The Wow Stopped Here
Technology March 29th, 2007Signs of the demise of my Vista box blue-screening multiple times a day have been greatly exaggerated. After upgrading to nVidia’s latest drivers, the problem has not in fact gone away, despite the longest respite to date right after the install (>24 hours). Upon returning after a trip, the system had blue-screened (and reported the video driver as the culprit) and it has since rebooted three times in less than 24 hours giving the same error.
I can’t take this any more… I’m wiping Vista off the system and replacing it with a stable OS. I’m amazed that after one of the longest and most open pre-release periods in Windows history, Vista remains unfit for production use on non-exotic, mainstream hardware (Intel motherboard, nVidia GeForce 6x series card, etc.).
March 29th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Check for old “fast” IDE drivers left over from a previous XP installation. I removed them manually, and the blue screening stopped.
March 30th, 2007 at 5:21 am
Wow, I haven’t had any problems with my Vista install. Two of my co-workers also have/tried Vista, one uses Vista Ultimate on a Dell Latitude D820 (and has no problems), the other tried it on a new PC and didn’t like it..complained about a few things. I use Home Premium and it works like a champ, no driver downloads, nothing…just worked!
good luck, and don’t give up!
March 30th, 2007 at 7:04 am
@Ross: There’s no previous XP install; I wiped the machine to install Vista. Plus, each time it reboots, it tells me the issue is with the video driver. It suggests I disable h/w acceleration, etc., but the nVidia driver doesn’t let me do that.
@codecraig: I agree, this can’t representative of a majority of folks using Vista. But I’ve given it a chance for three months now (started out with Vista Enterprise in December) and I can’t be bothered with the random restarts anymore. I’ll check again in six months or so.
I will install it on my MacBook’s Boot Camp partition sometime soon, probably after Leopard ships; I anticipate that will be stable.
March 31st, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I had this problem with the RTM as well; I disabled my screensaver (changed to default from my cool Matrix Revolutions one) and it stopped bluescreening (5-6x/day). I thought at first that it was the video drivers but Unreal Tournament and WoW worked fine.
Might be worth checking the screen saver.
March 31st, 2007 at 4:28 pm
@Sam: Hey, thanks for the tip. After I wiped the system and installed a different OS, a friend from MSFT convinced me to give it another go (and promised troubleshooting help), so I just reinstalled it yesterday. I’ve just turned off the screen saver; we’ll see what happens.
March 31st, 2007 at 11:46 pm
@Sam: And, it blue-screened again, after the screen saver change. Ugh.
April 1st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
You would expect otherwise from Microsoft because why? =)
April 2nd, 2007 at 7:38 am
[…] I’ve recently been whining about Vista blue-screening on me. Just after wiping it off the affected system, Tim Heuer from Microsoft offered to help me troubleshoot the problem. After re-installing and having another few blue-screens, I passed him the MEMORY.DMP files (~150 MB each via TransferBigFiles.com, a great free service). And guess what he found? […]