Sunday bloody Sunday

June 15 was Father’s Day, but what a day it was. Windows Vista on my computer resembled the Titanic-it crashed and sunk. If you’ve been following my Startup woes posts, you’ll know how I was faring. Toward the weekend, Vista was behaving like a very sick OS; fortunately I could still get it to boot up in Safe Mode and backup all my important stuff. It refused to boot up in Normal mode, hanging during the process.

The irony was that on Sunday I tried inserting the Vista DVD and did a Startup repair. After it was done, I started up in Normal mode, and lo and behold, BSODs (Blue Screen of Deaths). It was sink or swim time, and Vista was doing the former. And it also wouldn’t start up in Safe mode any more.

Well, what else can I do? No other choice except for the dreaded format and reinstall. I’d go for this option only when my other choices don’t work. It was time to take the sledgehammer out!

As of now (Monday June 16) I’ve got the OS up and running, together with most of my necessary programs. Grr…hope this new install will last me for a long time. That last install was 10 months ago, but of course I’ve installed and uninstalled so much crud that…well, I can’t blame Vista, can I?

And Doris, don’t get me started on that Programs and Features thing. I don’t know what the hell happened to it.

Startup woes, Part 4

OMG, you’re going to laugh at me, but that recent nVidia driver (see this post) has screwed up my system. So I ate humble pie, completely uninstalled it and let the OS choose an earlier driver to install. I also had to use jv16 Power Tools to clean out the remnants of all that nVidia crap. This is particularly important, otherwise the driver that Vista chooses won’t install and operate properly.

So Vista reports that the nVidia version I’m using now is 7.15.11.6369 (September 11, 2007). If you want this driver, don’t bother to look for it at the nVidia website, it’s not listed there anymore. Go to this website which I found in a Google search.

Startup woes, Part 2

Well, I suppose I was looking for trouble, or taking a big risk. I uninstalled the nVidia graphics drivers that Vista had installed (see my post Startup woes), went to nVidia’s website and downloaded the newest drivers for my GeForce 7200GS graphics card.

Installation went pretty well. I was told to reboot, so I did, and…plain vanilla blue screen. Took me another hour to get Vista to install its own nVidia drivers…damn.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. How true. I’m strolling off, with my tail in between my legs.

Startup woes

This morning, I powered on my computer, and…nothing. Vista refused to start. There was just a plain blue screen (not the BSOD aka Blue Screen of Death) with no icons, no wallpaper, no taskbar…NOTHING. I figured it was a video driver problem, so I uninstalled the present nVidia drivers, downloaded fresh ones from the Net (I could do all this because I booted up using Safe Mode with Networking).

Installed the new drivers in Safe Mode, rebooted, and…same problem. Made me wonder, so I uninstalled the nVidia drivers, rebooted and asked Vista to look for new video drivers. Did this in Device Manager. It did so, and after one more reboot, voila! Vista started up with all the familiar icons, wallpapers, etc.

Man, this OS can be picky about video drivers. So a good thing to try would be to let Vista connect to the web and download the drivers it deems “suitable” for your system. This was what I did with my oldish Creative SB card, and I’ve had no problems with that.