Technology- Fixed my laptop
posted in Technology |A couple of weeks ago my fairly new (3 months old) Dell laptop started blue-screening. I suppose the first sad thing is that it took my awhile to
bother trying to fix it. I tried disabling drivers, making sure my memory cards were secure. Yesterday I started running the Microsoft memory test
tool and the Dell diagnostics and everything was coming up great. Part of the issue is that the kernel driver that it was reporting the crashes in turns
out to not be the real source of the problem.
After a few searches I tracked down the issue to a driver called tfsnifs.sys. It turns out that the Sonic DVD software that
Dell includes with the laptop somehow turned on its “DLA” feature which does some drive-letter mapping for I think writable
CD and DVDs. I’m not sure how this got turned on but I probably accidentally launched it trying to burn an ISO or something.
In any case the software appears to be a piece of crap. I really wish Dell did a better job making sure the stuff they
shipped on their PCs was higher quality. The sad truth is that they are more interested in selling you the upgrade to whatever
package is installed. Still, this explains the huge tech support problems they have been experiencing. Between poorly-written
anti-virus, firewall, and three media center packages and all trying to fight for the system resources its amazing that it runs
as well as it does.
In any case, my experience is stay away from the Sonic stuff- it appears to suck, and I did check and there is no upgrade
available at the moment. My laptop is happy now that I’ve disabled it. I still need to figure out why media-playback
isn’t really working right anymore. Any medium disk access tends to make it stutter which is just not supposed to happen.
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