Having a bad Vista experience...

I love Vista, hence why first thing I did when I recieved my AAO this morning is shrink the XP partition with gparted, and install Vista Ultimate from a USB stick. What I cant seem to understand Is why Its just not runnning like it should. Im not really talking about speed wise, in fact its much faster then I expected, im more concerned with the issues like random reboots, random BSOD's, Windows Updates failing, Explorer.exe crashing... etc. The last thing I want to do is use XP. Do these problems seem normal for anyone else running Vista on their AAO? Thanks.

**EDIT**

2 More random things stopped working. About an hour ago, I got a "RPC has stopped working", and just now I got "Superfetch has stopped working"!!!

 

no, it's not normal. Have you updated all the drivers? run windows update?

 

this happened to me about 1.3 years ago with my desktop when I newly built it, I can tell you one thing for sure, it is the ram that is faulty.
it is 100% the same thing you are mentioning, and plus, test it with prime 95, if it fails within a minute or so, I can ensure you that it is the ram. I ended up RMAing my RAM for my desktop.

 

Windows update has been run, and as i mentioned above, some things failed, but they updated eventually. As far as drivers, I got the newest video/chipset driver from Intel yesterday (Aero works), aswell as the LAN and WAN drivers. Sound I didn't get as Vista doesn't seem to need any. It detects my HD Audio Device and sound works fine. I tested the webcam with skype and everything seemed ok there. I put an SD card in the left hand slot and Vista automatically installed the driver for that. When I put the card in the right slot, it deteced it as another DS card reader, but it also detected a bunch of other things called "Base System Device". It couldn't find drivers for them, so I just clicked cancel for them all.

FWIW, Device Manager looks A-OK, no red or yellow warnings.

 

Hmm, thanks. I was going to be ordering a 1GB stick anyway, hope that helps.

 

just try testing with Prime95, if you switched ram, and it is still like that, chances are, the onboard RAM is the faulty one.

 

Ok, so I have been able to replicate my BSOD, and it seems to happen right on que each time. Whenever I stream a video from my server over wifi, after about 2 min, I will get a BSOD. With the 7.6.0.172 drivers (and the previous ones), the BSOD says something about nthr.sys..... Google came up with nothing. With the most current 7.6.1.122 driver, the error is something about nwifi.sys. Google was a little more helpful there, but all I could turn up was to try a different driver,which i did.

Streaming XviD movies to this AAO is something I really want to be able to do, anyone know why this would be happening?

 

I think your trouble is wrong wifi driver? But then how can superfetch stop responding and Windows Explorer stop responding?
100% that it is the ram that is going all weird.
OK, so everytime when you get BSoD, is the error message different everytime?

 

The superfetch, explorer issue hasnt happened in awhile. What im most concerned with is the BSOD everytime I try to stream a movie from my server. I AM using the correct driver, its this one: http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=5317

It was also happening with the previous version of that driver that Windows Update downloaded. Everytime, like clockwork, roughly 2 minutes in to watching an video streamed from my server over wifi, I get a BSOD and it mentions "nwifi.sys". Everything else seems to be working great.

Interistingly, if I just copy the same video over the network to my AAO, everything is fine. Only when streaming it via VLC/MPC/QT..etc, do I get the BSOD.

 

It's definitely hardware related if you had never altered your Vista install (i.e. Lite it). I have Vista Home Premium installed from the DVD and I never experienced any problems. There is one thing you can try, in the power options, you can go edit the setting for your specific profile, there is a field to change the power saving function for the Wifi, change it to always max performance. My router constantly drops me if I allow it to go into power save mode.