Little Annoyances in Vista

1) The hard drive / busy signal constantly seems on, no matter what I do. What's going on? I turned off the auto-defragger, so I don't think it's that.

2) This happened to me on XP before... basically, the mouse/touchpad fail to respond. The cursor can move. I can alt-tab and alt-f4 (right after alt-tabbing), but no buttons, menus, bars or anything works. What's causing this, and what's the fix if it comes back? I had to reboot twice to get it to temporarily go away.

 

it seems you have some software that is not compatible with vista, did you upgeade the synaptics touchpad drivers and all others to vista compatible?
also the antivirus, firewall, and all other software?

 

1) Superfetch.

2) Can you word it differently? How can the cursor still move if both the mouse and the touchpad fail to respond? Could be a driver issue for your touchpad. Check in Device Manager and make sure there are no hardware conflicts.

 

The cursor moves, but the OS acts very weird when it comes to focusing on stuff. Put nicely, it's as if it's focusing on some invisible component that I can only escape from using alt-tab, and it always focuses on this component the moment I try doing anything with the mouse.

To be really specific, this is what's going on.

1) Vista loads fine.
2) I can do anything on the desktop fine (rollovers, right-click menu works, clicking on anything on the desktop works)
3) Start Menu and taskbar are unresponsive no matter what I do. However, pressing the windows key does bring it up, but I can't do anything in the start menu.
4) If I bring something up from the desktop (like Computer), the window will pop up, but if I try rolling over the close button, it won't glow, and if I click on the window in any way, it will lose focus. I can regain focus by alt-tabbing back to it explicitly.
5) For god knows what reason, ctrl-alt-del and entering the task manager alleviates the problem until I reboot.

I've tried installing the vista drivers for the mouse and the touchpad, but they don't seem to make a difference. I don't have any AV, firewall or 3rd party protection software on this computer yet.

 

Sounds like explorer.exe (or whatever Vista's equivalent is) is bugging out on you. Has it always been this way?

So yeah, it may be a corrupted system file, or a background service (malware?) running out of control. To be safe, I would just back up the data and reformat. It might also be quicker to do that than find the culprit.

 

Actually, I just saw your thread on BSOD's from Vista and now believe the problems are related. Definitely a WinXP program, driver, or service you're trying to port over to Vista acting up. BSOD's during OS installs are not good. If at all possible, seek out a way to clean install Vista.

 

I'm holding my breath on this, but this is EXACTLY the problem described.

http://www.actualtools.com/forum/read.php?FID=9&TID=63

 

1- Control Alt Delete not bringing up task manager directly

2-The Defragment interface getting dumbed down and not having any type of progress indication is really annoying.

 

Are sure it is not the embedded search system in Vista? The standalone version of it - which is offered as an add-on to XP (deskto psearch 3.0) , has been fingered as the culprit in this sort of thing. The XP add on already been revised to 3.01, but issue doesnt seem to have sorted it out.

 

1. Normal.

2. Reading the thread, we need system specs.