my old dell laptop (xp) lasted forever, with no major software problems. i finally decided to get a new laptop, an asus running vista. i'd heard the complaints, and i know that OSX is a more stable OS, blah blah. there are still some things that i need to do on my laptop that don't work that well with macs, so i went with this one. i've had it for 3 weeks now, and now on startup i get error messages saying that winlogon.exe and userinit.exe have been corrupted, then i get the blue screen of death, with a message that i need to run chkdsk. so, i start it up in safe mode (still get the error messages, but no blue screen). i run chkdsk out of c:// command, but it does not work. i've maybe used this thing for a grand total of 10 hours, and only on work-related stuff. i'm inclined to think it's just a buggy OS. any thoughts, suggestions?
I bought a laptop recently with Vista 64 and it starts up quickly. I was thinking of downloading the Windows 7 Release Candidate The Link that recently came out because it has an XP emulator built-in and I was having trouble getting an old game to run.
I can't really advise you on computer issues very well, but I can tell you that I switched back to XP and am awaiting Windows 7 before I consider an upgrade. I think my situation was a bit different though, because my computer was custom built by some tech-savvy friends and I figure it was some sort of hardware compatibility issue and the motherboard manufacturor is likely to blame (many of the issues I encountered were with onboard sound utilities, etc for the motherboard). However at the moment I would venture to say that XP is the more stable choice. I can't say that Vista is horrible as I enjoyed some of its features, but I have some very specialized music software that seemed to have serious issues with Vista. Hopefully most of the compatibility issues I experienced will be resolved with the release of Windows 7, since it is apparently an easier OS architecture for hardware manufacturors to create drivers for.
I don't know how much this helps but it provides some recent background and case history for you. I had no intention of switching to Vista and was planning on just going from XP to 7. But I bought a new machine a few weeks ago that came with Vista 32 Home. I immediately upgraded to Vista 64 Ultimate and had a ***** of a time with drivers. So much so that I decided to go back to Vista 32 Ultimate. I still had the driver issues for some reason, so I decided to go back to XP Pro (32) and this created even more driver issues. So I went back to Vista 32 and fought some more before I decided that if I was going to be fighting with drivers in any OS, I may as well do it with the latest/greatest, so I put Vista 64 Ultimate back on. This time around I just installed the LAN driver and plugged in and ran a windows update and that fixed almost all of the drivers. I still had to manually find one for the built in camera and I had to manually go to the intel site and get the display driver. Since then however, everything has been great. I blame most of my issues on Lenovo. All said, I second the idea of installing a fresh copy of XP onto your machine IF YOU CAN FIND THE DRIVERS. Otherwise, just do a fresh install of Vista and do a web search ("speed up vista") that will tell you 6-8 things you can do to make it seem very much like XP.
Most of the Vista problems people experience buying directly from the major computer manufacturers is with all the after-market **** they put on them. Seriously, a clean install should fix most of your problems.
i appreciate all the replies, unfortunately, i am about to go absolutely freaking apeshit. here's what is happening: normal log on: as welcome screen loads, i start getting pop-ups with the corrupt winlogon.exe and userinit.exe messages. about 8/10 times, before my user logo appears, i get the blue screen with a message telling me that "Program Files (x86)Common Files is corrupt and unreadable. Please run Chkdsk utility." If it does stay up long enough for me to pull up the cmd prompt and try to run chkdsk, it tells me i don't have the authority to do so. the other 2/10 times, my desktop will show up (without having selected my profile). keep getting error messages in the bottom right...userinit.exe is corrupt, C++ Runtime Library is corrupt, etc etc etc, blue screen. i tried to boot up from the restore disk i had those ******** at Best Buy make, and it doesn't do a damn thing differently. safe mode: i still get the error messages, but no blue screen. i can't install any new antivirus crap. chkdsk won't run in read-only...i can schedule it to run at start up, but of course, it doesn't start before the effing blue screen. i can't run a system restore without chkdsk, because there are errors on the drive (what the hell is the point of system restore then, I wouldn't be running it if something wasn't screwed up). i can't run a clean install of vista, because it won't run out of safe mode, and normal won't stay open long enough. i bought this computer 3 weeks ago. the best buy jackoff thinks is some sort of virtumonde trojan, which makes absolutely no sense to me, because i don't download crap, i don't go to freaking shady sites, i don't click on spam, and i'm the only one who has touched this thing.
To run the fresh Vista install, you need to go into the BIOS and set the boot order to your CD/DVD drive as the first option. Then, put the install disc into the drive and reboot. Is the disc you have an actual copy of vista or is it a restore disc?
sounds like physical hard drive issues to me. see if the system has any kind of diagnostics you can run before it actually boots to the operating system.
I agree it's either physical harddrive damage or virus. Can you get into safemode w/ networking? If so, try downloading this. Run an update and full system scan in safemode.
i ended up figuring it out...i had moved over my music from my old laptop with a key drive. old computer had vundo and somehow kept running. vundo absolutely raped vista into oblivion. the first disk was a restore deal from best buy. i wiped the partition and reinstalled vista from scratch (a pain in the rear, but i didn't have hardly anything saved on the new computer anyways). it's running fine now. right now, i'm running the norton trial, and have installed malwarebytes, spybot, and firefox/noscript. i do not intend to pay for norton later on...what is a good open source freeware antivirus program?
Glad you got your problem fixed..I've had a Gateway w/ Vista for 2 yrs and the only problem I ever had was when I was drunk and started deleting ****..I tell people computers are like women, the slightest little thing will set them off, and they won't work right until you apoligize/fix it to their satisfaction!!
I don't think AVG is open source, but I'm too lazy to look. Try ClamWin if you're looking for open source antivirus. If you just want freeware, then AVG Free. I would also highly recommend the free edition of Prevx in addition to AVG Free. Prevx will usually catch what AVG won't and vice versa.
