Mr Snrub

On 64-bit Windows there is no /3GB switch, applications have 2GB user-mode virtual address space if they are not compiled with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE, and 4GB if they are. So yep, that sounds like the ceiling your 32-bit apps are hitting. Native 64-bit apps would have a theoretical virtual address space of 8TB. Check out MSDN and Wikipedia for info.

Given that explorer.exe and iexplore.exe share DLLs and addons in either will be loaded in the other, I would guess an extension problem.I had IE7Pro installed at first and there were quirks with the search box flashing and IE8 crashed once - given that the main features I like of IE7Pro are in IE8, I uninstalled it and had no problems after that.

Prefetch is designed to be a list of binaries that individual applications will be requesting (immediately, or very shortly) after they are launched - by using these tiny files the OS can order its disk reads and have the files in memory before they are requested, removing latency from the application launch. (Superfetch is a further improvement that looks at what applications you typically launch, and prefetches the necessary files before the icon is even double-clicked.) So I would doubt removing prefetch files or disabling Superfetch could improve performance, but possibly the opposite. Superfetch only uses idle time to do its lower priority I/O, so even if it reads parts of files into cache and does not use them, it's not impacting user experience or delaying system services that want to use the disk. As for a community source (hence independent from Microsoft) regarding the prefetcher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher

The maximize button is slightly different to "set the dimensions of this window to the same as the screen resolution" - the window loses its edge controls for resizing and moving (and on Vista it turns off the opacity feature for that window).I guess the OP is talking about the small number of pixels making up the window border which are used for resizing it as they are not required - to my knowledge there's no built-in way to change the maximize behaviour (it works like that for efficiency, as it no longer needs to worry about repainting windows behind it - hence why opacity also turns off in Vista).

Obviously you have little experience with imaging drives then. In the process i'm thinking of one root out drivers and anything identifying what the system was, tho keeping anything else, it quickly gets very complicated if one should start detailing what should/can be kept in order to re-use system.Actually, though it's been a few years I have used Ghost extensively as a method of creating "restore-inside-20-minutes" images along with a network boot floppy disk - I've not used imaging techs for migrating existing OS's to dissimilar hardware though, due to the problems described already.The process you are talking about sounds more like a sysprep than anything to do with imaging specifically, and as you said not practical for a single client machine.

That makes the file look legal to MS and it doesn't update it every time you go to Windows Update. It stops WFP from removing the file, but if a GDR hotfix is released for TCPIP.SYS then Windows Update would still replace it (and the .cat file).(And as Windows Updates are security and severe stability hotfixes only, it would not be smart to avoid using it because of chance of regressing a hack.)

It is not supported to even do a system restore from one hardware platform to another that is different, and moving the hard disk is effectively trying to do that.Also, if the XP x64 installation uses an OEM license then you are not legally entitled to move it to another machine, the license lies with the mainboard on the original computer. I'm not sure what creating an image of the hard disk or volume is meant to achieve differently - the drivers will still be incorrect or missing for the new hardware, leaving the system unbootable.

What about the non-technical questions at the top?I find quite often when dealing with customers who open support cases that the "extra" information they don't think to provide initially can give clues as to the root cause of problems. There is a huge difference between a system that has been running stable for over a year and one that has just been (re)built - especially if a recent change such as added hardware or drivers being upgraded has been made, for example. So having an idea as to whether your system suddenly started having the problem "out of the blue" with no hardware or software changes would imply a hardware fault - conversely if some anti-virus or firewall product, for example, was installed shortly before the first bugcheck then it would be the thing to rule out. Fresh builds that are not stable are naturally the trickiest to resolve - there is no history to indicate whether the problem is provoked by software or hardware (sometimes you can get lucky by reproducing the problem in a specific way, but you have already indicated it is random). I would recommend that anyone running Vista should have SP1 applied, unless they have some specific software that is known to have problems with it. Did you follow the link to the instructions for configuring Windows to produce a complete memory dump instead of minidumps, for the next crash? That might give more information to show if the issue has a consistent root cause or not...

Dual 24" widescreen LCDs were probably the biggest investment on my main rig at home, followed by the graphics card - when buying a new setup I tend to go for the "price break point" CPU as it's easily upgraded later (when the price drops further, so it's still not the most expensive component), and RAM is dirt cheap, but the graphics card I tend to go towards the (reasonable) upper end of the scale.

Nope, this is the scenario I first described, a home broadband NAT router is designed to have 1 public IP address and assign individual private IP addresses for the internal clients - the traffic from all clients on the Internet is seen to come from the 1 IP address.

Not necessarily a problem - the startup & shutdown times are monitored for consistency, if it takes "longer than normal" then it might trigger these kind of diagnostic events - but for situations where hotfixes are installed or hardware is added, for example, the times may extend quite a bit for a one-off: the OS doesn't check for such exceptions and so reports it. The easiest logs to look at are under Event Viewer / Windows Logs : Application & System Any answers to the questions I posed? This might provide a bit of background to the root cause, or at least flesh out the problem a little...

It depends on whether the clients were getting public or private IPs directly from the cable modem, and what they get now - if it was an IP conflict I would expect only 1 of the 2 clients to even work, which is why I assumed the OP was talking about public IPs.If the cable modem and both clients are connected to LAN ports, it should act as a switch as before - does that help? That would make the network infrastructure identical as to how it was with the switch in place of the router (with the addition of wireless clients), so should resolve your problem.

This is just a minidump, so maybe not enough to make a useful analysis - have you followed the procedure for generating complele memory dumps for future crashes? Has the system been stable for a while, and this problem just started, or was it recently built (or upgraded maybe)? Any overlocking in place at all? Windows Updates installed up to date? I notice SP1 is not installed - any reason? Am I right in assuming the mainboard is an Asus P5E? I see the BIOS version is 0203, but I can't get much joy from the Asus website to see what the most recent is - often the BIOS updates relate to CPU support and I see you have a quad-core which is guaranteed to be "kinda recent". Crash occurred because CPU register RCX contained zero when it was meant to point to a memory address.RCX was populated by RAX, which is also zero, if we scan back a little bit - but once we've jumped into a couple of functions it's not reliable to make assumptions on the register contents. The STOP code here was 0xA, not 0x3B - which might indicate the bugchecks are different (possibly random) which could imply a hardware (or overheating/overclocking) problem. If you take a look in the System event log are there a bunch of BugCheck event 1001 entries corresponding with each crash? (Tip: Click on the column heading Source and wait until the "Sorting..." indicator has gone, then the events are sorted in alphabetical order.) If you find there are a collection of these, what does it say the bugcheck code was for each? (No need to record the parameters, just the single main code like 0xA for the one above.)

I think it's a NAT router that doesn't support more than 1 public IP address - I couldn't see a way to even disable NAT, though I only went through the emulator briefly. If the switch is behind the cable modem and the clients are connected to that and get unique public IP addresses, what purpose does the router provide? (Typically home broadband routers allow multiple clients to access the Internet when only 1 public IP is available.)

You could check out Dial-a-fix to see if it helps.

Strange, I just copied a minidump to my desktop and 7-zip was able to archive it from there... I did the following: Start / Computer Browse to C:\Windows\Mindump - click OK on prompt to get access Select multiple minidump*.dmp files, right-click and select Copy Show desktop, right-click and select Paste - files are now copied With desktop copies of files selected, right-click and go to "7-zip / Add to archive..." Did you MOVE the files by mistake, instead of COPYING? If I try to create an archive of the minidumps in the C:\Windows\Minidump folder, then 7-zip reports an access denied error similar to your screenshot.

You might need to copy the files somewhere first before you can zip them - I tend to use my desktop as a scratchpad for things like this, then delete them once done.

Do you have a memory dump file with today's date saved as C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP ? (I think the default for Vista is to produce kernel memory dumps, which was the "beginning dump of physical memory" message you saw at the bottom of the blue screen, but I might be wrong.) If you have that file, copy & zip it up, then upload it somewhere like http://skydrive.live.com as a public file and give us the URL. If not, then zip & upload any minidump*.dmp files in C:\Windows\Minidump instead - also prepare the system to create complete dumps in the future by following steps 2-3 under "Memory dump of the entire system" in the following post: http://www.msfn.org/board/Creating-memory-dumps-t90244.html

To ensure "like for like" comparison of startup times it might be good to define the start & end of the "start" process. e.g. from pressing the power button to reaching the user selection screen, or from the end of POST to the desktop appearing, etc. Some systems have a large delay during the hardware detection or PXE boot during POST which aren't anything to do with the OS at all. For extra "useful comparative information" it might be useful to indicate anti-virus & personal firewall products installed, as my experience has been that these can affect startup times and "responsiveness" of the OS considerably.

First, please don't copy/paste the same question 3 times in the same forum, ressurrecting posts from 3 years ago (I have removed the 2 duplicates).I would assume the reason XP & Ubuntu are unable to see the hard disk is that it is a SATA drive and they have no in-box drivers - however if the Vista installation fails then it might indicate a hardware problem elsewhere. More details on exactly when the Vista install crashes and what is displayed on the screen may be useful - e.g. does it get to the drive/partition selection screen and start copying files, then reboot during this stage, or get stuck in a reboot loop after the first restart?

I like the InPrivate browsing mode which doesn't bother to cache any information about browsed pages - very handy if borrowing someone's PC briefly without relogging. The real SLD is also highlighted in the address bar, which is great for visual security (further protection against phishing). The find-as-you-type feature I love - this was pretty much the only reason I installed IE7Pro, so that's gone from my system now. Opening a new tab also allows you to reopen tabs closed in the current session, which is nice as I asked for that feature in 7.0 and missed the boat. I'm liking this a lot so far

You could try using CACLS and RD in a batch file, something like this: cacls "C:\Documents and Settings\<profilename>" /T /G <yourdomainname\yourusername>:F rd /s /q "C:\Documents and Settings\<profilename>" The first line should recursively grant full access to the profile folder and everything inside it for your user account. The second should silently remove the directory and all its contents. I've not tested this at all, so check it manually on a non-important server first

What anti-virus product are you using?

I believe the web browser requests from the web server "favicon.ico", and if found then it uses that image - not sure if it's something that can be set client-side.

It sounds like the laptop has a SATA controller and therefore disk, and there is no in-box driver for the controller on the XP CD (bear in mind the OS came out years before SATA existed, so it's not unusual). You would need to find the SATA controller driver for Windows XP for the laptop on the manufacturer's website, and copy it to a floppy disk. From the comment about an external floppy disk drive, I assume they mean the laptop has no internal floppy drive? Then you would need to boot from the XP CD and hit F6 when prompted and insert the floppy disk with the driver present - this will allow Setup to see the hard disk and write to it. However, if you are not very techy then you might want to reconsider the manual OS downgrade - you may have issues finding drivers for the rest of the hardware (display, network, chipset, touchpad peripherals typically). It would be much better if the vendor could supply the laptop with the OS downgraded (complete with appropriate recovery CD), if they provide that service. [Moving to XP forum as this is not related to Vista.]