dell xps m1330 nvidia gpu failure

It seems to be a fairy common problem with Dell XPS M1330 GPUs which are NVIDIA 8400GS series.

I started seeing this problem few days ago after using this laptop for 11 months. I've very extensive experience with laptops and was wise enough to take a 1+3 yrs extended warranty plan since I know there are many more things which will go wrong with a laptop with the kind of travel I do.

The problem generally starts where the machine starts to hang at various times without any pattern. Sometime the mouse will stop responding for few seconds and then become active again and then the whole system hangs.

Ater few of such incidents, you'll notice that the machine won't start and you'll see the random color vertical lines (just like in the picture above). They'll start to appear from the left and thne slowly fill the whole screen and then start to disappear from the left again.

Some people have mentioned that it could be horizontal lines as well instead of vertical lines.

Although you might be able to boot successfully if you wait for sometime and might be able to work as well. For me, it didn't work for few hours even after I completed some display and other diagnostic tests but then the laptop worked fine for the whole of next day. And, same problem returned the following day.

Display Test: With machine in the off state, press "D" and the power button, release the power button and once the caps lock light is flashing, release the "D" button.

Complete Diagnostic Test: With machine in the off state, press the "Fn" button and power button, release the power button and wait for the top right to show "diagnostic..." or lights next to the power button start to blink and then release the function button.

All these test will be fine if its a GPU problem.

Sometime you are lucky enough to see the boot screen and actually boot the machine, but you might see randon "Blue Scree of Death" like the one here...

The technician showed up in two working days and replaced the completed mother board, the heatsink and fan assembly and I was good to go in 45 minutes.

They haven't seen any more problems with the updated GPUs but nVidia failed to mention if it was a problem with the GPU generating more heat or somthing in the GPU itself. But anthing which get hot (and hotter) will fail eventually.

mysqldump with stored procedures, triggers and functions.

Dumping data with mysqldump could be tricky with all the available options. If you are looking to backup all the data and triggers, here's the set of options you need.


backup complete database


mysqldump -u myusername --password=mypassword --databases mydatabase --skip-opt --routines > dump.sql


if you only want to backup the triggers and functions etc then you could use


mysqldump -u myusername --password=mypassword --database mydatabase --skip-opt --routines --no-create-info --no-data --no-create-db > no-data-dump.sql

Use --opt if you want to include the auto_increment as well in the create command.

Intel Mash Maker

Recently came across this browser extension from Intel which can be used to pull in information from various Web sites to create cool mashups.

There are widget APIs as well which can be very useful for quick applications using Web services.

http://mashmaker.intel.com/web/

Disabling Security Center automatic updates warning in Windows XP

Even when you disable the Windows Automatic Updates in security center, Windows XP prompts you with a warning dialog every time you boot up.

This will disable that warning dialog box.

Add or edit the following registry entry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center
Data Type: DWORD
Value Name: UpdatesDisableNotify
Value: 1

The machine would need a reboot for this change to take effect.

removing Search Box on IE7

I've been using Google Toolbar for a long time and have gotten used to it, so don't like the clutter of other search boxes as toolbars.

Here's how to remove Search Box on Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)

1) run Group Policy Editor using ... Start Menu --> Run --> gpedit.msc
2) Browse to
User Configuration -->
Administrative Templates -->
Windows Compoments -->
Internet Explorer.
3) On the right pane, double click on the setting
"Prevent the Internet Explorer search box from displaying" and change it to Enabled.

Restart IE.

configuring XP Start Menu -> Right click -> Explore action

I often right click on Windows XP Start menu button and then click on the "Explore" link to open the windows explorer. It'll always opens the following location which I'd then close and open the path I want.
C:\ --> Document and Settings --> --> Start Menu.
Here's a registry tweak to change that to your favorite location.

Navigate to

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\explore\ddexec

On the right pane, right-click on "default" and pick Modify.

On the Value Data line, reaplce both isntances of '%I' with your favorite folder as

[ExploreFolder("D:\workspace", D:\workspace,%S)]

Happy Exploring !!

Enabling AHCI mode after installing Windows (on a Dell XPS m1330)

The day I day I received my Dell XPS m1330 LED, I reformatted the hard-drive and installed Windows XP on it. Since XP doesn't come with AHCI drivers you need to do the F6 trick (and supply the driver disk) during the installation process. I didn't bother with it and just installed it after changing the mode as ATA in the BIOS.

<spam>
here's a comparison of LED (left) vs LCD (right) screens on Dell m1330 XPS

</spam>


Recently, I decided to change the mode to AHCI and followed the instructions on http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831 to enable the AHCI mode back on but wasn't able to successfully do it and kept seeing the BSOD.

Here's what the above website says:

1) Download the Intel Matrix Storage Manager from
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=2101&lang=eng

2) Extract it using the
iata76_enu.exe -a
on a command line and it'll extract all the files in
C:\Program Files\Intel\Intel Matrix Storage Manager\...

3) Copy the iaStor.sys file from the above directory (Drivers or Drivers64) to
C:\Windows\system32\drivers

4) Copy the following code in a file, say ahci.reg and then run the file to add entries to registry.

There were couple of different versions of the registry entries but a user combined all of them into one and here's the code

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2922&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_282A&CC_0104]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2829&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2822&CC_0104]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2821&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2682&CC_0104]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2681&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_27C3&CC_0104]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_27C6&CC_0104]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_27C1&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_27C5&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#VEN_8086&DEV_2653&CC_0106]
"Service"="iaStor"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor]
"Type"=dword:00000001
"Start"=dword:00000000
"Group"="SCSI miniport"
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"ImagePath"="system32\\drivers\\iaStor.sys"
"tag"=dword:00000019
"DisplayName"="Intel AHCI Controller"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor\Parameters]
"queuePriorityEnable"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStor\Enum]
"0"="PCI\\VEN_8086&DEV_2821&SUBSYS_B0051458&REV_02\\3&13c0b0c5&0&FA"
"Count"=dword:00000001
"NextInstance"=dword:00000001

5) Reboot the computer and do not boot the Windows and instead go to BIOS setup.

6) Change the setting to AHCI mode, save and exit

7) Boot the Windows, it'll identify a new drive and install the drivers and ask you to reboot.

8) Happy ever after.


Instead, It didn't work for me and I kept getting the BSOD even after changing many different registry entries.

I ended up downloading the driver for Intel SATA from the dell website (R154200.EXE) and then unzipped it. If you use the iaStor.sys from this file and follow the above procedure, you should be fine and the laptop should boot without any problems.

Final note from the website,
All this process worth nothing if you forget at the end to go to device manager, double klick your hard-drive(s) under "disk drivers", go to "policies" tab and mark "Enable write caching for this disk" (I recommend adding this to the guide)

building tag clouds

Hey !! Don't it look pretty.

These are some of the oil and gas basins of the world. I've been working on getting a tag-cloud for these so they can be included as a part of a bigger project which I'm working on. The Color and Size are based on the occurance of these basin names in a huge list of documents.

In the next post, I'll show you how to build this.

getting up and running with WAMP

WAMP: Windows XP, Apache Tomcat 6, MySQL and PHP.

Having been done this many times on Linux, I decided to setup my laptop with all these tech-essentials.

The first step was to get these running indipendently and then making sure that they run together.

1) Tomcat 6
This was probably the easiet to get up and running.
1.1 --> Just unzip/untar the package under D:\ say as tomcat6.
1.2 --> Go to D:\tomcat6\bin and execute startup.bat
1.3 --> Change the port number in D:\tomcat6\conf\server.xml, if you want to.

2) MySQL
I decided to go with no-install executable so I can start and stop the server wheneven I want.
2.1 --> It was unzipped under D:\mysql
2.2 --> You can put the following directory under the PATH
D:\mysql\bin
2.3 --> start the server as "mysqld --verbose"
2.4 --> shutdown the server using "mysqladmin -u root shutdown"
2.5 --> you can test the connection using mysql -u root
play away.

3) PHP with Tomcat
3.1--> Download the zip package or installer from Windows Binaries section of this url
http://us3.php.net/downloads.php
3.2 --> Download the pecl Win32 binaries from the above page
3.3 --> Unzip php to D:\php
3.4 --> Unzip pecl to D:\pecl
3.5 --> copy D:\php\php.ini-dist to D:\php\php.ini
3.6 --> In php.ini, uncomment the following line by removing the ";" (semi colon) or if the line doesn't exist, please add it
;extension=php_java.dll
3.7 --> Copy the php5servlet.dll from D:\pecl to D:\php
3.8 --> Create the following directory path in tomcat
D:\tomcat6\webapps\php\WEB-INF\lib
3.9 -->Create a file
D:\tomcat6\webapps\php\WEB-INF\web.xml
with the following content

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
  "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
  "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
<web-app>
    <servlet>
          <servlet-name>php</servlet-name>
          <servlet-class>net.php.servlet</servlet-class>
    </servlet>
     <servlet>
          <servlet-name>php-formatter</servlet-name>
          <servlet-class>net.php.formatter</servlet-class>
     </servlet>
     <servlet-mapping>
           <servlet-name>php</servlet-name>
           <url-pattern>*.php</url-pattern>
     </servlet-mapping>

     <servlet-mapping>
           <servlet-name>php-formatter</servlet-name>
           <url-pattern>*.phps</url-pattern>
     </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

3.10 --> Unjar the phpsrvlt.jar from the D:\pecl directory. If you un-jar is under D:\, one of the path would look like
D:\net\php
The two files under this directory will be reflect.properties and servlet.properties.
3.11 --> make sure the line in the above properties files looks like
library=php5servlet
this needs to be same as the dll which you copied in step 3.7
3.12 --> If you changed the above files to correct the library parameter, then re-create the jar file using the command below from D:\
jar cvf php5srvlt.jar net/php/*.*
3.13--> copy the jar file to
D:\tomcat6\webapps\php\WEB-INF\lib
3.14 --> Add PHP to your System or User PATH variable.
3.15 --> Create a test file called
D:\tomcat6\webapps\php\test.php
with the following content

3.16 --> start your tomcat server and test the PHP installation by going to
http://localhost:8080/php/test.php

If everything is working fine, then you'll see lot of php details on the webpage


4) PHP with Tomcat and MySQL
4.1 --> Unzip the following lines from D:\php\php.ini, or add them if they do not exist
;extension=php_mysql.dll

;extension=php_mysqli.dll
4.2 --> Copy the following files from D:\php\ext to D:\php
php_mysql.dll

php_mysqli.dll
Or you can also change the following property in php.ini
extension_dir = "d:\php\ext"
and move all the dll's to D:\php\ext
4.3 --> Test the php integration with mysql under tomcat. Make sure to restart the webserver.
4.4 --> If it still doesn't work, sometime you need to copy the above DLL's to C:\windows\system32 directory.

Good luck.