Vista: Best Startup Technique for S/W Needing Admin Rights

An audio driver and ftp server are two applications that are in my Vista Ultimate startup group. Both require admin authorization to start up. Nothing serious, but a nuisance, as they appear as "blocked" programs and must be manually launched.

Microsoft's Help suggests using Windows Defender to block the startup applications from running. This probably works fine, but didn't sit well, essentially "leave it broken."

Several solutions are possible. The one settled on, described in a forum post, utilizes the task scheduler to launch these applications instead of the startup folder. The task scheduler allows for setting the "run as admin" feature ahead of time. (The Vista task scheduler has a well-thought out UI and may be useful for you for other purposes).

But one of the tasks stubbornly refused to be removed from Startup. Unclear why, but by using the Sysinternals Autoruns utility, which has other benefits as well, the audio driver item could be cleared from the startup registry --without a tedious browse of the registry. (If you're on XP, try Mike Lin's utility).

Commodity Disk Drives May Fail in RAID

Upgrading disk capacity seems to be an ongoing nuisance. More music and video content ensures that most of us will run out of space sooner or later -- and that doesn't even begin to consider what happens with backup space.

If you're using RAID to improve reliability, there's cause for concern with ordinary commodity drives, e.g., your garden variety 1TB drive. Take a look at one Newegg commentary for a report from Western Digital about the difference between their RAID-suitable and ordinary desktop 1TB drives. It must be a big difference, because the same capacity RE3 Western Digital drive is close to 2X the price.

On the Promise TX4660 Compatibility List, a number of commodity "non-enterprise" drives can be found, but this statement accompanies the list: "In RAID storage system, we recommend user to use [sic] enterprise level hard drive, which has much better command timeout control and more reliable to vibration for critical application [sic]."

It seems one can't simply shop for the least cost drive and throw it on your Intel ICH10R LSI, 3Ware or Promise RAID controller.

On the other hand, this is a plus for the architecture of Microsoft's Home Server, which doesn't use RAID to accomplish its own sort of redundancy. The commodity drives would probably be fine for MHS.

Discovered: Source of Mysterious Musical non-POST Beeps

It's emblematic of how far we haven't come: signalling computer system problems with beeps instead of intelligible messages.

Yes, I know the excuse - no UI, compatibility with older hardware, and so on. But consider this brief story.

Take a Windows XP machine with Intel D865GBF motherboard. Running fine since 2006. The plan is to convert the boot disk to RAID 1. An existing controller already running in the machine was suitable for the task. Its firmware was out of date and incompatible with the Windows-based "PAM" management tool for the controller. The firmware was updated, the PAM applications and Windows driver to accompany moving from JBOD to RAID 1. The drives were updated to RAID 1 and files restored to it preliminary to making it the boot disk.

Windows booted fine from the old boot disk. After about two minutes, a repeated low - high beep pattern began - using a perfect fourth or fifth. No POST codes matched this symptom. The Intel desktop tools showed nothing out of the ordinary with power levels, temperature or fan settings. The pattern was ceaseless. Some POST codes seemed somewhat plausible, suggesting that the CPU detected a problem with itself, but under light test the O.S. behaved well except for the beeping. The system was rebooted and memory tests run for an hour. No errors were detected.

After much investigation and fruitless web searches, the culprit, if it can be called that, turned out to be the presence of the Promise TX2300 controller, which had been in the system for years. When it was removed, the beeping stopped. The ultimate cause is unclear - possibly there was an indirect consequence of changing to RAID 1, but there were no messages anywhere, not in the event log or in the directory where the Promise driver was installed.

The absurdity of troubleshooting beeps with the full Windows UI present should not be lost on anyone.