Jun 11
Consider this an amendment to my earlier post about uTorrent and nVidia Network Access Manager.
I can confirm that Network Access Manager is a no good piece of code. Not only does it crash uTorrent, but when I close Firefox, it takes a good 15-30 seconds, and during this time, it consumes 100% CPU power, and I suspect is must also leak memory. And I’m talking about RC2!!! That thing is supposed to work just fine!
By the way, I’ve uninstalled it. No such ‘I’m planning to …‘. Finito.
These are two apparently inocuous applications. nvappfilter.exe is a part of the nVidia ForceWare Firewall, which is shipped along with the nVidia drivers, in case you have an integrated ethernet controller on your nVidia motherboard. utorrent.exe is, well, for uTorrent, the amazingly lightweight BitTorrent client for Windows.
But, if you mix the two, you get a pretty heady cocktail. You end up with memory leaks, CPU overload, window freezes and God knows what not. Memory leaks occur, when due to a bug, an application begins to eat up the remaining free memory you have, till it eventually leads to your system crashing. CPU overload occurs when one process hogs all your CPU power, generally resulting in the rest of your system, including mouse, desktop, etc. not responding.
Well, according to the developers of uTorrent, it’s due to a bug in the nVidia Firewall. I find that not too hard to believe, because many people have flamed the code of that application for various reasons, most of them generally resulting in system instability. They recommend other third-party firewalls like ZoneAlarm.
But, in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section of uTorrent’s site, they’ve also mentioned that this bug had been repaired in the latest version of the ForceWare Firewall. I’m assuming that they’re referring to the version released with the driver version 6.86.
I think they’re wrong.
I had the old version installed, not 6.86, and I agree, uTorrent and ForceWare were not going hand in hand. I had trouble working with other applications. The mouse would move in a jerky manner. Other applications, especially games, would drop in framerate. Heck, I couldn’t even shut down Windows properly! uTorrent would stop responding, and this would cause me to End Task it. This is not good. Because this means that when I start uTorrent again, it will have to check the non-complete downloads in case any of them got corrupted. This generally takes some time and some CPU time, as in some percentage of the processing power.
Anyway, I installed ForceWare 6.86 for my nVidia 4 chipset. Along came the Firewall which I installed. Technically, they call it the Network Access Manager.
By the way, when you’re dealing with nVidia drivers, it’s advisable to uninstall the earlier version before installing a new version. If you can spare the time, uninstall your display drivers as well!
So, after restarting my PC, I start uTorrent. It’s memory usage starts at a healthy 1 MB or so, but after about 10 minutes, it’s reached 20 MB, which is a clear sign of memory leakage. This means that if I leave the PC on for a night of dowloading, it’ll probably crash my PC. :-O
So, I’m thinking that I’ll uninstall the firewall, because uTorrent is indispensable. Plus, the Network Access Manager, installs along with itself a host of other junk services and processes. For example, it installs the Apache Web Server, because the control panel for the firewall is through the web browser. The Apache processes take up a fair bit of memory. Also, there are a number of other processes for the Firewall, like nTrayFw.exe, which takes up 2 MB, nSvcAppFlt.exe, which is the application filterer for the firewall. The Apache processes take up 6 MB of memory.
I suggest the same to everyone else.
Jun 4
I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my PC. Had got the CD shipped from Netherlands. Got here quicker than I expected! Anyway, I’m like CompizFusion on my PC, it was one of the chief things that attracted me to Linux.
So, the first thing I tried to do when I got Ubuntu up and running (really, you don’t need to do much, actually!), was enable Desktop Effects. CompizFusion has been further expanded and integrated into Ubuntu, as compared to earlier versions. But when I tried to enable the effects, it gave a very simple message.
Desktop Effects couldn’t be enabled.
OK
Not like Windows, which would give something like..
Error 0×428563 :: Dektop Effects initialisation failed. Module GFX-core terminated in an unexpected manner. Last output – Unable to interface with nv169.21-6600gt. Writing 64KB crash dump to C:WINDOWSsystem32logscrashlogsdsktpxf.txt. Contact your system administrator for further help.
Send Error Report Details Cancel
Anyway, I had experienced a similar prooblem on my old PC, when I couldn’t enable Compiz. In that case, it was because there were no proper 3D drivers for the integrated graphics chip. So, I proceeded to enable the nVidia drivers.
I open Synaptic (to know more about Synaptic, click here), and search for nvidia. It turns up a lost of results, and I find that 3 of them are main drivers: nvidia-glx-legacy, nvidia-glx and nvidia-glx-new, with the first one being for older cards, second one for not so old cards, and the last one for the new cards. So, I tried installing nvidia-glx, and everything went smooth, except that it didn’t get enabled. Installed but not enabled. Now, not knowing how to edit xorg.conf myself, I tried going to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers, which is where you can enable Restricted Drivers. Restricted Drivers are those which aren’t open source, and thus, may or may not be compatible with all PCs and configurations. But I’d found nVidia restricted drivers pretty OK, and so I enabled that, thinking it would solve my problems.
Upon enabling it, Synaptic began downloading nvidia-glx-new. No probs, installed, restarted, and found that the resolution at 1024×768, whereas my monitor supported resolutions upto 1280×1024. I should note that while Ubuntu is loading the resolution is 1280×1024, but it later goes to 1024×768. So, I opened System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution and found that the list of resolutions didn’t have anything after 1024×768. Infact, the original generic driver which was working earlier, was giving me the resolutions I wanted! But not the one specifically designed for my 6600GT. But the generic driver didn’t support hardware acceleration, which is why I wanted to install the restricted drivers in the first place!
So, after a lot of uninstallation and installation, I was stumpted. But the tech nut in me, doesn’t like stumpted. He’s likely to blow up his PC, if that’s what it takes to fix it! Nothing that drastic required this time. I opened Synaptic again. Searched for nvidia and found a package called nvidia-settings. My instincts told me this was what I was looking for. It was, After installing, I could access this control panel for my 6600GT, which was not unlike the control panel for nVidia graphics cards in older driver versions. So, there I could set the resolution to 1280×1024.
But after resarting, the resolution was still 1024×768. I opened the Control Panel again, and there was a button, Save to X Configuration File. Well, I clicked, and it said that it couldn’t save the file. Then I realised that, like with many changes made to system files, this one also required administrative priveleges, so in the Terminal, I typed:
sudo nvidia-settings
and all was well… Clicked on the Save to X Configuration File after changing the resolution and it was OK. Just one thing. When Ubuntu boots up, for about half-a-second, the nVidia logo appears full-screen.
It’s kinda nice, cause it reminds me I have a 6600GT under the hood, although it’s not great anymore.
Nov 3
I think you might’ve read my earlier post on nVidia Display Driver. If not, click that link back there.
Thing is, that I recently came across the fact that Adobe AfterEffects need a minimum of nVidia Forceware Version 93.71 to use OpenGl on the graphics card to accelerate rendering. Well, I headed over to the nVidia website, to download the latest version. I noticed that they had a new interface for selecting updates. Kinda better than their earlier one. Also, the entire website is now tinted in green, to represent their colours.
I got version 163.71, and installed. Upon restarting, I kept my fingers crossed. I had downgraded to 77.77 because the booting time was considerably improved. Version 93.71 made Windows take a long time to boot up. But hey, it was exactly as fast as before. No change.
I had sent a mail to nVidia about this fact. Maybe that had something to do with this…
I’m a computer enthusiast, who likes to keep his PC squeaky clean, as efficient as possible. In the course of this, I end up uninstalling and reinstalling a lot of drivers in one go.
This is NOT safe.
Windows has a protection system, which doesn’t allow you to take make copies of you hard drives which has XP on it. If it detects major hardware changes, it will ask you to reactivate within 3 days, flat. Now, the thing is that, even with an original copy of Windows, you can reactivate only so many number of times, before that activation key becomes invalid. Unfortunately for me, I have done this a large number of time, and was in for quite a shock when … <BUZZ> … Activation Key Invalid.
I started hyperventilating.
But, regained composure pretty soon. I realised that I have an original copy and have no fear from calling up Microsoft. They even had the Indian call centre number when I clicked ‘Activate Using Telephone’, which is rare for out-of-India software. It was a breeze, nothing short of a breeze. I managed to do it without even talking to a call centre executive/employee/prole/whateva…
But, for people with cracked versions of XP, it doesn’t matter, coz’ activation itself is disabled (depends on what cracking method you’ve used).
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