Hi there,

I recently bought a Dell PC with VIsta Ultimate installed and one Hard Disk drive of 500 Gb (RAID). The hard disk came with one giant partition (C Drive about 480 Gb) and one very small one (D drive with about 20 Gb if I remember correctly).

The small Hard Disk drive partition contained a backup to restore my machine as it was when it shipped from factory.

Well using the Vista utility I made the first partition smaller by half, and added another partition (Drive E with 240 Gb, Drive C becoming 240 Gb too). I don't like the idea of one giant partition. It seemed to work ok, nothing was lost on the C Drive, no error messages appeared.

Anyway after installing some programs and widgets I started having problems, and a certain instability. I couldn't install a specfic new program, a message appeared saying I didn't have enough hard disk space lol (I had 200 gb free on C Drive and same on E Drive). Some widgets I installed didn't appear in the widget list at all, and I couldn't find them to use them.

Poser was having problems and freezing at end of renders, even small simple ones.

Then the final straw : I couldn't erase files properly anymore, a message would appear saying that Vista was calculating the time needed to erase the files, but then that window would remain permanently open until I closed down the PC. Each try to erase anything, even a shortcut for example, made a window appear with this message that would stay after. The erase did work however, after rebooting the PC each time, the files I asked to erase were gone.

A widget, monitoring the usage of my dual core processors, suddenly showed them being used at 80% percent practically all the time, what was going on ???

I tried going back to previous restores of the registry : no change. I did a checkdisk at startup, no difference. I took off all widgets, no change. In the end, I relunctantly backed up my data, and used the possibily given by Dell to restore my machine to factory setup (F8 at startup and repair menu : then Drive C gets reformatted and image on D Drive restored to main Drive).

That worked and Drive E was untouched, all files on it remained :) One good point for DELL.

So I reinstalled all my programs and all seems to work like a charm now. Even Poser has 0 freezes up to now :)

I don't really know what caused the instability, was it the fact I made the new partition or did something else go wrong while installing something. I have no idea. (you never really know what Vista is doing, perhaps while I was installing a program it was defragmenting my hard dirve and doing a spyware check or doing a superfetch thingie, it's hard to tell, often I hear the hard drive working busily even when I'm doing absolutely nothing lol)

My question is this : during the desperate times when Vista wasn't working so well anymore and Poser had frequent freezes, I considered the possibility of installing Windows XP to be able to boot to one or the other system, considering that some programs aren't working well on Vista yet anyway. But that didn't work, while installing from a CD, I got each time a blue screen after a while, stopping the whole process.

Is it possible on a DELL machine to install the two systems ? I have some friends that managed to do it on their machines (not DELL ones) and they are very happy, using Vista for certain things and booting up XP for others that don't work well with Vista.

I can't seem to do that, but luckily Vista is working fine again for the moment, with all the programs I use (Poser, Photoshop, Office, Explorer, PinnacleTV, Logitech Webcam, Wi-Fi/Router, HP Printer and the many games I play lol, like Oblivion, World of Warcraft, Civilization IV, Heroes of Might&Magic V, Age of Mythology, Neverwinter Nights II).

I get a few little minor glitches, like in Magic Online the window position isn't remembered by Vista, and each time I launch it, it goes back to the upper corner of my screen. A few other windows don't seem to remember their positions either, that's a bit strange. Otherwise all's running perfectly, but it would be reassuring to know I could switch to XP if things started going wrong, and havok and impending doom are closing in on me :)

Lunedust