Just have to vent...Vista!

[rkdiddy]

Well I finally bit the bullet and decided to install Parallels for my MBP (my works VPN site only works on IE).

Parallels' install was straight forward and when it came to installing Vista I received a few errors. It took reinstalling it twice to get it to work.

Next, I thought I would upgrade my XP PC to Vista. Put in the install DVD and everything seemed to run fine and then the PC timed out, restarted and then got stuck on the blue screen. After a little trouble shooting and online searching I determined it was the video card drivers. I disabled them and started again.

This time everything seemed to work fine. After a few hours of waiting for Vista to install, I decided to go downstairs. I came back to find the blue screen of death again. I restarted the computer and now it runs through the boot sequence and lands on the safe mode screen. So I tried all the different boot options in safe mode and they all result in the blue screen.

I can't get my computer to even get past this now. The whole time I was thinking to myself just how piss poor Windows is. I consider myself fairly computer literate and I'm stuck. I can't imagine how many other users have "bricked" their PCs over the upgrade.

Now I'm stuck with a PC that won't boot and I have no idea what can be done to fix it.

Shame on you Windows for making such a horrible product that is so dysfunctional that you can't even upgrade from one Windows product to another.

 

[Shoesy]

To be fair, my experience of upgrading from Tiger to Leopard was pretty horrid too, and Apple have a much smaller hardware base to think about than the mess of mismatched peripherals which is your average home pc.

Just a thought.

 

[windywoo]

Are you doing a clean install? Don't run the setup from within Windows, its not as reliable. This is recommended procedure on Windows and OSX.

If it still blue screens, try going into your BIOS and disabling non-vital peripherals like onboard sound, onboard LAN etc. You can enable them later after Vista has installed and see which one bluescreens.

 

[Gav Mack]

I would never dream of a direct upgrade of any OS to a newer one whether Mac or Windows and especially to Vista from XP which I made a decent living out of with all the problems it gave.

In your position if you have an external hard drive I would find 'hiren's boot cd 9.9' thanks to google, boot off that CD selecting the Mini Windows XP option with the external connected and copy your profile data (usually your username) in C:\Documents and Settings and C:\Users to the drive plus any other folders you have your data.

Forget Vista - if it's an original disk it's piss poor and now obsolete. Get Windows 7 RC from Microsoft and do a clean install reformatting the hard drive. With the RC I'm doing a custom setup creating a smallish NTFS partition for the install and the rest partitioned and formatted later via disk manangement for data. That way you can backup the entire system to the data partition, clean install the released version of 7 in October and restore your whole config back easily.

 

[LtRammstein]

Are you doing a clean install? Don't run the setup from within Windows, its not as reliable. This is recommended procedure on Windows and OSX.

If it still blue screens, try going into your BIOS and disabling non-vital peripherals like onboard sound, onboard LAN etc. You can enable them later after Vista has installed and see which one bluescreens.

Whenever I install an upgraded version of Windows I always backup and do a clean install. It works so much better.