Tech-No-Babble

Slow to show Windows 7 desktop with gigabyte board

Matthew Kleinwaks — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:02:00 GMT

I have a custom built PC using a gigabyte system board, and I recently upgraded my SSD from an Intel SATA2, to an OCZ Vertex3 SATA3. Since the upgrade everything is fine except my Windows login seemed to take forever. The machine would boot quickly, but I could count 17-18 rotations of the wait cursor between "welcome" and my usable desktop. Once at the desktop, again everything is nice and fast.

I was quick to blame the less than spectacular Marvell controller, since it was the SATA3 controller and I was forced to use it over the Intel ICH controller. It just seemed odd regardless, considering this one place was the only place I noticed a delay.

However while upgrading one of my customers machines, I ran into the same issue, this time on an Intel SATA3 controller and Intel SSD drive.

To get the solution, since anyone that is reading this most likely is having this problem, it was simple. You uninstall the Smart6 software from Gigabyte. For whatever reason, this software causes this delay. It may be that it is loading and interfacing with the systemboard (even though it does not have a startup entry you can disable). It likely loads as some lower level driver and it just takes too damn long. Maybe on a slow machine one would not notice it anyway, but on my fast i7 rig, this is not acceptable. It occured to me when I did my SSD upgrade, I grabbed the latest BIOS and also downloaded Smart6 and installed it at the time. So it was just because of the timing, that I thought it must be related to my drive swap. The software was installed on my customers machine while I was installing items off the CD that came with the board.

So with Smart6 uninstalled, I don't even see "welcome" displayed, it is a nearly instant transition from my password to my desktop. All is well again.

Windows Home Server - Slow File Copy

Matthew Kleinwaks — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:21:00 GMT

Tonight when I was trying to copy some movie files to my Windows Home Server (V1), I was getting horribly slow speeds and any file over a few gigs in size would eventually time out (if I let it hang that long doing nothing). Normally my speeds are very good for transfer because both machine use gigabit cards and the switch is as well.

I reset my router and switch, and rebooted both machines but the problem persisted.

Ultimately I was able to resolve the issue pretty easily.

Remote desktop into the WHS machine
Open the Device Manager from the system menu in the control panel
Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Open the properties for the Primary IDE Channel
Under advanced Settings, make sure you don't see PIO mode as the Current Transfer Mode for either device. If it does have PIO mode, then likely your problem is the same as mine. To fix it, close out of the properties screen and right click on Primary IDE Channel and select "uninstall". Once that has finished, reboot your server and you should be back in business. Also note that you should check the Secondary IDE Channel as well. It really all depends on what channels your drives are hooked up to.

I spent a while messing around before I figured this out, so hopefully it will help someone else.

DVDID XML files and how to get them

Matthew Kleinwaks — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:43:00 GMT

About a month or so ago, I started ripping my DVD collection to my WHS in an effort to use Media Center via XBOX 360 to play my movies. I found a great site called DVDXML.com (I am sure some of you are familiar with it) to get the XML files for these rips, so that media center would properly go out to the web and grab the cover art and movie data.

I ripped all my movies to MPG files (which works with Media Center/Xbox 360 in Windows 7) and was happy to find they work just as well as VOB files when it comes to utilizing cover art and the dvdid data. (even DIVX avi files work)

I spoke to Tim who runs DVDXML.com and told him I would be interested in writing a Windows client to simplify the process of getting these files for bigger collections.

I have created a Windows client app that automates the process of getting all the DVDID xml files for your movie collection.

The normal process of getting the DVDID.xml files from DVDXML.com goes something like this:

Login on website
Search for movie title
Look through results to find correct match, select match
Click button to download DVDID.XML file from website
Select directory where DVDID.XML file should go

So as you can image, if you have a big collection, that could be a pretty painful process. Tim over at DVDXML.com had created an XML api that could be used to gain access to his database of DVDID information. He currently charges $20 for a license to the API. My application uses this API to automate the above process down to this:

Run DVDXML.com client app
Select root folder where all movie rips are contained
Click Run Query button
All results for all movies are brought back instantly. You go through the list and click on the match, and the DVDID.XML file and optionally the cover art are saved to the correct folder automatically.

There are also some other features, like a directory creation wizard, for those of you who might have a folder with a bunch of movie files sitting in it (media center needs a folder structure to work properly with DVDID.xml files). As well as the ability to do manual queries, requires, consolidation of multiple DVDID.xml files if present for a single movie, etc..

Oh, and of course the best part, is that this application is written in Visual Basic.NET (using .NET 3.5 SP1).

You can download the application from the link below (keep in mind you do need an API license from DVDXML.com)

DVDXML.com Windows Client Download Page

Here are a few screenshots: