MrGuy

Ram and mobo huh? Always been partial to Kingston and Crucial higher end ram but now I'm leaning towards Corsair. I'm running their dominator 1066mhz ram now and haven't had an issue overclocking. They make a nice cooling fan unit, cools 4 gigs just fine. As for motherboards, I'm looking for a highend gaming board right now, still havent decided. Really p***ed at gigabyte these days. I picked up their Quad N680-SLIDQ6 rev. 2 and was fighting drivers in XP for over a year, went to Vista Ultimate out of necessity and now my nforce drivers are finally working properly. Make sure you get some decent cooling for your system. Thermaltake and Asus have a nice high end cpu cooler, corsair for your ram, and get a box that allows additional 120mm fans.

Start cleaning out your folders. Search for attachments, save to disc. Start going through your sent items and delete unnecessary content. We have a couple of Outlook power users on our domain and they don't want to delete anything--everything is important, well we got a 1.9 gig pst down to 750 just by removing attachments and cleaning sent items folder.

I'd give creative a call. Make sure you're absolutely using the most recent correct driver installation for your audigy card. Also could be a windows issue as well. How's your OS working? Are you current on your updates? Also doesn't hurt to have your motherboard BIOS up to date as well. I've had a similar can't find product on install but it turned out I was using the wrong download.

I'd check your DNS server. Sometimes they get tempermental with new devices.

Try flashing your BIOS. Doesn't hurt having that up to date. Also if you have a different hard drive, I'd recommend trying that as well. Sometimes failing hard drives can really make XP installs a pain.

Is it USB or PS/2? Could be a few different things, does't hurt to have your system board BIOS up to date. Is there a flash available for it?

little more info would be nice. Is it only doing this on one wireless router/accesspoint? What kind of card is it? If this is only happening at one point, could be what you're trying to connect to? If this is a netgear adapter, well there's a few models that have had known problems with dropping connection.

Are you opening up Word the first time as an adminstrator? The only other time I've seen this is when Office was newly installed and never run. Then when a restricted user tries to open the app for the first time, installer hoses up.

Have a similar problem with Symantec. Symantec, in my opinion, doesn't stand behind their products anymore and to make matters worse they're pulling a microsoft and buying up all the competition. They acquire a great program and then wreck it (restrictions, no support). Sorry for the rant. I don't know what I'm going to do about my issue--can't install and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for support from Symantec. I'm just going without for now. I'll find a different program that's compatible but in your situation Symantec has the monopoly on disc imaging. You might want to look into a disk duplicator. I have one, it works great. I called Symantec about Ghost Enterprise edition. I wanted to mass image from a server and needed the console version, they wanted $25 bucks for every computer that benefited from my ghost image, can you believe that?

Vista found my printer (HP multiprinter) and installed driver before I even knew it but I haven't investigated the scanning (twain driver) potential yet. I'm sure I'll have to install that, I'm just going to use my old installation for that and see what happens. So far my old drivers and applications, for most everything seem to be working in Vista.

Are you using an LCD monitor? If you are try autocorrect or power your monitor off and then on.

Try a clean install, seems to be the one tried and true method

You can make boot discs by creating an iso file and burning it as a bootable disk. Do a search on google or what have you on this process. ISO burner apps (freebies) usually have a size limit but I found an app called microburner that allows you to burn bootable disc without restrictions. Of course you have to create the ISO first, used magicISO for that.

A user with admin priviledges being restricted--that's messed up! Have you tried creating another user with priviledges and seeing it if does the same thing? I'm assuming this is a workgroup and not a domain

Is this a clean install or are you upgrading from XP? I haven't heard of anyone I know that was able to install upgrade option--just bombs out. I had to do a clean install so did my co-workers, then it worked.

Double bummer! Thought ATI was all over this Vista OS. Is your ATI card showing up in device manager or is it just the catalyst sofware that won't install? You can try an old tried but true technique--remove current display device and/or install standard VGA driver, re-boot system, when OS finds new hardware, direct it to your previous catalyst installation drivers location, see if Vista will install the driver without having to install Catalyst. This will at least give you card performance functionality but you'd have to use display properties to adjust settings. If this works maybe catalyst might install afterwards. Worth a try. Not sure about your NIC issue. Have you tried pinging your pc from another location or can you ping other IP's. I'd start with the IP and go from there.

My experience was similar regarding a clean install however: both my pc and my co-workers pc would not install using the XP Pro to Vista upgrade--it would start, install, and then bomb out on re-boot. Never got to desktop trying the Vista upgrade option. We both threw in new drives and started from scratch. Good news is I can always swap my purchased softawre back in once the demos expire, bad news is I had to install everything all over again on the new Vista drive. All my apps and updated drivers worked except for Symantec Corporate Antivirus version 10. Suppose to be a Vista Update but we couldn't find it. Also Citrix Metaframe XP drivers give you an error (which you can disable) everytime you start an app--these drivers are SUPPOSED to be compatible with Vista--NOT.

Do you have an integrated sound card or slot card? Might be a mobo driver issue, a software driver issue or your soundcard settings are overwriting your windows advanced volume control settings. I have a sound blaster software installed and that mixer panel will knock out windows volume control settings.

Just installed Outlook Beta 2 recently and I can't find the setting to correct an issue I'm having with graphics loading in e-mail messages. With Outlook 2003 I was able to right click to download picture/graphic. Now when I attempt that it just gives me a copy option. The graphic does say to right click to get picture but it's not working. Just wondering if someone else has had this similar issue? I've checked and double checked all settings including junk e-mail protection--must be missing something somewhere.

Have you gone on ATI's site and queried this problem. I've found known problems with their cards and operating systems are well documented there along with fixes and downloads. Also wouldn't hurt to look for updated drivers as well if you already haven't done so.

Have you checked security permissions on the short cut?

Is the hardware connected when you try the software uninstall? Might try un-installing drivers in safemode.

Try using safe mode (F8 on boot up) see if that will bring you to desktop. Did you make any substantial hardware or software changes around the time this started happening. Sounds like it's a driver issue, but then again it could be crapware instead. If you can get to safemode try running a spyware sweeper program (adaware, spybot...) and see what that brings up. If you did do some software installations, for an application or hardware, try removing that installation and restart.

You can install windows from a network, mass storage device, or USB if your Bios supports it. The question is how is your Desktop setup: Stand alone, workgroup, or on a network. If your CD-Rom is shot, I'd try installing XP from a external usb drive--if that's possible. Be a lot easier than trying to configure a Deskop drive to be read from your laptop.

I'm kind of wondering the same question. I'm sure there's an uninstall option somewhere if not going into add/remove programs and un-installing it there. There has to be a return to previous operating system option. I'm going to install Vista Beta and remove is once the trial period expires.