Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet on windows 8 disconnects

I have a P5KC Asus motherboard which comes with a Gigabit adapter onboard. The problem is that Asus has stopped support of the MoBo since Vista and my machine is perfectly fit to run win 8 (actually I just got 8.1 and I remembered to do this post). Windows 8 detects vendor id 1969 and device id 1048 as Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller, but I had the problem of the network being disconnected after a few file transfers or video streams.

Migrating from eSXi to Hyper-V

In order to transfer a virtual machine from vmware’s eSXI server to Hyper-V we used disk-2-vhd to clone the disk in a vhd. If you are planning to do such a task, make sure you remove the vmware tools *before* you clone the disk cause otherwise the installer will not do it afterwards.

SSMS and win32k.sys Blue Screen

I recently came across each user’s nightmare. The Blue Screen Of Death (aka BSOD). The BSOD occurred while I was trying to open a table in SQL Server Management Studio (aka SSMS) which was installed with my brand new SQL Server 2005.

The symptoms where not that clear because the blue screen would appear either when SSMS was trying to open the table and some other times SSMS would open the table (I was lucky enough to see the actual contents of the table) and while I was editing the cell values, the Blue screen would appear showing the following error:

*** STOP: 0x0000008E (0xc0000005,0xbf8E270C,0A8E11868,0x00000000)

*** win32k.sys - Address BF8E270C base at BF800000

The error was the same in each case. Searching around the net I found a few references to this BSOD but the following SQLServer feedback had actually a few workarounds:

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=258813

No one suggested why this could be happening although there are some things in common:

1. In each and every reference I found, this screen would appear in a laptop with intel dual core
2. Most of these laptops had intellipoint 6.1 or later driver for their mice.

The suggested workarounds were:

1. Turn off multiple CPU core's in BIOS: which would be an unacceptable option for me. Why buy a dual core if I am going to use it as a single core!!!
2. Disabling hardware acceleration in the advanced display properties : I did actually try this but when no hardware acceleration is active, many programs wont run and everything gets a little bit slower
3. Disabling or uninstalling IntelliPoint 6.1 Software (also listed in the following url http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/Workaround.aspx?FeedbackID=262721) : This actually did the trick for me.

So after uninstalling the IntelliPoint 6.1 Software and installing the IntelliPoint 5.2 instead, the blue screens disappeared.

I hope some one might find this useful cause I was starting to believe that I will never again be able to edit the contents of my tables from SSMS...