SpikedCola

Whenever I try to play older games in Vista, such as the two listed above, they are really jerky, have a horrible colour pallet, etc. Even playing WoW, Ive noticed that I lost 20fps switching from XP to Vista. Because of this Im almost tempted to switch back. Is there anything I can do to improve gameplay in Vista? Ive noticed that I have DirectX 10 installed. Would rolling back to 9 help? Also, Ive tried running the games in compatibility mode, and disabling visual themes, and that didnt help. WoW Im not concerned about so much, because 35fps is still decent, but when I cant even play AoE anymore, it kind of p***es me off.

I cant believe I didnt think of that. You're 100% right. Opened notepad, and it shows the system drive as F: when it should obviously be C:. I searched what you told me to, but I havent found anything relevant to whats happening, only a lot of stuff about XP or about changing another drive's letter. Care to explain a bit further? Hmm. Tried PartitionMagic in XP compatibility mode, and Acronis Disk Director, and neither would work (PartitionMagic said a file was missing when I rebooted, Acronis wouldnt even reboot the computer to complete the drive letter change). What other (hopefully freeware) tool can I use? FIXED IT!!! Here's the solution, for anyone else that has this problem: - When windows starts to hang on Personalizing, press CTRL ALT DEL - Go to New Task, type regedit and hit enter - Navigate to HKLM/System/MountedDevices - Find the key that has your drive letter, for example, mine was \DosDevices\F: and rename it to what it should be, in my case, \DosDevices\C: Reboot and youre done!

Long story short, Im set up as follows: Partition 1 - was 60gb, now 30gb - XP Partition 2 - was 10gb, now 40gb - Vista Partition 3, 4, 5 - Extended partitions for extra stuf Vista wouldnt shrink partition 2 for me, so I booted XP, and used PartitionMagic to resize. All went without a hitch, so I tried to load Vista (Im using EasyBCD for a bootloader, I didnt like Vista's) and it said it was missing a file. Popped in the Vista DVD and repaired like the error screen told me to, and now it boots Vista. Here's the real problem: After the loading screen, and the logon screen (I have it set to autologon to my account), it sits at 'Personalizing Your Desktop...' for about 5 minutes, then goes to a blank desktop screen (no taskbar, and the old windows 2k background - the blue one). If I CTRL+ALT+DEL, I can start explorer.exe (as its not running at boot) and it will load a 'temporary account' (theres a little balloon tip that says so). How do I get it to boot the proper profile, without having to reformat the partition and redo Vista?