The Vista Post, Finally

OK so, for those of you that don't know, I got a Dell XPS m1330 before my freshman year of college (i.e. last August) for a graduation present. Everything was going fine until I had a crazy graphics failure. My GPU had fried and I spent a long time with a guy named Bob from Qualxserve replacing most of the hardware and my screen. This is completely unrelated to the rest of this post, it's just a little tidbit to let you know that I've had problems with this computer before, though hardware rather than software problems.

My little baby came with Windows Vista Home Premium, which I didn't really like or dislike at first. I was pretty convinced that I was going to reformat and install Windows XP pretty soon after getting my computer, but I didn't do this, I just didn't really have good reason to. People were compling a lot about Vista at the time when I got my computer, but I couldn't really relate to the problems they were having. I had a couple problems with software compatability issues for the first couple months, but developers started modifying their code pretty quickly and the occassions where this is a problem are few and far between now. At this time, people were making a big deal of problems they were having with sleep/hibernating their computers. I did not have a problem with this until a couple months in when my computer crashed and rebooted while asleep, it told me afterwords that I had gotten a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death). Since then this has happened once or twice more, but it hasn't really been a problem. Other people have had problems connecting to networks after waking their computer up; this is not something I remember having problems with, but my girlfriend also has Vista, and is still having issues with this, even after all the patches and updates that have come out.

So why the bitching and moaning about Vista from me, you may ask. Well, after doing a whole bunch of updates (including Windows updates) I could no longer get sound out of my computer speakers. I could get sound from my headphones and USB headset, but nothing from the speakers. At this point, I was pretty convinced that it had to be a hardware issue. My computer had been taken apart and put back tougether (not put back tougether very well, mind you) many times when I had the GPU issue mentioned above and a loose speaker wire was the most obvious explanation. Since I had sound from the headset and headphones, I knew the problem was not with my sound card and I had tried installing the drivers again. It was time to reformat anyway (~8 months had gone by since I had gotten my computer from Dell), so I decided that I would reformat and that would solve any software issues I had.

So I first considered going Hackintosh, which would entail installing Mac OSX on my PC. It turns out this is not nearly as straightforeword as I had hoped. I was hopeing that since Macs are now Intel based and I have an Intel chip in my computer, that it would not really be a problem. The issue is that there aren't drivers for a variey of hardware as there is with a Windows installation disc, since OSX should only be installed on Macs and SteveJobs knows what hardware OSX needs to be compatable with. So you can either do some neat command line hacking to modify the installation or you can download a modified disc from the bittorrents. The OSX86 project (http://www.osx86project.org/) is all about this.

Then I decided that I would install Windows XP so I went and picked up a shiney new copy of XP Pro SP2 from my school (it's free). I had already backed up all my data and all that jazz, so I went ahead and put in the disc and restarted, pressing F12, I believe, to access the one time boot menu (I guess you can do that now, or I can with my BIOS, rather than changing the boot order until changing it back). Everything is going as expected until Windows cannot find my harddrive. Now, I assume this cannot be a hardware issue and must be a driver issue, though I've never heard of anyone having harddrive diver problems before. So I call Dell tech support and they tell me they cannot help me with my problem. They can only help me with installing Vista, so I say, sure, help me with that. So I reformat, reinstalling Vista. I start installing drivers from the divers CD I have from Dell that came with my computer and everything seems to be going fine. I install the new AVG (8.something) and go online to do Windows updates and driver updates and the like. Well, after installing Windows updates, Windows has to restart.

I have never installed so many Windows updates at one time (~50), so I don't know if it's actually supposed to take as long as it is to reboot. Eventually (I think it was 6-8 hours later) I just hard boot my computer, it failed to shutdown (hung on the Windows is shutting down screen). Then my computer fails to boot Windows.

The next couple days are a blur consisting of reformatting, attempting to install Windows updates and failing to boot, as well as time on the phone with Dell tech support. Every time I reformat I attempt Windows updates and am greeted with a non-booting computer. I finally talk to a nice Indian sounding dude and he takes me thorough the whole process, talks to me about SATA drives, drivers and harddrives. Then we reformat again because Vista is somehow already installed parallel to the new installation and its taking up space. He tells me the proper order to install my drivers (I was told the order didn't really matter at first) and I am on my merry way.

I still haven't installed Windows updates on this installation, I guess I'l bitch and moan some more if I still can't install them.