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Harsha Kodnad |
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Personal Website |
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© 2008 Harsha Kodnad |
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If you have any comments or suggestions you can write to me at harsha@kodnad.com |
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The Coding Home |
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Last Update on: 20-11-2008 |
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The Vista Experience [posted on 14-10-07] Three months back got impressed by the Windows Vista and purchased the Home Premium edition. I had to download Vista Upgrade Adviser before I could buy Vista for any compatibility issues. Upgrade Adviser advised me to upgrade my RAM to 1GB as I had only 512 MB of RAM. So curiously upgraded RAM to 1GB and installed Vista Home premium. Then my life started becoming difficult as each boot used to take around 30 minutes! Tried everything possible in the world including contacting Microsoft for support, re-installing Vista cleanly, trying to get updated drivers for all my attached devices … but unfortunately nothing worked. Microsoft Support advised me to upgrade RAM again as even though I had 1GB for RAM 128MB of it was reserved for Video RAM, which makes it effectively 896MB. But I was some how sure that just by increasing RAM by 128 MB will not solve my problem, so did not accept that solution. Later when installed Vista Ultimate edition at office PC which had a worse configuration when compared to my PC at home is when I got the confidence back. Office PC just had lower speed processor, 512MB memory and Ultimate used to work Ultimately except some application compatibility issue. After that digging internet for about 15 days also did not help. As I have upgraded Vista compatible drivers for all my devices, the only thing which left unknowingly was the BIOS. I did not even think it could be the problem. I also got a clue from the Microsoft Support about updating to latest BIOS may solve problem. Last week got the BIOS update from Intel website (which even did not say that this updated fixes any Vista issue) Updating BIOS to my PC was another nightmare. BIOS updater program works only on DOS. I did not had DOS or Floppy disk drive on my machine. Got the DOS bootable CD from the office and tried to update, but failed. The reason was updater wants to save previous BOIS to disk for recovery purpose and I have booted the system from a CD ROM. As I had a 160 GB hard disk which had Windows Vista installation, I had to get one old 10GB hard disk for formatting it using DOS in FAT file system. Finally thought I am very much closer to solution to my old problem. Booted system from CD, did a format /s on the hard drive (I thought it was 10GB hard disk!) and it happily formatted my 160GB hard disk. (Can you imagine DOS did not recognized the 10GB hard disk of its time and recognized 160GB SATA hard disk! My bad luck) Even though I lost all the data, I am Happy that, I was at least able to update my BIOS, re-installed Vista and it vroom booted in 30 seconds (instead of 30 minutes) and recover some of the important files using some disk doctor software.
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The Vista Experience |