PC Greg

Well, it was a no go on the Athlon XP 2200+, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 - AGP 128MB... Went down to Best Buy and bought a $500 eMachine T6412: AMD Athlon™ 64 3200+ Processor (512KB L2 cache, 2.2GHz, 1600MHz FSB) 512MB DDR (400MHz) ATI Radeon® Xpress 200 (PCI-Express) 128MB DDR shared video memory 16x DVD±RW multi-format double layer Booted it up off the Vista DVD and proceeded with the install. Took about an hour and a half and now am running and leanring about Windows Vista!

I let the install run overnight and in the morning found that nothing changed... Just sitting at the "Windows is Installing" screen with progress bar showing about 1/8th complete.... Restarted the system and at the Windows Startup menu pressed F8 and then selected Safe Mode from the Start up options menu. To my surprise, the "Windows is Installing" screen appeared again and the installation just took off as it should have in the first place. Progress bar moving along at a good clip... Unfortunately, at about the 50% marker on the prgress bar, it locked up... Restarted again in Safe Mode and got a new window stating Completing Intallation and a similar rogress bar moving along at a good clip... Then up popped a Windows Setup dialog box that reads Installation cannot be completed. Please start over and attempt to install again. Tried restarting several times, but am stuck at this point. Back to the drawing board...

SeBsZ: I found another post that mentioned that Vista Setup may not recognize hardware components and this may cause a hang like I expereinced. So I installed W2k SP4, all the drivers, and then ran Vista Setup from within W2k. Setup was able to run past the previous hang point, Mighty slow installation procedure though and scant UI feedback. Went thru about 10 screens and then says Windows Installing - Windows will now finish installing on its own. Note: Your computer will restart during the installion. In the hour since that point, screen went black for about 4-6 minutes, reboot, and then blue background went from what seemed to be 640x480 to 800x600. Now have "Windows is Installing" screen again, progress bar showing about 1/8th complete.... Read on a forum that some folks encountered 8 hour installation...so going to let install go overnight and see what happens in the morning...

SeBsZ: I'm encountering the same problem as you are... Boot from DVD. See the "loading files" progress bar. See the LONGHORN boot screen with progress bar that starts moving for about one second, and then it just freezes. Screen goes blank. Athlon XP 2200+, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 - AGP 128MB I read another posting on NeoWin.net that Vista Beta 1 has problems with onboard video chip sets, which includes a lot of laptops... Anyway, this motherboard as onboard video, but am using external card... Did you find a solution anywhere? Anyone else care to weigh in with ideas?