Mitch Wheat - Treat the cause, not the symptoms!

During a lunch time conversation with a colleague (Thanks Hadley!), it was mentioned that most PC setups are not utilising their hard disk speed potential due to being configured as IDE instead of AHCI. I’ve previously tried to get this working under Windows XP but it required a re-install and went into the too-hard basket.

The good news is, if you are running Windows 7 (or Vista, but let’s hope it’s the former!), ACHI is supported out of the box and you do not need to re-install.

You might be thinking that this doesn’t apply to you if you have a shiny new SSD? It does!  Back in August this year, I blogged about the Windows 7 performance score and how I was a little disappointed with the disk performance as it was the ‘slowest’ component in my new system.

How to Activate AHCI

These instructions are for expert users and are at your own risk. [If you installed Windows 7 with your motherboard BIOS set to use AHCI rather than IDE, then Congratulations! there is nothing to do.]

Otherwise, there are two things you need to do to activate AHCI.

1. You must Activate AHCI in Windows First

• Close all open programs.
• Open regedit and navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
• Double-click on the ‘Start’ value to edit it. The value will most likely be “3″. Change that value to “0″ (zero).
• Close regedit, and reboot your PC.

2. Activate AHCI in your Motherboard BIOS

• As your PC boots up, enter your BIOS setup.
• Go to the hard disk configuration. Find the setting that says SATA Setting or configuration (varies by motherboard).
• Select AHCI from the drop-down options. Once it’s set to AHCI, save and exit, and continuing booting Windows.
• Windows will install the necessary drivers and then prompt you to reboot.
• Re-boot and you are done!

If you don’t activate it in Windows first, you will get a blue screen upon loading Windows. If that happens, go into your BIOS and set SATA mode back to IDE, then boot Windows, and follow the steps as described above.

Please Note: this won’t work if you are already using RAID as your SATA setting, unless your motherboard has a second dedicated RAID controller like mine (many do).

Here is the re-run Windows Experience index:

And you know what? It’s not just faster by the benchmark score; it is noticeably faster accessing the disk as well!

The SharePoint 2010 (Beta) Developer Center is up and running with a host of new training modules. You can also find documentation on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK, the SharePoint Professional Developer Evaluation Guide, and access to SharePoint 2010 community pages.

The Windows SharePoint Services Resources look useful.

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group, Thurs November 5th to hear Joe Albahari present on the new C# 4.0 features. C# 4.0 is just around the corner, and it introduces a number of much-requested features including optional parameters, named arguments and (horror) dynamic typing! We're going to demo all of C# 4.0's new features, discuss best practices, show off dynamic Office and Python interop, and explore some novel uses for dynamic typing that may not have crossed your mind. In particular, we'll examine a surprising pattern whereby a little quacking can make large classes much more manageable. VB programmers may attend - but please, no smirking!

• TOPIC:    What's new in C# 4.0 - Joe Albahari
• DATE:     Thursday, Nov 5th, 5:30pm
• VENUE:   Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:     Free. All welcome

Joe Albahari is author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell and the upcoming C# 4.0 in a Nutshell.

There will be a door prize of a LINQPad 10-user team license donated by Joe, and a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, or IntelliJ IDEA).

More details here.