Windows 7 and Gigabyte P35 Motherboards

Here at the Gadget Grill we have a computer or two. Or three or four or … yes, a more than ample sufficiency, truth be told.

And of course, we felt a need to upgrade at least a couple of these to the all new, bright and shiny Windows 7, and so this has now been accomplished… but not without a little bit of pain.

Both of the systems that we wanted to upgrade are based upon Intel P35 chipsets running on Gigabyte motherboards, and my personal desktop system – a GA-P35-DS3R – proved to be a particularly troublesome install.

This was quite puzzling, as I’d experienced no issues when installing any of the Win7 betas that had been on offer, nor had I experienced any issues in running those betas.

By way of contrast, the Windows 7 RTM installation was particularly ugly: it would simply die mid-process, often (on repeated attempts) at what appeared to be a set of consistent points. While I would be able to struggle through and get what appeared to be completed installation – with, I think, four restarts after crashes along the way – the resulting system was anything but stable. Like the installation process, it too would just die. No blue screen, just a loss of video, along with a constant series of attempts to access one of the optical drives in the system.

Alternatively, the system might start issuing a high-ish pitch buzzing sound, which we couldn’t really track to any particular component.

Removing and swapping out memory sticks yielded no result, nor did removing and swapping out different HHDs. Changing the video card fared no better, and no matter what I Googled, no answer was forthcoming.

Turning to the Microsoft Upgrade Adviser, it suggested that I needed an upgrade to the drivers for the controller chips on the board, and while it seemed to offer a link to a source for those upgraded drivers, that was effectively just a circular link back to the same page. After some further Googling, I found what seemed to be the drivers I needed, but alas, they proved no more effective than any other solution I’d tried.

By now I was becoming quite frustrated: this should not be so hard, and surely this is just some sort of basic issue that is easily solved?

As it transpired, it is a very easy issue to resolve, once I’d found the solution, but of course that’s always the case.

Bottom line is that if you’re getting stuck with problems trying to install Windows 7 on a Gigabyte P35 motherboard, go into your BIOS settings and check your values for ‘C1E’ and ‘EIST’. These both need to be disabled, thus locking your CPU core speed, and this seems to address the problems I experienced. The solution was buried in a 6 page thread on sevenforums.com, and I thank that source for its resources.

Hopefully this post will be a little easier, or at least provide another reference to this problem, and most importantly, its resolution.

And yes, I’ve been using this new Windows 7 installation all day, just installing and setting up things, and I can honestly say that it truly is quite a pleasure to use.