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My son and I went through rather painful ordeal with this Event 11 that Windows quietly generates. It took us few weeks to fully work out why Windows suddenly started hanging, misbehaving or even crashing with blue screen. Now that I feel it is fully resolved, I thought I’d share my conclusion (and the process) – hopefully it will help few others out there who are struggling with this. Ridiculously, many people are likely affected by this issue, but unless they open Event Viewer and search for this event id 11, they will not realize that hanging is not “normal” behavior, even for Windows! OS seems to silently recover from this problem 10 to 60 seconds later, which is really strange in my book – considering that user isn’t even alerted to this serious atapi error.

For impatient souls among us, here are my conclusions:

• First thing – check the SATA/EIDE and power cable connection between your hard-drive and the motherboard. If possible, try another SATA outlet on motherboard or another SATA cable if available.
• If it still happens, the bad news is that this is likely a disk controller error, which is especially problematic since nowadays disk controllers are built into the Motherboard. If you are in a budget crunch, one potential workaround is to slow down your HD to use different PIO. This may avoid hangs, but will slow overall performance, so no fun solution…
• Proper solution appears to be to replace motherboard, hence replacing disk controller. There are many motherboards starting at just $50 and in most cases it will improve overall performance and stability for you, even if you keep the same CPU and other components.

I am pretty confident that this is the right diagnosis, as we went through a lot of trial and error investigative work, in a space of few weeks, after it started abruptly. At first, I was pretty much convinced that HD is dying. The system had two hard-drives, and the older hard-drive was seemingly working just fine, even with the same SATA cable and connected to the same slot on the Motherboard. Turns out it was using slower PIO by virtue of it being older HDD. During the troubleshooting process I reinstalled fresh Windows 7 64 Bit multiple times, on various HD drives, only to see the issue start happening almost instantly after clean install. Few days ago a fresh HDD became available (separate long story), so I tried replacing the “dying” HD. Guess what, it being newer HD, it was instantly affected by the same issue, even though I put clean Windows there also. Thus it was concluded that controller was faulty, and I went shopping for a new motherboard. As an aside – DDR3 memory is Ridiculously Cheap. I was able to pick up 8 GB of Gamer grade memory for $25 (after rebate), so that is another bonus with upgrade.

We ended up replacing CPU also (time for upgrade anyhow), but all other components stayed the same. Right now I have 3 Hard-drives happily working flawlessly there, including the “dying” HD, and the rest of the computer is faster and better than ever.

Feel free to leave comments if you are still struggling with this issue, and I will try to answer. Good Luck and Happy New Year!

PS: As a bonus tip – while I was troubleshooting, I had to reinstall Windows 7 couple of times on various HD drives. Did you know you can avoid “tarnishing” your license in such scenario by Skipping product key page during Windows 7 setup? Very handy, and then you have up to 28 days to put your real key in and activate. During that period Windows is fully functional and we had used it like that for over a week while troubleshooting.

Just a quick post regarding the Software Industry drama unraveling here, here and here. Quick recap: Google is upset with “patent trolls” extracting fees from Android manufacturers via Patents. This ends up costing device manufacturers, and probably ends up making more money for Microsoft than they make from their Windows Mobile 7 sales!

As someone in the Software Industry I just wanted to say this: Over my 18 years in software industry I have seen Many ideas dubbed “revolutionary” at the time. But, I have not seen a single one that I would consider patent worthy. In fact – just about every “software patent” that I heard about was borderline ridiculous. More often than not same algorithms or coding concepts have been in use for years in various companies, but likely were never disclosed in the open. Sometimes, they may have been disclosed in open-source even, yet Patent office doesn’t check there, so they grant it anyhow.

Let’s say tomorrow I think of a clever double linked-list, combining hashed keys distribution buckets concept with bloom filters, to speed things up. Heck I could sit down and write it from scratch, all from my own head, simply because it seems like a great efficient idea to organize data in memory! Boom, someone else could patent it, even a year after I write it and use it, and now my code is violating patents?!

I promised short post so let me just sum up my thoughts on this:

• Let’s abolish pure “software” related (algorithmic, code, etc) patents altogether, they just don’t make sense – much like protecting a Drink formula. (Yes, simply follow Coca-Cola’s advice and keep your source code secret, if you want to protect it).
• For other Innovation and Patents – I respect the companies right to extract value from their unique ideas. However, with our increased pace of society now, patents should step up also. I say they should be granted within a month from application and kept valid for a year or two at most.

So there – all problems solved – and no more giant corporations squabbling over source code that was (mostly) written years ago by (undoubtedly clever) developers who since moved on to write even more clever code, for someone else (who probably doesn’t try to trick patent office into patenting it).

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed above are strictly my own personal thoughts

Yesterday IE 9 Beta landed on the web. It’s a major rework of the most popular browser, with support for fancy new features (like HTML 5 and CSS 3) and Hardware Video acceleration. I of course installed it right away, and then was even more ecstatic when I saw in my Google Reader feed that Adobe (Finally!!!) released 64 Bit version of their ubiquitous Flash Player.

First impressions? I am not really all that impressed, unfortunately for Microsoft. Although I am really excited that 64 Bit browsing (which is presumably more secure) now finally sports HTML5 support and Flash support.

I guess speed still depends on server and Internet congestion. Startup experience is improved, but Chrome still starts faster on my machine. New tabs open pretty quickly, but look unimpressive (to say the least). Plus, on their own Beauty of the Web site, I get significant “hiccups” in frame rates, from time to time. This is on nVidia accelerated quad core beast, aka my main PC, which I am very happy with overall.

Oh well, it’s a Beta. Overall, it is definitely a step in the right direction. Plus, if you are one of those (strange?) people who like Toolbars and Add-ons, it will tell you which ones are running slow and impacting your overall IE browser performance.

Enjoy!

The Apps Store is all the rage nowadays and everyone says how “Apple Invented this Revolutionary Concept”. As I recall – Windows had a Marketplace for Apps and Accessories going way back…

Still, the true revolution in Apple’s iOS is the seamless end-to-end experience of discovering and purchasing / installing Apps. And, in my opinion, the “installing” part is even more critical here!

It is pretty obvious that with Windows 8 Microsoft will take App Store to the next level to try and “stay with the times”. But will they be able to take the bold re-engineering steps necessary to make install / uninstall finally a Seamless experience?

Why is this critical? Because of “experimentation” empowerment – with iPhone users feel Free to install Applications (either Purchase or Demo) just to Check them Out. This, combined with social “What’s Hot Now” aspect, leads to huge Boom in the Marketplace – ultimately bringing huge payoffs to Platform ecosphere.

iOS appears to have this art down. In my experience iPhone can easily have hundreds of Apps installed, yet it starts up just as quickly, uninstalls just as cleanly once you’re “done with it” and really releases the space back to the user.

For Windows to get to the same place is a huge challenge, but if they do – perception is an even harder thing to fix. Today’s Windows Apps require weird “install” wizards, force themselves into PC Startup, add slow “Services” and buggy “Drivers”, seed computer with Temporary files and often create countless duplicates “per user account” to operate. Even worse, we accepted as “norm” the fact that our Shiny New PC’s come with Crapware from the Computer maker, and the fact that anything we install is likely to slow our computer down and we will never be able to fully uninstall it.

Meanwhile Google’s Android Marketplace is showing us that it is possible to keep an Open marketplace and still maintain decent platform quality. Microsoft does have some right ideas there, but I wonder how much will come to fruition and most importantly, how soon will it materialize for Windows to stay relevant.

Biggest thing that Windows has going for it is a large user base which is familiar with it. Few Great Games and MS-Office are also helping to keep Windows alive, but for how much longer?

The title is all you need to know. The special price only at your local MicroCenter store and only for 3 days. Of you don’t have one, check local Costco. Or, I will have a link to Amazon, which promised to deliver on Oct 22, on here later today.
Posting from my iPhone, so signing off now.