New Turbo Memory Driver from intel

Anyone using this?

 

Not yet. I suspect I'll wait till lenovo gives it the okey dokey. Although since it is Intel it should work given its their chipset.

 

Downloading it now... Thinking about it, but my system is pretty stable at the moment and not sure I want to mess with it Guessing Lenovo will have it on system update before too long.

It doesn't look like this really fixes much of anything, other than packaging and some real minor stuff. A lot of the issues list still remains.

 

I just installed it, and no bombs yet. I know I said I was going to wait, but I figured I have the drived imaged so what the heck. It does look like they have fixed a number of causes of BSOD's from the release notes.

 

Keep us posted.... I overlooked a few of the BSOD issues in the release notes, looks like many of them are related to certain low memory conditions. I wonder if this affects systems that have little memory or if comes into play when allocated memory is exhausted before more is allocated from physical (i.e. it could affect any of us)... I'll give it a couple of days and install it, what's the worst that could happen?

 

I just installed it a few minutes ago. I am now running my t61 on battery and trying to put it down to its knees.......burning a dvd, extracting an avi to dvd format, chatting on google talk and browsing the web. Will keep you posted ladies!

 

Sounds crazy, but it seems like the boot time is a bit shorter...(could be wishful thinking)...

 

Installed it, no new problems so far. I never had problems with Turbo Memory, so I can't say if this fixed anything..

 

I would like to know if the interaction with the Active System Protection is fixed.

 

It has not crashed with ASP once since the update. Although I only got it to crash two or three times with ASP, and that was only just hours before the upgrade.

 

I've always had Active System Protection and Windows Hard Disk Hybrid Power Saving turned on and never had a problem...

 

Yeah I had no end of blue screens and freezes until I turned off ASP.

 

Yow.

I tried it. I got a BSOD on the first reboot, which isn't that unusual for Turbo Memory installations.

But then Windows deactivated and I need to reactivate. I resent that.

Well I promised myself next deactivation I would clean install on the 200GB 7k200 instead. So there might be a silver lining.

Did I mention how I love Vista activation.

What a piece of work is Vista. What idiots came up with this need to deactivate when the turbo memory gets a new driver? Same mobo, same cpu, same chipset, same laptop display adapter. What in God's name did they have to tie the activation to the disk drives for? To prevent someone pirating hundreds of copies of Vista on this one machine by um, installing a lot of different turbo memory drivers? All on the same machine?

I have not yet seen a sensible case where Vista deactivates itself. All the ones I've seen are laughable false alarms. Bunch of dimwits working at that place.

Yes. The Vista activation. The most convincing selling point for Linux I can think of.

Obviously, I don't recommend anyone try this driver unless they like activating their copy of Vista.

 

It's not everyone that will have to reactivate their Vista with this new driver. You're probably one of the very few...

 

I didn't have to reactivate Vista with the new driver. What is your exact machine time zenpharaohs?

 

It doesn't have anything to do with activating it, as the Turbo Memory is not a keyboard or CPU.

 

I agree with fade to black confusing as why your machine would need to be reactivated since I believe turbo memory is not monitored for a hardware change like CPU is.

 

Updating drivers is sufficient in some cases to reach the threshold

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=1443
interesting article: http://apcmag.com/vista_activation

 

[SARCASM]

The thrill isn't complete unless you get to talk to a human in the activation bullpen. Simply hitting reactivate or pressing 6,000 keys on your phone and keyboard just don't cut it.

[/SARCASM]

 

I hope so, but frankly this crap hits my fan far too often. When you have a struggling Vista install (I've been through the mill with this one - BSODs, freezes, black screen wakeups, failed USB recognition, failed ExpressCard recognition, all in sequence) then the things you have to do to try to fix Vista end up racking up the reactivation points. Vista has a "points system" for deciding whether reactivation is needed. And they got a really screwy set of points. They probably did some statistical work to try and make the points system nastier to pirates than to nice people, but in my case, it's been hell. And I point out that I am absolutely within any reasonable expectation of use of this software - it's installed only on one machine. There is no gray area here - MS has just fouled up with this system. I am not a happy customer, and could, if it comes to it, explain carefully to them what they are doing wrong and why I could do better, and why they should probably fire the people that came up with this crap. On the other hand, it's not really a good use of my time which may very well be better spent figuring out how to trick my last remaining "killer app" that only runs on Windows (because of a license manager) into running under Linux.

 

Flashing your BIOS can also do it.

Lots of things can do it. The last two times I was talking about activation with a Microsoft engineer (who was trying to get me activated) they explained a bunch of things which are all quite innocuous and which should be irrelevant to activation, which can cause deactivation. If your machine hits a rocky spot (which in my case was caused by drivers which acted against each other for my particular hardware combination) then you will end up talking about activation to Microsoft a lot.

I was surprised that the new Intel turbo memory driver tore me a new one, but I shouldn't have been.

 

I don't know if the Turbo Memory is monitored or not, but I would guess that it is, because it is a piece of hardware with a device driver.

But one thing I DO know is that the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, which is updated in this update to Turbo Memory, definitely IS monitored and definitely IS considered a hardware change.

So yeah, you might not be on the points edge, but if you are, this update DEFINITELY CAN knacker your activation.

 

oh no...are you serious? geez

so how are you guys installing this? are you uninstalling the old driver and then installing...or are you guys just installing it over the old driver? My system is FINALLY stable...i don't want to mess it up

zenpharaohs: did you try what i pasted below? i have turbo mem and APS active and have not had any problems. you may remember from before I was raped by freezes and bsod's prior to doing what i did below

install these drivers

4. Intel Turbo Memory Driver v1.1.0.1010 (8/2/2007)

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?ProductID=2813&DwnldID=13805&lang=eng


5. Intel Matrix Storage Manager v7.6.0.1011 (8/2/2007)

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...OSs=164&OSFullName=Windows Vista* 32&lang=eng


ignore any prompts that say you may be installing drivers older than what is currently installed

install the matrix storage driver after the turbo driver WITHOUT restarting. (the turbo memory already installs a matrix driver, but for some idiotic reason by intel, it is the old one)

restart your computer

then go to [Control Panel]->[Power Options]->[Change plan settings]->[Change advanced power settings]->[Hard disk]->[Windows Hybrid Hard Disk Power Savings Mode].

disable the Windows Hybrid Hard Disk Power Saving option


wallah! you're good to go

 

Keep in mind that this new TM driver also installs a new Intel Matrix Storage Manager at the same time. So you don't get to pick the order. My hybrid power savings have been off for a long time. Keep in mind that I have never had problems that depended on whether hybrid was on or off. I had freeze problems that only finally went away when I disabled Active System Protection.

But remember when TM has been working, you often get a BSOD on the first (and in the past second) reboot after the new install. I believe this is because Vista thinks there is stuff in the TM cache but it's not really there.

After the first reboot it seemed fine. But then Vista deactivated.

At the moment I have a clean install on a new 7k200 200GB driver and I haven't installed the System Protection driver. I'm thinking about what I want on there before I hassle Microsoft to activate.

I also took the liberty of getting another T61 which is almost the same (only 3GB and T7500 CPU) in case Microsoft denies activation. (In which case this machine will become my Linux learning box).

 

wow..it seems like you have so much $$ you don't know what to do with it..

I don't understand why you are worried about getting vista activated again. If you have a legit copy, then there's nothing to worry about

anyways, with the old turbo driver, you didn't have the option to pick and choose the order either. It was just that the driver i posted earlier came with an older matrix storage drive, so that is why i advised installing the newer one on top of it w/o doing a restart.

I don't know why you're saying getting a BSOD on the first restart is nomral...that is definitely ABnormal

 

FYI

2) The installer supports an over install from a previous version of
the Intel(R) Turbo Memory Driver package.

3) The installer will over install any version of the Intel(R) Matrix
Storage Manager previously installed on the system, as each release
of Intel(R) Turbo Memory is validated with a specific version of the
Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

also it looks like they bundled a new matrix storage driver in there 7.8, however, the latest one on the website still shows as 7.6

EDIT: I installed it over the old drivers at first and then i got some windows installer error half way through

"Problem signature
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Setup.exe_Intel(R) Installation Framework
Application Version: 1.1.0.47
Application Timestamp: 471f79a4
Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.0.6000.16386
Fault Module Timestamp: 4549bdc9
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00061884
OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 7b39
Additional Information 2: bc68537b0c65b8b9c056b4402d1b79fb
Additional Information 3: 9a8a
Additional Information 4: dd327897a455316b89a5d836c16c3aee

Extra information about the problem
Bucket ID: 557593223"

Does anyone know what that even means??

anyhow, i went and installed it again with success.

Edit: WOW!! my system seems to boot up 10s faster. I am amazed. Before this, when the initial desktop shows up, the system tray icons would show up 1 by 1. This time a group of 10 just popped up together! and then my sidebar popped up together as well...it usually loaded half and then the other half of the gadgets a few seconds later...may intel has finally fixed this! I just hope I have not spoken too soon. Only time will tell (the next few days)

 

A: Computers are tools for my work, which actually, is knowing what to do with money. Explaining to investors that we didn't want to spring for a spare computer is on my list of things not to do today.

B: I'm worried because Microsoft didn't tell people much at all about the activation details. It's all coming out by people discovering what the thing actually does. I can understand Microsoft not wanting to tell pirates how it works, but because there is a huge loophole in the OEM activation, then we actually know that Microsoft will not catch any pirates with the retail activation. But they probably have a threshold at which they decide that too many calls from the same product key is considered a piracy suspect. That would be even more fun to explain to investors - why is Bill Gates suing us....

C: It was possible in the past to separately install TMD and IMSM. There are actually still situations in which you might find that occuring to you (I hope it's rare but it did actually happen to me - by the way you don't want that to happen to you because that will cost you another activation).

D: The BSOD after installing TM can happen, and was not particularly abnormal, (although one can hope for progress). I walked a Lenovo engineer through that the second to the time I was being hammered by TM. I spoke to Microsoft engineers (three levels in) who were interested but sort of non-comittal since they don't really have to support intel's stuff. The Lenovo engineer at least tried to figure out what was going on. We didn't really figure out what was going on in detail, but we figured out enough to understand how to escape. If you want, I can reconstruct most of that situation from memory but it will be pretty involved. The main keys to understanding that situation is if you are faced with:

1. A file system which is corrupted due to an "unexpected restart" due to a freeze related to the TM driver not understanding APS turning off the hard drive while TM cache was writing to the hard drive.

2. Due to this corruption, backup cannot be run.

3. Because backup cannot run, precious data is stuck on the machine, preventing a clean install.

4. The Vista system files are also corrupted. This is not immediately apparent.

OK now the insidious thing which makes this situation nasty happens. The machine may boot if the image on the turbo memory is "good enough". But after a while, Vista prefetch can change the state of what is in the turbo memory, and this can eventually cause a BSOD and in a state where the contents of turbo memory will cause a BSOD on every boot.

It is not possible to use the Turbo Memory Console at that point to disable the TM. The only way to boot that machine that I could figure out at that point, was to change the mode of the SATA controller to "Compatibility" which disables TM.

Oddly enough, if you do this, then you can boot the machine. When that happens, a different SATA driver will automatically install, which will make your machine slow, and it will deactivate Vista, but you can get the machine up.

This is the point where you find out that due to the corruption, chkdsk appears to make corrections to the file system, but for no reason that Microsoft can explain (and they thought about it for a couple days) these corrections do not actually occur to the file system. (And yes, we observed that even when booting from the installation media and using that version of chkdsk while the hard drive was unmounted.)

OK your only option at that point is to perform an Upgrade install. Even though you are "upgrading" to the same version of Vista. Although this doesn't stomp the file system, so it might not always work, it did change enough things so that backup could be run, saving your precious data.

Now you want to get back to the correct SATA mode, so you change the BIOS back to the correct AHCI mode, but first, you have to uninstall and reinstall the IMSM to get back to the correct SATA devices. Otherwise you will get a BSOD from trying to run the wrong SATA devices in the correct mode.

So on that reboot, the TM can have some corrupt stuff in there. Even if you went and deleted all the prefetch files manually (which we tried).

When you reboot the system in that state, you can experience a BSOD. But keep attempting to reboot until the TM figures out that it's the problem, not the solution. In the particular case I am describing here, it required only one BSOD before it was OK.

In a previous instance (not described) it took two BSODs before TM was working well.

You might suspect that there is a hardware issue. I am pretty sure that is not the case. This machine is working fine now, and worked quite well for a long time until the APS freezes got corruption onto files that were actually needing to be read again, as opposed to pure prefetch stuff which isn't normally dangerous to corrupt.

 

Thanks for the detailed response...however. Did the program crash on you half way through install the first time?

 

I've never had the program crash the install. The BSOD is on the reboot following the installation.

Oddly enough I did a clean install of the OS after the last deactivation, and it has not had any BSODs. This may be because a new install of Vista knows not to go looking for anything in a ReadyBoost cache the first time it reboots.

I haven't quite finished installing everything on this machine so I will talk activation at the last chance. This way if I have to screw around with drivers it will cut the chances of getting deactivated.

 

yeah man i did the update the baby runs like it is a rocket. this laptop is really nice