Just thought I would post a note, if you don't see John on here for a while giving his expert advice, he emailed me & he is in France until November on dial up connection, his laptop took a crash & he is trying to get it up & running but right now he can't access this site.

Tom

Many many thanks to everyone who Emailed me during my 'enforced' exile from the 'cyber world'.

Everyone should have received a reply, but if not, please accept my profuse apologies!

The moral of the story is, Don't take liberties with Vista the day before you go on holiday - such as tugging out the power cable of a laptop when the battery pack is still out of it!
It Really Really doesn't like it At all!

I used to regularly break XP, sometimes just to see what I could get away with, which would generally leap quickly back into life when coaxed with the application of a few tools!

Unfortunately, Vista appears to be broke 'out of the box', so very little seems to do much more than keeping it limping along anyway.
As new pc's and laptops seem to be supplied only with a reset disk, which very thoughtfully totally wipes the hard drive in the process, it's a routine not to be taken lightly, and Not when only on a slow dial-up account!

Ah well, back up and limping along again now.

Best regards

John

John: I am glad to see you are back with us. Welcome home!

A friend here has Vista. He wanted me to help him one day with his computer. The system is a beast. My expert son, whom I called for TA said to through it away and go back to XP. The upshot was we could not accomplish what we wanted to do.

When I bought this new computer last year it came with Vista but I paid the extra for the dual boot option which gives the choice of XP or Vista....guess which one I use all the time.

Steve

Many thanks Ernie, really appreciated.

Unfortunately when I bought my Toshiba, it was pre-loaded with Vista and no dual boot options.
I did install Linux Ubuntu which worked a treat, And got Vista (and me) out of the crud by repairing the Master Boot files on a few occasions following 'hard boots'.
When the MBR died this time, nothing would save it!

I tried uninstalling Linux in the hope that it would reinstall the registry backup and with it the old MBR .......... no such luck!
So, I now have a dual boot laptop that only has Vista to boot into plus a wrecked MBR!

I'd found the old MBR backup ok, but wasn't brave enough to try re-installing it with none of my sutff to hand and only dial-up for updates if it all went belly up.

I did do quite a bit of research into installing from a new XP which I had to hand, but the hassle of finding drivers was manic.
I would guess anything from the 'box-movers' such as Dell & Toshiba etc will be the same, as they only write O/S specific drivers for their own hardware.

In the end I binned the idea because the big bogey on this pc, is No dedicated graphics card, which on a laptop is the death as far as performance goes!
If a laptop has on 'on-board' graphics chip rather than a card, it uses memory 'shared' with the operating system - and Vista is such a memory glutton there was darn all left over to run Paintshop Pro etc!

A lesson hard learned!

John.

Hey John,
When you fixed "Vista" it took over the MBR. Ubuntu installs something called grub to manage your boot menu. It also asks if you want to do this or not. Any version of Windows XP, Vista, or 7 won't ask it just formats your MBR for windows. If you still have the Ubuntu CD go here and follow the easy steps. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto...indows-wipes-it-out/
Samuel
PS your Ubuntu is not gone and all your files should be fine as long as Vista did not delete the entire drive.

Just noticed you said you "Uninstalled" Ubuntu. Did you use the WUBI install? If so all your Ubuntu files are gone. Now would be a good time to try the new Ubuntu 9.10. Many Many Improvements!
Samuel

Thanks for the link Samuel,

Yup, I used the WUBI installer to take out Ubuntu in the hope it would reverse everything.
The crash had killed Ubuntu good style anyway, and no amount of fiddling around would restore it.
This grieved me no end, because I'd totally updated Ubuntu knowing I'd not have a BB connection.

I've seen the hype for Ubuntu 9.10, and will have a play with it - hey, it might even repair the crunched up MBR

To be honest, I'm inclined to run Windows7 on another partition to see if it runs OK on my rig, and if so, ditch Vista, Then install Ubuntu on another partition.
I've still got a Beta download of Win7 with a serial key, so may as well give it a whirl anyway seeing as the drive needs formatting.

John

I've been beta testing "7" for over 6 months and it is a great improvement over Vista. But no matter how much you shine crap its still crap.
I have 7 and XP on one hard drive and Ubuntu 9.10 on another. It has been 3 weeks since I booted to either windows. Linux has made great strides in getting windows programs to run on it or finding an equal or better equivalent. And everything on Linux is free! So far Windows cannot come close to the security and stability of Linux.

Thanks for the comments on Win 7 Samuel, I haven't installed it yet, but probably will in preference to Linux mainly because I believe Win 7 is based on the Vista kernel, and my laptop's drivers are 'Toshiba OEM' for Vista.

I've now installed a 7200.RPM hard drive and re-installed Vista, and the difference the faster HD made is chalk and cheese compared to the old 5400.RPM unit (now residing in a backup caddy)!
Vista now actually lopes along instead of limping, so if Win 7 is all it's cracked up to be, the improvement should be better still!

I'll take a look at the latest Ubuntu though and see how it goes, but I do have some Windows based software that I couldn't make work, (and I won't give up without a fight) so it'll be interesting to see if any of it will run now.

Best regards

John

Win 7 runs a ton faster than vista and uses mainly the same drivers so you should see a massive increase in speed. What programs can't you run in ubuntu?

Sam, I'm not sure just how much stuff I won't be able to run, as I never tried all of it.

Some that wouldn't run are: Paintshop Pro, Photoshop8, MS Office, ABBYY Finereader (OCR), plus I have Corel Studio 8 and digital microscope software that I never even tried to run.

A big problem I have now, is a lack of time to really get to grips with Linux, hence having to stick with what I know (for now anyway)...... even if it means still polishing crap!
Heck I've been doing that for years anyway with all the junk watches I've bought to play with!

John

John most of those programs have Linux equivalents that run faster and sometimes better. For office try open office.org they have a wonderful office program that can open and save natively any MS office file. For paint shop and photoshop try Gimp.
Not sure on the microscope one though.
Samuel