Wednesday May 7
 
19:31
 
I Tried – I Really Tried 2

I was all happy because I managed to wipe Vista from my 5520 and install XP instead. Unfortunately not all was as grand as I thought it to me.

Despite installing well, surviving several reboots, and running nice and fast, I found that after leaving the machine OFF for 1-2 hours and then rebooting into Windows, I was presented with a VGA screen. Going into Display – Settings, I was presented with the error:

The currently selected graphics display driver cannot be used. It was written for a previous version of Windows, and is no longer compatible with this version of windows. The system has been started using the default VGA driver. Please contact your hardware manufacturer to get an updated driver, or select one of the Microsoft provided drivers.

There’s a Knowledge Base article about the error here – but it seems irrelevant to the times when the error hits me, and it’s supposed to have been fixed by now.

I tried reinstalling XP again, even updating to SP3. It appeared to work – then wham! Same error.

What’s most strange is that by rebooting the PC, it starts working again. So what seems to be happening is that after booting from cold, the display driver doesn’t work – but every reboot after that is fine.

So, I have a lovely Acer laptop with a NVidia GeForce 7000M graphics card which crashes with “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding but has successfully recovered” every five minutes under Vista, and fails to load the display driver correctly after a cold boot in XP – ie. a laptop that I effectively can’t used.

I called Bic Camera and they agreed to collect the machine and refund, though they did say the refund could be delayed until next month due to timings in credit card processing. That makes me very wary – but there’s not much else I can do.

The saga doesn’t end there, however. Since the machine is going back tomorrow, I decided to use the opportunity to try the Vista DVD that I grabbed from torrent – it was going to be my “fallback” incase I couldn’t get English menus in the Japanese edition. Since I have a Vista license, it’s not illegal to download an install CD.

As expected, a fresh install with that DVD gave me the same “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding but has successfully recovered” error – as soon as I switched on Aero.

Experiment complete, I whacked in the Recovery DVD that I’d made with the Acer eRecovery suite when my machine arrived. It should have reformatted my hard drive and restored the machine to the state it was when I first received it. Instead it gave me a pop-up with:

Type Mismatch

Doh!

I tried Alt F10 to being up the recovery mechanism from Bios. No response.

Owch!

If I send the machine back with XP or a non Japanese version of Vista installed, it’s asking for trouble.

I tried searching around on the net and found that Vista has most likely changed the partition details so that Alt F10 no longer was responding.

I also found out that the C and D drive should exist and be formatted to FAT32 – since I don’t remember my Acer being formatted FAT32, that seemed wrong to me.

In the end, I was able to get the machine to boot from the recovery DVDs I’d made and restore Vista without “Type Mismatch” by doing the following:

1. Use the XP Pro CD and boot into XP setup.
2. Remove all partitions EXCEPT the recovery partition (F: on my machine, 10GB in size).
3. Create C and D partitions with half of the available space each (70GB each in my case).
4. Start XP installing onto C, but reboot after formatting has taken place.
5. Start XP installing onto D – again reboot after formatting has taken place.
6. Recovery can now take place WITHOUT a “Type Mismatch” error.

What a pain in the neck, eh? A recovery mechanism should do just that – recover. Offer the option to format the disks if necessary, not breakdown and cry and shout “Type Mismatch”.

I know that I’ll never buy another Acer laptop again, or any laptop with NVidia graphics. I’ve no idea why PC makers keep using graphics cards from a company that caused almost 30% of logged Vista crashes in 2007.

In fact, faced with being FORCED to buy a machine with Vista installed and not be sure that it’ll work properly, it seems that the only way I can get a machine which is guaranteed to run XP properly is to buy an Apple! Ironic, eh?