Vista going to Windows 2000 look! + Black Screen Repair

[Island_Boy_77]

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!?

[Island_Boy_77]

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.