Ed Stoffel

After using Windows XP for three weeks, I’m finally getting Windows Vista up and running again at good, normal speeds. In the end, the culprit turned out to be Nvidia’s Vista drivers.

In my final install, I used Vista Home Premium OEM on an XFX nForce 680i LT SLI motherboard, XFX GeForce 8600 GT video, Intel Quad-Core processor, 4GB Corsair TWINX RAM, and Seagate 250Gb SATA hard drives. In earlier install attempts, the system would slow down to a crawl just after installation of drivers for the motherboard’s chipset, audio, and nTune utilities. I found that installing ANY of these from the included CD would cause the problem. There are newer versions of the drivers available online, but I’m waiting to get all the applications installed to try them out. Then I plan to make an image of the system, which I can revert to, in the event that the new drivers destroy the OS.

During this rebuild project, I discovered a number of things about some of the hardware. During Vista’s updates, the NIC stopped working, and I needed to run a repair process. My multi-reader stopped working, but I found it no longer worked under XP either, so I believe that to have been a hardware failure. My DVD drives are working again, able to read CD-R, CD-RW, and DVDs.

I experimented using a Netgear SC101, a housing for IDE hard drives making them available on my local network. Unfortunately, the device requires installation of software for each computer wishing to access the drive. The device also reformats any drives used in it, changing the drives to a non-standard format. I found the drives often became inaccessible, and ran extremely hot.

I also found it annoying to have to wait to make phone calls during normal business hours for reinstallation codes to get Quickbooks, Microsoft Money, and Audible up and running again.

In the rebuilding process, I used Seagate’s hard drive utility to clone my rebuilt Vista drive so that I could test an install, reverting back if it failed. After the install did fail, I returned to the original hard drive, only to discover that the utility had wiped the original drive, leaving me with nothing to fall back to. I won’t be using that imaging software again.

When my system rebuild is done, I’ll have two hard drives I can boot to, one with Vista, and one with XP. I’ll also setup a stricter backup regiment, including a Maxtor One-touch drive, and JungleDisk to upload to off-site storage. Using these, I’ll just have to be sure my backup routines are run often enough to preserve anything important.

Vista and I have gotten along well for the past few months, but all that has come to an end this week. Vista was installed and running fine until the failure of the computer two weeks ago. Around the time of some critical updates, the system just stopped working. Was this an OS failure, a motherboard failure, or a bad processor? The hard drive tested fine with Spinrite. Installing that hard drive in another computer still wouldn’t boot the OS, and using the Vista install disc to attempt a repair failed to cure the problem. Was that because it was now mated with a different motherboard/processor combination? I don’t know.

I purchased everything to build a new system: new Nvidia motherboard, Nvidia graphics card, an Intel Quad-core processor, a pair of Seagate SATA hard drives, new case and power supply. After installing Vista, the first problem I noticed was that it is painfully slow. This shouldn’t be, with an Intel Quad-core processor, but it is. Things weren’t slow with my previous Intel single-core 3.33Ghz processor. Vista turned my DVD-RW/CD-RW drive into DVD only, and failed to recognize my multi-media reader. Installation of a network drive failed (Netgear SC101), using Netgear’s latest firmware and management utility version for Vista. The install disc for HP’s office printer took over an hour to complete, and Quickbook’s online update feature took nearly 3 hours to complete.

But the biggest, most frustrating problem was that Vista literally wouldn’t let me do two things at once. With an internet browser open (either Explorer or Firefox), clicking on any link when the machine was otherwise busy would produce the (not responding) error to appear on the browser’s title line. This even occurred when viewing a disk directory in Windows Explorer. If I clicked again, Vista produced a white-out mask across the screen, further indicating that the application was too busy to respond.

I was able to somewhat speed up Vista by following the recommendations of Black Viper to turn off unnecessary services. Problem is, it is difficult to be certain which services I really don’t need.

After stewing about the problem overnight, I decided to pull the hard drive, insert a new one, and install Windows XP-SP3. It didn’t take long to get the OS up and running, and I immediately noticed how fast all the applications installed themselves… much faster than with Vista. My DVD/CD drive works again, as well as my multi-media reader. I’ll miss Vista’s sidebar gadgets, but this machine now flies along with XP. I’ll pack away my Vista OS disc, and we’ll see if Microsoft ever gets the operating system working well before the emergence of Windows 7.