My Windows Vista System Died!

About two months ago I purchased a new computer with Windows Vista already installed. Even though this is the most powerful computer I have ever owned, I wasn't too impressed with the new operating system. I have continued to use my older Windows XP system as my primary computer. You can read my earlier article at http://tinyurl.com/3yqm7h.

Today I am even less impressed. Windows Vista died on my two-month old system.

The system was left running over night. When I went to use it this morning, I found an error screen displayed and nothing else. I re-booted and Windows started to load. After about thirty seconds, a message appeared, stating that Windows was corrupted and asking if I wanted to repair Windows. Not having much choice, I selected "Yes."

The hard drive worked furiously and various messages flashed by on the screen. Eventually, a dialog box asked me to "select the appropriate driver from the following list." There was just one problem: the list was empty!

A phone call to the computer manufacturer confirmed what I already suspected: there would be no recovery. Luckily, Hewlett-Packard includes full diagnostics with each computer that can be run without loading Windows Vista. The diagnostics found no problem with the hardware.

The tech support representative helped me attempt a Windows restore to an earlier date. That also failed with errors. Finally, he gave me the instructions on how to re-format the hard drive and load Windows Vista again. We then said "good-bye."

This afternoon I went out and bought a Macintosh system for use as my primary desktop computer.

Comments

[Moultrie Creek]

Congratulations on your move to Mac. We made the jump just before Christmas and I'm more impressed every day. The only thing I miss is my favorite screen capture app - SnagIt. I haven't found anything - yet - that comes close.

I do have to contend with Windows at work and the difference in keyboard shortcuts is a bit aggravating, but I'm actively campaigning to get a Mac there too.

Here's a collection of links to useful Mac applications you might find useful - http://www.diigo.com/user/moultriecreek/macapp

[Dick Eastman]

The Macintosh operating system already has excellent screen capture capabilities built in. You probably do not need to obtain any other software.

Use Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen and saves it as a file.

Command-Shift-4 gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture and saves it as a file.

Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4) copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want.

I've been using Macintosh systems for years as secondary computers, this weekend I changed to a Mac as my primary desktop system. I still have the Windows systems here but will probably leave them powered off most of the time.

- Dick Eastman

[Cheryl McGregor]

While I too applaud your addition of another mac :-) I can pretty much guess how much $ you put out on that HP. Even though your system check came up clean on the hardware - you may still have bad ram. You may want to make a salvage attempt by installing new ram. I have a 3 1/2 yr old HP desktop with XP home that started intermittently crashing at just over 2 yrs old. The HP extended NO service contract was useless and all they wanted was for me to keep reinstalling XP. They would never take the thing in for repair even though I told them what the issue was. After the contract ended I sent off to Crucial for new upgraded ram and the machine has been running fine ever since. I told HP that since they refused to live up to their warranty, that in spite of being a long time customer, I would never purchase another one of their products and would make sure everyone I came across knew how bad their service was (and still is). I purchased an iMac 1 year after purchasing the HP because I was never quite happy with the HP. The HP now sits in the spare bedroom, mostly used by my cousin when she is in town because of certain programs that she needs for work are not designed for Mac.

[theKiwi]

And if you press Command-Shift-4 or Command- Control-Shift-4 to get a set of cross hairs, instead of dragging, press the space bar, and the cursor becomes a camera icon - move it around with the mouse and it will highlight the various windows as you pass over them. Clicking the mouse button then takes a shot of the highlighted window and puts it on the desktop or the clipboard.

For Moultrie Creek - I don't know what SnagIt can do, but Snapz Pro is a very highly rated Mac OS X screen capture utility - including capturing movies of actions on the screen.,

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Roger

[Rod Moody]

Very smart move, Dick! I have an aversion to all things Microsoft these days - remember, I used to work there. Wouldn't trade my Mac for anything now, although the powerbook battery issue is lame. Hope you are doing well - maybe I will see you if there is ever a gen conference held out here in Seattle.

Rod Moody

[Sandra Quinn]

I bought a Compaq Presario HP with a Windows XP operating system for my business computer and on the first year anniversary in November it crashed at the end of the warranty. Nice timing, I called for help and purchased the new warranty, one hundred dollars from a HP call center in (India) in order to get someone to even answer my question.

When I finally got someone they said "Sorry your hard drive in unrecoverable your computer is corrupted".

All my business files were on this computer. I nearly had a heart failure. They said they could sell me a HP USB hard drive for recovering files. My system was crashed and turned out this new hard drive they charged me an additional fee for was unable to be used. I purchased the hard drive but it arrived "after" my son recovered my files in this way:

My son who is a computer techie, using PCLinuxOS took my computer with a CD/DVD burner and CD reader in my system used PCLinuxOS in the CD drive. Since it was the Linux operating system on the disk he was able to boot the computer as the Live CD option which doesn't download anything to the hard drive and erases itself from memory when you are done and turn off the computer. He turned on my computer since the electronics still worked, and hit the CD reader open as quickly as possible and put the PCLinuxOS disk in and then shut off the computer and then turn it back on again.

If your bios is set to read the CD before it boots the hard drive it should boot PCLinuxOS. If it isn't set you can change your bios, you can find out how to do this by reading on the net. If you are lucky enough that your bios is able to start the CD reader like I was then then you boot into PCLinuxOS you can click on a My Computer icon and see all the file systems. He could see my windows partition and all the files in the partition. Then using a program called K3B which is a CD burning program in PCLinuxOS he was able to burn all the files that we needed to save onto a blank disk in the CD/DVD burner. I was so lucky because the windows operating system was what was corrupted but all the files inside were fine.

There was some sort of Windows partition that was always looking for updates to their own HP operating system which we feel is what was corrupted or corrupting the computer.

Then we overwrote the entire hard drive with a fresh install of Windows XP from a home OEM Windows XP home disc. Not the one that came with the computer but one from microsoft which we bought at Mwave.com which cost about 90 dollars but did not have all the unnecessary software embedded in it. We did have to search online for all my computers previous drivers.

Now I have a faster and more stable system.

However now the software of the HP printer drivers are causing issues so I am planning on switching to Xerox.

Even though Linux site seems to have issues the iso can be found here: http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/english/preview/

which you have to burn the file on the page:
pclinuxos-p93a-bigdaddy.iso

Which you have to burn as an image in your CD burning program.

Thankfully I was able to save all my files. It took a month to fully reorganize my business files. It was brutal, but at least I was able to have my data saved including my 80 MB family tree maker file of 40,000 persons including text and images.

I just bought a Toshiba laptop with Windows Vista. I had an issue last Monday with a two hour update. I thought the computer had crashed as it actually took an hour for 7 updates to load. The system kept saying do not turn off the computer until all 7 updates had loaded. There was no evidence or sound that it was actually loading anything and I was certainly worried, but then it started showing a moving dot that slowly showed something was happening and then it finished and turned itself off.

I nearly gave up and closed the computer but am thankful that I waited. Now it seems to work fine.

I will not store any files on this computer but use it and send all my files to my server space in California.

Sandy Quinn
http://www.ohgen.net

[David Larson]

Although I like HP products, their penchant for "add-on" software and driver problems is well-known. I am more suspicious of HP than Windows in this case.

[Bob Peterson]

The last time I was aware of your favorite OS, you were running and advocating Linux. Now, your primary system was Win XP?

I'm still running Win XP with no problems. If I bought a new machine, it would not be HP, Compaq (really the same company), or Apple. I use Apple at school. It crashes far more frequently than Win XP does, and it's a really dumb design.

Hardware crashes. Even Apple hardware crashes. You fix it, and move on.

[Nick Kelsey]

I just purchased a new laptop to replace a Toshiba that was one of those with the HDD drive controller card problems. Gateway with Vista...arghh. Trying to put a Vista system on a home network is a horror story, finally ended up using Network Magic and that made it simple, you know, like a Mac OS does. I do not even want to get into what it took to install Clooz. My next purchase will NOT be Windows based.

[Bonnie Elsten]

A screen capture program called Grab is included with the OS 10.4 system on the Mac. Check it out. It is in the Utilities folder.

[Pierce Reid]

Dick,
In case you haven't see this yet, you may appreciate these comments.

http://tokerud.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/dell_reinstates.html

Let us know if you ever get Windows running on your Mac and are able to evaluate the performance of the many genealogy programs designed for Windows.

[Dick Eastman]

---> The last time I was aware of your favorite OS, you were running and advocating Linux. Now, your primary system was Win XP?

Correct. I like Linux and it does all the "normal things" one expects of a computer: word processing, e-mail, surf the web, etc. If I did not write this newsletter and did not review programs and similar tasks, I would probably own only one computer and that would be a Linux system.

HOWEVER, I also do many tasks for this newsletter. As a result, I have owned Windows and Macintosh systems for years so that I could test and use all sorts of software. For the past ten years or so, I have had Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers sitting side-by-side on my desk.

- Dick Eastman

[Dick Eastman]

---> Let us know if you ever get Windows running on your Mac and are able to evaluate the performance of the many genealogy programs designed for Windows.

I already did that several months ago by using my MacBook laptop. I am running all the Windows genealogy programs that I care to test on the 5-pound Macintosh laptop. It works great. The only thing different now is that I added a new Macintosh desktop system to my collection of computers on the desk, replacing the rather old iMac that I have had there for the past five years or so.

You can read my earlier articles about running Windows programs on Macintosh at http://www.google.com/search?oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&q=macbook&btnG=Google+Search&domains=http%3A%2F%2Feogn.com&sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Feogn.com and in my Plus Edition article "The Best of Both Worlds: Use Macintosh and Windows Simultaneously on One Computer" at http://www.lulu.com/content/569345

- Dick Eastman

[Nick]

I'd just like to comment that Windows Vista has worked perfectly for me. I got the system right when it came out and have had no major problems with it. All my genealogy programs work fine with it, and I also use the FamilySearch Indexing program on it. I've been able to build and support my family history website all from that computer. I've enjoyed all of the new features and have found many things useful. I have to say that I do have pretty good hardware that helps make this all possible, though. I've actually had the opposite experience as you, Dick. My Mac computer has numerous problems with the hardware and is extremely buggy and slow. I don't trust putting anything on it now. My Vista system works fine. Maybe I'm an extreme case, but I thought I'd just mention my good experience.

-Nick

[Maureen]

"Users force Dell to resurrect XP"
"Responding to customer demand Dell has restarted selling new PCs with
Windows XP installed on them."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/
Scroll down a bit and on the right is a listing for most popular stories
(see either Sat or Sun)

[Kathy Amoroso]

The best way to install Windows Vista seems to be this:

http://www.toxicjunction.com/get.asp?i=V1797