Vista installation stops at "Completing..."

I recently decided to re-install my laptop for a variety of dull reasons. Unfortunately, the Vista install kept stopping on the "Completing Installation" part. Rebooting in to safe mode led to it halting at "crcdisk.sys".

Anyway, after much head-scratching I found a couple of potential problems that can cause this. Firstly, if you have over 2Gb of RAM in the machine, try removing some so it's under the 2Gb mark (you can replace it post-install) - Vista, particularly 64 bit versions, seem to have trouble with this.

My problem was slightly different. It appears that AHCI mode for SATA can cause problems during the setup. I'm not sure why, but in any case, after disabling AHCI mode in the BIOS, the install ran through first time. BEWARE - if you simply enable AHCI afterwards, the chances are it won't boot. You need to enable the AHCI driver in the registry before rebooting with AHCI switched on, by following the steps in this MS Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976/en-us

Hope that helps!

Timelapse photography

I've been playing around a little with timelapse photography. This is basically where you take a series of photographs and then combine them in to a movie. The effect is that of a 'sped up' film and works very well with scenes of constant movement over time (think traffic at night in a city).

My first attempt was simply of some clouds passing over the house, and you can see the end result on the weather pictures page of the website. I set up my Sony DSLR camera on a tripod, and used a programmable shutter timer (from ebay) to take a picture every minute. I then resized the resulting .jpg images to a smaller size, and finally combined them into a movie using the simple img2avi utility. It came out pretty well, so I'm going to try this technique a little more!