The Tech Journal

NVIDIA GeForce Drivers for Windows 10 – Dual Displays not working

Nov 162015

After upgrading to Windows 10, I immediately noticed that my 3 display setup no longer worked. It was powered by two NVidia graphics cards (GeForce GT 640, and a GeForce GTX 550 Ti).

For some time, I couldn’t find anything on the internet explaining as to why I lost my dual display setup. Finally I came across a forum that pointed to this NVidia Support KB article: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3707/~/windows-10-will-not-load-the-nvidia-display-driver-for-my-older-graphics-card

Essentially Fermi based GPUs utilize WDDM 1.3 mode, whereas the newer architectures of Maxwell and Kepler support WDDM 2.0. In Windows 10, it is not able to load multiple display drivers using different WDDM versions.

For a really long time I waited and no updates enabled the functionality until September when I performed an update, and out of nowhere they started to work. I assumed they fixed the issue permanently, however after updating once again, I lost the capabilities. In this case I reverted to the last driver.

I’m not sure if they updated the Fermi driver to support WDDM 2.0, but I just know it started working. And then after a short while, with another driver update stopped working again. Again, the driver rollback fixed the issue.

I recently upgraded to the latest build of Windows 10, and completely lost the ability once again, and lost the ability to rollback drivers.

It was time to find out exactly what driver version WORKS with both Kepler, Fermi, and Maxwell architectures.

After playing around, I found the WORKING NVidia driver version to be: 358.50

Load this version up, and you’ll be good to go! Hope it saves you some time!

Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd Gen 2015 – How to add LTE (WWAN)

Mobile Computing, Wireless 3 Responses »

Mar 192015

So I picked up my new Lenovo X1 Carbon 2015 Gen3 laptop yesterday, and I absolutely LOVE it… I’ve been waiting for it to come in for a couple months now, and wanted to add WWAN as it wasn’t available as a preconfigured unit with the WWAN built in.

The unit I purchased was the 20BS0035US part number, which essentially is fully loaded with the exception of WWAN.

One big things for me is that I need to have LTE availability as I hate using USB data sticks. I did a bunch of research, and while waiting I went ahead and ordered the Sierra Wireless card that you can order as a configure to order.

I called IBM parts and placed an order for FRU Part# 04X6014 (Sierra Wireless Gobi5000 EM7345). When I received the laptop yesterday, I opened it to install the module, and thankfully the unit DID ship with the WWAN atennas built in. Installed the card, connected the antennas (orange is the main), popped in a SIM card and I was good to go!

The WWAN module is working great with Rogers on LTE in Canada!

Again, this laptop is SLICK!

For those of you that want to add it, place an order for the FRU Part# 04X6014. IBM notified me that this is a Wi-Fi adapter, however I can confirm this is in fact a WWAN adapter.

Event ID: 513 – The system cannot find the file specified.

Windows Server 6 Responses »

Sep 302014

Recently, a new type of error I haven’t seen showed up on one of the servers I maintain and manage.

Event ID: 513

Source: CAPI2

Event:

Cryptographic Services failed while processing the OnIdentity() call in the System Writer Object.

Details:
AddLegacyDriverFiles: Unable to back up image of binary EraserUtilRebootDrv.

System Error:
The system cannot find the file specified.
.

Also, after further investigation I also noticed that when Windows Server Backup was running, sometimes snapshots on the C: volume wouldn’t “grow in time” so were automatically deleting.

It was difficult to find anything on the internet regarding this as in my case it was reporting “The system cannot find the file specified”, whereas all other cases were due to security permissions. On the bright side, I was able to identify the software that this file belonged to: Symantec Endpoint Protection.

Ultimately I found a fix. PLEASE ONLY attempt this, if you are receiving the “The system cannot find the file specified”. If you are seeing any “Access Denied” messages under System Error, your issue is related to something else.

To fix:

1) Uninstall Symantec Endpoint protection.

2) Restart Server

3) Disable VSS snapshots for C: volume (NOTE: This will delete all existing snapshots for the drive.).

4) Re-install Symantec Endpoint protection.

5) Re-enable VSS snapshots for C: volume.

When this issue occurred, I was seeing the event many times every hour. It’s been 4 days since I applied this fix and it has completely disappeared, back to a 100% clean event log!

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 – Overheating

Microsoft, Microsoft Surface No Responses »

Aug 142014

So I purchased a Surface Pro 3 today from the new Microsoft Store that opened up in Calgary, Alberta today. I purchased the 512GB – i7 version with 8GB of RAM.

The unit is slick, beautiful, and totally has a purpose, however there is one major problem I encountered: overheating!

First it sync’ed my apps from my Microsoft Account, upon installing 20 (Metro) apps, the unit overheated and I was presented with the black background screen with a circle and a thermometer icon. The unit had to cool down for a while before it allowed me to power on. I wasn’t even using the device, except 20 “apps” were installing in the background.

I put the unit in my server room (air conditioned to 18 degrees), and then proceeded to configure the Surface, install applications, and install all the Windows Updates and firmware updates. Since installing the firmware updates the unit has not overheated, however it’s burning my hand from just ONLY running Microsoft Outlook.

Here is a screenshot of the temperatures when running only Microsoft Outlook.

This specific unit is too hot to use for me. It’s too hot for me to even hold to just read e-mails, and the sound of the fan racing non-stop (even when idling) is driving me absolutely insane. I’ve decided to return the unit for a refund until it sounds like these issues get resolved.

Is anyone else noticing overheating issues with their i7 version of the Microsoft Surface Pro 3?

UPDATE: I found this thread on Microsoft’s “Answers” forum – http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-surfusingpro/excessively-loud-fan-constant-overheating-during/1efa253a-f7f2-486b-a891-5633738b8532

HPE MSA 2040 Benchmark – Read, Write, and IOPS

ESXi, HP, iSCSI, Storage, VMware, vSphere 41 Responses »

Jun 072014

I’ve had the HPE MSA 2040 setup, configured, and running for about a week now. Thankfully this weekend I had some time to hit some benchmarks. Let’s take a look at the HPE MSA 2040 benchmarks on read, write, and IOPS.

First some info on the setup:

-2 X HPE Proliant DL360p Gen8 Servers (2 X 10 Core processors each, 128GB RAM each)

-HPE MSA 2040 Dual Controller – Configured for iSCSI

-HPE MSA 2040 is equipped with 24 X 900GB SAS Dual Port Enterprise Drives

-Each host is directly attached via 2 X 10Gb DAC cables (Each server has 1 DAC cable going to controller A, and Each server has 1 DAC cable going to controller B)

-2 vDisks are configured, each owned by a separate controller

-Disks 1-12 configured as RAID 5 owned by Controller A (512K Chunk Size Set)

-Disks 13-24 configured as RAID 5 owned by Controller B (512K Chunk Size Set)

-While round robin is configured, only one optimized path exists (only one path is being used) for each host to the datastore I tested

-Utilized “VMWare I/O Analyzer” (https://labs.vmware.com/flings/io-analyzer) which uses IOMeter for testing

-Running 2 “VMWare I/O Analyzer” VMs as worker processes. Both workers are testing at the same time, testing the same datastore.

Sequential Read Speed:

Max Read: 1480.28MB/sec

Sequential Write Speed:

Max Write: 1313.38MB/sec

See below for IOPS (Max Throughput) testing:

Please note: The MaxIOPS and MaxWriteIOPS workloads were used. These workloads don’t have any randomness, so I’m assuming the cache module answered all the I/O requests, however I could be wrong. Tests were run for 120 seconds. What this means is that this is more of a test of what the controller is capable of handling itself over a single 10Gb link from the controller to the host.

IOPS Read Testing:

Max Read IOPS: 70679.91IOPS

IOPS Write Testing:

Max Write IOPS: 29452.35IOPS

PLEASE NOTE:

-These benchmarks were done by 2 seperate worker processes (1 running on each ESXi host) accessing the same datastore.

-I was running a VMWare vDP replication in the background (My bad, I know…).

-Sum is combined throughput of both hosts, Average is per host throughput.

Conclusion:

Holy crap this is fast! I’m betting the speed limit I’m hitting is the 10Gb interface. I need to get some more paths setup to the SAN!

Cheers

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