I made a big mistake recently... anyways, background first: I downloaded a torrent of vista 64bit to test it, ran superb, after a few weeks the 'genuine advantage' kicked in and flagged it as a pirate copy, because it was... Fast forward to a few weeks later: i was ordering my raid controller + a few more HD's to make the raid array on scan... it pops up: 'you are eligible for a OEM copy of vista with this hardware' as i haven't brought an OS since win95, i thought MS was due some cash, so i finally paid for a MS OS, buying an OEM vista premium selection. Heres where the problem starts though: attempt one: Boot off DVD, vista bluescreens* attempt two: boot off DVD, vista installs for a bit, then bluescreens attempt three: boot to XP 64bit, run installer from there. Vista starts installing, gets to ~75% complete, restarts 6 times, gives up, then uninstalls itself attempt four: vista installs, but prone to random hard lockups. diagnosing the fault is impossible, as even with automatic reboot disabled the system never detects a problem, i just get hard lockups at random (note: PC is stable for days of uptime in 32/64bitXP, and 32/64bit linux, problem only occurs in vista) have tried updating/downgrading all drivers, nothing seems to make a difference, and i cannot pinpoint the problem in vista, the PC *NEVER* bluescreens or produces an error, just does a complete hardware lockup... *this one is particularly notable, this PC has been known to run stable for weeks+ of uptime, yet bluescreened on the vista DVD before *any* code that wasn't on the DVD could even run... That just looks really bad on MS, surely it should run stable at least with no drivers installed...
Tried installing it with just 2Gb of RAM installed? There is a known error, and a patch somewhere on MS' site.
