Stabalizing Windows 7 beta
Many of you may be getting the BSOD on the new Windows 7 Beta. Well I have figured out the cause and suggested a fix for it. The crash will report a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL error and give you some memory addresses. I immeadetly assumed it was a hardware driver issue but it is not! The issue spawns from an “anti hacker” driver that Anti-Virus programs use. I have tried AVG, Avast, and Symantic all with the same error. The conflict apears when you try and transfer large ammounts of data through or around a samba share. I have a home server running XUbuntu with all my media files on it and accessing it almost always caused a crash. Another give away that you have this issue is tha every time you restart after the BSOD your network drives will fail to reconnect. The BSOD reference addresses that appear will lead you back to a page fault error but once agian even infinate tweaking of the page file size and location will only delay the inevitable……..CRRRRAASSSSHHHHHHHH!
To solve this error you will need to do a couple of things:
1: You must uninstall any AV program you may have installed including ClamAV, Norton360, Avast,AVG, or Kaspersky. Do not Restart yet.
2: Open the Advanced Memory Settings under Control panel->System->Advanced System Settings then under Performance click Settings then under the Advanced tab then click change underVirtual Memory. Set any paging file options to NO paging file and click the SET button. The changes WILL NOT take if you do not clik SET!
3: Restart and if you are dual booting you will see a GRUB like boot menu then press F8. If you are not dual booting you can simply repeatedly tap F8 while booting to open the safe mode options. Choose the Start windows in Safe mode option and allow it to boot. I have found that in many situations Windows 7 will hang if you attempt to change the Paging File settings in normal boot. When you have arrive in safe mode use the path specified in the previous step to get back to the Virtual Memory options. You will need to use the Custom Size option. Each person will most likely choose a different size with respect to differing sizes of available hard drive space. I chose Start:3000 and End: 12000. You may find this is much larger than your needs and if you have a lot of physical memory(>4gb) then you may set this to relatively small or in some cases you may leave it disabled. If you leave it disabled and you find Windows 7 giving you out of memory errors simply return to this menu and boost the numbers. Restart your PC for these changes to take effect.
4: Finally boot normally. At this point you should have a custom paging file size and NO ANTIVIRUS!!!!! That is the key! I know that sounds shady but trust me! The only AV client that I could find that does not exibit this Driver failure is ESET. Their new Beta is compatable with Windows 7 and has worked flawless for me so far. You can download the AV client here at http://beta.eset.com. After you have downloaded and installed it you can confirm it is woring properly by clicking on the small flag on the task bar and clicking open action center(you may also open the action center through the control panel). There under Security(click to expand) then under Virus Protection and Spyware protection you will see ESET reporting its status to windows.
I hope this fix is helpful! I hate vista but I really enjoy what 7 has brought to the table and after many hours of hard work and debugging I finnaly get to see its true potential. Please let me know how this fix works!
