Software to Back Up Drivers on a PC

Ever come across the odd system where it seems no matter how hard you try, you can’t find the drivers for the system? Sometimes, it’s due to the fact the hardware is too old or sometimes the company that manufactured the item is no longer in business. Although websites like driverguide.com are extremely helpful sometimes it can be a pain to find the correct driver. A good piece of free software that can help you save time is DriverMax by Innovative Solutions. Although billed as ‘new tool that allows you to download the latest driver updates for your computer’, in my opinion, the best feature of this program is that you can backup drivers currently in a system. Note that this software only backs up drivers currently on a system and does not help search out drivers.

Click the link below to download DriverMax:

http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/

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EVGA 780i SLI Reboot Issues with Vista

Another FYI post. This time specifically for those of you that have EVGA 780i SLI motherboards and are experiencing issues with the system locking up at the Vista logo after a reboot. EVGA has issued a BIOS (P6) as of last Thursday to address the issue.

http://www.evga.com/support/drivers/

Select ‘Mainboards’ in the first column, then ‘BIOS Updates’ in the second column, and then ‘NF78 – Intel 780i SLI’.

Why Defrag Your Hard Drive?

Over time, your computer’s hard drive becomes fragmented from actions such as adding and deleting files and programs. As it becomes fragmented, the computer becomes slower accessing files and programs and it results in a slower computer.

Think of your computer’s hard drive as a bookcase full of books. At first, all the books are neatly placed in order either by category or alphabetically.  As you take books out to read them, add new books, and throw some out, inevitably some books get placed back in the wrong place and gaps appear where books have been thrown out. As this occurs finding a book becomes more difficult and takes more time to find. The same thing occurs to the hard drive on your PC. To make it easier and faster to find the books, it’s important to reorganize the books on your bookshelf once in a while. On a computer, this process is known as defragmenting or ‘defragging’ for short.

All recent versions of Windows have come with their own built in defragmenting utility but they can be very slow and sometimes not as intuitive. It’s still good to run the Windows version if you are willing to leave the system on for a while but it tends to feel like a chore to get it to run. As such, I’d like to introduce a freeware alternative to use on a more frequent basis. The program is called ‘Disk Defrag’ and is by a company called Auslogics. The program is very simple to use, works quite quickly, and best of all, free. So let me show you just how simple it is to use the program. You’ll need to first download the program from the link below:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download

If you need help installing the program, just click back on the link above and read on further down the page.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the program, click on the program icon to get it running. You should be presented with the screen below:

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Speed Up the Startup of Windows XP and Vista

As time has passed, many of you have noticed that your PC has gradually become slower and slower starting up. We’ll try to help speed things up using the System Configuration Utility to remove unnecessary and unwanted startup items.

1. Click ‘start’ then ‘run’ to open the ‘Run’ dialog box and type ‘msconfig’ just like the example below. Click ‘OK’

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Using Event Viewer to Help Troubleshoot Windows XP and Vista

One of the often overlooked methods for troubleshooting a system running XP or Vista is Event Viewer. Event Viewer is a component included with these operating systems and, as the name suggests, allows you to view the event logs on your machine. So let’s get to work on seeing if we can find out some more information in regards to your system troubles.

For Windows XP
1. Click ‘Start’, and then ‘Control Panel’. Click ‘Performance and Maintenance’, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click ‘Computer Management’.
2. In the leftmost column, click the ‘+’ sign beside Event Viewer.
3. You should see ‘Application’, ‘Security’, and ‘System’ should appear below ‘Event Viewer’
4. Click ‘Application’ and look to the right hand column. Look down the list for white ‘X’s’ in red circles with the word ‘Error’ beside it.
5. An ‘Event Properties’ window should open with details as to the error.
6. Input the appropriate information into the ‘Events and Error Message Center’. The link to it is here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/ee_advanced.aspx
7. Repeat the process for ‘Security’ and ‘System’

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Using Windows Vista – Help Yourself

Most of you coming to this site are here in hopes of obtaining an answer to a problem with your system. Sometimes the answer may already be on your system. For Windows users, it’s just a matter of accessing the ‘Help and Support’ on your ‘start’ menu. The new and improved Vista help menu offers a new feature, which shows up in some responses to your questions, called ‘Guided Help’. ‘Guided Help’ can be easily identified by the blue compass and presents two visual methods that may help you with your situation

Just click on the straightforward options and watch it work. It works either automatically while you sit back and watch or works like one of those late night infomercials hawking educational software where the tutoring CD walks you step-by-step and waits for you to complete the step. A Youtube video posted by czh88 provides a visual example of the feature at work.

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You receive an error “STOP 0×0000000A” installing Windows Vista or “STOP 0×0000007e” when rebooting a machine installed with Windows Vista

When you go to install Vista, you get a “STOP 0×0000000A”. This occurs if the following conditions are true:
- You have more than 3 GB of RAM in your system
- The computer uses a storage system that is running the Storport miniport driver.
- The computer uses a controller that uses 32-bit direct memory access (DMA).
- You have a Vista DVD which does not have SP1

Furthermore, when rebooting the system get a “STOP 0×0000007e” error after installing the nVidia or ATi Catalyst driver for your video card.

The way to fix this problem is to remove any extra RAM from the system to get you to 3GB or less of RAM. After doing so, complete the installation of Vista and install the Windows Vista hotfix from the link below:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777/en-us

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Why Does Windows XP / Vista show less than the 4GB (or more) of memory I have installed on my system?

So you just plugged in that brand new system with 4GB+ of memory or installed some more RAM in your current system. You go to check your System Information (Vista) or System Properties (XP) and it only reports 2.2 to 3.3 GB of memory. Unfortunately that’s normal if you’re running a 32 bit version of Windows Vista or XP.

32 bit means 2 to the power of 32 which is commonly denoted as 2^32. For those of you that were not very good at math in school, it looks like this:

2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2 = 4294967296 bytes
4294967296 bytes / 1024 bytes/1 kilobytes = 4194304 kilobytes (kB)
4194304 kB / 1024 kB/1 MB = 4096 MB
4096 MB / 1024 MB/1 GB = 4 GB

Therefore a 32 bit OS can only support up to 4GB of RAM.

Some of you thought you had done your homework when you read up that Windows Vista/XP 32 bit supports up to 4GB of RAM. Unfortunately, Windows Vista and XP reserve higher memory addresses for other devices in your computer. An example in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Article 929605 explains it well:

”if you have a video card that has 256 MB of onboard memory, that memory must be mapped within the first 4 GB of address space. If 4 GB of system memory is already installed, part of that address space must be reserved by the graphics memory mapping. Graphics memory mapping overwrites a part of the system memory. These conditions reduce the total amount of system memory that is available to the operating system.”

Further reading on the 4 GB RAM limitation of 32 bit Vista:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

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How to Share the Root of a Drive Under Vista

Hardware Canucks has a great article on How to Share the Root of a Drive Under Vista.

Quote:

Well one of the biggest challenges I’ve had with Vista has been file sharing related. I’m on a secure (read: wireless w/ lead paint in the walls) home network, so when I share a folder, I just want everyone to be able to access it from any PC in the house. It’s that simple, or so it seems.

Vista makes sharing folders a pain. When you click share on a normal folder (right click, then “share”), you have to add the “Everyone” permission to that folder in order for anyone to be able to access it. I wonder why Vista would assume that when you share a folder you don’t want anyone to be able to access it except yourself…. from the machine on which it’s shared….. I’ve actually tried created an account with identical sign-in credentials to the Vista machine and it will not allow it to access files that have my own name as the “Owner” with full permissions….

Anyway, after some struggling I figured out how to share folders. Here’s problem #2 though. I use a full drive as my “My Documents” folder. Basically it’s a RAID-1 with anything that I could possibly value stored on it. That way I don’t have to waste space on my RAID with my Vista install/programs etc by mirroring my main drive and storing everything in default directories. So that means in order to share all of my “My Documents” stuff over the network (music, movies, etc), I need to share the root of a drive.

Vista will allow the permissions to be set, even though you have to do it manually by right clicking, then hitting “share”, and manually setting the permissions to everyone, but then when you try to access it from a remote computer, it will say “access is denied”. So I struggled with this for a bit, and finally I decided to dig deeper. Here’s how to share the root of a drive under Vista:

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How to Slim Down Vista with vLite

I found an excellent tool for sliming down Vista. As you know, it is somewhat bloated and is not the snappiest OS Microsoft has put out. vLite really impressed me and got Vista running at almost XP speeds on my computer.

From Authors site:

vLite is a tool for customizing the Windows Vista installation before actually installing it.

Main features are:

* hotfix, language pack and driver integration
* component removal
* unattended setup
* tweaks
* split/merge Vista installation CDs
* create ISO and burn bootable CD/DVD

Windows Vista from Microsoft takes a lot of resources, we all know that. vLite provides you with an easy removal of the unwanted components in order to make Vista run faster and to your liking.

This tool doesn’t use any kind of hacking, all files and registry entries are protected as they would be if you install the unedited version only with the changes you select.

It configures the installation directly before the installation, meaning you’ll have to remake the ISO and reinstall it. This method is much cleaner, not to mention easier and more logical than doing it after installation on every reinstall.

I’ve also added a vLite Video Guide by Grundtrin.

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ASIN: B0013O77GM