A Problem; My Exit

[Galt]

I think I'll say it right here, even for those of you who have it running just fine.

Vista sucks.

In short, after seeing the new shiny Nvidia ForceWare 196.21 drivers officially released today, I was tempted, as always, to update it. Well, a click here, a click there, and I ran into problems extremely quickly. The first and foremost being the fact that my computer is stuck in an endless shutdown sequence, but never really shuts off. A simple search reveals that the primary cause is a... faulty driver. No surprise.

This hasn't been the first time this happened to me, but the previous encounters I simply gave up and used a System Restore. But after looking at Vista's ntblog.txt (which documents all startup services upon booting and shows whether or not they loaded), it would seem that the problem had persisted long before then (hint: 90% of my services failed to load upon startup, including my video drivers).

So, I lost it. I'm flipping Vista the bird and going back to XP. Good riddance. It was very painful to manually remove every single one of my games and utilities, but, hey, that's why we have flash drives! The most important of my most valued digitally downloaded games (and the heRO installer), the music I bought from iTunes, and my save files (Mass Effect 2!) have been safely stored in my 15 GB FD. But until then, I won't start reformatting (OMG! *dun dun dun*) until tomorrow.

Indefinite hiatus until... whenever. See you until then.

EDIT (for those who are starting on Page 1):

Well, after considering it for about 10 seconds, I've decided to quit heRO. It's gotten to burn-out phase for me and I'm going to go wait the standard 3 months-1 year waiting time and then get back into it. Until then, I'll go play something else since RO seems a bit too bland for me right now.

I'll still pop into forums every now and then, of course.

[Herman]

I deliberately disable all automatic updates, both with windows vista and drivers for this very problem.. sadly I dont have a copy with me here in Korea to swap back to...

I feel your pain though, get the computer up and running quickly! I hope it goes smoothly for you tomorrow!

[TPC]

What you're experiencing could also indicate a faulty motherboard or some other similar problem. I hope its not, and that its just vista being vista. Good luck.

[bugaboo]

I've never used Vista before, so I wouldn't rightfully know what to tell you.??All I can say is, good luck, and I hope you can reclaim that computer of yours soon, for both the sake of heRO and Mass Effect 2.

[Session]

I think I just got inadvertently convinced to get a new computer, running windows xp.


I dont think any online games require 7/vista do they?

[Galt]

@Herman:
Reformatting will start today. I am tempted to get Win7 under the recommendation of another PC-gamer-friend who has it.

@TPC:
It's not the motherboard. This same exact computer used to have XP installed on it before I switched to Vista. XP ran perfectly fine, and with much less problems than Vista.

@Malady:
Thanks. And for the record, my computer is custom-built. So the technical support staff is yours truly.

@takhara:
No. Hardly. In fact, Vista has problems with certain online games (sound stutters, game freezes computer upon exiting, etc). But, I think I'll lay it out for you; if you are going to only use your computer for casual use and gaming, go for Vista since it has better security. For the more serious PC gamers who value performance, XP is still the king. Win7 has yet to prove itself to the gaming community; time is the only deterrent to see if it is worth it.

[Ultima_Pi]

I don't particularly like Vista myself, but I haven't had that many problems while gaming.

I would honestly rather like to be on XP though, but I don't feel like reloading everything...

Good luck.

[Sepharius]

It's not particular Vista itself that is the problem.

It's about the little demon inside known as Windows Update.

[Galt]

Successfully reformatted and installed Windows XP.

Reformatting is so easy; I don't get why everybody can't do it. :S The installation took all of the better part of an hour to complete.

Had a small roadblock when internet didn't work, but I wrote down my network card model and I was able to obtain drivers for it. Now downloading all the other junk I need for the computer to run.

Oh, and already downloaded and installed Service Pack 3.

[mahawirasd]

windows XP FTW!

hope we can have you back soon


-w-

PS: use norton ghost...