mid-saga

[susandennis]

So, this morning, it would not set a restore point.  A reboot brought more issues.  So I rebooted from the CD and tried a repair.  No joy there, either.  It did a bunch of stuff but then would not come back up.  It would just hang.  Probably if I did not touch it, in an hour or so it would come back up but still be lame.

Now I have rebooted from the CD and selected Install.  I've been looking at a Vista backdrop with the words 'please wait' now for about 30 minutes.

I did have a pretty funny phone call with Microsoft earlier.  I had put the CD in and it clearly read the thing (and offered up the Vista backdrop and a big old cursor arrow) but then nothing.  So I called Microsoft.

They can really only deal with two scenarios.  Either you bought the computer with Vista installed OR you are upgrading from another operating system.  They don't have any other options available to their brains.

"So what was your operating system?"  

"This is a new machine that had no operating system"

"So how did you operate it before the problem?"

"Vista was running successfully at one point."

"So it came on the machine?"

"No, it was installed after the machine was built."

"But, you bought the machine with Vista on it?"

"No..."

About this time, the CD option menu came up and so I told her I'd call her back if I needed her.   I might.  It's still in Please Wait mode...  I guess I'll give it a couple of hours and if nothing by noon, call Microsoft again.

Comments

I feel your pain

[nezbitthecat.livejournal.com]

Not to rub it in, but all this new computer talk prompted me to impulse-buy a new Mac Mini (http://www.nezbitthecat.com/archives/000795.html) last week. The only thing it is not happy with is printing on my XP-shared Laserjet.

Re: I feel your pain

[henare.livejournal.com]

you can enable lpd-style printing on your xp-shared laserjet and then your mac will play with it just fine.

[nt.livejournal.com]

Apart from the OS problems, how does the new machine look? Are the lights extremely cool?

words

[henare.livejournal.com]

if you didn't install vista yourself then you bought the machine with vista on it. (for some reason they're funny about how you got vista thing ... )

i'm thinking good thoughts for you and your new toy.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

So far I've installed Vista in various configurations on 17 machines for 4 clients. If its taking over two hours, something is horribly wrong. The fact that you're getting "please wait" screens for 30 minutes or more also makes me wonder if something is not hosed at a hardware level or a bios setting is seriously wonked.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that it is very hard for me to tell you specifically what to do when I'm 2000 miles from where the machine is located.

[pisceandreamer.livejournal.com]

Sorry your computer is fighting you already - shouldn't it at least wait a little while??!?

[vetch.livejournal.com]

I've only had problems that bad with install when something's not right in the machine itslef - have you tried having a tinker with it's innards? Perhaps flash the bios and start from scratch?

That said, Microsoft support can be pretty amusing- we've in the middle of our first year's trial of daylight savings here in Western Australia, so mikeysoft released a patch to fix all our system clocks.

It all went horribly horribly wrong - for some reason it makes some people's clocks spaz out when they come in contact with clocks in different time zones, and it's stuffed up a lot of outlook calendars.

It mainly affects businesses - my Dad's work had a real hard time of it, and after a couple of days they gave up and logged a call... weeks went by, then microsoft called them back and said yes, we see you have a problem. We think the problem is with the patch. We will fix it... maybe for *next* year.