A gal at work asked me to look at her laptop, (Gateway MT3705 running Vista)it was freezing and /or running very slow.After about 2 minutes, it would just stop responding to everything except moving the mouse pointer.

In short, I narrowed the problem down to something in her sons profile. Any time I got near that folder, the the machine would come to a screeching halt. I was able to delete his profile and that helped, but it was still unstable.

I ran the Gateway system restore from the boot menu and had it back up her profile. It worked fine for a while but then started lagging badly.
I backed up her data (documents, pictures, etc) onto a CD and did a "factory" restore of the laptop. It boots much faster, but...it only created the disabled Administrator and User accounts!! There was no prompt to create a user account during the final stages of the process.
I repeated the restore 3 times thinking that I just missed something along the way or something silly like that. (I'm very unfamiliar with Vista) Nope. The restore process starts and finishes without user input, and I wind up at a login screen. Logging in as Administrator or User indicates the accounts are disabled. Others just indicate an invalid username or password.

I can get to a command prompt in the Gateway recovery panel. Is there any to add a user account from a command prompt? Any other ideas? I'm stumped.

 

go buy a copy of XP and install it. i really really dont like vista.
go try searching on PC world dot com they might know something

 

That was a very early thought. I avoid Vista like the plague. There are NO XP drivers for this machine. From what I've read, Gateway does that quite often.

 

a side note .... your ride is an EMD E-8A? whats in it a 12-567?
i work on EMD's but in the Marine sector

 

This could be caused by a bad spot on the disk.. Did you run scandisk/chkdsk?

When you did the restore did it format the drive??

It is probably not doing a full install just more of a repair..

And I totally agree Vista Sucks big time..

 

It supposedly formats the Windows partition and restores the system to it's "out of box" configuration. OOB, it should prompt you to create a user account at first boot, but it doesn't. It isn't the Windows System Restore utility. It's a third party utility provided by Gateway. You access it via the (F-8) boot menu.

My experience with Vista has been limited so far. I can say, though, that none of it has been a positive experience. I usually chalk it up to my lack of familiarity, but...

 

I believe that accessing the restore option from the F8 menu is actually a built in Vista recovery/repair..

The Gateway system recovery is usually started by pressing F10 or ALT+F10 or from a Gateway CD.

 

Yep! 2 of 'em! A 567B and a 567C if I recall correctly. Both are naturally aspirated. The E-8s were the larger of that "series" of carbody locomotives, used mainly for passenger service. The more common F-7was just over half the length and used only one 567 prime mover.

Folks are amazed when they do the math. 567cid per cylinder x 12 cylinders x 2 engines= 13,608 cid.

 

Got a better idea - Linux.

I have a 2003 HP laptop that came with XP SP1. Windows aged out the driver for the ehternet card (which they often do for certain hardware - kinda forces a refresh)

It became unrunable.

Put on Ubuntu Linux 8.4 - it runs like a top. I have open office which runs with all windoze files, I have a Mp3 player and a chat program that recognizes all the file formats. And I have 'WINE' which runs windows aps.

Cost: $Free

 

I like turtles!

 

F-10 takes you to the BIOS setup. F-8 takes you, of course, to the Windows Boot Menu. One entry in the menu is Repair Your Computer. Selecting that brings you to the Gateway System Repair utility. It's a 3rd party customization.
There are options that let you do a (Windows) System Restore, but there were no restore points set. There are other selections like a memory test and a "startup problem repair". (It found no problems, natch).
The last option is the Restore Manager that restores the system to the OOB Gateway configuration. That's what I was trying for.

 

Me Too!! In soup...

 

On my computer, absolutely! (I use Red Hat 8.xx on my other box and Open Office on everything) Long live Open Source!
On a typical users computer, NFW. I'm not a teacher, and there IS a learning curve.
I work in a Windows environment, I don't think a large retail corporation is going to switch to Ubuntu any time soon. Microsoft has that market just about sewn up. (Although, we DO have POS controllers running IBM OS\2. When is the last time you heard THAT name?)

Open Source is a very good way to go, but it's very nature severely complicates use in a corporate environment. You can't go back to the "producer" for support. Corps aren't made up of computer geeks, they are made up of a collection of mostly clueless users with an IT support staff.

 

I worked for IBM for 11.5 years. Had OS2 1.3, 2.1, 3 and warp 4! And some of it on PS/2's!!!

Twas a shame, in the days of Win 3.11 and 95/98 OS2 was superior and in the days os ISA/EISA/VESA, MCA was superior.

 

i have an m series gateway with vista and no problems at all......but ui have to say im an xp person myself