Windows Vista Wal-Mart pulls Vista

Not really a question, just a comment.

The other day the wife's Emachine running Vista crashed. I won't get into all the details about what happened but the final straw is now when Vista boots up it says windload.exe is corrupted or missing. Yet when I try booting off the repair diagnosis CD (I downloaded off the internet) it runs a scan then says there is nothing wrong with the PC.

I can't say for sure but it seems like it has something to do with the Lexmark printer or after the computer tried installing an update.

So I tried looking on the internet for ideas. Seems like everyone is having this same problem with Vista and everyone got's their own fix but none of them seem to work for me.

So I set up a spare PC for my wife running XP. I gave up her Vista machine and she is going to take it to a qualified tech to see what he can do with it. I have little experience with Vista and don't have time to fool with it during this week.

So we have several options. First of all the PC came with no recovery CD. After calling tech support the guy said I was supposed to make one after I set the computer up.

We were going to just buy a new copy of Vista and install it but Wal-mart says that after Windows 7 was released, they pulled all of their copies of Vista and sent them back to Microsoft.

I've heard so many bad things about Vista. People call it the next Windows "ME ".

I'd really like to install XP because it seems to run faster than Vista, providing I can get drivers for this PC. I think XP is going to be around for awhile and now that Windows 7 is out, new copies of XP are much more affordable.

I'm still skeptical that WIndows 7 is not as buggy as Vista. Sort of like buying a new car. They say never buy the first year of a new car. Wait until the car has been manufactered for a couple of years so they can work out all the bugs.

 

Yeah that's what I get for not reading the manual that came with the computer.

We use Vista Enterprise here at work and although programs still lock up from time to time, it doesn't seem to be any worse than any other operating system with the exception of Windows ME.

She never had any problems with this computer until Windows update tried installing some sort of security update. Or so she says. I managed to get the computer working after uninstalling the Lexmark printer. When I went back and installed it, that's when it started going haywire again.

One thing I have found is if you buy a computer with bundled software they are always slower and have more problems than if you just install the operating system yourself.

HP computers comes with allot of bundled software the runs in the background that really takes up allot of resources.

The computer my wife is using until we get her Emachine working again is an old HP Pavillion my parents bought in 1999. I replaced the fan on the power suppy, and installed XP and it runs faster than ME with all that bundled software that came on it.

Emachines seem to be better. I'm still using the original installation on my Emachine PC I bought back in December of 2005. I run CCleaner and MalwareBytes from time to time and defrag it and it seems to run OK. Not as fast as it did when it was new.

As far as Vista goes, I still can't find any advantages of it over XP. All I can tell is it's different.

I still use Windows 98 SE on my computer out in my garage. It seems to run faster and is more stable than my XP machine. It just doesn't have very good USB support like wireless and thumbdrives. Also Microsoft doesn't support it anymore so Internet Explorer version 6 is as fas as I can go with it.

YouTube is going to phase out this version so you can't view any videos. For whatever reason.

Also the latest version of Firefox won't run on 98 but I have an earlier version that will.

Luckily Opera browser will work in any version of Windows. Or at least they support the 98 version. And Realplayer still supports Windows 98.

If Emachine supports driver's for her computer I may just buy a copy of XP and put on it rather than going with Windows 7.

 

Is this an Acer Emachine? In that case you just have to call Acer and they will ship you a recovery dvd for like $20.

No need to go and buy a new windows license since you already have the license number on the PC. You could also try and find someone with an identical model and loan their dvd.

 

No it's an Emachine. I bought it last February so it's less than a year old.

My wife took the computer to a guy who works on computers for a living and he says he *thinks* the hard drive just went bad. So he's been going round and round with Emachines on getting a free replacement hard drive.

The Emachine T3302 w/XP I bought almost four years ago has never given me any problems. I've never even had to reload windows.

 

As "a guy who works on computers for a living" you never guess whether a hard-drive is bad or not. You run the drive manufacturers bootable test program and it says that the drive is either OK or broken.

My experience with supermarket-type computers is that you can hardly ever get replacement parts from them. The customer needs to bring in the entire PC with his receipt, then he waits 1-8 weeks before he gets it back fixed.

 

You can get "Startup Inspector" (its free) and it will let you
turn off those startup programs that are eating all your resources.

http://www.windowsstartup.com/download.php

Install it, run it, click on "Consult ", then uncheck then
programs you dont want to auto-start and click "Apply ".

This little program works quite well for me.
Some programs will need to be turned off via their options or
they may restart again.

 

Just thought i'd add some other information in for you to know if you didnt already.

Who told you that walmart pulled vista? I know they have not, because they use vista on there own systems still. They are still selling vista on there website.

It sounds like you just needed to reload vista thats all, I never used the orginal OS disk to repair an operating system and it worked just fine. It didnt have a problem if the disk was a newer version or not.

Plus with vista you can go and change the product key in the system as well.

With most computers from places like walmart, target, kmart, and sam's club I have reformatted the drives and started a completely fresh install on everything. It didnt matter if the computer was brand new. I have seen computers that came straight home and I set them up for people that have crashed due to bad pre-installs from the sellers. I simply did the install myself and left out some of the package products until I had windows OS installed properly.

If it was a bad drive you would of heard a noise most likely from it before it crashed and when it started up. Hope that guy was smart enough to get information off the drive before he said it was dead.

I always connect drives up to my computer in the secondary connection and back up all the information i need or other people need just incase the drive fails. I usually will do this if I need to do a fresh install though and if you can hear the hard drive whine or make any noise at all.

The only reason the older OS's run faster or seem to is because they do not use as much memory to run and they have less system programs running in the background.