Overclocking nVidia cards
When it comes to overclocking video cards, two applications come into mind. Rivatuner and ATITools. Rivatuner is intended for nVidia and ATITools is intended for ATI, but both now support the rival cards as well.
You all know that I’m an overclocking addict. But funny thing is that I use neither of these applications. I use nVidia System Tools. I have an nVidia card btw.
This is an official tool from nVidia. Overclocking is only one function of it. There are other functions of it such as monitoring and viewing system information. I think GPU-Z does a better job that this at those functions.
So why am I using the nVidia System Tools instead of the more popular RivaTuner? For all this time, there was only one reason, but now there is another reason and this new reason is what compelled to me to blog it.
See, I am an overclocker, but I try to be green as possible. I do not overclock all the time. I only overclock when I need to overclock. For example, when playing a game. Other times, I not only NOT overclock, but I underclock. The stock clocks of my 9600GT are 650MHz for the core, 1625MHz for the shaders and 900MHz for the RAM.
Rivatuner only lets me go down up to half of those values. But nVidia System Tools lets me go down up to 25% of those clocks. So when I’m not playing a game, I run the core at 162MHz, shaders at 406MHz and memory at 225MHz, as shown in the GPU-Z screen below.\
So I can save more power. But the power saved through underclockoing isn’t huge. There is virtually NO gains with underclocking the core and shaders, but underclocking the RAM saves few watts of power.
Ok, so what’s this new reason that’s so cool?
See, the interface of nVidia System Tools sucks! There is no doubt about it. It’s very hard overclock quickly. The damn thing takes forever to load in the first place. But it lets you create profiles. OK, big deal! Everything else lets you do that. But it lets you create profiles that can be loaded when something is triggered, such as loading a game, closing a game, bootup, loading an app, closing an app etc. There are lots of triggers.
10 million points in ogame
Finally the day has come. I might lose a couple of RIPs tomorrow though, but should celebrate while I can. 
I just replaced the touch screen on my Omnia
Why did I need to do that, you must be wondering. Let me explain.
There was a problem with the touch screen, that’s why! Well, at one area of the screen, the touch inputs would register incorrectly. It also happened to be where the A and S keys were in the Samsung Keyboard. When I hit A, it would register S. To register A, I had to press the left edge of A. That was the significantly screwed up area. But the issue had been spread for a radius of few more pixels.
The overall touch responsiveness of the current screen was pathetic anyways. I had heard that there were better touch screens available for purchase.
So putting both of those reason up front, I made up my mind to buy a new touch screen.
At first, I didn’t know what the touch screen was. I thought it was a very expensive component of the phone. But after researching, I found out that the touch functions were not built into the LCD screen, but it was another screen that was placed in front of the LCD. They call it a digitizer. The name makes sense in a generic manner, but doesn’t have to be just for touch screens. The purpose of the digitizer in this case was to convert the touch inputs to a unique digital signal which can pin point to the coordinates of where you touched.
So where did I check for the prices? It was no other than Ebay. I got a few results from the search. Some were giving away just the digitizer. Some were giving away tools along with it. I opted for a seller who gave away a screwdriver and a plastic opening tool. It came from Honkong, and totaled out at $15 including shipping. I thought it was a good price.
Anyways, the package arrived on the 2nd and I couldn’t try it out on the same day as I was tired when I got home after a gym session. So I had to postpone it to the next day.
Yesterday, I was all set for the operation. I found an article on how to disassemble an Omnia. I had to peel away the Invisible Shield. *sigh* Anyways, parts of it was getting pealed off with usage. But it could hold few more months if I left it there.
So now to the fun part.
I removed the battery, SIM and microSD card, then removed the 4 nails and popped out the shield covering the circuit board. Then I removed the two screws on the circuit board, disconnected the three cables and removed the circuit board. Then I removed the sticker where the IMEI number was printed, then came the camera off. Well, I had to force it to come out as it was stuck to the body. Finally the bezel came out, then the soft keys and the digitizer. The digitizer was glued to the body. It was a sticky mess.
Then I placed the new digitizer and reversed what I did before. I got stuck at one place, not being able to plug in a cable. I had to insert the cable through a little gap, and the gap was too small. Only after some fiddling around that I found out there was a little notch I had to pull before inserting it. hehe.
Other than that, the reassembly went smoothly, and the Omnia was back to the state where it was….with the exception – now it had a brand new digitizer. Yay!
I turned the phone on. No issues there. The screen worked fine. In fact, it worked amazingly fine! It was so responsive that I didn’t have to use the nails anymore. But there was one problem. The Invisible Shield didn’t just protect the screen, but also presented a nice grip to the surface. Without it, the fingers would slip when typing. I guess I will have to order a new shield. But it is very expensive. ~$20 including shipping just for the screen only. I won’t get the full body protection anyways. But I haven’t decided whether to order one or not. There can’t be cheaper solutions out there. 
All in all, I’m really happy with the job. I’m back in love with the phone. Now I can’t take my finger off it. LOL
P.S
The digitizer I ordered doesn’t have the Vodafone logo. It is an OEM Samsung digitizer. Now people won’t ask me, “Oh you have a Samsung Vodafone?” or crap like that. Seriously! People don’t know that Vodafone is just a carrier? It’s just asking “Oh you have a Samsung Mobitel?” LOL
Screw you, Asus P5B-E!!
I was just too soon to party 
All of a sudden, it just hates having 6GB RAM. It passed memtest. But it would not fail the desktop version of memtest and give lots of BSODs. With just the 2GBx2, memtest doesn’t give errors. Not does Windows BSOD.
I wonder if the memory densities are different in the two types of modules. Because motherboards don’t like different memory densities. See, I used to have all my RAM slots occupied, but then I had 1GBx4 which were same speed and brand and density. So there was no issue.
Let me check now.
Yikes! Both the 1GB and 2GB are double sided and has 8 chips each side. So they definitely can’t be the same density. This probably can be the cause.
What I can do is install two more sticks which are of the same density as the 2GB 800’s and see if that does the trick. I wonder if someone would give me their 2GBx2 sticks for testing.
I can’t buy new RAM because if they don’t work, I’m screwed! Besides, the RAM prices have sky rocketed! A 2GB stick used to be around Rs. 2600. Now they are Rs. 6000. OMG! What’s happen to DDR2 market??
Windows 7 woes
Sure I installed a clean installation of Windows yesterday. Sure I installed only the software that I only needed. Sure I installed the latest drivers for video and sound while others were automatically downloaded from Windows Update. Sure I installed all the updates for Windows except the post SP2 updates for Office 2007. I don’t really think they would cause the BSODs I was getting!!! Right?
And sure I upgraded to 6GB RAM. But once I got them working properly, I didn’t get BSODs for hours! I even played COD4 for an hour or so. But when I was going to exit it, the game crashed with a BSOD. A whole new error message that I’ve never seen before. It was something about a Video Scheduler error. Oh boy! (I think I should run memtest86+ overnight, just to make sure it if not the RAM)
However….before playing COD4, I installed the activator without disabling UAC. It sure activated correctly, but it could be the problem. Because one of the stop errors I got was about a system file modification. (Dang I should write these messages down!)
So, my new Windows installation faded away in reliability. I could not take it anymore. I restored my old Windows 7 installation. Yeah! The 100days+ old one. I’ll see if this gives errors when I get home. I installed the new apps like Acronis TrueImage 2010, iTunes, Opera and removed Nero. Will have to install VMWare 7 when I get it.
But I’m still getting two common errors in Event Log. I have been getting them for a while.
The LogMeIn Kernel Information Provider service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified.
P.S.
Found a resolution for this error here. Gotta try that out when I get back home.
The Nero BackItUp Scheduler 4.0 service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the file specified.
Looks like these are related to Scheduled Tasks. Will have to do something about them.
P.S.
Found a nifty utility to analyze Windows Crash Dumps. It’s called WhoCrashed. Gotta try that when I get back home. But hopefully, I won’t get any crashes.
Download: WhoCrashed
How are these two figures different?
Yes, that girl is hot, but that is a different story. XD
The pic on left is when I select everything in the C:, right click and click properties. This is after showing hidden and system files.
The pic on the right is when I right click C: and click properties.
Looks like a bug. The drive properties value seems to be skipping something.
Back to the future with 6GB RAM..lol
Yeah, it is back to the future, because I had 6GB RAM a while back, and then had to lower than to 4GB and now I’m back with 6GB.
So let’s see what I had to do to get them to work.
I had the 2×2GB Kingston DDR2-800’s in the slot 0 and 2. (slots are 0,1,2,3 and 0,1 in channel A and 2,3 in channel B). They were running at 802MHz as I’m running at 1604MHz FSB.
I installed the 1GBx2 Kingston DDR2-667 in slot 1 and 3. Great, the PC POSTed. Quite pleased, I booted into Windows and just started doing what I usually do. Browsing and music. WOAH! Couple of minutes was all I was given the enjoy my rather simple accomplishment. BSOD!
OK, so the RAM wouldn’t work that way. Time to head into BIOS and play with the timings. I increased the timings a bit as in loosening them and tried. BSOD again! This is no good. I can’t just crash this brand new Windows installation like that. Yeah, I installed Windows 7 RTM today in the morning.
So the only solution was to test the RAM with Memtest86+. I had the ISO. And I had some software to be backed up, so I created a bootable memtest DVD with the software in it. Booted from it. WOW! It gave errors just within the first 5 seconds!!! What??? Was it that bad? Apparently so. No wonder Windows was BSODing.
So I did few things in BIOS. Played with Vmem, Vnb, timings. Nothing worked. Same errors, within seconds into the test.
This time I looked a bit more into the error info. Well, the error info didn’t make any sense to me, but one little information did. The test failed in the first test, and exactly after 4GB. Hmm… what does that mean? It tests the first 4GB in the system, then fails in the next 2GB…which is the newly added (but 3 years old) RAM most probably.
So what I did was remove all the RAM sticks and start from there. First I installed 1GB RAM in slot 0. No errors. w00t! Then installed a 2GB stick in slot 1. So still only the channel A is being used. Nothing in channel B. w00t! No errors again. Then I installed the other 1GB stick in slot 2, which is the first slot of channel B. w00t! No errors again, but I’m still at 4GB RAM. Before that, the errors only started after 4GB. So this is it. I installed the last 2GB RAM in slot 3. And w000000000000t! No errors again! WTF! I let it test further and further. No errors from any of the tests.
I have to agree, PCs are just weird! No wonder there are so many people who can’t troubleshoot PCs properly. Who would have thought something like this was the case? I’m not saying I successfully troubleshooted this, because those steps were all new to me. Just following a hunch, which is illogical as well.
Anyways, finally I’m cruising with 6GB RAM. I think it’s a great start to the month of December. XD
If Microsoft is not gonna fix it, I think I gotta do something about it!
And I did.
OK, I am sure you guys are wondering what the heck I’m talking about. It is no other than the problems that I have been having when Windows resumes from hibernation (that’s S4 mode) when there is a pagefile. It’s funny how these two are important features, but they don’t like each other…at least in my PC. I can’t speak for anyone else, but this has been the case with Vista as well.
Anyways, the issue is that it takes a long time to resume from hibernation when there is a pagefile. It takes as long as 3 minutes the last time I checked with my 100days+ long Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition installation. 3 minutes for resuming from hibernation? WTF! Is it not supposed to be faster than booting??? Without a pagefile, it resumes in 30 seconds to a responsive desktop.
The thing is, I don’t know what the real cause is. If the PC was NOT busy (i.e. the HDD LED wasn’t lit) and waited like that for a long time, then it could be some device not properly waking up or being reluctant to do so. That is indeed a hardware related issue. But in my case, the HDD is busy for the entire time. Poor HDD! Reading reading reading – nobody knows what!
So why not disable the pagefile. Of course that is what I’ve been doing this entire time. But once in a while, the error message pops up saying that Windows is running out of RAM…especially when I’m playing a game. That drives me crazy, because every time that happens, the game gets minimized. I’m waiting to snipe someone and it is just bizarre when that happens! This error message comes up when the RAM reaches 80% used. That popup can be disabled with a hack, but it is kinda dangerous thing to do.
So the best thing to do, is to install more RAM. I already have 4GB and I used to have 6GB when in Vista days, but I had to go back to 4GB because for some reason, after a BIOS flash, the system would no longer let me use 6GB RAM. I moved that RAM to dad’s PC back then, and today I wanted to move them back to mine and see if I can get them to work somehow. And guess what? I did exactly that! Now I’m a happy 6GB RAM customer. But getting them to work is another big story, which I will post next. For the moment, just know that I finally have 6GB RAM and I intend not to see that wretched running out of RAM popup again!
COD4 crashing fixed!
This is a follow up to this post.
I installed the latest official WHQL drivers from nVidia – that is version 195.62 – last night and checked if it solves that COD4 crashing issue. Sure enough, it didn’t crash when I tried it about 4 times. It’s too early to surely say that the issue is fixed, but I’m feeling it is.
Let’s hope that the good news stays as a good news.
Edit:
The issue doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Phew! I was blaming Windows 7 for the crashes. It was driver issue after all.
Windows 7 reboot time after 100 days
This was after a few days. That’s 60 seconds.
This is now after 102 days. A 30 second degradation.
But not that this is not the boot time, but the reboot time. That includes shutting down, hardware detection stuff by the motherboard and the boot into desktop.
