Vista - The Enemy of My Laptop

My philosophy about my electronics is that it should be used and used to my convenience. I totally see the up side to keeping everything pristine and in proper form, but I can't always live my life that way -- there are going to be bumps. My laptop has been a trooper through all of these bumps: a bump into the wall, a bump into my desk, a bump into the floor after being flung 4 feet from the table....ya know, the usual. Luckily it's an IBM Thinkpad, so it's been a tough cookie, but after the most recent bump, it started to fail me.

Problem 1 + Solution:

• Blue Screen of death (crashes)
  
• Upon immediate startup error message: Media Test Failure - No Operating System Found

After speculation about hard drive corruption, fan failure, etc., the obvious first test would be to reformat. My brother is a Vista fan so he convinced me to go in that direction. Let the horror begin (well, continue)...


Problem 2: "Failed in finding proper screen mode for Gr2D"

After the hours of backing up and installing Vista, my first program installation would obviously be Maplestory. If I can't game, what else is there? I would get that annoying Gr2d message every time I try to start the app. My brother narrowed it down to having the improper driver installed for my video card. Vista automatically installs the generic VGA video driver because it does not support the ATI Radeon Mobile 7500 card on the T42. After several more long hours of trying to work around the problem (including installing the XP driver), I finally found the solution on Google.

Solution 2:

Manually update the driver by going to Device Manager. Navigate to the Display Adapters section and select "Upgrade Driver". Select the option to "Browse my computer for driver software", sift through the huge list of drivers, and select the ATI Mobile Radeon 9000 driver.

Problem 3: "Connection Status Unknown: Server Execution Failed" and Network Folder Frozen

I took my laptop home that night excited after finding the solution to the video card driver. I tried to connect to my parent's network and started installing a couple random things including AIM. However, I noticed that my connection was failing (red x), but then the internet still sorta worked. When I tried to view my network folder, the whole thing would just freeze. I uninstalled everything I just installed, but it was still having the same problem. So for hours the next day, my brother and I tried to figure out the problem. We thought it was a driver issue again but for the network adapter this time. No luck. Finally, again with the magic of Google, I found the problem...

Solution 3:

So the culprit was the newest version AIM. All you AIM haters don't snicker quite yet, the forum posts indicated the same problem for Yahoo Messenger, MSN, etc...sounded like a bunch of chat programs caused this problem. Why in the world a chat program would affect the network connection and freeze a particular folder is beyond me. To fix this problem? Uninstall the chat program and do a system restore. Forums say installing an older version of AIM is fine, but I'm not about to try it just yet.

Problem 4: Installing Adobe CS3

I love Photoshop. It seems that everything I love causes problems to Vista. So I wanted Photoshop, but the version that is compatible with Vista is CS3. CS3 requires at least 1 GB of RAM and my poor IBM T42 does not have enough.

Solution 4:

Purchase more RAM! This solution was straight forward but painful nonetheless. Keep in mind that there are 2 slots for memory with a max of 2GB, but one is pre-populated with 256MB or 512 MB, so there's no point in buying two 1GB chips.

Maybe this will help someone, but my advice? Don't even go there, not on a T42. I'm keeping it because I've put it way too much blood and sweat, but if i knew beforehand...

Conclusion

Me = Enemy of my laptop
Vista = Enemy of my laptop

Therefore: Me <3 Vista (I guess)