I havent been here recently cause............

Sorry to hear of your troubles kitty.

Am pleased you were able to get back to us though.

XP Rules! Welcome back Kitty!

I've seen so many posts about how people hate Vista. You say you liked it. How so? What made it better in your opinion?

Well, I liked the fresh new design, I found it very refreshing, and different...I loved the new icons it came with.....and I guess I loved the overall design, the only thing I had a little trouble with was finding settings, and where some files where stored......but I got around that with previous experience with xp.......

just a pity i never got to try the dreams! lol..... i would like to install in the future.......but right now, i just cant for some reason...... ill be happy with xp till i get vista sorted out.......  

Dreams are what I would want the most. Someday I'll get a new 'puter that can handle Vista and I'll be "dreaming".   
Welcome back and Happy New Year!

Hi, Kitty, I'd like to be able to help you get Vista up & running again....if you'd like to drop me an email, maybe we can work towards that end... you can find it on my personal page or just add 53 to my nick at hotmail.

Hopefully U partitioned and dual booted so you still have XP.

I am with Starkers if there is anything I can do to help I will. I have been running Vista on over 100 machines now since its release and have probably had the wonderful opportunity to see it all.

Not to start another bash Vista thread but I do like Vista much better than XP. I started with the very first version of Windows and all the way through XP and have really put XP through its paces and now have done the same with Vista. Vista when setup properly is much more stable than XP and is much better at self-repair.

However the old pilot saying applies...Good approach good landing - Bad approach bad landing. Vista stability and usability is all about the computer setup and initial OS setup.

One other thing I have found is that computers that ran XP then had Vista installed did not work well. For some reason they do not play well together.

When I noticed you hadn't been here recently I just assumed you were tied up in a dungeon somewhere   

OMG.......hahahha as you would.....    


GUH....!!! spent all day insanely trying to work out what was wrong with my pc, had the same probs on xp.........turned out i had to update my bios...and my via sata raid controller.......or something like that. shes working now though, thanks GOD.

sorry i havent been here to thank all you guys for your support and stuff.....

Johnny....i wanted to have a dual boot, but that retard pc guy talked me out of doing it, he reckoned if it crashed, the whole lot would crash and id lose everything on both drivers........ (:(  im just a kooky girl, i dont know nothin about pcs......

thanks for your offer of help starkers....(hugs) and you too Ranger....(hugs)

Well you realize that without a Dual boot you will only be able to skin one or the other. It's a necessity if you want to skin both.

I dual boot only because I need XP to make XP logons...otherwise I'd stick with Vista. Vista logons suck, as I'm sure WB experts feel the same way about Vista Windowblinds.

It's not the greatest platform for skinning yet.

No worries, after all the pleasure you've given me through your fantastic skins, I'm only too happy to help.





....I'll be in touch soon and we'll see what we can do about this for you. Can't have you not having the best of both worlds...especially after you already paid for it.

I don't get it...

kona, to make Windowblind skins for both XP and Vista you need both operating systems as there are a lot of differences   

Kitty my advice is change your pc guy,firstly it's a computer anything can happen at anytime so dual boot or not data loss or boot corruption can occur,2ndly any data that's important should be regularly backed up to another media or an ext hdd anyway,3rdly he gave poor advice since there is such a thing as drive imaging but it would seem he's never heard of it tho it's been around for years (drive imaging:an exact clone of your working hdd to be used as a backup in case of emergency,usually is not connected until needed,then using the imaging software can restore 200GB of data in 2-3hrs so your corrupted hdd is backup & running again unless the hdd has failed),a simple test of your hardware that by passes your hdd is to use a linux live cd,basicly if that loads & runs then it's a good test of the majority of your hardware & drivers apart from an hdd & ide cable )

edit:
It would be real simple to keep the old hdd disconnected but fully updated,while creating partitions on the bigger hdd so you can dual boot xp & vista on it,also would'nt hurt to install a free linux OS on the very end or where ever,reason is if you can't boot into windows you may be able to save any data by using linux,it worked for me on a number of occasions when xp got corrupted i was still able to continue with ubuntu even tho it was on the same hdd & xp was corrupted,the resaon i could still boot to linux was i was using the grub as my primary boot loader & not windows,if nothing here i've said convinces you go get more input from others,quite frankly don't be afraid just do it i do (dual booting xp & linux that is *mutley laugh* & sometimes more than 3 OS's on the one drive).

Sorry for your trouble, Kitty. As they say, the best install is the clean install (ie...that's the first OS on the computer). Good luck....don't try asking MS for help, they'll only charge you an arm and a leg for what should have gone smoothly from the get go.

hey kitty, i had the same problem with my brand new HP i just got 4 months ago. It's an HP Pavillion with an AMD 4000+ Proccessor 2 gigs of ram and 300 gig hard drive. The one piece that made it lock up constantly was my graphics card, i had a nVidia geforce 6150 se and that was the whole problem...after writing in various forums and asking for advice, the advice i got was that Vista will only really be compatible with 8 series graphics cards. needless to say i went and got that 8 series and haven't had a lock up since. so maybe if you try upgrading the graphics card that would help. I know its pretty crappy a computer manufacturer will put a grahics card that isn't compatible with the OS and make you pay for the headache....none the less try a better graphics card, it worked for me

Glad you're intermittently back, anyway.

I'm personally a bit leery of doing a Vista upgrade. I suspect it would be cheaper(?) and certainly more stable to get a new Vista-ready box with the OS preloaded. That way at least I know all the components are designed to work with Vista. By the time I spent money on the software, a bigger HDD, and more system RAM, I'm basically talking about the cost of a relatively-inexpensive PC.

Hopefully Sir Starkers and the other tech gurus here can get you up and skinning soon!

Warreni Said :I'm personally a bit leery of doing a Vista upgrade. I suspect it would be cheaper(?) and certainly more stable to get a new Vista-ready box with the OS preloaded. That way at least I know all the components are designed to work with Vista.


shoot when i bought my PC i thought they would have brains enough to put a graphics card that worked with vista but no they couldn't do that, i had to go buy one and now i don't have any problems at all....vista needs an 8 series graphics card seriously

Vista is as smooth as anything with my 7600GT

Sigh, kitty kitty kitty... what did I say about going dual boot?

If it were my 500Gb, I'd have 4 partitions: 20Gb for XP (not much room needed there), 80Gb for Vista (Vista needs breathing space), 100Gb for documents (always have these seperate for easy backup), and the fourth partition for backups. I would also use the old drive as a second backup.

Get a good backup program for making regular images of Vista. Something like True Image or Ghost - both will run from the disk in case the system wont boot. Also a free proggy like SyncBack for doing frequent backups of your documents.

Next bit of advice... that pc guy is a tosser - get rid Find someone who will set it up the way you want.

I'd do it for you, but the 24hr flight is a bit much

As I recall, kitty's is a 7600GS, as was my previous card... much slower clock speed and draws more on system memory than the GT, thus it is not as efficient in Vista and has paint/repaint issues even with the most recent drivers.



I'm just down the road a little ways, so all being well, I can go set it up pretty much the way you suggest.

I would be asking HP why they included a video card that doesn't work with Vista...