Dell Latitude E6410: SpeedStep, or SpeedSTOMP?

Recently on the Dell Latitude E6410 I use at the office, on several occasions Windows 7 would slow down and become completely unusable, necessitating a hard reboot.

Event Viewer revealed the following events in succession for each core of my laptop's quad core Intel i5 CPU:

The speed of processor 0 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 5 seconds since the last report.

Windows slowed down to the extent that I couldn't even open Task Manager, which normally comes up readily even if the system is otherwise sluggish. Interestingly, in this state it would enter Sleep Mode eventually upon closing the lid, but was otherwise unusable.

Several steps can avoid these slowdowns:

• In your system BIOS, disable Intel SpeedStep.
  
• In Windows 7, ensure your system uses the High Performance setting for Power Plan.
  
• Ensure adequate cooling with a utility like SpeedFan to monitor temperatures.

However, based on at least one thread in the Dell support forum and another on a hardware forum, this could turn out to be an indication of a hardware problem.

Intel SpeedStep is triggered to activate, among other things, by heat. If the system is heating up and can't dissipate heat effectively, SpeedStep by default will engage and step down the CPU so that it generates less heat. Whether that heat is generated by the CPU itself as a result of a dead heatsink fan or the heatsink somehow being detached from the CPU surface, or the GPU overheating for whatever reason, or heat simply can't dissipate due to factors like lack of ventilation thanks to dust or covered vents, it will try to compensate by throttling down the CPU speed.

While this seems perfectly reasonable in theory, in practice it seems to not work as intended, at least in the case of my E6410. I've read reports in the very helpful Dell Latitude E6410 Owner's Thread that some have had similar issues which necessitated a mainboard replacement, while others were able to get up and running by just clearing dust out from the vents of their laptop. 

My particular situation, however, doesn't seem that common, which makes me wonder whether my GPU might be on its way out. Yesterday with the laptop on battery and without a lot of ambient noise, I noticed that when I would ALT-TAB from say a mostly white background to a vividly colorful one, a distinct whine would be emitted from my system, and the display wavered just slightly as if some interference were rippling across the video hardware (update on this, according to some info in this thread, this whine is characteristic of systems with Intel Core 2 Duo and newer CPUs).

For now, I've disabled SpeedStep and installed SpeedFan to keep an eye on temperatures, and cleaned out dust. Hopefully this will do the trick, but if not, given this and the sound problems which continue to plague my E6410, a warranty comes in handy. I added a link to my bookmark toolbar to the aforementioned E6410 owner's thread, it seems Firefox sympathizes with my plight based on how it shortened the bookmark title. Ow indeed, Dell!

Chattr - A New Way to Talk on the Web

Chattrr is a novel new way to chat. 

It's a bookmarklet which utilizes an intelligent chat room allocation algorithm to connect you with other Chattrr users who happen to be browsing the same website.

Picture yourself at an art gallery. Perhaps you're puzzling over why someone would pay $140 million for a Jackson Pollock. Someone else strolls in, and they, too, find a common thread to chat you up about. Others come, looking at the same thing, which might remind one of a high school art project they didn't take seriously, another of a haphazard work of "art" slapped together by a chimpanzee one afternoon. Then a fine arts major strolls in and decrees everyone else to be philistines for disparaging such a fine work of "art".

So it is with Chattr, which enables a whole new level of conversation, in real time, among people with eyes trained on the same content.

By applying the real-time chat of IRC atop otherwise relatively static nature of website commentary, I think Chattrr has carved itself a unique niche in the realm of social networking. Whereas you might post a comment on a blog and wait days, even weeks for a response, finding someone to chat with via Chattrr means instant discussion with whomever else is looking to share their thoughts about the experience, particularly for discussion based forums and sites like Reddit, where at any given moment thousands of people may be commenting on the news of the moment.

While the tool has only recently debuted, it is fully open source, has been tested successfully with Firefox, Chromium, Chrome and Safari, and in my mind is the start of something wonderful.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Boot Failure

Windows 7 SP1 has been released, but upon installing it, I found my system no longer boots into Windows. I get the BLACK screen of death, with the cursor flashing helplessly in the upper-left corner and no hard drive activity.

The dreaded BLACK screen of death, complete with animated cursor!

There were no obvious issues during the installation of the service pack, so I'm going to try using the BOOTREC utility in the Windows Recovery Environment in case some aspect of the service pack install, or some weird twist of fate, decided to damage the master boot record rendering my system unusable, for now.

Please feel free to share your own Windows 7 SP1 experience, whether good, bad, or ugly!

-= UPDATE =-

As I inserted my Windows 7 disc and rebooted, ready to attempt a repair through the recovery environment, I remembered something.

Before updating to Windows 7 SP1, I made a change on my system to enable AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), which enables two of the best features of SATA, hot swapping and native command queueing. I'd just recently replaced the last of my old IDE hard drives and went full SATA.

To see whether this made a difference, I entered my system BIOS and changed the setting for "Configure SATA as" from IDE to AHCI, and then rebooted.

No more black screen, my system successfully booted into Windows! 

Here are the steps I'd used originally to enable AHCI:

1. Exit all Windows-based programs.
   
2. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
   
3. If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
   
4. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   
   
       HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
   
   
5. In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
   
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
   
7. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

However I stumbled upon a Microsoft support article (922976) which is slightly different in that it specifies an additional registry key that may be modified in order to enable AHCI.

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV


In my system's registry, the subkey value for Msahci I had changed to 0, but IastorV was still set to its default value, 3. I changed the latter so that both subkey values are set to 0, then rebooted, entered the BIOS, and this time changed the SATA setting from IDE back to the desired AHCI, saved changes, and rebooted once more.

Now, my system appears to be back to normal. From this troubleshooting misadventure, it seems like the question of whether Windows 7 service pack 1 may want just ONE of those two registry subkey values set to 0 is no longer a question but a fact as far as AHCI goes.
 

ASCII Art

Here's a quick guide on how to create ASCII art in posts on sites like Reddit, forums, email and elsewhere.

ASCII art has been around for decades now. This site provides a very nice summation of the history of ASCII art, including its beginnings in hieroglyphics, monasteries, and finally on computer screens. You can find ASCII art online today in the form of emoticons, and also at various sites (like this one) that have compiled all kinds of ASCII art creations for your enjoyment.

Creating most ASCII art relies mainly on using a fixed-width font, such as Courier New. Doing so ensures that your work will look the same when rendered by the browser or email client or whatever medium as it does in whatever tool you're using to create it, because each character has a set width, a set number of pixels that it occupies.

Many text editing widgets on websites and email clients give you the option of picking what font to use. For purposes of ASCII art, pick a fixed-width font. Then, begin crafting your design. You can also simply copy-and-paste someone else's ASCII art, like this cupcake, for example, but if you do so, it's best to keep any attribution the artist might've tagged their creation with (thanks Krogg, whoever you are):

          )
         (.)
         .|.
         l7J
         | |
     _.--| |--._
  .-';  ;`-'& ; `&.
 & &  ;  &   ; ;   \
 \      ;    &   &_/
  F"""---...---"""J
  | | | | | | | | |
  J | | | | | | | F
   `---.|.|.|.---'
               Krogg


Many forums have a WYSIWYG text-editor that lets you pick from a variety of fonts. In those cases, you can typically create your art in any text editor (I use Notepad++) then copy-and-paste it into the forum's editor, and then highlight the text and then change the font to apply fixed-width formatting.

Email clients, too, usually have WYSIWYG editors. Microsoft Outlook, for example, can be configured to use Word to create emails, allowing for great flexibility in formatting. For email messages, you can simply configure your email client to use a fixed-width font like Courier New, or alternatively change the email format it uses to plain text, rather than HTML or Rich Text; by default many email clients will render incoming such email messages in a fixed-width font, saving you some guesswork about whether the ASCII art will appear as intended.

Specific to Reddit, their text editor doesn't let you choose what font to use, beyond the font selections you choose for your web browser, but they do enable you to use a fixed width font by preceding each line of text with four blank spaces. Users in the programming field will sometimes post programming code, and while this feature is particularly suited to that purpose, it can also help you break up an otherwise serious discussion with some frivolous ASCII art creation.

To reproduce the above cupcake ASCII art on Reddit, then, you'd simply copy-and-paste the above into a new post or comment on Reddit, then copy a set of four blank spaces and paste them in front of each line of the cupcake. Then when Reddit displays the text, it will apply formatting rules and display the cupcake in fixed width font for everyone's enjoyment. Here's an example.

Unfortunately, some sites like Facebook won't allow you to choose your own font, their text formatting is very limited. However, you could simply host either a plain ASCII text file or an HTML document on a free web host like Awardspace. Then, simply refer your friends to the URL for that page to show them your creation.