Interesting Problem

[Denaun]

I've gotten myself a new system after 4 years or so of being out of the loop on games and hardware (i was a student, it was either eat or game, eating eventually won out).

When i built it all together i decided i would install my version of XP home that I had for my uni laptop that i was no longer going to use. It wouldn't install - whenever it got to the "Loading Windows..." step it would blue screen and blame "PCI.sys".
So next a got a copy of XP Pro from work, same problem.
I read online that some other people had this problem and the work around was to use a copy of windows that had SP2 pre-installed. So i made and ISO of my disk and integrated the SP installed.
Same problem.
I got a windows 2003 and windows 2000 CD of one of the IT guys at work, same problem.
So thinking all was lost i went down to the local PC shop and managed to convince them to sell me an OEM version of windows vista (didn't take much convincing, the guy remembered that i had recently bought a bunch of hardware so i guess i qualified to buy OEM) and it installed with no problems!

So the computer is working and Vista is fine, but i would prefer to be running a less resource intensive OS if i possibly can - the main purpose of this computer is gaming after all, so the less resource hungry crap on it the better.

My computer is;
ASUS p5vd2-mx mother board
Pentium D 3.0GHz dual core
Albatron 6600GTS
1Gb RAM
250Gb SATA HDD

I'll be upgrading from the low-end mother board and 'old' CPU in a couple of pay-day's time, and i'll be upgrading to 2Gb of RAM just as soon as i get a replacement for a faulty stick i bought.

Basically my question is this - does anyone have any ideas or input what might be causing the installation problems, because i'm all out of ideas.
Since vista works OK etc. i'm not too concerned about actually resolving this issue, i just thought it was a little odd...

 

[pkellmey]

2 immediate thoughts came to mind:

Before Vista, even up to 2K3, SATA had horrible driver support It sounds like you may not have a non-SATA drive handy, with your requirements to eat over playing PC tech, but I would believe this would be the primary culprit. A secondary possibility is a little remote. Some SATA man. have had issues with ASUS mb, especially Maxtor. You could try flashing your BIOS to the latest version to see if it makes a difference, but I suspect it won't.

 

[Denaun]

BIOS is one of the first things i tried. I guess i should've mentioned that.

I also used an old IDE HDD out of my Dad's computer and had the same error. That drive was quite old and has a few errors on it, so i don't put too much stock into having the install fail when using that one.

I might take a trip down to the computer store and see if i can pick-up and IDE hdd cheaply and give it a go...

 

[riser]

You can disbale Aero in Vista.
In device manager, go to the properties on your SATA HDD and allow it to cache to the disk. This is default in XP, Vista it isn't.

The resource "hog" isn't as bad as one thinks. Vista will cache a lot of your programs that you use so they start up faster. You can clear the cache by going to the run/search, type "prefetch" and delete everything in that window that comes up.

Play a game.. see how it works. I've heard a lot of people say they're getting better performance with Vista. I personally haven't tried.

But you may also want to try installing 3rd party drivers (F6 during install) for your XP issue.