Google and Dr. Nathan saves the day


One of my co-workers just received a lovely Dell Precision T3400 with an on-board Intel RAID controller (ICH9) so he bought two 750GB drives to run it as a RAID 1 mirror. So we activated the RAID in the BIOS setup screen and let it rip! Uh oh, Vista started up but then the ugly BSOD appeared and it rebooted again. Whenever we deactivated the RAID controller the PC was happy, but once we enabled it, Vista would start loading and then BSOD in just a few seconds. I tried the Dell Support site but it did not have anything useful, so it was time to use Google and see what people had found out. It did not take long to find my happy fix from Dr. Nathan which was a registry fix that worked like a charm. Why is it that you can find this information so easily with Google, but not on the manufacturer's support site? Dell's support site is usually much more friendly than many other manufacturers (can you say Sun or HP?), but it still did not have the answer. I know in the past Dell's community forums helped me solve a problem with my daughter's laptop, but it did not help this time. Thank you, Dr. Nathan! I knew it was an OS problem with Vista not being able to properly use the RAID controller driver, but I definitely would never known what to hack in the registry. I was hoping to test Ubuntu on the T3400 to see if it could see the on-board RAID controller and the mirrored volume there too. We had suggested running Linux on it and just running Vista or XP within VirtualBox under Linux. For some reason, the user did not want to try that!

And now for a completely different topic, I am happy to report that both houses that were for sale on our street are back off the market. We know one is definitely under contract, but the other is suspicious since that homeowner puts her house on and off the market all the time. This time, however, she actually lowered her price quite a bit and used a different realtor, so maybe she actually sold it. I am still waiting for the one house listed by our old realtor, Mary Cella, to sell on McKnight Road, though. That one was for sale when we bought ours early last year, and is still listed as "active". My one co-worker who listed his condo with Mary now has a contract too, so hopefully that sale will go through too. I truly hope the housing market is finally turning around.

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