OT: AI Suite 3

[Scott]

I installed a piece of Asus software known as AI Suite 3. It does not do the job I wanted it to do. Majority opinion on Google is that it is bloatware. I am thinking about uninstalling it? Is this a good idea? When it installed it deleted another program. Stupidly, I did not keep a note of its name. Does anyone know what it might be; and should I try to get it back? Thanks for any assistance with this obscure question.

[wasbit]

As a generalised answer, yes uninstall it. What did you want it to do? There are lots of free system information & tweaking programmes. Look in the Programs folder & you may find the program that got uninstalled.

[Paul]

What it could have done, is remove a tool that uses the same hardware interface as Ai Suite uses.

It's possible the LPC bus (nibble wide, 33MHz) is atomic and two attempts to access the bus at the same time, will not corrupt the winning access.

Whereas I suspect SMBUS (serial bus, low rate), there can be corruption if two programs randomly probe SMBUS. At the time, someone suggested an industry-wide semaphore practice, but I suspect a lot of the participants never even read any of the material about this. The issue was duly ignored. On Linux, they appear to have a semaphore, but the documentation does not explicitly state why it is needed, so I cannot be sure of its provenance (what it is really for).

CPUZ reads SMBUS to get DIMM SPD tables.

Speedfan may read SMBUS, for some sensor data. Speedfan is not being kept up-to-date, and may not be able to "see" the sensors any more. Some AM4 and AM5 AMD boards are affected by that, and then Speedfan isn't used any more. A good deal of the hardware monitors now, could be on the LPC bus (not a problem).

It's possible there is an MSI cache, which would contain installer component files, that you've used in the past. While there is an unpacker for MSI files, it would be a lot of work to go through all of them looking for breadcrumbs. The names of the files are anonymized, so you can't tell from the name what they are.

There is an uninstaller tool, perhaps something that knows how to remove Asio.sys or similar. If the uninstaller in the tool worked properly, stuff like this would not be necessary.

This article has a list of some exploitable drivers. ASIO32.sys . ASIO64.sys .

There are two ways to access hardware. One way is using these "bypass" drivers, that remove the security and give access to hardware buses. A second way, is to pass ACPI objects between the BIOS and the OS. It's hard for me to remember or recognized some of these things, like ACPI\PNP0A0A (or maybe ATK0110?) for Asus. There might still be an issue with semaphores and multiple agents, even with something like that present (if, for example, a Windows program has its own giveio.sys or similar, competing with the ACPI one run by the BIOS).

Since this sort of issue, is not popular on USENET any more, it's hard to refresh all the terminology and not forget parts of it. We did have active motherboard groups (one per brand), but they're not really used any more. The info could be on Reddit (not currently available), in the MSI forum, in the Asus forum, and so on. I'm not sure which of the enthusiast web forums (ExtremeSystems) are still actively used by people. Some of them seemed to die. Naturally, Google is almost useless now, at finding this stuff. There is still one popular forum in the UK for this stuff.

Paul

[Scott]

Thanks. I wanted to update the BIOS and this was one of the methods. I used a different method, via the BIOS itself. I'll uninstall now and go looking for the 'lost' program.

[jon]

I have previously downloaded the asus bios update file and installed it from inside the bios

[Scott]

Yes, that is exactly what I did this morning. I am definitely minded to uninstall AI suite 3.

[Paul]

Some machines have a button you push, on the back of the machine, and one of the USB ports has a white dotted line demarcating a special USB port. Connecting a USB stick there, the machine can flash a BIOS, without MSDOS floppies or AI Suite.

The button for this, is recessed on the MSI board.

On this one, the button has a label. The "white" port on the stack to the left, bottom-most, is where the USB stick goes.

For a few machines then, a different challenge awaits. Due to the relatively poor "interface" on this idea, it's hard to tell whether it has started and is flashing, or it has "thrown an error". That involves two different blinking patterns of a single red LED. Naturally, the documentation explains none of this.

Paul

[Brian Gaff]

Well, normally a well written installer is capable of replacing anything it took out when uninstalling, however you could look for install point in the system you can roll back to, as that should put the machine back as long as the installer was written correctly, but these points are reversible so you would not lose anything by trying. I see this function is on Windows 10 as it was on 7, so one assumes it works. Normally what programs tend to do if they want to use their DLL, is merely move a pointer in the register to point to their one rather than the Windows one and of course these changes are logged so should be undoable. What it cannot protect you against is manual deletion of files and folders by the user. Often if that is done either a reinstall of windows or a system file check is needed. Brian