Does anyone have much experience of fixing Vista?

Me or my team have no experience of Vista, but as it's not a company PC I don't want to ask them.

A friend of the wife called asking if I know how to fix a laptop running Vista.

The laptop gave "an error" saying the OS had a problem and needed to shutdown. He shut it down, re-started it and it asked if he wanted to start in the safe modes or start normally. He chose normaly but it only showed a black screen with the mouse arrow. Choosing safe mode only made the mouse cursor bigger.

I'm guessing that it has lost the video driver, but don't know if there is an easy fix.

The Laptop is a Dell and about 3 weeks old.

I have all of his data from his old laptop and a system restore disk for the current one.

Do I just take the easy option and re-set it or is there an easier less destructive option I could take?

have you tried a boot disc or switch it off (power socket jobbie) on start up then restart? its the only options i can think of off hand.

I haven't actually seen the laptop yet - just checking here before I get too involved!

He brought his new laptop to our house to work on some accounts with the wife - then left all his disks and manual here. He's lost them already, but I know where they are.....

DONT use the recovery disk. It will wipe all your data since you bought it.

It might be best to speak to Dell or even Microsoft to be honest. If it's only 3 weeks old then there's plenty of warranty left.

Microsoft won't want to know as it's an OEM system, they will refer you to Dell.

Sounds like Vista is stuffed, if he's got his data backed up, just restore it. If not, you can take out the HDD, pop it into a USB caddy and read the data off on another PC, then replace and restore.

Vista is rubbish. :( To fix it properly, upgrade to XP.

I picked up the laptop in the pub last night.

When it boots, the Zylon strobe starts and the word Windows appears, but no logo and it is monotone.

The whole story of the "error message" is that it was shut down by his partner who "didn't do anything" with it. On reboot it asked for the keyboard language then said drivers missing, choose from the list. The list was blank, but he chose continue anyway.

Next it said Windows was corrupt and would he like to repair it? He chose yes. Laptop now nadgered.

I reckon I've just got to use the restore disk and put it back to how it was.

I won't bother taking out the disk and rescuing the data - not a lot has changed. He has a caddy I bought him that still has the disk from the last laptop that wasn't caught by his partner in a particularly heated domestic discussion. This hasn't left the box so still has all his data on. I will restore from this and remove Norton again (see another thread) and replace the AV software.

As for updating to XP - I agree, I would always recommend this - we have taken a decision at work to skip Vista and stay on XP.

Nowt wrong with Vista.

Nowt wrong with Vista.

Probaly not. Vista wasn't why we took this decision not to upgrade, we run over 1000 applications and a lot are badly written with the vendors not intending to develop their product for Vista for some time. This is probably because Vista insists that they don't take liberties with their programming. Most issues with Windows are caused by third party applications not being written correctly.

We run a Novell directory and they have not yet produced a working client for Vista. This was our killer for the project.

Meanwhile, back on topic, I'm about to restore the laptop having watched qualifying. The mighty North End are now losing to our rival neighbours so I'll open a beer.

nowt wrong with vista? lol.. I beg to differ... swmbo's PC died recently, and she asked me to fix it, was impossible without a reset to facotory settings (which I did) and when I got it working, vista had 40+ updates to download :eek:

only reason for this is fixing problems (40+ problems) that were inherant in the original programme....

everyone I know who has used vista has experiances a serious problem...:(

just my experiance anyway

only 40?

Try a factory re-hash of XP and I bet you'll be running updates for about a week

there is an answer to all the problems, buy apple

Nowt wrong with Vista.

Agreed, I run it on every pc at home and have no problems at all. In fact one of our new laptops at work runs faster under vista than XP because all the drivers are vista optimised and the XP ones are now no longer being developed.

Seriously, Vista is not the problem. The problem is with poorly written software that took liberties with the OS. Vista is more secure and blocks a lot of these back doors which if the 3rd party software was written properly in the first place would not exist.

Remember back to when Windows XP came out, we had exactly the same anti-xp lobby then as we do ant-vista now. People do not like change, or having to rewrite there dodgy program code so that it will work.

Also sorts the men from the boys when the systems go nips up.

Also sorts the men from the boys when the systems go nips up.

Yeah - thanks for that!

Think I'm becoming PHB!