[Anne-Marie]

Hullo! I'm a newb, but I'm a nice person, so I'm hoping you'll help me with some general advice.

I've just installed the Vista Beta (brilliant idea - it did fail, freak out, and leave me computerless for days... but I tried again). It's up and running fine now, although I'm having two problems, as follows:


1: On boot, I get a message asking whether I want to load an 'earlier version of Windows' or just windows. The second option gives me Vista, the first gives me an error message. When I used the windows memory diagnostics tool, it reported problems, but gave me no real advice on fixing it. I'm not sure if that's related, but I only had the chance to scan because of the initial problem.

The Vista beta is currently installed on one of two partitions (I would've liked to keep it more isolated, but it's a 200gig drive so that would've been ..silly). I don't have any other OSs installed, I wiped that partition clean for Vista.

2: My video card (ATI Radeon 9250) has no Vista compatible drivers available. I've noticed a reduction in the quality of my screen image, and this is bothering me, but I don't know whether it's ultimately a real problem. I'm not even sure what the drivers do, exactly, because I'm not a gamer and I've never really looked into it. I just put the drivers in because I assume I should have them Vista is also telling me that my ATI stuff, which Vista actually installed, is slowing down my startup, which indeed is horribly slow.

I know that's a lot to read in one go, so my apologies, but please help?! O_o Some general advice would be fantastic.

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second one first, ati has released some beta vista drivers, but that card is not supported by vista. You can use the Xp drivers, but you will not be able to use the AERO UIU

For the first, what is your desired goal. It sounds like you did not successfully remove your previous OS--Vista setup saw this and saved the boot sector, which is why you get the dual menu.

What is the default setting...if you do not choose a menu option, does Vista load, or do you need to select vista?

[gerryf]

second one first, ati has released some beta vista drivers, but that card is not supported by vista. You can use the Xp drivers, but you will not be able to use the AERO UIU

For the first, what is your desired goal. It sounds like you did not successfully remove your previous OS--Vista setup saw this and saved the boot sector, which is why you get the dual menu.

What is the default setting...if you do not choose a menu option, does Vista load, or do you need to select vista?

[Anne-Marie]

Thanks for your reply, gerryf.

That's annoying to hear about the video card, but I'll survive. I wasn't exactly dying to use this AERO UIU thinger

Other than that, my desired goal was to clean up these loose ends, because I can see there was something not entirely clean about the supposed partition format that Vista did before installing. It saved a folder called windows.old, which it claimed to put a few folders into, but I wouldn't have thought it contained anything serious. I'm currently deleting it because it's not of use to me (full of folders such as Program Files from XP which I've already backed up).

The default setting is Vista.

[gerryf]

since you do not use the boot menu anyway, the easy fix would be to just set the boot menu to 0 seconds

right click MY COMPUTER, choose PROPERTIES<, choose ADVANCED on the left, then go to START UP and RECOVERY....on the top, it says something like SHOW STARTUP MENU, and in the box it says 10

change it 0, and PC will boot straight into Vista

[Anne-Marie]

Thanks I think I'll just do that. So long as I remember how to change it back it sounds like the easiest and most stress free option.