One of my coworkers is using a Dell laptop with Vista home premium (x86). She was telling me about this weird problem where the computer would sometimes load Vista all the way to the desktop. But other times you'd see the DELL logo startup and then the Vista "loading bar" would appear like its going to actually load the OS but then you just get a blank screen after that. It essentially hangs somewhere when trying to load the OS. At work me and another PC guru tried to reproduce the problem but it was very random.The woman who owns the PC took it to Best Buy and had the Geek Squad look at it earlier. They said it was free of spyware/viruses/spam etc. I inspected the PC myself both in the BIOS settings and the few times it loaded into the desktop. There were no anomalies that I noticed. So, what could this be? Bad PSU? Vista needs to be reinstalled? ???Opinions welcome!

If the OS was in need of a reinstall or repair the boot process would hang all the time not intermittently. It sounds more to me like a hardware issue. Could be just about anything, Mobo, CPU, RAM, HD, or PS.

One of my coworkers is using a Dell laptop with Vista home premium (x86). She was telling me about this weird problem where the computer would sometimes load Vista all the way to the desktop. But other times you'd see the DELL logo startup and then the Vista "loading bar" would appear like its going to actually load the OS but then you just get a blank screen after that. It essentially hangs somewhere when trying to load the OS. At work me and another PC guru tried to reproduce the problem but it was very random.The woman who owns the PC took it to Best Buy and had the Geek Squad look at it earlier. They said it was free of spyware/viruses/spam etc. I inspected the PC myself both in the BIOS settings and the few times it loaded into the desktop. There were no anomalies that I noticed. So, what could this be? Bad PSU? Vista needs to be reinstalled? ???Opinions welcome!

Did the Vista eventlogs report any errors? Did you run a disk check on the C drive? All devices OK in the Device Manager?

............................... Vista needs to be reinstalled? ???Opinions welcome!

Ryan, I won't speculate to the cause but I will add to tread very lightly on deciding whether to re-install vista because the days of an easy OS wipe, even for the experienced, have been put on hold with vista and sp1. I just went through about 3 days of hell trying a simple format/reinstall with v64 and sp1 that ended with my machine not being able to boot at all - even from the disc. The first time I migrated from xp pro everything went very smoothly and had no issues - this time around was a bloody joke - I tried numerous times with different methods to get SP1 installed. There are many, many others like me out there too. All this because my simconnect.dll somehow became corrupt. I resorted to installing xp pro 64 and was patched and up and running in less than 2 hours.

Ryan, I won't speculate to the cause but I will add to tread very lightly on deciding whether to re-install vista because the days of an easy OS wipe, even for the experienced, have been put on hold with vista and sp1.

I know what you mean....and this person isn't very computer savvy. Reinstalling is my last resort. I couldnt find my USB drive but I was going to put memtest on and run that and run a chkdisk today. I don't think she had the laptop with anyway oh well. Next week maybe

Ryan, I won't speculate to the cause but I will add to tread very lightly on deciding whether to re-install vista because the days of an easy OS wipe, even for the experienced, have been put on hold with vista and sp1.

I can

I can

Ryan might want to consider other options first

The first thing, and it

And I've also done many fresh installs etc etc. I'm not about to compare install times, but all in all, it is a pain to start out fresh. It's not only the OS, it's the software, drivers, files, etc etc etc, personal settings, all that crap you have to redo haha.I will run chkdisk and memtest and see if anything turns up.

And I've also done many fresh installs etc etc. I'm not about to compare install times, but all in all, it is a pain to start out fresh. It's not only the OS, it's the software, drivers, files, etc etc etc, personal settings, all that crap you have to redo haha.

Unfortunately it

...........As far as my experience with Vista Service Pack 1 goes there again I

Tom, I would have agreed with you until my latest experiences. I thought it might be hardware too but I tested all ram, did a full sector scan on HD (yawn) have latest bios and I obviously reset bios defaults and backed off the OC when all this occured.

When you say

Ryan, if you haven't already you might want to try boot logging to see if you can narrow down what or what's not going on at startup.Tom, I tried many known stable configurations in the bios and yes, the first thing I did before I started was to back everything down to stock. Again, I had originally installed v64 and subsequently sp1 successfully without a hitch. The only reason I needed to do this was because I was receiving a simconnect Hresult_e failure message when I tried to connect to ADE. More about that here: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthrea...8697&page=3 I tried a suggested method of repairing simconnect by deleting a fsx winsxs entry but it didn't work and decided a "quick" clean reinstall was the easiest thing to solve all issues............censored :( 1st time I've been caught without an image BU in a while :(

a "quick" clean reinstall was the easiest thing to solve all issues............

I would never recommend using the

I would never recommend using the