My First Vista Blue Screen! w00t!
I just bought a new laptop after working on an Dell m700 for 2 1/2 years. No real reason, I just figured it was time to upgrade. I bought another Dell, an XPS 1330. So far it’s slick. The downside? It ONLY comes with Vista. Just like you, I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Vista.
After it arrived, I loaded up everything from my old laptop onto the new one. Like any normal geek, I started messing around with various settings in Vista. It was running fine, it’s just a habit I guess. (No wonder Windows has such a bad name! haha) For kicks I decided to try and turn off “Data Execution Protection” (an edit to the boot.ini file). Why not, right? I figured my machine would run at *least* twice as fast if it’s off. Well I reboot it, Bios…then Windows logo…BOOM! blue screen. Aw crap! Now all the Webappers are going to make fun of me for using Vista! (Yes, you read that right, I’m not worried about not using my computer, I’m worried about being made fun of)
So I reboot it again and it gives me this options to try and repair the problem. Which is pretty cool on its own. I say yes and wait like 5 minutes while it does all these tests. It does something (I don’t remember what, something about a boot sector virus) tells me to reboot; same thing happens. Now what? I try it a couple times with no luck. I’m about to suck it up and pop in the Vista CD and sigh… reformat. It’s going through the tests and I click “cancel” figuring it’ll reboot again. W00t! it gives me another option to do ‘advanced’ edits. Kick ass! It gives me a bunch of options and exactly what i wanted, a sweet sweet command prompt.
To make a long story long, I typed this in:
bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx Optin
Rebooted. Held my breath and closed my eyes (literally). Now everything is back to normal. Take that you Mac lovers!
Ok, back to work for me. I’ve got a TON of new stuff to post, come back soon.
-Steve Nelson
Steve,
funnily enough I just got the M1530 last week and i’ve now had two blue screen situations – I did remove a lot of the preinstalled crap that came on the laptop though.
Comment by JohnB — January 22, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Yeah I removed a bunch of preinstalled crap too. But honestly it wasn’t overloaded with too much extra software.
My mother-in-law’s Vista laptop from a few months back, holy cow! You should have seen how much was pre-installed on it. That machine was running beastly slow because of it. What killed me was turning off a SQL Server service on her laptop. It came PRE-loaded with SQL Server?! wtf?
She bought it to do email on. haha
I haven’t gotten a blue screen since my little DEP adventure though. What caused yours?
Comment by Steve Nelson — January 22, 2008 @ 12:00 am
no idea what caused it…second one though, I closed the lid (i have it set to hibernate) and didn’t think anymore of it – when i awoke it it was a clean reboot and said that it had BSOD’ed. But on the whole, still liking Vista more and more.
Comment by johnb — January 23, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Yeah I think I’m beginning to like Vista more than XP. Who knows. Ask me again in a month and maybe my answer will be different.
Hey are you coming to CFUNITED? I’m chatting with John Beynon right? Or am I losing my mind?
Comment by Steve Nelson — January 23, 2008 @ 12:00 am
yep steve, the same johnb
CFUnited Europe or the one over there in the USA?
Comment by johnb — January 23, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Europe? Pfff. Hasn’t my current President let you know we are the center of the Universe?
Comment by Steve Nelson — January 23, 2008 @ 12:00 am
"Take that you Mac lovers!"
Classic
Comment by rob — January 24, 2008 @ 12:00 am
My story sounds very similar to your but way more simplified. I received my 1330 with Vista Ultimate pre-installed and was pretty happy. But within a day I was looking at a bluescreen, a 9f stopcode. In the next few days the laptop crashed while idle nearly once per day. Support had me reinstall the wireless card drivers and reseat the card itself (why I let them talk me into that I don’t know.
Finally reverted the system to its factory state and left the system idle for a day. It crashed twice! Some odd interaction with the wireless driver and hibernation, I believe.
Dell tried hard to make me happy and sent a replacement system, but it shows the same behavior.
I finally had to ask for a refund on this turkey. Too bad, it looks pretty.
Comment by steve skaar — February 14, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Interesting. I’ve been running this machine almost a month now. Once I stopped messing around with changing OS settings I haven’t had any problems
Granted, it does use a gig of ram when i have everything turned off. But screw it, my machine has 4 gigs.
Comment by Steve Nelson — February 15, 2008 @ 12:00 am
good grief, it was my first blue screen too and I didn’t even do anything! Just doing what I normally do, surf the net, watch movies, made home video- BAM! wth? It blue screened D: But thankfully, everything was back to normal as soon as I restarted it TT_TT major panic attack right there!
Comment by Nezzy — October 31, 2008 @ 12:00 am