A Bit Conspicuous

My faithful computer of five years died a horrible death last week. I’ve tried all I can and it still won’t even post bios. A dead motherboard or CPU on a five year old computer means only one thing.

Time for an upgrade!

Luckily, my friends and I had been pricing out systems and watching for deals since I was already planning on getting a new system.

The fruits of our labor was the fact that, as usual, if you catch Dell on a good deal it will beat out building your own by a large margin. In my case the difference between the Dell I got and the DIY I would have built was around $350.

I’ve added a few new components (some which caused issues) already, so here are my final specs on a stable system.

• Dell Dimension 9200 - $649
  • Intel Core 2 Quad 6600
  • 2 gigs 667MHz ram
• XFX 8800 GTS 320MB - $250
• Western Digital Raptor 150gig boot drive

The WD Raptor drive caused some issues, unfortunately. My system would sometimes stall in mid boot for over a minute. Frequently it would halt and sit there for over a minute after I clicked on something. Clearly something was wrong.

I checked the events log and saw a bunch of these iaStorV errors with Event ID 9.

A quick Google search brought me to The Flying Nerd. He offers a lot of background reading and a description of the exact problem I was having.

The Intel site he linked to offered more information. Essentially, some power management registry keys have been set in the Vista Intel Matrix drivers that can cause issues if your hard drive does not support those features. The result is hanging during install and these iaStorV timeouts.

The Flying Nerd offers several potential solutions. For my case, installing version 7.6.0.1011 of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager has cleared up my timeouts completely.

The pertinent benchmark:

• 3DMark06 - 9085

For some reason PCMark05 aborts on the HDD XP Startp test. I haven’t been able to find out anything about that.

Now to see how some real games run.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.