Is this normal?

I posted a few days ago complaining about the Vista OS...

I pretty much still dont like it, but i dont really HATE hate it any more...

i play an online game called world of warcraft and i'm pretty much patheticaly addicted to it(Flame me if you feel its nessisary )

and it seems windows vista has a great deal of trouble running World of warcraft for what ever reason...i['ve heard its DX10 i've heard it's vista's incompitance towards video games in general

Blizard told me that its the GMA950 and windows vista, they seem to have a problem with one another....then made the reference that if i kept using winxp drivers on vista it would keep crashing, which kinda made no sense, so dead end there....



ANY WAYS to my real question.....

in lue of the above, i decided it was time to get rid of vista and revert to my beloved windows xp.....

when i put my windows xp cd in the drive, boot the computer up, hit f12 and select boot from CD drive...it goes to the whole motion of installing xp

hit any key to being instalation etc etc...

it gets to the blue screen where it asks yo uabout installing 3rd party scsi drivers and such, thats all fine, then it goes through the motions of installing the software needed to instal XP....You know the whole "setup is loading required files(Such and such file....) .... etc...

then just as it says "windows XP is loading"

i get a blue screen error....



so..i figured, okay ram is bad....take it back, get a replacment...so..i took it back to the walmart i bought it at and they said "we have no more" So i went to another walmart and got the same one...and i'm CERTAIN it wasn't a resale because when i got the one, it was still sealed inside the shipping box...So....i figured, cool...definutely no problems here....so i get it home, boot it up, figure i'll give vista one more try, i boot it up, set it up, put some of my stuff on it, install wow....still giving me issues with wow....so i get fed up....especialy when it starts acting weird when i plug in a ethernet cable that has active internet being fed through it and vista doesn't even recognize it....

at that point i was fed up, and decided no more...so i tried to instal xP again...and again...

blue screen....


please help me learn a way to remove vista from my computer without actualy having to buy a new blank hard drive for it(thats really a second to last resort, last resort being take the **** thing back and just do without laptop for another 3-4 months(while i save up a bit more cash and get a better one)

 

Do you have a floppy drive? If so, then have someone with a working computer make a boot disk for you. Then boot from the floppy and reformat your hard drive, install XP from scratch. If you have no floppy drive, then try making a (i have never done this myself, theorizing here) make a bootable USB flash drive and boot from USB. Then reformat...

Just curious, why did you change to Vista? Just a glutton for punishment? Was WoW not running well on XP? I know how boring it can get when an OS is working ok and you feel the need spice up your life some with something riskier, but Vista......that is a little extreme. Even for most masochists.

 

i think if you download a bootable version of gparted and format the partition vista's on then reinstall xp and it should work fine

 

honestly hon...it wasn't a choice...i bought the new laptop and it came stock with vista....i wouldn't bother upgrading to a new OS until its about 6 months to a year old, i'm not that computer illiterate....

it's a laptop, so no...no floppy...closest thing to a flash drive i have is a microSD card.....i'm not even sure if i can tell it to boot off that....

i suppose i could go drop 20 bucks on a flash drive....

what about burning the info you'd put on a bootfloppy to a bootCD?

 

btw...what is gparted?

 

2nd this and check if u must first install sata driver before installing xp

btw, vista & WoW have NO isssue - i've been running it since RC2. Check ur video driver

cheers ...

 

The BSOD is most likely caused by an incompatible XP driver with your laptop or clashing drivers.

Are you trying to install a new copy of XP on top of your Vista? So, on the same partition on the same HD? If that is the case, then it is highly recommended to first format your HD (you will lose all your files), and then install a fresh copy of XP.
Otherwise, make a new partition on your HD using Gparted (a free GNU partition program) or PartitionMagic (a non-free powerful user friendly Norton partitioner).
As Gparted is an open source GNU application, installing it is usually a pain for non-IT professionals. The easiest way to get it for Windows is to download the ISO CD image: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
burn that CD image to a CD using Nero or something (note: use Burn CD Image or Backup Image, and then select the ISO file. Do NOT burn a data disc and add the ISO on the CD as a data file) and then boot using it and split your HD into 2 partitions (I recommend at least 20GB for Windows XP, as you will be playing games on it after all).
Afterwards, during the XP installation, on the HD selection screen, select your newly partitioned HD. You might have to format it to NTFS using the XP installer beforehand.

 

Did you format your hard drive first?

 

Yeah pretty much, i didn't format the hard drive first because i CANT unless i can get past the point in the windows install where it crashes to get to the point where it askes how i wanna format and partition my drives before the install....


and i updated my drivers ,but the effing realms are down so i cant playtest it for another like.....freakin 6 hours....

 

Oh okay I know where you're getting the error now.
I'm not sure how to go about formatting Windows Vista. I'm assuming that you don't have the CD (or DVD whatever it is) for Vista?

Did you try using GParted like someone suggested?

 

Use the VISTA disc to do the formatting

 

Have any of you ever tried isntalling vista from a CD?

it pretty much gives you two options through out the whole install

Would you like to instal Windows Vista? Yes...No..


thats it..yes or no

no partition information....no format data.....no scsi instalation, no this, no that...nothing!....

i already tried it...man vista sure is teh craptastica....


as i asked before...wtf is gparted!?

 

Ok. You're getting a blue screen before anything having anything to do with Vista happens. This is a problem with your XP cd, or your hardware.

Gparted is an open source partitioning tool. It has support for some NTFS resizing operations.