Re-Installed

I've re-installed. Being very, very careful and paranoid with this install. Using high levels of security on everything.

Hope I never have to go through that again!

BSOD - Vista Unusable

So... Last night my Dell computer with Windows Vista Home Premium decided to blue screen. Unfortunately, I am unable to use Vista any more. My Linux partition, fortunately, boots and I'm able to check online for solutions, read mail and pretty much do everything I would do in Windows Vista.

It will most likely require a re-install.

Dang

Ran into that multiple selection bug AGAIN!

Why was Vista released? It clearly wasn't ready.

At least Linux doesn't have this problem. It won't be long before I switch to Linux. At least I'd have a 64-bit operating system.

Sleep/Awake Bug

There's a bug with waking my computer from sleep. There appears to be no solution to it at this time. From what I've read online, this bug was only in the Vista RTM. The Vista Betas never had the problem. Whichever developer introduced the bug should be fired.

Activation

I had to call Microsoft in order to activate my computer. This happened once.

I'm not sure why it happened. They had asked me if Vista were installed on another computer or if hardware had changed. My copy of Vista has never been installed on another computer. My hardware has never upgraded since I purchased the computer in December 2006!


Another update: I still have no 64-bit version of Vista. I do have a 64-bit version of Linux installed. Should I Vista ever want to activate again and Microsoft says no, I'll just tell them I'm moving to Linux since their software would have been the cause of the problem.

For My Nieces

Wednesday, I decided that I wanted some of the pre-installed apps on my machine. Also, my nieces really liked one of the screen-savers. It was my duty as an uncle to get that screen-saver back! Plus, that bug with file selection was annoying.

Installing XP Media Center Edition was easy. Dell System Restore did not work. Thankfully, the discs did.

Upgrading ran into the blue screen problem I originally had. Performing a clean install also had the blue screen problem. I tried the method originally used to get Vista to install, but it also blue screened.

I spent the day removing and formatting partitions. I ended up removing them all, even the diagnostic and restore partitions. That didn't work. The computer still blue screened.

With a call into Dell Support, the nice tech got me to change the RAID setting on my computer to auto detect. It made sense since I don't have a RAID setup. That appeared to fix the install problem.

Having spent way too much time installing Vista, I went with the clean install. The applications and the screen-saver were never installed, in the end. Hopefully the nieces won't be disappointed.

Wasn't this feature in the product since 1.0?

I've continued to track down solutions for the multiple file selection problem. The solution to delete the Bags and Streams registry keys did not work on my computer.

Also, this problem is on all user accounts.