Windows x64 problems & solutions

Yesterday I’ve installed Windows x64, with latest drivers and yada yada yada. Here are a few problems I ran into, with their solution. Forgive me for the “keywords” section in each problem, but I’ve found this infos hard to find on the internet and a little search engine tricky trick could do the job.

Warning : the tips below may not work for everyone, may destroy your preciousssss hard drives with all their data, may set your house on fire and may be offensive to sensible people. Seriously, try them (especially the Promise one) only if you have a backup copy etc etc etc.

Windows x64 crash (hang) when playing movies
Keywords : Windows x64 K8T800Pro nVidia VIA Asus A8V Deluxe AGP movies crash hang.

Whatever codec you chose, whatever movie you have it’ll crash badly on VIA K8T800 Pro chipsets based motherboards with an nVidia AGP graphic card (mine is a 6600GT/AGP). Solution : install Via Hyperion drivers. Ok it should always be done, but it’s easy to forget since no device is missing drivers in device manager, and I usually don’t install motherboard drivers if not absolutely needed.

Intellipoint x64 drivers
Keywords : Microsoft mouse Intellipoint x64 Intellimouse

There is no Intellipoint for Windows x64 (this tells how much M$ really cares about x64 : zero). However you can find a good replacement here : http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

USB Multimedia card reader disappears after installing SCSI/RAID driver
Keywords : MMC Compact Flash 6-in-1 x64 missing disappear

Probably you just have to un-plug and plug again the adapter. If you have an internal adapter this is not very handy however. Locate the “Unknown Device” in Device Manager; if you have it, toggle “View->Devices by connection” and locate it again. Delete the USB controller it’s attached to. Magically it should redetect all the devices and it should work ;)

Promise 378 / TX2 not working in SATA mode
Keyword : Promise 378 20378 SATA RAID x64

Promise 378 controller doesn’t work in x64 in SATA mode, you should configure it in RAID mode. Since you probably have IDE / SATA drives attached to it, you should create Stripe arrays of 1 drive only. When it says “Y - Create and initialize , N - Create only”, press N or you’ll lose all your data.
Defects of this workaround : SuSE Linux 10 spits out warnings if you have the 378 configured in IDE/SATA mode. Probably, since you’re not using RAID features really, it will work anyway, but I don’t want to try risking losing my data, so you’re warned ;)

November 7, 2005 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off 

Sony->DRM->Rootkit. Uh. Oh.

There is an incredibly interesting article on some Sony DRM protection on Audio CDs at Mark Russinovich’s Blog.

To resume. If you buy the Van Zant Brothers’ last CD (of Lynyrd Skynyrd fame) and you use it on your computer, a DRM enforcing software will be installed on your PC. The problem is that the software uses techniques common to rootkits, spyware, viruses and so on, to hide itself and it quickly becomes uninstallable unless you do a complex procedure. The DRM software will use (waste) some processor usage (2% on Mark’s PC) to scan the executables you run. Also, if you try to remove the DRM software, your CD drive will disappear from My Computer.

This is not only an insult to the regular customer (note : if you bought the song online or illegally downloaded them you will not have any problem. Only regular customers are actually damaged by this protection schemes.) This has all the aspect of something illegal : it’s an attack of personal privacy and theft of computing resources.

I still can’t believe the recording industries are so blind. Do they really think they will end piracy by infecting computers of regular customers with spyware ?! Suggestion : downloading these songs from eMule (albeit illegal) will not infect your computer with that shit. Buying them from iTunes is even legal, and again, no shit. With both methods you will be able to burn them on a CD-R and listen on a regular car audio system. Or copy it on your iPod or other portable player. Or use it on a different operative system. Give me a reason to buy the CD.

And please don’t do these things on Van Zant’s CDs :(

November 3, 2005 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment