Rom's Rants

Free-Roaming Hostility From A QA/Developer Perspective.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

WORKAROUND: Visual Studio 2008 Fails To Install

Symptoms:
You are running as a limited user on Windows Vista and when you run Visual Studio 2008's installer and approve the UAC prompt, setup either hangs during the .NET Framework 3.5 installation or the installation hangs during setup.

Workaround:
Reboot your machine.
Log in as an administrator.
Install the .NET Framework 3.5 installer by itself.
Reboot your machine.
Log in as your normal user.
Install Visual Studio 2008 as normal.

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posted by Michael Russell at 11/21/2007 05:05:00 PM | 0 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Friday, November 16, 2007

FIX: Vista Freezes For 10-15 Seconds Every 10-15 Minutes

Symptoms:
While using Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer or anything that accesses the disk drive on a regular basis, the Windows UI seems to freeze. If Process Explorer is open, you'll notice that Hardware Interrupts are pegged. You can still move your mouse cursor, and at the end of the 10-15 seconds any UI actions that you had started will happen, seemingly all at once.

Hardware:
Motherboard with an Intel chipset with integrated RAID support and SATA drives, like most recent Dell Dimension motherboards, but you are not using RAID.

Cause:
RAID is enabled on the motherboard. As a result, the RAID version of the chipset driver is loaded.

Solution:
(NOTE: This solution involves changing settings in your BIOS. Modifying these settings if you do not know what you are doing could result in your system not being able to boot up. Please do a full backup of your machine prior to attempting this fix.)
Reboot your machine.
Go into the BIOS settings and look for the RAID settings.
Disable them. (On a Dell Dimension, change the motherboard settings from "RAID Autodetect/ACHI" to "SATA/PATA".)
Save the modified BIOS settings.
Boot into Vista.
Go into any profile; new drivers will start installing that require another reboot.
Reboot when prompted.

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posted by Michael Russell at 11/16/2007 09:03:00 AM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Find the FUD

As many of you know, I'm a regular over at Shacknews. That said, there's been a lot of FUD lately surrounding Vista going on over in the posts.

Let's take this post for example.

The last post in the thread as of this writing is #612, so let's find some FUD, shall we?

1. Aero/WDM framerate is horrible (#55). It isn't that it's terrible, it's that it doesn't need to update the screen anymore than it currently is.

You can verify this yourself if you have FRAPS installed. It's easiest to reproduce this if you don't have anything animating on your desktop. To reproduce this, launch FRAPS, then launch any D3D application, then exit back to the desktop with the framerate monitor enabled. Notice that if you do nothing (don't move the mouse, don't update any windows, etc.), your displayed framerate drops to nothing. However, if you do a lot (move windows rapidly, have a banner ad on a page, etc.), the framerate increases to match.

Vista is only updating what it needs to. In other words, Aero/WDM is acting intelligently.

2. Vista 32-bit only supports 2Gb of memory (#545). This one is partially true. Vista 32-bit processes can only support up to 2Gb of memory (that is, each process has its own individual 2Gb address space), but Vista 32-bit can support more than 2Gb of memory. I've got 3Gb now, and Windows Vista is detecting and using it. That said, I'm guilty of a little FUD here. I thought Vista maxed out at 4Gb, but further reading makes it look the home versions max between 8Gb and 16Gb, while Business and Ultimate can support whatever the motherboard supports.

3. Vista uses a lot more memory than previous versions of Windows (#425). Another partial truth. Vista does use more memory, but only for SuperFetch. If actual physical memory is needed by a process, Windows reclaims it from SuperFetch. If you compare actual task memory used between Windows Vista with Aero and Windows XP, you'll see that Vista is using a bit more memory by default (it seems to be about 105Mb for me), but since 70Mb of that is for WDM, I'm not that worried.

I'm sure the thread has kept going...can you find more FUD?

I don't mean to pick on the Shack. I just want to remind people that Vista is a completely different OS than Windows XP. It's the equivalent of opening the hood of your car, yanking out the plug-3 engine and swapping it out for a 4-cylinder hybrid motor.

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posted by Michael Russell at 2/11/2007 07:34:00 PM | 3 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Monday, January 29, 2007

Anti-Virus and Vista

At home, I'm now using Windows Vista Business on my primary rig. I'm also using AVG Anti-Virus.

I'm getting a weird issue when I'm browsing using IE7, where the entire shell (except for the mouse pointer) will become unresponsive for one to two seconds while I'm visiting a page with either a lot of HTML or a lot of images, and I'm thinking it might be AVG that's causing it...

Has anyone else encountered these pauses, and if so, have you found a workaround/solution?

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posted by Michael Russell at 1/29/2007 04:29:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Sunday, September 03, 2006

[SiN] Vista and SiN

(Note: All of the information here is accurate as of Vista build 5536 [Pre-RC1]. This information may change in later builds.)

(Update: For updated information, go to VistaGameDoctor.com. You'll need three seperate articles: Steam, SiN (Steam release) and SiN Episodes: Emergence.)

Here is the compatibility information that you are going to need to get "SiN" and "SiN Episodes: Emergence" working in Vista.

Steam: In a default configuration, Steam does not work on Windows Vista. In order to get Steam to work in Vista, you must right-click on your desktop shortcut for Steam and select "Run as administrator," even if you are running in an administrator-level account. If you do not, Steam will either error out after the next Steam update, or will fail to update your GCF's when a patch is released.

If you do elevate it to administrator privledges, you will not be able to close Steam by right-clicking on the tray icon and picking "Exit." After doing that, you will have to open Task Manager, list all tasks for all processes, and end-task Steam.exe manually.

Clarification: Steam will work fine until either the Steam client is updated, or you restart Steam to get an update to a game. At that point, you'll encounter issues due to the way that Vista handles file system security for the Program Files folder.

SiN Episodes: Once Steam is working in Vista, "SiN Episodes: Emergence" works fine using the built-in drivers for nVidia and ATI. In other words, as long as you have a DX9.0c-level card, you should be fine.

SiN: At the moment, "SiN" will not work in Vista without a driver update. Vista only ships with installed support for OpenGL v1.1 (driver: Microsoft Corporation GDI Generic version 1.1.0). You will have to update to the latest Vista drivers for your video card in order to play "SiN" either from the original disc or from Steam.

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posted by Michael Russell at 9/03/2006 12:58:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

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