Picture Problems, Repairing and Sharing in Vista, Cross-Country Tech Support

Posted 04/01/2008 at 3:40pm | by The Maximum PC Staff

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No Login Screen

My old computer’s login screen won’t display. When I boot the rig, I get past the XP loader only to get a black screen, where the user accounts should be. I’m currently dual-booting XP and Vista on one hard drive. The computer has an Intel chipset with a Pentium 4.3GHz CPU and a 400-watt PSU. Is there any way to load XP without wiping my hard drive?

The Doctor is willing to venture that you’re having an issue with something display related, be it your monitor, videocard, or drivers. Enter Safe mode by repeatedly pressing the F8 key while your computer is booting. Safe mode should resort to a bare VGA display, which will allow you to perform a number of troubleshooting options on your PC.

From the Control Panel, go to System Properties. Go to the Device Manager and uninstall your videocard’s display drivers. Restart your computer; you should be able to enter your normal Windows XP operating system. Then hop online, grab the latest drivers for your card, and install them.

If you’re still finding no success, you probably have a critical Windows issue. To test this theory, fire up Vista and back up all your critical XP files. Then wipe your XP partition and reinstall the OS—this will give you some funky boot-loader issues since you’ll be installing an older OS after Vista, but you should be able to pull up both OSes after running Vista’s boot repair wizard.

Vista Kills Network Transfers

I just built a new PC, and I’m dual-booting Vista and XP. When in Vista, I cannot seem to transfer files to my file server. In XP, on the same machine, it works great. When I transferred a 72MB folder across the wired network using Vista, it took over two hours. The same files in XP took less than two minutes. Oftentimes, Vista times out with a “program not responding” error. Any suggestions before I totally banish Vista?

Quite the brouhaha is raging on the Internet right now regarding Vista’s slow transfer speeds—the operating system seems to keel over and die when it tries to copy files on a single drive, across drives, or especially across a network.

Microsoft has yet to come up with a solution for your woes, though it has managed to find a potential reason for the problem. Network transfer speeds will be drastically diminished if you’re running an application that uses Vista’s Multimedia Class Scheduler while transferring files. For example, Windows Media Player will kill network-transfer speeds.

Aside from that, your best bet is to install the most recent Vista SP1 release candidate. It isn’t the final SP1 release, so caveat emptor, but this update dramatically improves network-transfer performance. Updated Vista rigs are capable of transfer speeds that are three times faster than those of non-updated Vista machines. While the Doctor hasn’t experienced the extreme slowness you’ve described, the numerous tweaks and fixes in SP1 might very well set your transfers right. Give it a shot, as really, it’s your only option right now.

Whatcha Got, Mom?

I want to upgrade a few things in my mom’s PC—namely, the RAM. We live on opposite sides of the country. Is there a way she can find out for me what kind of RAM is in her computer?

Have your mom grab CPU-Z (www.cpuid.com). When she runs the app—a single no-installation-needed executable—a ton of information about her computer will pop up. She’ll be able to tell you about her processor, socket type, and motherboard, as well as the kind of RAM currently installed in her machine.

The Doctor plans to release a version of himself that’s entirely wireless. With the Doctor Air, you’ll be able to clone his mass of knowledge and carry it with you. Unless, of course, you just feel like emailing doctor@maximumpc.com for old time’s sake....