My laptop transmogrifies into a hair dryer and other Vista installation tales

After I rolled off of my last project, I decided that it was time to flatten my laptop and start anew as it was getting a bit crufty (and, if for no other reason, to rid me of the evil known as ClearCase). I decided (as evidenced by the title of this post) to go with Vista [Enterprise] instead of another WinXP install. So, I made the usual preparations and then updated the BIOS (required for running Vista on this model) and set the boot device to the optical drive.

I then put in the DVD, rebooted and subsequently reformatted the drive, exorcising the demons from my laptop (or so I thought).  After installing the OS and OS components (e.g. IIS, MSMQ, etc), I disabled UAC.  I did so because some applications (Exhibit A: Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK) will silently fail otherwise.  The next thing I did was join the laptop to the corporate domain via VPN. After a few failed attempts and subsequent research, I discovered that I needed to make the registry edits described in this KB article for RPC.  That done, I started down my list (yes, I maintain an ordered list (I have OCD, what did you expect?!?)) of items to install which numbers around 100 entries. This includes applications, utilities, SDKs, service packs, and patches.

..fast-forward several hours...   My installations complete, I re-enabled UAC and then logged on with my domain account (which does not have adminstrative privileges - my choice).  Think I'm crazy?  I ran as non-admin on WinXP for years - doing development, no less. Yes, really. Am I masochistic, you ask? Perhaps. I happen to think that it is the RightWay to do things. 

As I'm getting things tidied up in my profile and letting Outlook rebuild its .ost file, my CPU gets busy. As a direct result, the fan gets busy too.  Unfortunate, but it is to be expected.  After this was complete and my machine was at idle, it had somehow transmogrified into my wife's hair dryer.  Yep, the cooling fan was screaming and I was ready to flip out. As friends and family can attest, I'm an absolute freak when it comes to quiet and computers (more on that in an upcoming post).

A quick digression: On my last XP image, I installed the Toshiba PowerSaver utility craplet. Worthless. Caused my ears constant discomfort. I even brought my Targus ChillHub into work (which was an extra pain in the ass because 'work' was in another state and that was one more damn thing I had to haul around in my bag/on the plane). Not much help. I finally uninstalled that and instead installed the excellent SpeedSwitch XP utility. Life got much better very quickly.  Ok, back to the story...

Clearly, something was driving the CPU hard which triggered the fan to create such a ruckus. So, I opened Task Manager and then selected show tasks from all users (which as non-admin with UAC trigged an elevation prompt).  Task Manager goes away and then reappears (this is both disconcerting and annoying) displaying the processes from all users. Sorting on CPU reveals our serious offenders [in order]:

SearchIndexer.exe, SearchHostProtocol.exe, Outlook.exe, and MsCam32.exe

Well, well.  Vista was indexing - like a file clerk who just did an eight ball.  Outlook was..busy (hrmph). And MsCam32 was being stupid (and with no cam connected -wtf?!?). I then broke out three more tools from my toolbox: Process Monitor, FileMon and RegMon as I wanted to see _what_ these processes were doing (note: As noted by Grant in the comments, ProcMon replaces FileMon and RegMon. I realized that soon after I opened up the three but I still blogged that I opened all three - and yeah, I haven't spent much time with ProcMon, yet).  These are three excellent SysInternals utilities (get the troubleshooting suite).  In the process of sorting this all out, I found another soul who was experiencing similar pain: read Mike Fullerton's post. I agree with Mike, I would like to schedule SearchIndexer.

Ok, so Vista wants to index; let's let it be.  I broke out the ChillHub (why not try to help out the cooling fan?) and sequestered my laptop to another room for the night.  When I returned to it in the morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find my laptop much quieter.  Still, the volume level of the fan was higher than, oh, near silence, so I was not yet happy.  

I then went to Control Panel > Power Options > Edit Plan Settings and selected 'Change advanced power settings'.  This opens the Advanced settings dialog. In which, I located the 'Processor power management' entry. I changed the minimum and maximum processor states (I ended up doing this a few times over the course of several days to get it to where I was happy). This helped a bit more. If you change these, don't forget to edit these for _all_ power plans, although you may wish to maintain different values for each power plan. 

While I am pretty happy where things are from a noise perspective when my laptop is plugged in (and not being stressed by say, lengthy compilations in VS2005), when it is on battery, I'm less than happy and I haven't yet found the magic formula.  Still tweaking and trying to avoid being on battery.  And yes, I did install the PowerSaver utility for Vista. Again, worthless, but I tried.

I'm still searching for the magic formula to keep the fan quiet while I'm on battery; I'll update this post if/when I do. Part of me thinks that I should be grateful that I can even run Vista on my M3; the other part of me is bitter about the fan noise.  Someday, I might actually have a laptop whose fan I won't *** about. Right. Not bloody likely.

Update (200703150850): I found Notebook Hardware Control, but all I get is a blue screen (noting Reference by Pointer).  Oh, and did I mention that Speedswitch XP does not run under Vista?