Following my "Home PC is Dead" posting I bought myself one of these. http://www.ebuyer.com/product/161642. It's a great machine (so far) but a couple of words of warning for the less IT savvy buyers out there. If you get one of these one of the supplied quick start docs states that you must use the DVI port on the graphics card and ignore the DSub VGA port on the motherboard. They're not lying. The VGA port will not work at all. So if like me you don't have a DVI cable, go out and buy one now or you're stuffed before you get started. Secondly the docs also say that you must complete the initial set up the very first time you turn the PC on or you will be left with a non-functioning PC. Again, they do not lie as I found out the hard way. The PC keeps booting into a Windows error message and your only option is to reboot but of course that just returns you to the same error message.
So what do you do? Well you'll need a Vista Recovery disk. I didn't have one but managed to find a torrent to get to a recovery ISO which I was able to burn to a CD from another PC. Here's the link to get to the torrent. http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/. Once I booted from the Vista Recovery disk I elected to get into a command prompt window. From here I found that my PC had a C: D: and X: drive. The D: drive had an os.wim image file which was a pre-canned Vista image for the PC. I found a "restore" script which called various other CMD files. To cut a long story short I only actually needed 2 commands to reset everything. One blew away the C:\windows folder. The second reimaged the C: drive using the os.wim file. Once that was complete I was able to reboot and it was as if I was turning the PC on for the first time. If you need the exact commands or more advice please post a comment and I can give you even more precise details.
Anyway once I'd got over those initial challenges the PC has been working like a dream and is very fast. I'm happy with it based on working on it extensively over the weekend configuring it with all my software, tools and windows updates.
Hi, Dave hope you can help I have purchased this pc and have the error message also I'm not that good with computers can you pls tell me what to do step by step please my e-mail martinspup@hotmail.co.uk if you can send to that please would be so greatfull thank you.
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