- FIX: Solving ATI Black Screen Problems in Vista
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Posted by oVan on Friday, August 10, 2007 | PermaLink | 5 commentsI've mentioned in my previous post about remotely restarting Vista with RDP that my switch from the finally fully working but oh so slow nVidia Quadro FX 550 card to the very fast (Aero Graphics: 5.9, Gaming Graphics: 5.5) and affordable XpertVision ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Super didn't work out because of the many sleep/hibernate problems in Vista.
To explain the situation a bit more, here's what my problems (and some early solutions) looked like.- The system (sometimes) boots normally and the ATI card performs fast and stable.
- Putting Vista into Sleep mode or Hibernation mode always works.
- Shutting down Windows Vista also always works.
- Resuming from Sleep or Hibernation, or powering up sometimes works, but other times this can lead to this:
- Boot or resume works but with black screen syndrome: Windows is running but the ATI card appears not present and thus you get no picture whatsoever. You can however log in remotely using Remote Desktop Client.
- Boot or resume fails during the BIOS POST routine, and after some 30 seconds you get two beeps indicating your machine is tired of waiting on the video card to come alive.
In the first case, it is enough to shutdown your pc remotely, and then retry the whole routine.
In the second case, it only helped (in my case) to eithe remove and reinsert the ATI card, or to remove the power while your pc is hanging in the BIOS routine. Both solutions reset the video card and should get you going. - Note that this happens with the ATI Catalyst 7.7 drivers, as well as with the beta version (RC3) of Catalyst 7.8.
However, while checking the very limited ATI/AMD support site, I decided to try some of the few solutions they had for similar but not identical problems.
To my big surprise, one of them actually worked... I've been able to put my workstation to Sleep, Shutdown, Restart for several times and not once did it fail.
Here's the solution:- Open the Start menu and type services.msc, then press Enter:
- You'll now see the list of services. Select the ATI External Event Utility service, then press Enter:
- This brings up the properties window. You'll notice that the service is started but that you can't stop it.
- Change the Startup Type dropdown list from Automatic into Manual.
- Close this window by pressing the OK button, then reboot your machine (with a proper restart via the Start menu).
- Test the Sleep, Shutdown, Restart and Hibernate functions... it should work now.
I hope this really solves it, and that I don't need to revise this post or write a follow-up.Labels: ATI, crash, driver, hibernate, Microsoft, problem, problems, sleep, Vista, Windows Vista
- Fix: Vista sleep problems with High Definition Audio device
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsSimilar to the sleep problems with Creative X-Fi and SoundBlaster audio cards, many Vista users have sleep/hibernation problems with the High Definiation Audio device from Intel.
Microsoft has released a new fix: as described in KB 937077: A high definition audio device may no longer work after you resume Windows Vista from hibernation or from sleep.
Download here: 32-bit or 64 bitLabels: AC'97, AC97, audio, fix, HD, HD Audio, hibernate, hibernation, Intel, Microsoft, problem, problems, sleep, Vista, Windows, Windows Vista
- Solving your Vista sleep problems (really)
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Posted by oVan on Monday, May 21, 2007 | PermaLink | 10 commentsOnce upon a time
I've posted before of my journeys into solving Vista sleep problems. Although using the latest nVidia drivers for the video card certainly eliminated a lot of lockups, the truth is that the problems on my Dell Precision Workstation 690 never really went away.
In my original post Fix: How-to solve your Vista sleep problems I touched the possibility that nVidia wasn't the only one having trouble writing decent drivers. If you have a sound card from Creative you probably know what I mean.
It struck me that sometimes upon booting or waking Vista from sleep (whenever that worked) there was no sound from the speakers. A quick look at the device manager didn't show anything unusual, and the volume mixer was looking normally too; yet no sound to be heard. This strange phenomena was resolved easily by rebooting, but still it remained in the back of my head.
There's always a side track
In the second post – Windows Vista sleep problems, revisited – I side-tracked towards the LSI SCSI/SAS/SATA controller. I don't think I can prove that the changes to the power plan actually solved much, since Vista still hanged every once in a while upon entering sleep modus.
The solution I stumbled upon
Since I was looking to replace the current speaker setup (two Solid Monitor speakers with a Solid Active Power Bass (now discontinued) from Bowers & Wilkins, which needs a decent amplifier and is thus more suited for Hi-Fi systems, I decided to go with the Logitech Z-10 Interactive Speaker System. I'll leave my impressions of the Logitech speakers for a future post, but for now let me just say that I'm quite pleased with both the sound and the lookds.
What's more important and of relevance to the Vista sleep problems, is that the Logitech speakers are connected via USB instead of audio jacks. Unless you want to use the surround capabilities of your Creative X-Fi card, you can actually replace your sound card with just these speakers. When you open up the playback devices, you'll see them listed amongst other sound hardware you have in your computer.
So, you may ask, that looks really nice, but what is the solution to the sleep problem then? Well you've just read it... remove the Creative Sound Blaster or X-Fi card from your system and replace with something else. The Logitech speakers are one possible option, but you can also use the built-in High Definition Audio Device that is present on many machines, you just need to enable it in your BIOS.
Anyway, I've never had a sleep hang since I removed the Creative card from my system and uninstalled its drivers and software (a whopping 1Gb!).
ps: You can probably apply the same fix by buying a sound card from a different manufacturer, but I'll be the first to admit that I have no experience with other companies. If you do, let us know if it fixed the Vista sleep problems so we can help others too!
Relocate saved files into excel with pdf to excel software. Here you can check out a guide to owning this software. The pdf server will save you so much time as well. If you are using all Microsoft applications then you need the pdf to doc converter for your word files.Labels: creative, driver, fix, Logitech, nVidia, problem, sleep, SoundBlaster, soundcard, speaker, Windows, Windows Vista, X-Fi, Z-10
- Windows Vista sleep problems, revisited
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Posted by oVan on Saturday, April 21, 2007 | PermaLink | 4 commentsAs much as I was happy with the major improvement in sleep problems with Vista, I have put my feet back on the ground. After a few good sleep/shutdown/hibernate routines, suddenly it was stuck again.
After further investigation, I suspect that the LSI controller is also responsible for some of these problems. Contrary to "simple" SATA and IDE/ATA controllers, the LSI SAS and LSI SCSI controllers need much more time to activate all drives.
When Vista goes to sleep, it signals all processes of the coming event, and gives them only 2 seconds to save whatever they want to save at that point. Furthermore, Vista keeps a second copy of the LSI SAS/SCSI driver in memory, and when the sleep event is announced, that second driver is enabled because it is needed in the startup process. Due to the nature of the SAS/SCSI driver, it has to spin up all drives again before it can put them to sleep.
So after my post about updating the nVidia drivers, I have now changed my power plan settings to not spin down the harddisks after 20 min. I will keep them running all the time, until Vista decides to put the whole computer to sleep.
A quick test revealed that the machine goes to sleep without problems using those beta nVidia drivers and all disks running. I'll report later on if the change to the power plan resulted in a (near) perfect solution.Labels: beta, disk, driver, hibernate, LSI, LSI-Logic, nVidia, options, power, SAS, SATA, SCSI, sleep, update, Vista, Windows
- FIX: How-to solve your Windows Vista Sleep problems
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Posted by oVan on Friday, April 20, 2007 | PermaLink | 6 commentsYou've heard it before: some people rave about Windows Vista, others keep complaining. From the computers I've installed and/or upgraded so far, I can tell that it's a hit or miss operation. Either it all works out smoothly, or it goes down to hell quickly.
One of the biggest problems I've encountered so far is that the new Hybrid Sleep from Windows Vista works so good on my Dell Latitude D810 notebook, and at the same time totally made the Vista Experience worthless on a Dell Precision 650 Workstation and even on a brand new Dell Precision 690 Workstation.
Here's what goes wrong: you push the power button in the Start menu – this is by default configured to use the Sleep mode. Sometimes this works ok, other times you get a black screen, some USB-peripherals are correctly disabled but the machine itself doesn't power off (fans keep turning etc.). To make matters worse, you can't wake your pc because your USB keyboard has already been disabled.
It also occurs that while your machine apparently went to sleep without problems, it won't start up again or even if it does, it hangs on a black screen and you can't do anything to go further.
The big constants between my Precision 650 and the Precision 690 were: a SCSI controller based on the LSI Fusion MPT chipset in the 650 and the newer version SAS/SATA Raid controller from LSI in the 690; and both machines had an nVidia Quadro FX workstation graphics card (Quadro FX 500 in the PWS650, FX 550 in the PWS690).
The solutions I've tried:- Having tried the latest drivers for the LSI based controller, downloaded from the support websites at Dell, HP, Intel, and LSI-Logic, it didn't solve the problem. I did see controller errors in the Event Viewer that were obviously related to the sleep problem, but the most recent drivers didn't solve a thing.
- Updated BIOS firmware for the machines, installed most recent drivers for about anything in the machine, including the latest Intel INF files. No help.
- Changed the Power Plan settings in the Vista control panel to never sleep, but use Hibernate instead. Unfortunately this gave me the same problems.
- Changed the BIOS settings to use agressive S1 power state instead of S3, so that more devices are disabled and more power conserved. Alas, no resolution.
- Reset all BIOS and Power plan settings to their default. I've experienced exactly one (1) successful sleep, after that it was back to square one.
- This gave me the working solution: I changed from the latest WHQL nVidia drivers 97.46 to the nVidia beta drivers 158.18. Despite their wonderful explanation on how to install them, it didn't work at first: my video card was not supported. No problem, I've been a supporting fan of the LaptopVideo2Go website, and they have modified INF files for about every possible nVidia driver release, both official WHQL and beta drivers. So I grabbed a copy of the modified INF for the 158.18 driver and the install went smoothly. The only problem so far is that I can't access the new nVidia control panel, other than that the system runs much more smoothly than with the 97.46 driver and Sleep mode works perfectly so far!
Time will tell if and how good it keeps working, but so far the sky is bright :-)
This obviously leads me to the conclusion that nVidia was, contrary to ATI, totally unprepared for the launch of Vista, although they've had access to the beta and RC versions for months! Just do a Google search on "Vista sleep nVidia problem"... you'll find hundreds of thousands of pages. The machines I've installed or upgraded using an ATI video card never experienced this problem, they just work out of the box. In fact, they've had an WHQL'd driver from the very (consumer) launch of Vista, while nVidia had to catch up weeks and months later.
Another company that is totally unprepared for Vista is Creative Labs, but I'll save that for a future story!
Update: here's my follow-up post about more Vista Sleep problems
Update 2: I published the third post about Vista sleep problems, in which I removed the final culprit and solved the problem completely!Labels: ATI, creative, driver, fix, hibernate, hibernation, hybrid, INF, Microsoft, nVidia, problem, sleep, solution, Vista, Windows