"Auto-tune feature can be a disaster"
One feature I thought would be interesting to try is the auto-tune feature (coarse 20 minute setting) on my 7600GT (CPU is AMD XP30000. It ran for a few minutes and then as it mentioned, the PC crashed. I rebooted and just after the desktop showed, the PC hung again. Each time I rebooted, it froze over & over. After around 10 tries (more than 30 minutes later), I gave up and started looking around online to see plenty of others having similar issues.
I was able to boot into Windows XP in the end by holding down CTRL (override's nTune), however, to my surprise, when I went into nTune, it gave no option to undo the tuning that I could see. I decided to uninstall nTune, however, once I rebooted, the PC crashed again just after it showed the desktop, so even though nTune was taken off, nTune's changes still took effect.
Finally, I booted into the safe mode and performed a system restore to the state when nTune was installed and this finally put an end to the crashing on boot. So while nTune may offer a wide range of tuning, after seeing this awful mess nTune caused on me, this is something I'll not be putting back on this system! For those seriously interested in trying nTune, I would strongly recommend ensuring System Restore is enabled before installing it.
by: Sean Byrne | 2 | 2008-03-16 |
