I’ll try to shoot an email to

I’ll try to shoot an email to Ian about the mceBackup (restore) problem that I saw.  Having never used the tool, it was probably something I did wrong or a misunderstanding on my part about how it is supposed to work.

One other thing I should mention for those of you thinking about SB.  There is definitely some issues with HDMI and this chipset.  I’m not sure what is going on at this point, but it seems that after a soft reset (ie. Start -> Restart from Windows), the system will hang trying to start Windows.  It hangs even before the Win7 “flower animation.”  Interestingly, I never saw it when I had it connected to an old Dell monitor via DVI-D (no HDCP, a Dell 1901FP, circa 2003) and I’ve never seen it happen on a cold boot.  And I did a lot of soft resets in the process of setting it up (all those reboots after Windows updates and installing software).  It wasn’t until I hooked it up to my HT that I started seeing it.  In addition, it will generally work after failing by using the (hard) reset button (and answering “Start Windows Normally” at the “Windows failed to start last time” screen).

I’m planning to enable some boot trace output and see if I can figure which driver is causing it.

But let this be a word of warning.  It seems maybe Intel is slipping on their quality, given the big SATA issue earlier this year and now all these HDMI issues, not to mention how long it has taken them to adress the 24p frame-rate issue mentioned in every review on this website.