Reply to: Help!

[BoredBloke]

As he states in his post - most new machines are shipping with Vista on them, plus he didn't buy the machine - so I don't think it's fair to kill the guy for this. As I said in my post, get a HD caddy for about £10 and stick the drive with the duff xp installation in it. You will then be able to take off any data and reinstall a clean copy of xp.

I have vista installed and use it a lot - but I have dual booted my pc so that I have an XP option also. Agree with the HP comment. To not write a driver for a major sw release is pretty bad - as I said earlier, is there a compatible driver which might allow them to print eg a bog standard colour laserjet driver - I would have thought it would be backwardly compatible

[Board Game Geek]

As for the rest of your post about flying cars - stopped reading that after about two lines. If you can't argue your point in an adult manner, don't bother.

The point of the flying car was as an allegory.

Apologies if you took offense or don't know what an allegory is.

Let's start again from the top. As if I had never read the post before. I'm going to approach it again from a fresh perspective.

2) 2nd machine is a new Toshiba laptop with Vista installed

Format C:\
Install XP Pro

Problem resolved.

[cojak]

Don't get so tetchy, dear.

After all, who would we have to laugh at if all posts were sensible and considered?

[interested]

Erm...actually you do.

For desperately wanting to get your hands on Vista, when it's not even at Service Pack 1 stage.

Why do people do this ? Same story with every new O/S release.

They rush out to buy it (or get it bundled with a new pc/laptop and think it will work with no problems) and suddenly this doesn't work, that doesn't work, and they have the temerity to blame the supplier.

Ok...here's a flying car. Yes you can be the first to own one. It's passed extensive testing back at base. It even has an I-poo holder on the dash.

"The accident investigation report concludes that whilst the Flying Car Company did do rigorous testing of a wide range of I-Poo devices in the vehicle, the X1000 I-Poo which caused the accident was released 3 months after the Flying Car was released.

Unfortunately, no one could have predicted that the X1000 I-Poo would attempt to throttle the Flying Car's engines in syncopated rhythm with "Wait and Bleed" by Slipknot.

However, we posthumously congratulate "interested" for being at the bleeding edge of technology."

It's called "bleeding edge" for a reason....

What utter crap. Try reading my post properly. I was not 'desperate to get my hands on Vista', I was helping a mate who just bought a laptop.

Try buying a laptop without Vista on it. If I buy a product, I expect it to work. Vista is not beta software or 'bleeding edge', it's been released after extensive testing amid great marketing fanfare as the best version of Windows ever.

I bought a Macbook Pro for myself a couple of months ago, and guess what - it works. Downloaded the latest update to OSX the other night, that works as well. What a strange concept!

Further to my original post, it also took me about 2 hours to get a Philips Skype/DECT phone working with Vista as well. Searching various forums leads me to believe that there are a lot of pissed off people who have found their hardware doesn't work anymore. HP are basically too lazy to write a simple driver for a two year old printer. That sucks.

As for the rest of your post about flying cars - stopped reading that after about two lines. If you can't argue your point in an adult manner, don't bother.

[cojak]

a really polished and professional launch then...

[darmstadt]

For desperately wanting to get your hands on Vista, when it's not even at Service Pack 1 stage.

Why do people do this ? Same story with every new O/S release.

On my new contract, the new software product they've given me needs to run on Vista although no-one knows why and here, we're not really interested. However, the powers that be have decreed thus. The manager has now given me 2 copies of Vista (I'm the only one with it,) one is the 32 bit Business and the other is the 64 bit Business and both come under some volume licensing deal and sent from Ireland. I don't have any license keys as the upgrade path we chose is from OS/2 which was the cheapest way (only $70) as these versions need a clean install. Still haven't worked out where to get the license keys though as MS only sent a jiffy bag with 2 shrink wrapped DVDs.

[cojak]

It's called "bleeding edge" for a reason....

Which is something that M$ exploits.

If you want to be 'bleeding edge' you normally put your hand up to be a beta tester.

If you want something more stable but still slightly risky you go for a Release Candidate (RC) version.

If you want stable then you're prepared to wait for the proper announcement and launch of the full version of the OS.

But most Windows punters don't understand it/have never heard of this manner of version release. They 'trust' M$ (God help them/serves them right for their gullibility) and are prepared to pay for this privilege...

[Board Game Geek]

HP and MS, you suck.

Erm...actually you do.

For desperately wanting to get your hands on Vista, when it's not even at Service Pack 1 stage.

Why do people do this ? Same story with every new O/S release.

They rush out to buy it (or get it bundled with a new pc/laptop and think it will work with no problems) and suddenly this doesn't work, that doesn't work, and they have the temerity to blame the supplier.

Ok...here's a flying car. Yes you can be the first to own one. It's passed extensive testing back at base. It even has an I-poo holder on the dash.

"The accident investigation report concludes that whilst the Flying Car Company did do rigorous testing of a wide range of I-Poo devices in the vehicle, the X1000 I-Poo which caused the accident was released 3 months after the Flying Car was released.

Unfortunately, no one could have predicted that the X1000 I-Poo would attempt to throttle the Flying Car's engines in syncopated rhythm with "Wait and Bleed" by Slipknot.

However, we posthumously congratulate "interested" for being at the bleeding edge of technology."

It's called "bleeding edge" for a reason....

[darmstadt]

It does recognise NTFS. It can read from an NTFS volume, just not write to it.

Correct:

Knoppix has native NTFS (read) support, and also has captive support for NTFS write. This uses the real XP drivers to handle this - but requires the XP partition to be accessable. If you have a dead XP install, you are out of luck.

And to help people:

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Rescue_FAQ

[BoredBloke]

Am helping a mate with 2 laptops at his small business and have the following problems:

1) The HD on the older Toshiba (4-5 months old) seems to be up the spout, and the machine cannot boot. I've tried booting off the recovery CD but the only option is to reformat the HD. Not sure if I want to do this as all the data probably isn't backed up. So - do I send the machine back to Toshiba and get them to back the data up and fix the HD (will they do this?) or just go ahead and wipe the HD using the recovery disk?

2) 2nd machine is a new Toshiba laptop with Vista installed. Just found out that HP don't provide a Vista driver for his HP CL1500L printer and he needs to print. So - should I downgrade Vista (that is pre-installed on this machine) to XP, or set up some kind of dual boot option (not sure how) or run XP in some kind of VM in order to be able to print?

Not impressed with Vista at all. Total rip off of OSX, even down the wallpaper choices. This is driving me mad.

Ok the way I would attack this is by first buying a hard disk caddy http://www.advancetec.co.uk/acatalog...riv_mount.html

You can then use this with the duff HD to get the data and dump it to any other PC via USB.

As for the printer - Is there a lower spec/older printer driver which could be used until HP get their @rse into gear? It might mena that they can print at the very least although they won't have all the functionality. It's pretty poor of HP not to have a Vista driver for this.

If the laptop has no data on it then you might want to downgrade it to XP until the Vista thing settles down.

[Cowboy Bob]

Try Googling for 'Windows Live CD', you'll be surprised. Personally to recover Windows systems I use a Linux Live Cd although you can hit problems there, especially if the Windows system is using NTFS. With Knoppix you then need extra tools as Linux, natively, does not recognise NTFS.

It does recognise NTFS. It can read from an NTFS volume, just not write to it.

[darmstadt]

A Windows Live CD would be equally as good, if there was such a thing.

Try Googling for 'Windows Live CD', you'll be surprised. Personally to recover Windows systems I use a Linux Live Cd although you can hit problems there, especially if the Windows system is using NTFS. With Knoppix you then need extra tools as Linux, natively, does not recognise NTFS.

[cojak]

It's important that it has to be a live CD though.

Linux Format live CD of the month - OpenSUSE 10.2 Live.

Ignore mcquiggd, Bob - he's not interested in boring stuff like Mono and Ruby on Rails...

[Cowboy Bob]

Then spend three years searching for the software you need to install to still earn a decent living... or a Linux based VM to run Windows XP / Vista, which is frankly where the money is...

Great post there.

Just shows how your so determined to run Linux down that you haven't even bothered to read the thread. The OP wants to recover some files from a hard drive that won't boot before re-installing Windows. A Linux Live CD is perfect for this task as you get to run Linux from the CD which can then join a network or connect to a USB stick to transfer the files off the machine. He is not wanting to install Linux, just recover some files.

A Windows Live CD would be equally as good, if there was such a thing.

[mcquiggd]

Then spend three years searching for the software you need to install to still earn a decent living... or a Linux based VM to run Windows XP / Vista, which is frankly where the money is...