Vista going to Windows 2000 look! + Black Screen Repair

Hi all
I've got a friend who's just taken the "big plunge" into Vista - and regretting it already after 1 day! He bought a brand new Asus G2Sg laptop (4GB RAM, 512MB DDR3 video, 2.6GHz CPU blah blah), and he's broken it already! All he's done is: reduce 2 partitions to 1 using Vista resizer; installed ALL updates; installed Office XP Pro with all updates; de-installed all languages that came pre-installed except English so he could install SP1; installed SP1; run a couple of defrags with PerfectDisk (which wouldn't do an offline defrag due to a known error so he deinstalled it) and JKdefrag (no probs). What he's ended up with is:
1) On each and EVERY restart, he gets a black screen with white writing that has an option to either boot Windows normally or do a repair (with repair being the default). Choosing repair does nothing at all. Selecting boot Windows works no probs. This screen just suddenly appeared one restart, and is very annoying (does it mean something, or is it some stupid glitch with SP1?)
2) After changing font size to 150% and doing a restart, now his task bar and side window thingy look like Windows 2000! I presume this means that the Aero stuff is somehow broken or switched off.

So, any thoughts? It seems incredible that the machine is in such a poor state after only 1 day's use! Admittedly, he's new to Vista, but then so are a whole bunch of people: surely this can't be good...

Cheers
Peter

Does he have a Restore disk? I think he made a huge mistake by reducing the partitions to one, the other partition normally has the restore data.

Change the default boot option using Vista Boot Pro, other thing I don't have any experience of - just switch it back as it was. Vista Boot Pro can be obtained at www.vistabootpro.org - I have used it many times and never had a problem with it.

Hi Conan - yes, he's got a proper restore DVD (a bit unusual these days, but nice), and the 2nd partition was half of the 320GB HDD, so it wasn't the recovery partition (and as an aside, I was VERY pleased how easy and painless it was to resize the main partition and delete the 2nd using Vista - about time Windows got it's act together!)

Hi Curio - thanks for that: will give that a go soon. I was thinking that the option was probably something like editing the boot.ini in XP: a shame it isn't as easy a thing to edit! The weird thing about Aero disengaging is that it only switches itself off after 30-60 seconds of the desktop starting up - which obviously isn't right.

I'm considering a complete reformat and reload, but was hoping to chase these issues down in case I get a repeat performance after a fresh load. Boy, is this drama like the early days of XP or what!?

Well, here's one for the books: it turns out that this problem is the fault of Asus! One can't load SP1 onto this model of laptop - it has to be done thru a new factory-supplied image! What sort of bollocks is that!? I've put a claim for compensation into them for wasting my time. :eek::mad: