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With some time off over the Christmas period I decided it would be a good opportunity to upgrade my local PC and server. The plan was to buy all new hardware to form my new machine and then make a hybrid from the last server and my old machine. As you'd expect with brand spankin new hardware and software there were various hiccups along the way, I thought it would be handy for others following in my footsteps if I chronicled what I did to fix these issues and get things back up to 100%.

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The new system consists of these components:

Motherboard: Abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi with 13 bios (came with first release bios, I upgraded it)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
CPU Heatsink: Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme
Additional Cooling: 4x 120mm Noctua NF-S12 Fans
Fan Controller: Akasa Fan Control Pro Fan Controller
Case: CoolerMaster Stacker RC-831 black with white mesh
Memory: 8GB OCZ PC2-6400 ReaperX HPC Enhanced Bandwidth (4x OCZ2RPX800EB2G)
Graphics Card: XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog XXX 512MB
Soundcard: Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty
Power Supply: Tagan TG1100-U6 Turbojet Plus 1100W Quad SLi
Hard Disk: Western Digital Raptor 150GB
DVD: Samsung SH-S203N (Lightscribe capable drive)
Pointing Devices: Logitch Trackman Wheel and a Wacom Volito 2 tablet
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64

All in all it's a pretty rock blockin system. Like a complete noob I expected it all to work straight away after I assembled it all. Little did I know that even just getting it all assembled would be a chore.

The first bump in the road came when I tried to fit all 4 sticks of the memory. If you look at the image in the link for the memory you'll see that it has a dock off heat pipe system sticking out of the top. It actually comes off the sides out of the heatsink that is clipped onto each side. This makes the memory both wide and tall. The first 3 sticks went in just fine from left to right. The fourth stick wouldn't push all the way in. After I shone a bright light in there I realised it was pushing down on a big transistor situated next to the fourth slot. After much deliberation I decided to unscrew the memory seatsink and remove it. After doing that I realised I could just unscrew it, move it up slightly and then re-tighten the screws. This then meant it had enough room to clear the transistor. I tried it again. Still a no-go. A lot of four letter words were uttered at this point. Turns out that because the sticks are so wide they all push each other to the side slightly. The ultra simple solution is simply to loosely slot the memory in, then push it to the left so it's properly vertical, then push it in. Before it was being pushed into a very slight angle so it wasn't fully vertical. I tried this later on with an unmodified stick and it doesn't touch the transistor when inserted this way which means I didn't have to void the warranty on that pesky 4th stick earlier on. More four letter words were uttered at the moment I realised that :¬)

So that was all the hardware in place, everything else was fitted with no problems. The case came with 2 120mm fans; 1 intake fan on the HDD rack and another as an extractor at the back of the case. I swapped both of those for my Noctua fans and fitted a third at the top of the case as a top extractor. The 4th fan was attached to the heatsink, blowing onto it, through it towards the rear extractor. All of those are connected to the front bay fan controller so I can manually crank them up as needed. So far though I haven't need to with the system rarely getting about 30 degrees.

OK so that's the main background on it all, here's the proper step by step guide that includes all the fixes:

• During the initial hardware assembly make sure there is only one stick of memory in the system. Vista will allow you to download updates during the installation process but it will not auto-download the patch required to allow more than 3gig of memory (KB929777). You have to manually install that after the OS is installed.
• Download the latest silicon image sata IDE driver or the Raid one depending on which system you're using. Make sure this driver is on a floppy, CD/DVD or harddisk that can be accessed during the setup process.
• Setup the bios. This involves enabling and disabling any devices you might want to use or not use. For me I also had to go into the fan control section of the uguru menu option and disable the CPU fan warning system since I don't have a 4pin fan connected to my board. I'm using a dock off heatsink and a 120mm fan that's linked to a case mounted fan controller system. If you don't disable the CPU fan bit in here then when the system restarts it will not even get to the bios. It will just power itself off and you'll see a code on the motherboards LCD display. I don't remember the code off the top of my head but in the manual it says that there is an error with the CPU fan, in this case there isn't one :¬) The only way to get around this is to hook up a fan to the CPU fan socket on the board, get back into the bios and disable the auto-shutdown option. You can plug a 3pin plug into the 4pin socket. Remember to set the CDROM to be the first bootable device so you can boot off the Vista DVD.
• Setup the memory in the bios. For this I had to experiment a bit. The system auto-detects the memory at 800MHz with a 4-4-3-15 timing. This caused the setup process to fail numerous times. I did get it installed once but then couldn't get into the first bootup as it would BSOD on me each time. The trick here is to set the CPU/Mem to be "unlinked" in the uguru section. Set the mem speed to 667. Go into the voltages and set the mem voltage to 2.1v. Finally go into the Advanced Chipset section->Memory Timings and set the timings to be 5-6-6-18 2T and set the trfc to 60. I'm not really sure what that does but I read a few posts in the OCZ forum where they said it should be at least 42 if not 50-60 for 8gig. I just settled on 60 to feal safe with myself :¬)
• Now we're ready to install Vista. Stick the DVD in and boot up. During the early stages of setup it will ask you where you want to install to. On this scren it should show you the drives you have available. Don't be tricked by this. It's using some ultra outdated driver which will give you random blue screens during and after installation. Pick the Add Driver option and point it to the silicon image driver you downloaded earlier. You have to do this even if you're not using the silicon image sata. I plugged my hdd into the sata 0 socket and my DVD into the sata 1 socket. That means I'm using the Nvidia sata. Even then though if you let Windows install using it's own driver for the silicon image sata you will keep seeing 0x0000007E blue screen errors. Took me a while to figure this out as the message itself doesn't tell you what's wrong. Initially I did get through the setup process but Windows kept crashing and then at one point, like the 3rd restart it refused to boot at all into normal more or safe mode.
• Phew, getting there. Windows should now be installed along with all the latest updates since you did let it download and install them as part of the OS installation, didn't you ;¬)
• Start installing your drivers. Make sure they are all the latest ones. I put all my extra devices on first and left the Nvidia NForce chipset drivers till last. No real reason I guess. One thing to make sure of at this point is that the Nvidia drivers have actually been updated. I found that even though I installed the very latest NForce driver the actual Nvidia sata driver was left using the old version 0.885. This gave me a few blue screens till I worked out what had happened. Just manually update the drivers for the 3 sata controllers. Head to Device Manager->IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Right click each of the sata controllers and choose Update Driver. Then browse to the NVidia directory that it created when you ran the setup program earlier. For me this was C:\NVIDIA\nForceWinVista64\15.08\IDE\WinVista64\sa ta_ide. That should update each of them to the latest version .995. Restart and bobs ye uncle, you're now using the latest drivers for everything. On the Nvidia page where you download the NForce drivers it actually states what version everything should be so it's easy to compare to what you actually have installed via device manager.
• Now do a quick google for KB929777 which should take you to the page about the >3gig MS patch. Download and install that, making sure it's the for your version of Windows (x32 vs x64). Without this patch you'd get constant 0x0000007E and 0x0000000A blue screens when you stick the rest of your memory in.
• Power down, unplug your system from the mains and install the rest of your memory.
• Plug your system in and power it up. Head into the bios and setup it up.
• I found that custom settings above or below the 667 one I mentioned earlier would kill Windows and alot of the time wouldn't let the system boot at all. If you find it's not even getting to the bios status screen or that it is but then freezes just power it off. Flick the clear cmos switch in the back of the case, it's just under the PS2 sockets. Count to 10 and then flick it back. When you power on you'll find that the bios is reset back to defaults.
• A handy thing with our bios is that you can save the settings as up to 5 different profiles. Go into the bios, make some changes and then press F6. This will open the save dialogue which lets you pick a save slot, enter a name and save. Now if you have to use the clear CMOS switch you can easily restore you're last setup by going back into the bios and pressing F7. That will open the list of saved profiles and load your selection straight away. I found this to be a great time saver in my tests.
• I found that by using the "Linked" option in the uguru screen I could get it running stablily at all the options as long as I keep the CPU at stock speed of 2.4 with a x9 multiplyer and a 1066 FSB. The trick is to leave everything at defaults after you pick Linked mode. Then change the FSB:Memory ration to one of the preset options. Make sure you're set to PSB1066 and that you up to the memory voltage to 2.1v which is the spec'd voltage for this memory. I'm running the FSB:Memory at 1:1 so my mem speed is auto-set to 1066. Running at this speed I'm using 5-6-6-18 2T trfc:60 as my timings. I don't seem able to get it to 4-4-3-15 at this speed. The bios refuses to boot. All the other memory settings are at defaults as are the other voltage options. I tried out a FSB:Memory ratio of 5:4 so the mem was at 853 and a 3:2 ratio so it was at 711. They both ran fine but I wanted to have the higher speed. As I mentioned in my post; the bios seems a bit odd with memory speeds/timings. If you set it to be unlinked and manually setup the exact same options it will not work. I couldn't get it past the bios status screen with my current 1066 5-6-6-18 settings in unlinked mode.
• This bit is for if you have a Wacom tablet and want it to work in Vista as it does in XP. This took me a while to work out so hopefully it will save you some time.
  • Make sure the Wacom pen software is installed and that tracking is set to pen mode.
  • Control Panel->Pen and Input Devices->Pen Options
    • Double click the "Press and hold" pen action and then untick the enable box at the top of the popup and ok to close it.
    • Untick the "use top of pen to erase" option
  • Control Panel->Pen and Input Devices->Pointer Options
    • Untick all the tick boxes including the last one about showing pen cursors instead of mouse cursors.
  • Control Panel->Pen and Input Devices->Flicks
    • Untick the top tickbox to disable Flicks.
    • Untick the bottom tickbox to get rid of its icon next to the clock
  • Control Panel->Table PC Settings->Other
    • Click the "Go to Input Panel Settings" link to open the options popup.
    • ->Opening Tab
    • Untick everything in the "Input Panel icons and tab" section to disable the sliding input text panel
  • That's it. I restarted the system afterwards to make sure it was all set correctly for future usage. The main one was disabling Flicks and the "Press and hold" pen action. With those two enabled I got arkward delays and jumpiness when trying to drag n drop windows and files etc. Now it all works fine, feels just like it used to be.
• The final polish is to clear up this error message from the event log:
  

  Originally Posted by system event log
  The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
  {BC866CF2-5486-41F7-B46B-9AA49CF3EBB1}
  to the user USERNAME from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

  That's being caused by the Nvidia Forceware Intelligent Application Manager (IAM) component not having the correct access rights. To fix that you have to first find out the name of the component since as you can see from the error it just gives you a big long CLSID. Do Run->regedit.exe, select the top node in the tree and do Edit->Search. Copy and paste the CLSID, not including the brackets into there and search. It will land on a node pretty quickly. Just look around that node and you'll find a component name. This one is called app_filter. Now we go into the Component Services panel: Run->comexp.msc expand Component Services->Computers->My Computer->DCOM Config. Now look through the child nodes for the component name you found in the first step. Right click on it and choose Properties->Security. Set the Launch and Activation Permissions to Customise and then edit it. Add the user account that the event log message was referring to to the list if it's not there and then set the Local Launch and Local Activation allow boxes to be ticked. The user account it's referring to is most likely your current login. Now repeat the process for the "Network Services" account. OK out of that and close the component services panel down. That's the last you'll see of that pesky event log message :¬)

• Pat yourself on the back, your system is now ready for usage.

A short while later I decided to try out some games and realsied that the system wasn't as stable as I thought it was with 1066MHz 5-6-6-18-2T (Linked mode 1:1 FSB:Memory). All my main apps worked fine; Flash, Photoshop, 3D Studio, C# Express IDE and the many SQL apps I use. When I tried playing Battlefield 2142 and Supreme Commander I started getting constant freezes. It would freeze for between 10-30 seconds and go to a black screen. It only happened a couple of times in SC but BF2142 became totally unplayable. My event log started getting alot of these errors:

Originally Posted by system event log
Event ID:4101 - Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

They'd also be a little warning sign next to the clock with a message about how my display adapter had been restarted. If you google it you will find alot of other people with this problem. They all state various fixes that work for some and not for others. I tried a few things but the only one that worked straight away for me was to drop my memory down a bit. I just gave it a good thrashing with it set to 854MHz at 4-4-4-15-2T and it seems to be working great as in zero blackouts. When I tried 4-4-3-15-2T it refused to get past the bios complaining about an invalid checksum. I picked that odd speed as that was what it auto-calculated it should be when I picked a 5:4 FSB:Memory ratio while in Linked mode.

I installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 in 16 minutes, that's from pressing the powerbutton up until the point where I could first login. It seemed to install fine the first time around although I brute forced the installation since I hadn't gotten my head around the memory timings at that point. The install kept dieing but I eventually got it to go all the way through. I noticed that the network speed was appalingly slow, transferring files between my PC and the server would take hours. A single 600MB file took about 3 hours. A 1GB file took over 3 hours and then died stating that my machine had lost it's connection to the network. I did alot of googling and found a huge number of people with the same issue. I tried all the fixes that they suggested and nothing worked. In the end I just resided my self to waiting for SP1. I wasn't that bothered since most day to day operations only involve transferring small files which still seemed slow but bearable.

The thing that really killed my first installation was when my X-fi soundcard started screaming at me. It was after a full day of tweaking. I'd got tempted to overclock my CPU bya a friend so I did about 4-6 hours of that with my speakers off. When I had it running stably at 3.4GHz with my memory at 1066MHz I tried playing BF2142. When I turned my speakers on all I got was a constant static sound. I wigged out thinking that I'd killed it with my overclocking attempts. Depsite what other people said Creative Labs were proper decent. I emailed their customer services department through their support website and received a reply later that day. After a bit of discussion with them they said they would RMA it and send me the latest model as a replacement. The thing that irked me was "What if it happens again?" and more bugginly "What caused it in the first place?".

That last question took me down a 4 day path of misery, late nights, lots of alcohol and plenty of swearing. The end result was that I couldn't actually find what had caused the problem. I tried everything that all the other people with the problem had including trying modded drivers, moving the card to different slots, trying older official drivers, tweaking various registry entries, uninstalling certain Windows Updates, installing various Windows Updates. Absolutely nothing worked. The nagging voice in the back of my head wondered if the problem was software or hardware based. I figured the only ways to test that would be (1) install a 2nd copy of the OS or (2) test the card in another machine. I stuck it in the server which remember was my old machine. I knew the card had worked fine in that for almost a year. Instantly I was hearing the normal sounds of the server, no static. The card was fine. This then brought the fear that I'd broken the motherboard itself. The only way to test this was to do a 2nd install. 20 minutes later I had a 2nd copy of Vista installed and lo and behold the sound was a-ok. This meant something had gone cupput in my original installation.

I decided to fresh install the whole thing again which is how I wrote the above step by step guide. As far as I can work it out my original installation was probably bugged from day 1 due to my brute forcing it to install without addressing the memory and sata issues. This time around I've left most of the standard Windows services enabled. I figure with 8GB I'm not really going to see them denting it that much and this way it's kinda fun stumbling across the various new features in Vista. As soon as all the updates were applied and all the latest drivers were installed I did a complete system image via Vistas built in backup program. If it dies again I should be able to restore it back with that.

It's almost perfect now. Network speed is back to awesome-o levels, all my games are working exceptionally with detail levels set to maximum, all my apps are glitchless. The two little annoyances that are left are (1) can't close IE windows by right clicking the taskbar and choosing Close. It just beeps at me. It works with the rollerball or keyboard so I reckon it's something glitchy with the Wacom driver. The second annoyance is with Winamp, it's global hotkeys plugin and the Microsoft Intellitype Pro 6.1 software. They don't seem to want to work together at all. I've tried various solutions to get my multimedia keys to control Winamp like they used to in XP but it refuses to work 100% of the time. The latest Winamp release does partially support them but it seems very tempremental. Hopefully future releases will fix this permanantly. I know there are various 3rd party solutions to this issue but I would prefer to have a properly working app then something that requires 3rd party tools to work.

I'm all installed and back to full operations now. Battlefield 2142 is like a whole new game thanks to how smooth it plays and how much better it looks. I couldn't play Supreme Commander at all before so that really is a whole new game but it plays fantastically at full detail. Took a while getting used to the vast number of troops you can control but I think I'm getting there. Can't wait to try Dawn of War again. Anyhow, no point making a super long guide longer with endless chatter, I've got work to do :¬)

ps. I posted to the OCZ forum and Wacom forum about the issues I had with their products. Hopefully those two threads will help other people as with this post.