gig at B1). I powered down the pc, removed all the cables and removed A1 memory. After reboot, I saw a message which said something like “Because of AMT requirement A1 bank should be filled or you may experience system malfunction”. I went ahead anyway and launched Asus update utility after logging in. This time, it did not complain and gave me the option to save and update bios. I did that and chose to reset CMOS.

All went fine. I rebooted and of course got CMOS checksum errors. I hit F1 and continued to logon to Windows. All seemed fine. Then, I rebooted and went into BIOS. Took out the awesome  documentation from Falcon and reset all the setting one by one to what was documented. Saved and rebooted again. I do not see the fan error and all seems to be OK right now.

Imported old blog here

When I started blogging in 2004, I had a different address. When blogger was moving to a new format, I started this one. It was not possible to merge the two for quite sometime. Today, while looking around, I found out from Blogger Buzz that this feature has been implemented already and it's very simple to import/export blogger blogs.

So, I went to my old blog and from Settings > Basic page, chose "Export Blog". Then simply logged on to this one and clicked "Import Blog" from the same location. I have it all here now, yay!

If only now, I could find a nice template to make the posting space larger...

Code Syntax Highlighting for Blogger

I was envious how nice my friend, Arnoud's PowerShell blog was showing up the code and decided to look for something similar in Blogger. After a bit of searching, I found a very nice open-source tool Called SyntaxHighlighter. There is a great instruction page here.

PowerTab for PowerShell

A friend of mine had mentioned to me this cool free PowerShell addon, which takes tabbing into a whole new level. You can download "PowerTab" from ThePowerShellGuy.com