Thursday, June 29, 2006

Laptop running at 590 MHz

My laptop has a pentium M processor which should run at 1.6 GHz, but it usually runs at 590 MHz. this i believe is because the power management comes to play. On linux, this can be changed by 'echoing' to a tunable variable in /proc (i vaguely remember doing this). Now how do i do this on Windows. Yeh i also run Windows XP on my laptop and i need to make the processor run at 1.6 GHz instead of 590 MHz. Ok id google and try to look for some tools that can help me do that.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

booting windows from grub prompt

I did the unthinkable. In a fit of rage i booted my laptop i WinXP and deleted my linux partitions.
Now why did i do that? See the story below


I have been happily running linux on my laptop for quie some time now and i run winxp on vmplayer. vmplayer has been slow but not "irritatingly". now a couple of weeks back, i noticed the winxp getting to that "irritatingly slow" level. i thought about it. *I* dint do anything that could have slowed it down. Also because of the ACPI issues, the linux usually ran only at 590 MHz for which i did a "echo performance > /etc/sys.....A path i will update later (can be googled easily)
However even with that i dint notice any discernable performance excpet that the windows welcome boot message was now understandable :) earlier when it booted, i could hear every note :) and it went on like for a screeching 10-12 seconds (im guesstimating here). ok finally this got to me one day and i thought id just do everything from scratch up. Had all the data i required on CD's.

Into windows and in 2 minutes deleted all my linux partitions, recreated some blank partitions for linux and then remained on windows. i decided id run linux on windows inside the vmplayer and check the performance. *THEN* it hit me...............huh!!!!
there was an enterpirse patch for an antivirus software that was installed on my virtual machine (win xp). now this wasnt there earlier and this software rn 10-12 services which took quite a toll on the processor (i believe).

Anyways, things went on fine that day and i was ready to work on windows fo a while.

Next day, i started my laptop as usual and hey it just came to the grub prompt. Ooops!! i realised, where is the grub.conf?? i deleted that linux partition. I was ill and at home and couldnt boot into any OS to chek out google. So i called on my friend who did the googling.

Well there ar just 4 steps to get into windows from the grub prompt. do this

1) rootnoverify (hd0,0)
2) chainloader +1
3) makeactive
4) boot

and then you are in Windows!!!!!