Category: General Computing

I had an E6400 Dell with an issue where his Verizon air card (PC770) would not connect up every time. It would say device unknown. I looked at device manager, and it showed the NEC driver as have an error code of “Code 12: This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use”. After some goggling, and failed attempts, I found a fix!

I ran this command in the command prompt (right click->administrator in accessories) :

bcdedit /set CONFIGACCESSPOLICY DISALLOWMMCONFIG

rebooted, and he has not had an issue since.

When I was running my AHCI vs ATA tests, I thought it would be a perfect time to see if a fresh install (factory image from dell) of AHCI is better then a registry tweak AHCI install (basically coming from ATA, without reformating with our stock image).

AHCI with registry tweak :

[zp src=”atto-ahci-samsung.jpg” album=”blog/samsungSSD/” width=”600″]

[zp src=”crystal-ahci-samsung.jpg” album=”blog/samsungSSD/” width=”600″]

AHCI after a fresh install :

[zp src=”atto-ahcifresh-samsung.jpg” album=”blog/samsungSSD/” width=”600″]

[zp src=”crystal-ahcifresh-samsung.jpg” album=”blog/samsungSSD/” width=”600″]

It’s interesting that dells factory image (fresh install) is almost slower performance wise! If anyone’s interested, I might have time to do a test from a fresh install (from win 7 DVD).

There is a very simple way to do this, Microsoft has it all laid out.


1) Exit all Windows-based programs.
2) Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
3) If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
4) Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys:

5) In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
6) In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
7) On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

The only one I saw was Msahci with the “name” option, so I changed that from 3 to 0 (hexdceimal), rebooted, and changed BiOS over to AHCI, and I was good to go. Rebooted, and it was live in ahci!

Enjoy 🙂

This operation assumes your machine can boot from a USB enabled device. Check your BIOS to make sure. You also MUST have a DVD copy of Vista to install the source files from the DVD to a USB flash drive:
1. Insert your USB flash drive and enter the following commands:
(please note this list assumes that your USB flash drive will be seen as disk 1. To confirm that it is type “list disk” after you’ve entered the DISKPART command) Otherwise you may wipe a different drive (such as your hard disk drive!)
2. Type:

diskpart
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
At this point your USB drive is formatted. DO NOT format the drive from within Windows. You MUST have a DVD copy of Vista to copy the source files from.

The final preparation step is to copy the installation files to your flash drive, this can be done by running the following command:
(Please note D: is the drive letter for the source files and E: is the drive letter for your flash drive, if they are different on your system you need to change them accordingly).
Exit DISKPART. Type:

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

That’s it, configure usb device as primary boot device in your bios and select it as your boot device!

Enjoy.