Blog:: Craig Pringle

Previously I blogged about an issue I was having on one of my PCs with Live Mesh.  The problem was that Moe.exe (the process behind Live Mesh) was consuming excessive CPU when ever it was running.  This has obvious ill effects on the battery life and overall system performance.

I was hoping that the recent update to Live Mesh would of fixed it.  Unfortunately this was not the case.  However since I was only experiencing this issue on one of my machines I decided to see if I could find a fix.  I did.

What I did was remove my problematic machine from my Mesh.  I then copied the contents of the synchronised folder to another location on my hard drive (as a precaution) and deleted everything in the target folder.  I then re-added my machine to my Mesh and set up synchronisation for that folder again. 

In the Before shot below the yellow line shows the percentage of the CPU that Moe.exe was using.

After the fix it consistently looks more like this:

A vast improvement and suddenly Live Mesh is useful to me again.

I have been living with the fact that SD Card reader on the LS800 does not work under Vista since I installed Vista last year.  However I recently had a conversation with a Motion Computing employee in which he indicated that he thought that issue had been solved.

Full of hope I rushed off to check the knowledge base article on the Motion site that documented the issue to see if it had been updated...

There is no SD card reader driver available for Windows Vista on the LS800/LE1600 at the time of this writing (1/29/2007).  Motion is working to provide this driver as soon as possible.  This knowledge base article will be updated at the time of the driver update.

Hmmm, still no joy.  However - while I was on the site I thought that I might as well see if there were any driver updates available.  Why OEMs don't put an RSS feed on their drivers page is beyond me.

While poking around I realise that there have been two BIOS revisions released since my version.  I'm was running A09 and A14 and A15 are on the site.  What happened to A10-A13 I wonder?

Nevermind.  I check the release notes for the two new BIOS releases.  Low an behold the Release Notes for A14 state:

What's New In This Release

· Support for Intel 1.1GHz processor

· Support for SD card reader in Vista

I check the release notes for A15 as well, nothing major in that one except one fix.  However BIOSes are cumulative, so A15 includes everything A14 had.  To avoid having to do two upgrades I flash the BIOS with the A15 version.

After a reboot I can see that the SDA Host Controller is listed in Device Manager without the little yellow exclaimation point it had before!

Full of anticipation I break out a SD card and slot it in.  **Poof**  Bluescreen of death.  Interesting.  I reboot and try it again.  **Poof** again.  Well at least the fault is repeatable...

Time to break out the Windows Debugging Tools to analyse the crash dump.  Not for the faint of heart.

After repeating this a few times and analysing three dumps I see the debugger pointing to three different drivers. None of which are the SD Card driver.  Given the highly repeatable nature of the fault I think it is clear that it is related to the SD Card Driver, so my guess is that the SD Card driver is corrupting bits of memory, which causes an exception when some innocent driver wanders along and falls into the whole.  Believe it or not - this is progress.