First Boot, BIOS, and Software

The first boot of the systems takes me to the BIOS. I disable the following: Legacy Diskette A:, HDD SMART monitoring (doesn’t work for this configuration). I then find the two menus I’m not totally familiar with. Under advance there is a menu JumperFree Configuration and CPU Configuration. They both mostly listed things as enabled or auto. I’ll get back to those two later.

I save changes and exit, booting in Vista 64 Ultimate now. Within a few minutes BSOD! The BSOD mentions STOP 0x0000000A, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, and something about updating my bios. After some searching I found the following on Microsoft’s support page: Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: “STOP 0x0000000A”

Annoyed, I removed two sticks of ram.  I now have 2 GB and I am able to boot into Windows. I apply the update, along with a few others. Shut down, reinstall ram, boot up. No more blue screens since then.

I start installing drivers and included software now. The most notable of the bunch here is the ASUS software, ASUS AI Suite. It is an interface to the various power saving functions of the motherboard. You can also “easily” over clock and monitor your system temperatures. I did not like the UI for this software at all.

You get this gear shifter and you shift it high or low depending on your needs. High being performance and low being maximum power savings. I didn’t want or need this functionality. I wanted my clock speed to stay constant. No option at all to do this. As far as the easy over clocking, I did over clock using it to 20%. It booted and worked but I didn’t like how it made the changes. I ended up uninstalling all the ASUS software.

I thought that would stop my clock speed from changing on it’s own but it didn’t. I had to go back into the BIOS, into the advance menu. I set JumperFree Configuration to “Standard” and everything under CPU configuration was disabled. 

After that everything I almost had everything running how I wanted it to. The last issue was the way Vista was detecting my SATA hard drive. It was showing up as a removable SCSI drive. Apparently there are/were a lot of issues with the Nvidia chipset drivers. I downloaded the latest 750i nForce driver for Vista 64 and it solved my problems. I would later read I should never use the nforce drivers…but so far they’ve been fine.

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