Whenever something goes wrong with computer software or hardware, inevitably, the Internet is the first place you’ll try to look for solutions (assuming you can get on it of course!). It’s such a rich source of information that almost every problem you experience has happened to someone, somewhere previously. Hence the reason for this post – it describes the problems I have had with Windows Vista Business which came installed on a new PC. I just hope it is some use to someone at some point.

As the title suggests I’ve recently got my very first copy of Windows Vista. I had read and heard a lot about Vista – mostly bad – and had decided not to even bother with it this time. I was going to get a ‘downgraded’ XP PC instead but I found a stonking deal on Dell outlet, and so ended up with Windows Vista Business instead.

I have had numerous problems, of which I will detail here, and what solutions I found:

First Start Up

When starting up you new Vista PC for the first time – ONLY plug the keyboard, mouse and monitor in. First mistake by me, I foolishly plugged everything in, and got, not surprisingly, blue screen hell. Maybe I had got used to XP’s robustness, but it didn’t cross my mind, I thought in this day and age it would ‘just work’. I blame it on the fact that my new PC came with no documentation – no pretty posters telling where to plug stuff in, no getting started guide, nothing. I tried to install the latest drivers but that made things worse – apparently the only drivers that are reliable with the NVidia 8800GT are the original Vista drivers from last year.  I then opened up the box, and removed the memory chips and the graphics card just to make sure they were seated correctly, and ran the Vista memory checker through twice which found no errors
Fix: restore to factory settings.

First Start Up – Attempt 2

Much better – I saw welcome screens that I had not seen before, and things were much more stable… for about 24 hours! Gradually, errors started occuring, windows would freeze, and files got corrupt. The add/remove windows features option would keep erroring, until it froze, and a hard restart had to be performed. Then it wouldn’t even show anything and not having IIS on the PC was not an option! So I tried to use System Restore several times – this failed as well. Running sfc /scannow found 2 corrupt files (tcpmon.ini and settings.ini – quite common from what I’ve read).
Fix: Restore to Factory settings again.

First Start Up – Attempt 3

This attempt is still in progress but has involved uninstalling McAfee Security Center before even connecting to the internet. I didn’t want it on there anyway and I have read a lot of negative stuff about it causing problems – so it was uninstalled and I will try to remove every trace of it to ensure everything is off. I then tried to add IIS and it all went well. Running the sfc /scannow found the same 2 corrupt files, so my next attempt will be to replace those as well and then I will check the two services described here. Then I will connect to the internet and get the vital updates.

I’ll keep this blog updated with any news but my hunch is that it is McAfee that is causing the errors – it is a new PC, the memory seems fine, the graphics card works, and nothing else is plugged in to the PC. At this stage I don’t believe correcting the 2 corrupt files will have any effect but I’ll do it anyway.

Wish me luck!