Windows Steadystate reboot loop problem

Recently, I got myself one of those solid state disks for my laptop to increase it's performance.

But since it's got a jmicron chip in it and since it's a first generation MLC SSD, you need to apply tweaks under Windows XP and Vista to get the full performance out of the disk because those operating systems are not designed for this type of disk.

Without those tweaks the disk will slow down to a crawl.

Among the many tweaks you can do is to install a program called "Windows Steadystate". It's a free program from Microsoft. You can take a look at it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/whatis/default.mspx

With this program installed and when you turn on the "windows disk protection", the performance improvement is quite noticable.

After a while, I had this problem when I had set the program to "retain all changes".

The computer would have a reboot loop where it would say something similar to, "Windows disk protection is committing changes" .

Then the computer would restart, and it would say the same thing over and over resulting in an endless loop.

To stop the loop, I booted the computer into safe mode, and that fixed the problem for a while but the reboot loop would happen all the time or frequently.

So, to get rid of this problem, I decided to uninstall Windows Steadystate and remove all registry settings having the keywords, "Steadystate", "vcfsvc" and "vcfservice". Some of the registry settings could not be removed until I changed the permissions. To learn how to do this, read my blog entry "Windows Vista Upgrade Problem" dated April 10, 2007.

Afterwards, I installed and ran "ccleaner" which has a registry cleaning option. You can check out this program here:

http://www.ccleaner.com

I finally reinstalled the program and finally the reboot loop problem was mostly solved.

After reinstalling Windows XP SP3, the reboot loop problem has not returned, even after several reboots.

So finally this annoying problem has been solved.

So far, my experiences with Windows Steadystate has not been that great, but as long as I can fix it, I am willing to live with it.