Signs 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.).

8 thoughts on “The Wow Stopped Here

  1. Check for old “fast” IDE drivers left over from a previous XP installation. I removed them manually, and the blue screening stopped.

  2. 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!

  3. @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.

  4. 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.

  5. @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.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s