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Lessons In Hardware / OS Troubleshooting
Esther Schindler writes "We like to imagine that every Microsoft OS installation will work just as well as the company promises. When things don't work out, identifying and remedying the case of failure can be time-consuming and frustrating. This lesson in how to determine why Windows 7 didn't install may help you troubleshoot a problem of your own, and save you from a Lost Weekend. Maybe you'll find this account useful all on its own. But the real key here is that the author is Ed Tittel — who's written over 100 books. If this hardware geek spends days solving a CPU-meets-Windows 7 problem, what chance do mere mortals have?"
He has issues with an "unsupported and unwarranted engineering sample CPU from Intel" with Windows 7... and Windows 7 is of course to blame according to the OP.... *roll eyes*
If crapware won't install on your computer, don't install the crapware. I'm sure there's plenty of other choices out there.
just rolls right on past the fact that, if what he was installing was -- oh, say -- a Linux distribution, he wouldn't have an opaque "I'm uncompressing files" thermometer, he'd have real progress status messages, with, y'know, *parameters* and stuff, and -- unlike me this morning with my boss's iPhone -- a hope of actually figuring out what's broken.
And what specific parameter in any Linux installation error message is likely to point towards the CPU being defective? Most of them would be generic hardware-has-shit-itself errors (DMA failures, null pointer exceptions, hash failures) that could mean any of the cpu/motherboard/ram/psu/hdd are defective. It's impossible, even in principle, for any installer to be able to pinpoint with specificity what hardware is fucked.
Just for lols, I wish you would get modded up (me too, of course :-P) so that the OP can install $DISTRO on that original setup and see what error we get and whether it exactly pinpoints the cpu or whether it spits out a generic hardware error.
If this hardware geek spends days solving a CPU-meets-Windows 7 problem, what chance do mere mortals have?"
You need first to show me a "mere mortal" who has, and uses, an engineering sample CPU. There is a very good reason why -ES parts are marked as such - because they have bugs. And those bugs will be a problem sooner or later.
So the whole sob story can be reduced to this. The guy runs software on a prototype hardware, and the software crashes. In other breaking news, dog bites man.
Even more reason why they should provide useful status messages: the odds are *much* higher than might be intuitively obvious that the person doing the install can make use of them.
I'm likewise unimpressed with the *order* in which he swapped components; you generally do it in descending order of "likely to be causing this problem".
Shame his installer didn't have a copy of Memtest+ on it, too, ain't it?
This is the reason I will not buy a "Enthusiast" or a "Entry-Level" piece of hardware. With the former it's always the overpriced overclocking features that are wonky, and with the latter, it's the cheap hardware. Second-generation midrange stuff (with FreeBSD-compatible hardware (i.e. open source drivers available), even if it will only run Windows) has always been the best.
Exactly. He swapped every piece of hardware - saving the engineering sample CPU as the last thing he swapped. The system ran fine under Win 7 32 bit. You have to assume that hardware still works fine and that the problem was 64bit specific - which points to the CPU. Granted Intel said it should support 64bit, but it was an engineering sample.
He replaced the case, power supply, the video card, the mother board, the hard drives, and the cables first??
I've installed Windows 7 on my home PC. Played some games on it. I'm impressed. It's at least as stable as XP, and not noticeably slower.
I still strut around feeling good about using Linux. You don't have to hate one to like the other you know. I wouldn't use Windows every day by choice, only because the command line utilities on Linux are so much more convenient. I like the GUI better too, real virtual desktops, windowshading, the selection buffer, all great. And the repositories are great too.
So yeah, not everyone who likes linux is prejudiced against Microsoft.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
More evidence he's a "script-kiddy": He uses Microsoft's "excellent" Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool, instead of simply using diskpart to create a partition on the stick and copying the files over from the ISO.
Yeah, right. He writes books on Windows 7, but he shouldn't try the official way of installing from USB. Because that would mean that he had used the tools that he wanted to write about. Shame on him!
I didn't read the article, but judging by the summary, I think it is more about troubleshooting than assigning blame.
Dear self important guy who isn't near as good at computers as he thinks he is:
This may surprise you to learn, but all those defaults out these, all those specified values, all that kind of stuff, that isn't just arbitrary. See many smart engineers and other folks worked on designing and creating all the hardware for your computer. A lot of extremely complex stuff went in to it, modern computers are quite a marvel of engineering. As such, they discovered that certain tolerances, certain ranges work well. Outside of that, there can be problems. Thus the defaults because, well, default. They set them so that things are very likely to work in all cases.
As with most things, they aren't absolutes. They aren't things you can never exceed. In various circumstances you can go outside those normal ranges, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. However, problems can potentially result. What problems those are and when they happen is not predictable. A system can appear stable but only crash on one app, or it can be stable for awhile then develop an instability.
Regardless, the first step to troubleshooting should be to USE THE FUCKING DEFAULTS, you idiot!
Seriously, I'm supposed to take someone seriously who is running overclocked settings of some sort or another (RAM timings, FSB, etc) and an engineering sample CPU and has problems? Ummm, duh. That right there is asking for problems. When you OC, you go in to it knowing you may have some difficulties. You understand this is the tradeoff for something that runs faster than spec. If you start having problems, the first step is to back off the OCing and see if that fixes it.
This is true even of OC'd systems that were fine but aren't now. I had a Celeron 300 that I OC'd to 450 back in the day and it worked well for about a year, then started to burn out. System started crashing randomly, and so on.
To me, it sounds like he's being whiny because he didn't bother to troubleshoot his setup properly. Come talk to me when you've got a retail CPU running at stock spec and FSB, RAM running per it's JEDEC spec at standard voltage and so on. Oh, what's that? You did that and it stopped having problems? Well there you go then. Don't bitch that your i7 920 "should" run at 3.8GHz. I don't care if others have done it, doesn't mean it'll work in your case. If it does, wonderful. It if doesn't well tough shit. Don't get mad at the software. It has pretty much no way to know if the CPU is going crazy as it runs on the CPU. About the only way software can indicate a CPU problem is by inducing a problem and thus a crash.
The guy does 400+ successful installs, then runs into a decidedly obscure hardware problem, and people flame him? And Windows 7?
Yee Gods. Get a life folks. I read this as a success story, both for the author and for Microsoft.
Three Squirrels
Nowhere in the original article did I get the sense that the author was blaming Windows for his issues. In fact, he starts out by stating that he's installed Windows 7 hundreds of times without a single incident, but this was a "problem PC". So, how did this turn into an anti-Windows rant? Oh, right, it's Slashdot...
who's written over 100 books
Michael Behe's written dozens of books trying to debunk evolution. It does not make him an expert in evolution. He installs Windows, copies down what he sees on the screen and writes it down. That does NOT translate into "he knows what he's doing". I'm not saying he's not an expert, just that it's not a valid qualification.
If this hardware geek spends days solving a CPU-meets-Windows 7 problem, what chance do mere mortals have?"
They wouldn't be installing an OS. Very few non-geeks do so. They buy a computer from a vendor like Dell, it comes with an OS. When it's time to upgrade, they buy a new PC and give the old one to their kids or grandparents. They also, as has been stated numerous times in the comments, wouldn't be installing on machines that had an engineering sample for a CPU. Actually, this debunks the claim that because he's written books, he's an expert. He knew he had a machine with an unsupported processor in it and still replaced everything in the machine first. Um....duh!
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
Different tasks, different skills. If you can write good guides and enjoy doing it, why should you want any more? Having in-depth knowledge doesn't make you a good teacher.
How many people had the same impression I had: "Why, this sounds exactly like one of the 'Chaos Manor' columns Jerry Pournelle used to write in BYTE!"
All it needs is a few of Jerry Pournelle's favorite stock phrases. "The disk trundled for a while..." "I tried swapping out the hard disk, but no joy..." "I called up Bill Godbout..."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When the book is out, someone should write a review on Amazon to tell potential readers the author's capability of running windows on properly.
So after 400 (presumably) successful installations he has a hardware failure that causes problems. Exactly what would you say that he couldn't do in your review on Amazon? That he couldn't get Windows installed? Surely not, because he did end up getting it installed after replacing the faulty part.
Sure, he replaced all the other parts of the system before he replaced the CPU, but he already had those other parts on hand. He had to end up buying the new CPU. Surely you would try the stuff that you could do for free before shelling out money on new equipment.
Windows 7 will install perfectly well without a network connection. (Just to make sure, I postponed sending this until my test VM, sans network interface, had completed installing.)
My guess would be either you were using badly OEM'd install media (a practice I do wish MS would prohibit) or you don't know how to manually install device drivers.
Just make sure you have the directional indicators pointed the right way.
What were those 100 books on? Think about that - how many years has be been writing books. Say it's been 10 years. 10 books a year? A book every 5.2 weeks? WTF
Here's what I posted as a reply to this "expert's" article. It's now awaiting admin approval to appear as a comment. We'll see if it makes it.
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While reading, I was thinking this was a well-written detective story. Then I got to the end and found out it's a story about a massive waste of time because you didn't follow standard procedures.
Here's how to save a few days next time: go to the motherboard manufacturer's website, get the list of supported CPUs for the motherboard you're trying to install. Then download and install the BIOS that supports that CPU. It really is that simple.
Asus is particularly good at providing a CPU support list for their motherboards. It took me entire minutes to find the lists for the P5Q3 and P5E3 Deluxe (not P5E3 Pro, as you wrote). The QX9650 is listed for both motherboards -- and in both cases, it is supported only as of a recent BIOS revision.
So all you had to do was download and install BIOS version 0204 or later for the first motherboard, the P5Q3, and I bet Win 7 would have installed correctly the first time.
As for the motherboard automatically making BIOS changes to match the fast DIMMs you installed, Asus motherboards do NOT do this by default. You must have left the BIOS in some sort of overclocker's mode.
Next time, look up and download the BIOS that supports the CPU you're trying to use. After installing it, use the BIOS setting that restores all other BIOS settings to their defaults. Then install the OS. THEN and only then, can you start tweaking BIOS settings.
Once again, the article was well written. But it's also an inadvertent confession.
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One of the reasons I use Linux is that, currently, it is much more secure than Windows, given my personal use scenario.
Yes, if I were a specialist in securing Windows that might not be the case, but I'm not. Yes, if equivalent amount of effort was invested to break the security of casual users of Linux compared to that invested in breaking Windows, again, Linux might not be any more secure than Windows (well, with Linux, there are distros where I can always boot off of USB and then not save any changes, so until Microsoft offers me the same functionality there's little chance that I could use it in as secure a fashion as I can use Linux).
Running Linux in a VM under Windows just wouldn't "cut it" for me. Sorry.
When you crank out a lot of stuff, it is extremely hard to make all of that stuff be high quality. Quality usually takes time, it takes research, it takes refinement. It is possible, in some rare cases, to have someone that produces a vast quantity of work, all of which is top quality. However it is far more common to see someone produce a vast amount of mediocre to bad quality work.
As an example: Dr. Mark Russinovich has written a grand total of three technical books to date. So, clearly a man who doesn't know what he's talking about right? Wrong. Those three books are "Inside Microsoft Windows 2000," "Windows Internals Fourth Edition," and "Windows Internals Fifth Edition." He has, literally, written the book (along with David Solomon) on the recent versions of Windows, published by MS themselves. These are extremely accurate, comprehensive, technical documents of Windows down to its very fundamental levels. He also has written a suite of tools, the Sysinternals tools, so good that MS bought them, and hired him on as a technical fellow.
So while he's produced only three books, they are all of the highest quality of technical information. There haven't been more because he hasn't had the time to write hundreds of books, nor the need to issue revisions to correct problems with the ones he has (each new edition covers a new version of Windows).
Thus when I hear someone talk about how good they are because of the quantity of they works, I am skeptical. The only way you get a vast quantity of high quality work is either laboring an entire lifetime (and even then often not), being a prodigy, or both.
INstall linux and run Windows in a VM. When your windows install gets infected/hosed with a virus/malware/whatever it could well mess up your linux VM machine and make it inrecoverable but if you install Windows in a VM and run on top of linux the worst that can happen is the VM gets hosed.
No thank you. 95% of my time is spent in linux. It runs my RAID array, my torrents, I do a lot of emulation on it. A VM just isn't going to cut it. Maybe once a week or so I'll reboot for some modern 3d gaming, and that really isn't that inconvenient.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!