Clean install of vista problems

Sorry if this has been asked but I couldn't really find much help through google or through the forums.

I purchased a Gateway (model is gateway tc7804u) and about a week ago. When I did the vista updates, it restarted like normal, and came back on and displayed the "step 3 of 3 configuring updates" part and then once it got to 100% and then shut down.

I decided then to do a clean install of vista, but everytime it gets stuck on the last step. I tried it a couple times thinking that it was just being slow, but I left in on overnight and it still was just stuck at the same spot. I'm using a copy of 32bit vista that I have lying around my house, but the laptop has 4gb of ram. Would that make any difference? The laptop also didn't come with a recovery disk or drivers disk.

I really need some help :/

 

i had that problem, your getting the old version, i had to do manual updates and exclude that one, then in the ms support page for the issue i downloaded the file from there, and installed, and it seemed to work no issues now.

and what you should do if u have a disk to recover it without reinstall is boot from the cd, then do a startup repair and then do a system restore, maybe another start up repair, i can remember if u do that before or after the restore, anyway it wont do it harm either way, this way you wont have to reinstall

 

Thanks for the help, but in the end I just ended up installing Win7