Author Archives: daniel

New graphics card in the Mac Pro

To recap: I’ve got two old 2008 Mac Pros. Lovely machines. The video card in one went bung (possibly power problems).

As a workaround I’ve been using a friend’s spare ATI Radeon 3870, which only works in Windows, not OS X.

I’ve just bought an upgrade: an nVidia GeForce GTX 480. Very nice. A beast of a card, too, very impressive looking. Got it on eBay from a bloke in NSW selling under the name “Mac PC Parts” for about A$270, which is a bit cheaper than the official Apple upgrade — which is no longer available anyway — and a LOT cheaper than any of the new cards at OWC or other etailers and retailers that I could find.

Mac Pro, video card installed

A note of caution to fellow Mac Pro 2008 users: it appears to be near-impossible to get the card out once plugged-in, due to the placement of the PCIe catch on that model of Mac Pro. It might explain why later models went to a bar thingy which is easier to get to. This also means it’s worth plugging in the two power cables before the card goes in.

Anyway, the card has taken the graphics rating in Windows 7’s Performance index thingy from 5.1 to 7.9. It even seems more responsive for regular web browsing.

There’s a certain amount of geek pride in getting each item, one by one, to the top of the scale.

But given the weak point is now the hard drive, it would seem that the next upgrade needs to be a new hard drive/SSD.

Windows performance index

But the main reason I wanted to get it was to get this computer running OS X again — son the elder is getting familiar with it at uni, and may need to run OS X-specific software again soon.

Alas, plugging in the OS X drive and trying to boot off it got me a “Operating system not found on disk” error. It would seem the Microsoft gremlins got onto it.

The disk doesn’t have anything important on it anyway, so stand by for updates as I figure out how to wipe it and rebuild OS X.

Update: It was easy. Download Mavericks onto a USB, boot it up and use the built-in disk manager to re-partition the OS X drive (I unplugged the Windows drive just to be sure I wouldn’t accidentally wipe it) then install onto it.

Plugged the Windows drive back in, and installed ReFit again to provide a more visible boot menu. Done.

The Age: subscriber problems

Recently The Age has been hassling me when I get to 30 articles/month. But I’m already a subscriber!

I suspect their code is buggy. Not hard to see how it might be trouble-prone when you see how many Cookies there are: no less than 92.

The Age/Fairfax cookies

Clearing them made the problem go away… for a little while, at least. (Isn’t that how freeloaders fool it?)

Not sure if that’s a permanent solution though. And as a paying customer, it’s very annoying.

Can’t copy address bar from Google Chrome

I’ve had periodic problems with Google Chrome on Windows (Version 32.0.1700.102 m, but this has also happened occasionally in the past); sometimes it will refuse to copy the address bar.

Instead of copying, it will clear the clipboard.

Copying from other places, such as a web page (content or using Right-click / Copy Link Address) works fine.

Not sure if it’s an environmental issue — only seems to happen on my work machine; I haven’t seen the same at home.

Very odd.

Blogging it here because I can’t see any mentions of it online (which might be because it’s just me). Will post back if I find the solution.

Update 2014-01-31: I uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome… it seems to work again, for now.

Update 2014-02-05: The problem seems to have come back. Very odd.

Update 2014-02-20: Some old posts on a related problem seemed to suggest it might be a Chrome Extension causing issues, so I removed all of mine. The problem seems to still be intermittently occurring.

Postscript: As per the comments, if you have Remote Desktop running, try shutting it down.

Nvidia 8800GT nvlddmkm.sys blue screen of death

I’ve got two old Mac Pros, and on one of them, the Nvidia 8800GT video card suddenly started causing weird errors in Windows.

Nvidia crash

Then it started doing the blue screen of death repeatedly, a crash in nvlddmkm.sys.

Nvidia blue screen

I have no idea why it started happening now — the Nvidia drivers don’t appear to have been updated for months, and Windows Update hasn’t installed anything for almost a week.

Oh well.

Boot into Safe Mode With Networking

Download the latest drivers

Install with Clean Option on

Reboot

Seems now to work, touch wood.

Update 2013-11-19 18:45 — No such luck. It seemed fine this morning, but later on started crashing like before. Investigations continue.

Update 2013-11-19 21:00 — After playing around disabling various things, and puzzling over what might have updated itself (since there was nothing recently installed or patched listed by Windows), I think I may have found the culprit: the Steam client beta (which I’m using to get the family sharing trial). Have disabled this, and Windows seems to be stable again. Will try it for a bit longer, then report findings to Steam.

Update 2013-11-20 — It couldn’t be that easy, of course. And I have dissed Steam without justification. The video card is still playing up — now so much so that:

  • a lovely speckly pattern appears when booting
  • Windows proclaims the video card isn’t working, and automatically puts us into Base Video (640×480) mode
  • OS X won’t boot at all — the GUI presumably tries to come up, then it reboots

Oh dear. Trouble in video card land.

The card is an NVidia GeForce 8800 GT, quite a nicely specced card. I suspect it’ll need replacing, dammit.

Update 28/11/2013: As per the comments I found another spare PCIe card (an ATI Radeon 3870) which works… in Windows. Not in OS X. Even the broken card partially works in Windows, but not at all in OS X.

A workmate pointed me to the Tony Mac x86 web site, where I found a good list of graphics cards compatible with OS X.

Thankfully however this specific machine is mostly used for Windows-only, so there’s no tearing rush. In fact Windows performance index thingy rates the ATI card slightly higher than the nVidia one.

One option is to buy the official Apple-supported Mac Pro video upgrade kit, an ATI Radeon HD5770, which is A$299. Despite the Apple site claiming it requires a post-2010 Mac Pro, plenty of sources indicate it’s fine with a 2008.

Update 2014-04-08: New video card bought and successfully installed

“Microsoft account”. One product, 6 names.

Hahaha, what a classic:

Microsoft account (previously Microsoft Wallet,[1] Microsoft Passport,[2] .NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID) is a single sign-on web service developed and provided by Microsoft that allows users to log into many websites using one account.

— Wikipedia

So over the years it’s had 6 names!

Nice work, Microsoft.

Mac Pro: RAM Red light

We got a second secondhand Mac Pro recently, and I was mucking about over the weekend with it. At one point, after taking out the RAM to clean inside, I noticed it seemed to think it only had 2Gb instead of 4Gb. (I’ve got another 4Gb on order.)

Then I noticed the flashing red light from where the RAM is plugged-in. PANIC TIME!

No, wait, calm down. But a quick Google found the solution, and I stopped panicking: Switch off, pull out the RAM, unplug the modules and plug them back in, push it back in. Reboot.

All good.

Of course, if it had still been flashing after that, then I’d definitely start panicking.

By the way, I still love the Mac Pro build, and how easily accessible the components are. I wonder if the new Mac Pro will be as good?

Windows Vista: Could not connect to the System Event Notification Service

M's laptop got the above error after rebooting during a Windows Update.

The error itself appears just after entering the username and password. And the big problem is it then doesn’t logon, but just freezes up.

Doing a bit of Googling finds quite a few instances of this error, but usually on Windows 7. One notable thing: the problem means non-Admin users can’t logon, but Admin users can. But the other info around the place didn’t really seem relevant.

So I logged in as an Admin user, and while looking through the Event Log to try and find out what happened, I noticed Windows Update said there were 3 more Important Updates to go.

I let them go in, and then rebooted. Fixed.

Yeah I could keep digging to better identify the cause, but the problem’s resolved for now, and I’ve got better things to do.

So my conclusion (in the absence of any other information) is that this weekend’s Windows Updates somehow require an Admin user to logon to complete… and if not, they leave the SENS service unable to start, possibly as well as other issues that prevent non-Admin users logging on.

Mac Pro – faster booting Windows than OSX

As I mentioned, my secondhand Mac Pro might very well be the best Windows computer I’ve ever owned. The hardware is just lovely, and it runs Windows really well.

Here’s the thing: it seems to boot faster in Windows 7 than it is in OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion.

  • Boot time (from Boot Camp menu to logon): 55 secs OSX / 35 secs Win7
  • Logon to desktop (from hitting enter on password, to desktop ready): 28 secs OSX / 12 secs Win7
  • Start Chrome and click bookmark for GMail: 10 secs OSX / 7 secs Win7

Once it’s running, OSX is very responsive, but the boot just seems to take ages.

What's going on here?

Perhaps being a 2008 Mac it doesn’t run OSX 10.8 that well… though I’d have thought it is a pretty fast box (2 x 4 core Xeon 2.8 GHz, 8Gb RAM). It’s true that Win7 is not the latest version of Windows — it appears Win8 is not supported on this Mac model under Boot Camp.

Does something in OSX need some optimisation perhaps? What's the OSX equivalent to running msconfig and turning off automatic startup for things you don't need?

OSX experts, any ideas?