Installing Vista - issue

**Consultant** · 12-25-08, 02:37 PM

Merry Christmas, folks.

The family is full of food, the living room is full of crumpled wrapping paper and my DVD drive is full of an OEM Vista Home Premium disc.

I went into the BIOS and set the DVD as the boot device, it boots normally - I guess. Says "Windows is installing files" then finishes that and loads a vista-looking blue pretty screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else. I can move the mouse around the screen but there are no buttons, no options, no menu, nada.

Any idea what I should be seeing or doing??

**KromMonkey** · 12-25-08, 03:43 PM

Looks like it might be getting hung on detecting/ identifying your hardware. Have you tried the same process with the minimal H/W installed(i.e. remove any add-in sound card, extra drives, fancy controllers, etc...)?

**Consultant** · 12-25-08, 04:44 PM

It worked.

I decided to get up from the desk, have a beer, reheat some crawfish and when I came back to the desk it was on the next step. It just sat there for 5-7 minutes and it started working. It must have been silently checking my system or something...who knows.

Anyway, here I am, rockin the Vista 64...legally. INSANE.

**KromMonkey** · 12-25-08, 05:01 PM

Fantastic, Merry Christmas!

**619summon** · 12-26-08, 12:17 PM

cool now you can do the windows wheel they stole from apple: hold the windows key and tab!!! then let go of the tab and tap tab or mouse wheel thought your windows.

**Consultant** · 12-29-08, 08:50 AM

Didn't they steal pretty much all of Vista from Apple?

The side-bar, the games, the gadgets, etc?

A question, I have, though...

Since I'm brand new to Vista, are there any essential tweaks or doo-dads I need to gather or perform to fully utilize this puppy?

I haven't been home much the last few days and last night I fired up TF2 and it seemed to be running fine.

Call me crazy, but I think the sound quality within TF2 was better than it was a week ago when I was using XP...

Is that possible?

**WileECyte** · 12-29-08, 01:20 PM

Originally Posted by Consultant

Call me crazy, but I think the sound quality within TF2 was better than it was a week ago when I was using XP...

Is that possible?

They totally reworked the driver model for audio in Vista. They've stopped supporting EAX. So it's possible.

As for tweaks, just make sure you're fully patched and have all the compatibility/stability patches installed (most if not all are mandatory through Windows update) and ensure you have the latest greatest drivers for all your hardware. Beyond that, go grab DirectX from Microsoft and apply that to ensure you have the latest and greatest patches. (http://www.microsoft.com/directx/)

I've not tweaked too much beyond that, but you could give TweakGuides a check. Their Tweaking Companion has a lot of good stuff Windows & BIOS related that can help sometimes. They also have their Vista annoyances guide as well.