Often, and I’m not sure what the cause is as it seems to vary depending upon location or “some other set of conditions”, my PC will shutdown and reboot. I’ve been running temperature monitors and everything is well within tolerances. One possible correlation is that it happens soon after I load into a new area.

The googles suggest various bits of voodoo but nothing official. There are also enough occurrences of this that it doesn’t appear to be specific to my machine.

I’m posting my configuration in case others have had similar problems:

• Intel i7 2600K
• Asus P8Z68-V Pro Motherboard
• Asus 560Ti
• Windows 7 64bit
• OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD
• Tons-o-RAM

Please leave a comment if you’ve had this problem yourself. Double-plus bonus points if you have a fix for it.

Update 2012/04/04: It isn’t my RAM:

http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_caps_lock/

The post describes how to disable the caps lock key or remap it to a control key. And various other permutations to boot!

Here’s the registry information if you’re into running regedit.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

Now if I could figure out how to disable my num lock key at startup… (edit: it’s a BIOS setting)

I’ve longed for a decent small keyboard for many spins round the sun now. It seems like a simple thing. Make a keyboard with no number pad with a bunch of keys on it suitable for a Windows computer. Simple! It should be wired with a USB connector because I don’t want to fiddle with batteries or yet another USB wireless dongle. The keys should be decent with good tactile feedback. They should also be full-sized. It should do these things and take up as little space on my desk as possible.

Enter the XGene Multimedia Mini Keyboard. Take a moment to have a look at it.

That’s it. Sitting above my Apple Wireless keyboard. You’ll note that I have different requirements for my PC keyboard compared to my Mac’s, otherwise, I’d just use one of those. So far, keyfeel is pretty solid. It requires a bit of force to type on this thing. I’ve had a couple of keys not register because I wasn’t typing hard enough. The keys themselves get a little tiny when you get out to the edges of the board. The outside right edge is bordered by home/page-up/down/end which means that they’ve shrunk the backspace, backslash and enter keys to accommodate. The same goes for the keys on the left, the tab, caps lock (now a control key) and escape keys are pretty smallish.

Backspace is probably the worst of the bunch because it’s surrounded by a home key, the equal sign, and the decades old and mysterious PrtSc, Scroll Lock and Pause Break keys. Trying to erase a mistake often leads to more mistakes and funny beeps. The backspace key should probably cover the whole top right of the keyboard the way I type.

It doesn’t get much better at the bottom of the keyboard. The space bar is small and shifted just far enough to the left that I often hit the tiny little “alt” key next to it, popping open a menu. Windows key, Context menu key, Ins and Del live next to it, all competing with the arrow keys. Yes, it is a little cramped.

We’ll see how it works for gaming though. The main keys are normal-sized so I’m hoping they won’t hinder my use of the ASDW keys. I’m already considering prying up some of the worst offenders around the edges.

Preliminary review: 3 stars.

Annoyed by the inability to see more than 3GB with Windows 7 32 bit, I decided it was time to enter the world of 64 bits on my PC. I had to flip a chipset option to allow memory remapping through the northbridge controller. Having done that, my memory performance is no longer the bottle-neck on this machine. That honor falls to the lowly hard-drive. Maybe I need an SSD.

taking delivery of a tube of Arctic Silver. In its very own box.

The goal

See how much I can improve my LGA775-based system for $500. The motherboard is getting a little old, but they’re a pain to switch. Jumping up to a more modern i7-powered board is going to be a much pricier proposition and probably require completely new guts. Power-supply and motherboard. Plus, I’d probably feel more compelled to look at a 5000-series ATI card or comparable Nvidia. The whole prospect of going up to an i7 was more of a hassle (and money) than I really wanted.

The parts list

• Intel 3.06GHz Core2Duo E8400 (Wolfdale)
• 4GB Corsair XMMS DDR2 RAM @ 1066MHz
• MSI 9800GT graphics card

Installation was shockingly easy, and once again I had nice thoughts about my Lian-Li PCV600 case. It’s not the quietest, but it sure is nice to work in.

The biggest issue I had was the RAM. My BIOS firmware was a couple of years (!) out-of-date. That it was able to use the processor at all was a bit of a surprise. At boot-up, my machine sat on the ASUS logo screen but wouldn’t go any further. There were no extra beeps during POST so it seemed to be working. On a hunch, I pulled the new RAM and put my old, crusty RAM back in and that got me into the OS.

There’s something vaguely troubling about flashing your firmware with a tool that looks like Winamp from 1998. Telling me it’s connecting to ASUS’ servers in Taiwan is always exciting. What are they installing? Am I a new node in a botnet? Windows Defender didn’t complain though, so it must be safe!

After updating, I was able to put my new back RAM in and was rewarded with Windows telling me I had 3 whole gigabytes to play with. I reran the Performance tool, and this is what I got.

Yup. A whopping .1 increase, thanks to my marginally faster RAM.

The Real Deal

Well, those numbers may not be stellar, but there’s a significant boost in processor performance. Playing Dawn of War II felt noticeably zippier last night with no slow-downs or hitching as I’d experienced before. I was able to increase my resolution from 1600×1050 to 1920×1200 with improved framerates. The machine feels a fair bit snappier.

This is a fairly subjective measurement, but without bothering to go through the whole XBench rigamarole, this is what I get. Was it worth it? You bet!

If you put your computer to sleep in one of these modes and find it immediately wakes back up again, fans whirring, login-screen ablazing, open a Command Prompt as Administrator (right click on the Command Prompt icon in the Start Menu>Accessories and select “Run as Administrator”). Then type:

powercfg -lastwake

You’ll likely see something like I did, and see a USB Root Hub caused the start.

type

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

and it’ll give you the names of the devices that actually caused the wake-up signal to fire. For whatever reason, my Keyboard and Mouse both seemed to be culprits so I disabled them both by typing:
powercfg -devicedisablewake “HID-compliant Mouse”
powercfg -devicedisablewake “HID-Compliant Keyboard”

case was sensitive for those names and they matched the output from the “wake_armed” device query above. That did it, allowing my machine to sleep properly. Waking up now has to be done from the power button on the front of the case.

There are some additional tips in this post on vistax64.com which I may experiment with if I get the time, but the current setup is good for now.