Vista Repair

To make a long nightmarish tale involving Acronis installation and boot up problems short, I ended up using a Windows XP/Drivers recovery CD meant for my old HP laptop to reformat and reinstall OS (downgraded to XP, albeit temporarily to fix the booting problem; I was unable to call up the recovery parition through F10).

Immediately following this, I used the F10 method to restore C:\ drive (back to Vista), but the system just has not been living up to its original glory since then, in spite of my having gone through all the system optimisation methods (from the forum). After enduring random and frequent explorer.exe crashes and general sluggishness, and really, really not wanting to reformat all over again, I'd like to give Vista Repair a try . . . except Sony forgot to provide me with that handy little feature. No recovery disk, no option to repair other than "restore C:\ drive" from OEM recovery partition, and no repair option in F8 either.

Running sfc /scannow on cmd hasn't helped either, telling me that it did find errors but was not able to fix them (and as far as I can see from the resulting log file, they can't be terribly important because they involve the sidebar, which I do not use).

As an aside, Sony's launcher.exe, which used to work in the beginning also crashes when I try to use any of its features. System Restore seems to be slightly unstable as well, though I can manage to make it work somehow after going through notifications that 'no backups have been made' despite there plainly being several.

Anyways, to sum it up: is there any way I could repair Vista at this point, without reformatting or going out and purchasing a copy of Vista which I already rightfully have, just to have the disk?

Your comments are greatly appreciated,
Rurutia

 

Hmm . . . does anyone know? Is there no way?

 

It probably won't be worth your time to try to repair your Vista installation.

Your easiest solution would be to just reinstall it, and to do that you basically need to borrow a Vista DVD identical to the version that's on your notebook (Home Premium , Business, Ultimate, etc.) from someone or download it online (at your own risk and if it does not conflict with your moral standards), and call Microsoft to activate your installation by telling them the key on the bottom of the notebook, borrow a set of recovery discs from someone for your model, which you haven't mentioned, or buy a custom recovery disc from Portable One, which may or may not work depending on your model. After you've reinstalled Vista, you can then follow one of the many clean Vista installation guides available on this forum.

 

If you do the F10 recovery it will take you back to the out of box state. If the machine is now unstable it is because of one or more of the tweaks you have done have somehow gone awry. There is no way I would trust ANY sort of repair at this point, there are too many things acting up to EVER trust this installation now. If I were in your shoes I would pursue one of three options.

1. A recover using the F10 to get back to a clean state and carefully uninstalling the bloatware leaving the system restore functionality in place. Then testing after each "uninstall or tweak" and use a restore point if necessary.

2. A semi clean install.

3. A clean install.

I would NOT consider trying to repair the damage done to the current config. Even if it looks OK after you did, what would happen a few weeks from now when SP1 comes out? Would the repaired instance be able to apply Vista SP1? Why risk it? Cut your losses now.

Gary

 

Thanks for the help!

I don't think the culprit could be any of the tweaks, &c that I've applied because I didn't do anything that I hadn't done to the original copy (i.e. before reformat) . . . and as far as I can remember, the problems didn't "suddenly" appear out of nowhere while installing all the necessary programs, &c, but was actually that way from the beginning of the reformat. I was in a hurry (work due the next day) and extremely tired from trying to deal with the booting problems, so at the time, I was just happy to have a working laptop (hence the reason I hoped it was just a temporary thing and moved on in spite of the lacklustre performance).

In fact, I applied several Windows Vista updates from MS yesterday and noticed a significant improvement; it's a lot less sluggish (although it still isn't as blazing as it used to be) and the explorer.exe crashes less frequently (again, not completely resolved but it's something).

I'm on the SZ650NC model, by the way.

 

Hey -- just to let you know

DON'T use the key on the bottom of your laptop -- that WILL require you to reactivate with Microsoft

Instead search clean install in dell or lenovo and you'll see that someone made a program called ABR Beta 2

If you get that you won't need to activate you windows installation and it will use the same OEM key (not the one on the bottom of the laptop).

I just did a clean install using the tool and their methods -- and this computer is blazing now!

 

Ohh, thank you for the advice, ng12345 -- though I sort of read it too late (I, too, just discovered that the key at the bottom does not work this morning). XD

Ah well, ended up restoring C:\ again (through OEM recovery partition) and I think it's more or less better now . . . final verdict remains to be seen! I may report back with a more concrete result after a few days of actual usage.