doveman

I'm not really sure how to do that. All the guides I've looked at refer to Computer Management/Policies/Administrative Templates/System/Power Management but I don't have Policies when I open gpedit.msc and for me it's Computer Management/Administrative Templates/System/Power Management. Certainly under that everything is "Not Configured".

It may be some application (I don't have any screensavers installed) but I can't think what. That's why I tried monitoring for any registry changes to catch it but didn't manage to unfortunately. Whilst selecting a custom profile might be easier than adjusting the settings, it's not really a suitable solution for me as I'm fed up with the display turning off after 20 minutes when I'm watching video with Mediaportal, so I really need to find out what's causing this and fix it.

I set my power options to Balanced, Turn off the Display - Never, Sleep after 30 mins. Every now and then when I check them they've changed to Turn off the Display - 20 mins, Sleep - Never. I've got no idea what could be causing this and it's very annoying. I even ran a registry change monitor for a while in an attempt to catch whatever was doing it but it never happened whilst I was doing that. Has anyone got any ideas how to fix this or find out what's causing it? I'm running WIndows 7 x64 with Avira Antivir and Comodo Firewall.

Well I disabled the Noguiboot and Show Boot Info options in msconfig and now it takes just as long but just doesn't show anything for about 1.5mins until the Windows loading animation appears, followed not too long after by the Welcome screen.

Man this is doing my head in now. I've put my Phenom II X3 720 in the TA790GX A3+ board I bought and it still doesn't work. Does much the same as the TA790GXBE board did, the leds briefly flicker on when I first try to power it up with the onboard button or the case button (not on subsequent attempts until I power-cycle the PSU) and that's it. I've put the Athlon II X4 640 in the Gigabyte board and that works fine, so I don't know what's going on unless the TA790GXBE board died and the TA790GX A3+ board I bought is also faulty. EDIT: Although I'd already tested the PSU on my Gigabyte system with the PSU out of the case, I just tested again (with the X4 640 in the Gigabyte board) with it in the case, just on the off-chance that there was some weird problem making it not work properly when screwed into the case but it worked fine, so it's definitely not that. EDIT2: Tested the DDR3 in another board and that powers on fine. In fact, that board powers on OK without any RAM installed, so I don't think it can be a RAM problem preventing the Biostar boards powering up.

Ah OK, maybe that's it. I can't recall if I had the delay before and that's why I activated the logging (with the bootlog option in msconfig, rather than F8) but I'll try deactivating that and see if it speeds it up.

If you're asking whether xbootmgr's trace is showing the 1min26s delay that happens on every boot, no it doesn't. I could do but I'm not sure I see any point. The delay happens every boot and neither of the two traces I've done so far reflect it, so for whatever reason xbootmgr doesn't appear to notice it and I don't see why making it repeat x times would change that.

Well I've double-checked and whether I'm doing the trace or booting normally, there's a 1min26s delay between atipcie.sys loading and the Welcome screen appearing, so the bootDoneViaExplorer="32867" is nonsense

I wish it did Wierd the delay's not captured in the trace. I'll try and make another one as I didn't actually time it when making that one but rebooted and timed it then. The delay happens every time I boot though.

Well I got the replacement TA790GX A3+ board today and fitted the CPU and 4GB DDR3 my Dad had spare after I upgraded him for his birthday. Still doesn't work! Seeing as I've tested all the other components, either the CPU's dead or I've been sold a faulty motherboard but I don't think the latter's likely as the seller has 100% feedback. So I'll just have to strip my Gigabyte system (the worst part is taking the Thermalright SI-128 SE CPU heatsink off) and test the Phenom II X3 720 from that on this new board (and the old one for that matter). At least if the CPU is faulty it's got a lifetime warranty, so I'll just give my brother the Phenom II X3 720 and put the replacement Athlon II X4 640 in my Gigabyte system when I get it back.

Thanks for analysing it for me but that doesn't seem to explain the 1min22s delay between atipcie.sys loading and the GUI / Welcome screen appearing, which is what I'm bothered about.

Indeed it does. It's only 38MB now! http://www.mediafire.com/?dor41dw2kan981k

Hi MagicAndre, thanks for this guide. I'm having a problem where W7 is taking ages to boot to the GUI. I recently installed the ATI SB drivers and then my PC wouldn't boot anymore (BSOD) so I had to boot to Last Known Configuration which worked and has now become the default, with ControlSet001 marked as failed. I obviously haven't tried installing the ATI SB Drivers again as I don't want to mess it up again, so it's using the MS AHCI SATA driver at the moment. I've set the boot options, NoGUI and OS Boot Information and the last thing I see loading is atipcie.sys and then it doesn't seem to do anything for ages before the Welcome screen appears. Looking at the trace, PreSMSS takes 5.9s, SMSSInit 11s, WinlogonInit 5.7s, ExplorerInit 8.3s, PostExplorerPeriod 40s, TraceTail 84s. As the delay I'm concerned about is in the pre-GUI stages, I'm guessing the problems in the SMSSInit stage but it sure feels like longer than 11s. I'll go and time it to check. I also checked the start parameters of the AHCI/ATI drivers in the two ControlSets and this is what I found: ControlSet001 (Failed/BSOD): amdsata - 0 amdide - 3 atipcie - 0 msahci - 0 ControlSet002 (Current/Working Set): amdsata - 3 amdide - 3 atipcie - 0 msahci - 0 Can I upload the trace for you to look at? Will the summary_boot.xml be sufficient or do you need the 377MB .etl? EDIT: As I suspected, the delay is much longer than the trace suggests. From the boot.ini countdown finishing to the last driver in the list (atipcie.sys) being shown was 5s, then the GUI didn't appear for another 1min22s and it was about another 35s until everything finished loading.

Regarding the problem with XP locking up when copying files to the CF (I've been using Puppy Linux to do this now), it's peculiar as I can edit a file and save it and I defragged an 800MB IMG on the CF OK (had to use defraggler in XP for that as I couldn't find out how to defrag a file in Linux), which obviously both involve writing to the CF so I don't understand why copying files is a problem. I'm pretty sure I tried both in Portable XP (booted from the IMG as Filedisk) and a normal XP installation on the HDD but I'll have to double-check that but if it is both (which I think it is), it's obviously a general XP issue rather than something peculiar about Portable XP (which still contains all the essential parts of XP anyway). I don't really know why copying the 800MB IMG to an almost empty 15GB partition (there was one other 700MB IMG on there) results in the file being fragmented anyway. There seems to be a somewhat dismissive attitude to defragging in the Puppy Linux forums, so maybe it's not considered an issue in Linux and so it doesn't bother to try and make the file contiguous when copying but it's necessary for booting with grub4dos so I have to take care of it somehow. It would be a lot easier if it copied the file contiguously in the first place, rather than having to boot to XP to defrag it though, particularly as it's rather slow, no doubt due to the relatively slow write speeds of the CF card.

OK, I'll do that (after making a True Image backup of course). Yeah, my mistake. It seems the 760G chipset does have HD3000 onboard http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/chipsets/7-series-integrated/pages/amd-760g-chipset.aspx Anyway, I've bought a s/h TA790GX A3+ on ebay for £34 now, so it should be quite straightforward. I'll let you know when I've got it and tested.

Thanks but I just got him a 8GB Corsair Ballistix kit in the end.

Win7 Ultimate x32. I think I used the ATI 12.6 SB driver install but it might have been an earlier one, I can't recall. Not sure which driver it installed. The Asus has a ridiculously large NB heatsink which would probably clash with my CPU Heatsink though. The MSI doesn't have on-board graphics. Yeah, I always make sure there's adequate airflow.

No wonder we couldn't find the same sticks. When I swapped the RAM over, I saw that the old sticks are actually CL7 not CL6, so ebuyer's site misadvertised them.

Hmm, seems rather hard to find a AM3+ board with on-board graphics (there's a few mATX but I need a full ATX like the TA790GXBE). I've found a couple of refurbished TA790GX 128M and TA790GX A3+. I'll probably get the latter as the former doesn't have the 4+1 Phase VRM and 2 Phase Memory Power, which the latter (and the TA790GXBE) does and suggests better build and (hopefully) longer lasting to me.

That's the drivers you did add. I don't know, which drivers are installed at your machine. Primarily the mass storage drivers. Which mass storage drivers did you add in the past? Should be sufficient to delete relating *.sys files. Ah, you mean the AMD AHCI driver? Yeah, I did install that as part of the SB drivers (just that and the USB filter driver I think) so I'll set that to start=4. Thanks.

Yeah sure, Athlon II X4 640. Ah, good warning thanks. Which AMD drivers do you mean though (how are they listed in the registry)? Not with my Athlon II X4 640 or Phenom II X4 955. I'm not really into all this integrated nonsense (eggs in one basket) Besides, I'm sure the chip must get hotter if it's the CPU and GPU combined, which just makes it harder for me to cool it silently.

Actually I don't think this board even has a speaker/beeper so it can't beep but I tried it without the RAM and it didn't do anything different (I might have expected the LEDs to stay on or the fan to spin if it was the RAM stopping it booting). I've tested the RAM in my other PC and that's fine. I'm going to test the CPU in my Dad's PC as he's only got the stock heatsink so it will be a lot easier to swap them over than on my boards, which have massive heatsinks bolted to custom backplates and so will require removing the board from the case to remove the heatsink and swap over the CPU. Hopefully the CPU's fine in which case I'll just have to get another board. So I'm hoping if I get another ATI chipset board Windows 7 won't put up too much of a fight and will just install any required drivers. The ATI one's shouldn't need changing/reinstalling and that covers the AHCI driver which tends to be the major source of problems when changing boards I think. The onboard graphics will still be ATI and the onboard sound Realtek, so they'll probably be OK although I might need to reinstall the drivers for both if they're different chipsets. Are there any other things to be aware of or is there a procedure/guide for doing this or should it be fairly straightforward?

Thanks jaclaz, I used your screenshot to create a second partition and that's working fine for the XP Portable images. Nice to be able to finally unplug the noisy old HDD. I need to expand the img to loose files as for whatever reason, it's incredibly slow doing anything with the img running from CF (had the same problem when testing on my Gigabyte board, so it's nothing to do with the VL400). I think it must be write-related, as if I enable the EWF filter to block writing they work fine. Once all the drivers are installed my brother will be running them with the EWF filter enabled anyway, so I'll probably just get him to install the drivers and check everything's working with the img booted from his HDD and then I'll enable the EWF filter and copy the img to the CF for him.

Yeah, my mistake, forgot to change the 06 to 0E in the spreadsheet before copy and pasting I wasn't talking about a partition table entry when I said 11 (or 13) but about the number of bytes to be left untouched BEFORE the first partition entry. OK, it's not a "line" in the partition table but it was in my post (which is what I was referring to) 0E actually but yes, still rather "queer" Thanks for the image. I was going by your previous post but that was for a smaller partition At least it's not just me who has these stupid problems with CF cards then. Never mind, "we shall overcome"

OK, I finally got to test and we're finally getting somewhere. With the 500MB CHS partition and type 06, I just got the flashing cursor. After changing it to type 0E it booted to boot.ini and from there loaded grldr fine Then I booted into my Portable XP img (from the HDD) and tried to copy a file from my USB stick to the CF and Windows locked up completely, just like before when I hadn't formatted with a 16/63 geometry. I then rebooted into Portable XP again, hid the HDD partitions (D & E) with Disk Management and installed the EWF Filter and rebooted, to eliminate problems with writing to either the HDD or the img (not that it should have been doing either) causing the lockup. It still locked up when I tried to copy from the USB to the CF. I then rebooted into Thinstation (Linux) and was able to copy the files using that OK, so it seems it's just Windows that has a problem I did think this would be a problem, as at some point my brother will need to copy some files from his HDD to the CF but I guess I can just stick a small Linux distribution on the CF and he can boot into that to do the copying (unless of course you have any brilliant ideas on how to fix the problem but it's not really worth spending much time on). Then I changed the CF MBR from NT5 to G4D and rebooted and it boots fine straight into G4D and I can boot my Thinstation ISOs or vmlinuz from there no problem So now I want to try creating a second partition for the remaining space on the CF and try booting my Portable XP (as an IMG and as loose files) from that. What I meant by 11 is the bytes before the first partition (it's actually 13). The figures I used in my last post for the second partition are bogus anyway, as it's a 16GB card not 8GB and I'd just calculated to fill the 8,455,200,768 set on the PTtables tab. So taking what you've said, using the PT to MBR tab I came up with: 0E 80 0 1 1 1,023 15 63 63 1,032,129 528,450,048 Active BIGDOS 0C 00 1,023 0 1 1,023 15 63 1,032,192 30,195,648 15,460,171,776 Not Active WIN9532Lba 00 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Not Active unused 00 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Not Active unused 15,988,621,824 which seems to add up (30,195,648 + 1,032,129 + 63 = 31227840) and which in Hex is 80 01 01 00 06 0F FF FF 3F 00 00 00 C1 BF 0F 00 00 00 C1 FF 0C 0F FF FF 00 C0 0F 00 C0 BF CC 01 so I just need to paste the second line to the appropriate sectors on the CF with TinyHexer