waruikoohii

The Vista image, uncompressed, is about 9-12GB (depending on if it's 32 bit or 64 bit). Compressed it's between 2.5 and 4GB. Are you making sure to enable WIM compression? It sounds as if you aren't compressing your images.

I was having a very similar issue when I first built my computer. I narrowed the problem down to my wireless card, and a Google search confirmed my suspicions. I had been using the card in my old Vista x64 machine, and there were no issues, but there were issues in my new machine. Apparently the x64 driver for that specific card has issues with memory amounts >4GB, which causes lockups. Not all the time, but when doing very specific things (for me, it was uploading to certain websites). There wasn't an updated driver, so I stuck in a wireless USB dongle and haven't had an issue since. So I would suspect a network driver if I were you, since the lockups occur during network related tasks.

Why is SP2 needed to fix bugs? Microsoft can release standalone patches.

Runs old and new applications fine here. You're partially right about drivers. Some companies don't have decent drivers out, but most do. nVidia drivers aren't fantastic. ATI is more on the ball when it comes to Vista. Linux has never been all that great here. Performance has never been quite there for me (when running with a GUI. When running just the terminal it's pretty quick, which is to be expected).Vienna is coming out in 2010. This is 2008.

I would probably blame vLite for that one. SP1 took about an hour to install on my four year old laptop.

I'm on the slipstream now with no problems. I have a Home Premium desktop that was upgraded to SP1 with WU. It doesn't have this problem, however. You could perhaps try disabling the Group Policy service. That may help.

Nothing there. I got ahold of a Microsoft provided SP1 slipstream disc, though, so I'll probably be doing a format and reinstall this weekend, which makes figuring out the problem not really worth while. Thanks for your help, though.

When trying to enable Receive Window Auto-Tuning via the command line (netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal), netsh reports "Ok" but when running "show global" Receive Window Auto-Tuning is marked as Disabled. There is a note after the settings stating "**The above autotuninglevel setting is the result of Group Policy overriding any local configurations." I have hunted through the group policy editor, and could not find anything related to Auto-Tuning. I am not on a domain. Any ideas on how to fix this so I may enable Receive Window Auto-Tuning?

Is there a reason why you don't want to just install everything..?

Exactly what would be the point? The VLK only works with Buisness. Even if you could add the other versions, you'd still have to enter a key for them.

Most of the people who have had bad experiences with Vista have had those experiences, surprise surprise, with OEM installs. Fresh installs of Vista are generally very fast. And on my laptop, I actually get better battery life under Vista than with XP (by about 20 minutes).

exFAT is an optional filesystem for removable devices in Vista SP1. FAT is still the default, at least in current builds of SP1. exFAT is designed for flash drives, primarily. NTFS is still the best choice for hard disks.

Maybe that's why? Take out the "maybe". All of the major OEM's install tons of crap. I haven't seen what Dell does recently, but I've seen HP's and Lenovo's, both of which come from the factory with over 100 processes running. My Vista install has 36 processes running, and that's with an instant messenger, IE, and Firefox running. It's faster than any stock laptop I've used with Vista, and it's four years old. So Vista isn't to blame. It's the OEM. Vista is fast if you're willing to either clean off the OEM's crapware or install Vista from scratch.

You do realize that the problem isn't Vista so much as all the crud Dell preloaded, right? Did you make any effort to clean all the crap off? No? Well, don't blame Vista, then, blame yourself.

I won't don't worry. I'll just wait for Culberti, who claims to have this progress bar... (this is the weird part) I would love to see how he hacked in a progress bar.