Vista crashing and freezing Dell Inspiron 6400?! Help!

MrGKaplan

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Apologies for my realtive inexperience with Vista/PCs - hope someone can help with this frustrating turn of events!

New laptop is under a week old - Dell Inspiron 6400

120GB Hard Drive 1GB RAM Vista Home Premium Intel Core Duo 2 T5300 @ 1.73 Ghz

Windows Experience Index Score 3.1


Entered the world of Vista to find installing majority of software seems to make Vista freeze up, screen goes a transparent white and laptop becomes non-responsive. I cannot get to Task manager so have to force power-off the laptop and then I get a "Windows did not shutdown properly" boot up screen

I'm aware a lot of software is not Vista compatible but here is what I have attempted:

VLC - installed fine
Firefox - fine
MSN Messenger - fine
AVG 7.5 - fine
Realplayer-fine
Windows Media Player 11 - fine


Problems with:

Quicktime - would not install - caused laptop to freeze up and had to manually power off (I have since installed "Quicktime Alternative")

Daemon tools - same issues of freezing


Laptop was installed with Adobe Acrobat 7 - when i attempted to view a pdf file it asked for an upgrade - I attempted to download this to face the white screen of death and a frozen computer.

Attempted to installl Office 2007 Enterprise and it got as far as the install green bar (which had barely started) where it froze up and crashed the computer.



Since these constant crashes have been occuring Windows Explorer on a whole now seems to be a touch slower with pages such as my documents/control panel taking longer to appear.

So is this type of behaviour typical of Vista?! Or am I doing something wrong? Can anyone suggest what I can de to rectify the situation?

Do I need to reinstall Vista from the disc that came with laptop and start again? Or is there a possible hardware fault?

I'm rather dissapointed that such a new computer is causing me so many problems :(

Hope someone out there can help - many thanks in advance
 
There are so many problems with Vista and so called Vista Compatible Software

Here is a nice list of software and known issues

http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5175

As for daemon tools (I presume you wish to mount .iso) Use PowerISO, I know of no problems installing or using it.

Quicktime 7.15 should be ok

Acrobat is evil IMO, I've had many many problems with Abode update (at startup) you'll probably be offered updates 7.05 7.07 7.09, I tried doing each one, don't. Just go straight for 7.09
Also before updating or running Acrobat set it to run as administrator, I worked for me.

As for Office, I'm totally lost. I had no problems with trial, but it's just too expensive for what it is, I uninstalled it and got myself Office 2003, works like a dream.

I see your score is only 3.1 ( I don't know if this one of your problems ) but what is causing this low score (graphics, ram?)

I reformatted my brand new laptop within 3 hours of getting it, if I was you (as long as you know what your doing and have all the disks, and BB connection)

I had to uninstall windows defender and one care as they were screwing with other programs.


Hope this helps in some way
 
Installing a bunch of software onto a PC all at one go?

Try installing one then seeing how you get on.

Wait a while then if ok, install another.
 
There are so many problems with Vista and so called Vista Compatible Software

Here is a nice list of software and known issues

http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5175

As for daemon tools (I presume you wish to mount .iso) Use PowerISO, I know of no problems installing or using it.

Quicktime 7.15 should be ok

Acrobat is evil IMO, I've had many many problems with Abode update (at startup) you'll probably be offered updates 7.05 7.07 7.09, I tried doing each one, don't. Just go straight for 7.09
Also before updating or running Acrobat set it to run as administrator, I worked for me.

As for Office, I'm totally lost. I had no problems with trial, but it's just too expensive for what it is, I uninstalled it and got myself Office 2003, works like a dream.

I see your score is only 3.1 ( I don't know if this one of your problems ) but what is causing this low score (graphics, ram?)

I reformatted my brand new laptop within 3 hours of getting it, if I was you (as long as you know what your doing and have all the disks, and BB connection)

I had to uninstall windows defender and one care as they were screwing with other programs.


Hope this helps in some way

Cheers for the advice

My graphics card that came with Laptop is Intel® Media Accelerator 950 Graphics Up to 256MB shared graphics memory

"Graphics" and "Gaming Graphics" are both rated at 3.1 (lowest score across the range)

I wouldnt know how to reformat but I'm sure I can read up on it/have someone help me.

UPDATE

I've just had the laptop freeze on me about 5 mins ago and the cursor was permanently "thinking or loading" something (blue circle)

The screen froze for ages then went totally black with white/grey box appearing on it

Across the topof the box reads "Logon process has failed to create the security options dialogue"

Below is a red and white error/cross logo next to which says

"Failure - security options"

?!

After clicking ok it reverts to desktop but is sluggish in doing so

Regarding Synchrouk's post - I got Laptop last Friday and have been adding software day by day.

Anyone else shed any light on what is going on?
 
Did this have XP on it and you upgraded it to Vista? A clean install is normally much more stable.

If it came with Vista, it could be Dells third-party software screwing it up. Again, I'd recommend a wipe and a reinstall of Vista.

You will have problems with some older software, but if it won't install Office 2007 then there is something very wrong.
 
So it looks like re-installing Vista is the way forward

Gah! Uninsatlling Google toolbar cause laptop to freeze up and crash - think I'm gonna get on the blower to Dell regarding a replacement
 
What Dell will (eventually) suggest is doing a reinstall from the recovery partition anyway. However, as it sounds like it was 'broken' before you got it, it may not help.
 
Hi there, i would definitely suggest that you do a complete format of your hard drive and install a clean version of Vista, i have a new lenovo laptop and had XP on it. Got the dreaded blue screen of death after installing vista premium and had to completely reinstall after formatiting and now do not have any problems.

Good luck.:)
 

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