If it were me, I'd reinstall Vista.
In your current state, if your hard drive crashes, you're going to have to
get everything reinstalled anyway, and you'd be worse off because you'd
probably have data loss. Yes the reinstall will be painful but you've been
through the process recently and it should be fresh in your mind on what you
need to do. A year from now, it will hurt much worse.
You might be leaning towards going back to XP and I don't blame you. I think
you got a bad apple with your Vista install and I think you'll be pleasantly
surprised at how well it works when the installation is done properly.
Though I can't say for certain that bad imaging is to blame, I can say that
everyone I've talked to who clean installed over the likely bad image is no
longer having backup problems. There may be some magic fix out there for the
VSS error but so far I haven't found it. I bet there are other things broken
on your system as well.
If you do a clean install, here's what I recommend: do the clean install and
then take a Complete PC Backup BEFORE installing any applications. This will
allow you to make sure the Complete PC Backup is working and isn't breaking
due to some incompatible application. Then make sure that the apps you do
install are compatible with Vista.
Once your applications are completely installed, take another backup and
save it to DVD (if you can). Saving to hard disk is fine for periodic
Complete PC Backups (even preferred), but putting your original image on DVD
ensures that that particular point-in-time image won't eventually be purged
as new images are created.
--
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Mark Norris said:
Thanks for your response Jill ... I must now think very hard about your
recommendation for a clean install of Vista to try and solve this problem.
This puts me in a dilema which I would like your experienced opinion on
...
... The principal reason why I wanted to make a 'Complete PC Backup' is
because it has taken me such an extraordinary amount of time to set up
this
new PC with a variety of 'industry standard' programmes which have all
required updates & downloads & contact with software manufacturers &
premium
phoneline calls, etc, etc, to get them to function with the Vista
operating
system. Other than from yourself, no one has been of much help and no one
is
prepared to take any 'responsibility' for the problems of glitches and
incompatibility of Vista. I have no free support from Microsoft because
the
computer manufacturer installed Vista ... and the computer
manufacturer
will not provide any free support with 'software issues'.
... Having already thought 'I can't possibly go through all that setting
up
process again, so I will purchase an external hard drive to create a
Complete
PC Backup' ...
... it now appears that I will have to start the entire process again?
So, in your experienced opinion, do you think I should stick with Vista
and
re-install everything from scratch, hoping that most of my problems will
be
OK on a clean install ... or, as the teething problems &
incompatibility
problems of Vista may still be ongoing for a while, should I play safe and
simply install Windows XP?
I'd be most grateful for your opinion before I proceed.
With many thanks,
Mark Norris