Monday, May 19, 2008

Don't trust the OEMs

I've always been a little suspicious of OEMs. That's why the very first thing I do when I receive any branded computer I've purchased is to wipe out the hard drive and start from scratch.

This practice of mine also means I avoid brands like Acer which seems to love to use Norton Ghost for their recovery CDs. Dell is way better; they provide the original Windows media so I can choose to install just the base system without all those extras OEMs always include on all their systems :-)

Recently, I had to deal with an old Asus notebook at work. It was giving BSODs whenever the AC adapter was plugged in/out of the port. From the message, it looks like an issue caused by gv3.sys. A quick google search turned up a link to Microsoft's site. Lucky me.

Based on the explanation on KB888399, it would seem that Asus force installed an old version of processor driver onto the machine and this is the source of evil here. Simply tell Windows XP to search for a better driver and it should automatically switch to the proper driver. Once done just reboot and test to be sure that everything really is in order ;-)

2 comments:

  1. Have you ever encounter a Toshiba notebook where if you try to install windows with its battery plugged-in, you can never finish installing because it'll reboot before the process is completed?

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  2. Nope. Never encountered that so far. Have you tried using something to raise up the notebook during installation? It's possible that it's overheating causing the reboot and a hot battery isn't helping.

    I know some old notebooks tend to get real hot during Windows installation so I've had to use some plastic supports to raise the notebook up so the bottom has better air flow. I used the plastic covers that's used to package Intel processors :-P

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