This is my rant ... my rant about how Vista has screwed me over for the last time. (this is going to be very long)
I'm a game art student at Fort Lauderdale ... so I am heavily dependent on my desktop PC to function properly and most efficiently. SO when I got my new bitching awesome computer, I figured I should use vista since, ya know, I had a beast of a machine that could run it.
Needless to say I had my issues and problems, but tonight ... tonight was the last straw.
I have a midterm to turn in tomorrow. Really simple and easy midterm. Make a level in unreal 2004 using its editor. I had to load 10 static meshes created by myself, including the textures, add some emitters, one single mover, a skybox ... All very simple, just tedious.
Last night, Saturday.
After working for about an hour, my computer starts giving me shit again. Its been acting up for quite some time and I haven't been able to fix the problem effectively. So I figured Ill give my hard drivesssSSSSS a good formatting, deleting any software related problems it may have, and install a fresh copy of vista.
SO, 1st problem
Vista wasn't letting me format my storage hard drive. I found this to be very odd. I went online and did a few searches and it appears to have happened to other people before but they couldn't figure it out neither. Well lucky me, I have a docking station for sata hard drives. I pulled that sucker out, formatted it (which took a long time) on my laptop and then I popped that baby back in to my pc.
2nd problem
with my clean storage drive in there, I turn my computer on, still running windows vista on the main hard drive. Once I get to my desktop, I want to install a fresh copy on the empty drive.
not letting me
restart
nothing
go into bios, boot priority cd-rom
not letting me
Im thinking its a hardware issue now. I test my stuff out, it all checks out. I run some more test, nothing.
I get desperate, its getting late and I have a midterm to work on. So I install window XP. Now my better judgment said to me "Oh stay with xp and do your work. Worry about Vista later." ... but no ... I didn't do that.
Once xp was installed which took its sweet ass time (40 mins? an hour? I dunno) I install vista! woohoo
3rd and final problem.
Awesome, vista is finally installed, taking advantage of those 8 gigs and direct 10x! Great ... lets install the software I need. But, before I do that, lets remove that one hard drive with windows XP in it.
Once that is removed, I go to turn on my abused computer with dirty, mindless things inside of it (damn you vista).
What this! Its not turning on ... missing bootmngr? wtf!?!
I popped in the HD with XP, and it booted ... weird...
I had no time to waste since my Midterm is due tomorrow and I have most of my work completed, so I moved on
I installed my programs, max and unreal, went to work, and now then came time to texture!
let me install Photoshop.
pop in the 1st cd ... before its even half way done
computer crashed
ok
Lets turn this back on.
Pop in the cd again
crashed
wtf!!!
So, I turn the computer off
I proceed to test the hard drive again, run memtest again, the usually troubleshooting I do
nothing.
Well ok
found nothing wrong, maybe its the cd thats scratched
yeah thats it. Let me just turn my computer on AGAIN and check the cd.
As I pull out the cd, I notice something
the pc isnt booting up
its not booting
ITS NOT BOOTING!!!!!!!
I start moving the hard drives around, using different sata slots, running viral scans using my laptop and the sata docking station
nothing. I reconnected them
nothing, absolutely nothing.
Well shit
let me pull off the work I have done so far and finish it at school tomorrow. Yeah
thats smart, I just need a few more things
yeah
no problem, easy as pie
I grab my files
I run them with my laptop which can barely run 3ds max without it lagging.
Files
corrupted
NO! well at least I have my stage all setup up right
I can just model something up really quick and turned that in
Nope, FILE CORRUPTED!
After 2 days of trying to get this to work
it ended in failure.
That was it
the last straw
after a years worth of vista, I cant take it anymore
the night before my midterm and it just crapped out on me
who does that, why has god forsaken me? Is he trying to teach me a lesson? You suck at lesson teaching Jebus!!!
Starting From Tonight, I DENOUNCE VISTA. I shall never use that garbage of Satans software ever again!
Luckily for me, I still have some of my work in another drive
unfortunately, its about ¼ of the work I got done from todays effort.
Vista ... I hate you
Replies
Although I found vista to be slow and shit, your problem might be just "popping the drives out" and generally giving your machine a hard time, not vista.
XP installed on my machine in under 7 minutes. Gotta love parallels (yes I had to get that nugget in there)
I honestly never had any trouble with Vista, though (granted I'm no longer using it, but I have my reasons [praise be to Apple :femme:]). It ran pretty damn well, it had a nice start menu (love that search thing), and it did everything exactly what I expected it to do: act like Windows. Job well done, product delivered, it's Windows XP + pretty and a few features. Hell, it even worked nicely on my laptop, so I was happy.
Anyhow, the missing bootmgr thing is due to you installing XP on one drive, where that is your primary drive with the boot loader on it, and installing Vista on another. The boot loader isn't going to change drives, so you should have just kept the XP drive in. This is not Vista trying to cause trouble, this is how that shit has worked for a very long time.
The file corruption is more likely due to you continually fucking with your drives as well- not Vista's fault, as this would happen with any OS. Unless you specifically unmounted the devices and such before pulling them out, you were risking data loss.
Either you killed the vista bootmanager somehow, or you did something wrong while installing xp.
And seriously, if you got problems getting your copy of vista to boot from the dvd
you did something extremely wrong Oo.
i never had a problem when running windows xp64 ... and with vista, i always had something going wrong or weird or just plain sucking.
recently the vista installer has been quitting on me halfway through installs, and uninstalls.
also my scanners VISTA driver all of a sudden crapped out on me, so now i can't scan reference from my military books and scale models. max runs slow as shit, photoshop brush strokes stutter when i draw too quickly, the photoshop screen goes blank when i export to DDS, and sometimes vista wrestles with me for admin control.
I think Windows 7 is going to be pretty sweet.
I don't know why you were having an issue formatting the drive with Vista, but since I didn't have that experience in Vista, I'm not sure what to say there. Beyond that, it sounds like you were dropping OS's on different drives. Your bootloader was placed on the drive that had XP, so when you took out that drive, the system lost it's bootloader (thus the bootmgr error). You should be able to take out your XP drive and run a bootmgr repair (google it for Vista).
The real problem here is you have an obvious hardware issue and you blamed the OS for it. Even if you run XP full time, I bet you'll continue having hardware issues. I'll go even further to bet that you have a capacitor blown on your video card or motherboard. It's easy to check, because the top will be split (even if there's the slightest split).
That all being said, I am not a big fan of Vista. I run Vista on my desktop, but I don't think it's worth fighting to keep on your computer. The problem is, it sounds like you have memory that will be a waste in XP. Wait for Windows 7. It's getting great reviews so far and is very nicely optimized. Unfortunately, you can't have it now
Its called procrastination.
I nuked out all the vista flim-flam when I first got it, but I didn't do any really hardcore tweaking. Basically now it feels like win2kpro that can use my quadcore and manage resources better.
But, vista seems to work just fine for me and the entire studio. Also works fine at home with no issues. In fact, I've had considerably less problems in vista compared to XP, by far.
and it has the multi-touch screen supports too!
But really, it sounds like hardware (probably hard drive) issues.
I'm pretty sure this happens to everyone at some point during school. Just take it as a sobering wake up call that you need to have redundant backups, especially of important shit.
Do you emit static electricity? Do monitors flicker as you walk past? dogs chase you down the street?
this might be a case for Fox Mulder.
killed my xp64 after half a year without any crash
since then everytime i start my computer the screen turns on and of about 4 times, after the windows runs correctly
but tips on vista: its a bitch so use it like a bitch, any tweak makes it unstable so keep it with all your trash lol
Acronis
Image that badboy clean install... and the next time you have OS trouble... bam.. half hour format and restore image and you're up and running again.