Installing Windows Vista for my brother
My brother asked me to build a PC for him. He has about £1000 so I went to overclockers and bought £1000 of hardware and Vista Home Basic with it... the next two days were not fun.
I spent a LONG time trying to get Vista running on an ASUS M2R32-MVP motherboard. As I was installing Vista it would just pause for 10-30 minutes with a black screen. I knew something was up... even Microsoft doesn't release software this bad. At first I suspected it was something to do with the RAID drives I had set up. So I flicked back to standard IDE. This reduced the pauses to 10-15 minutes but I still knew something was going wrong.
I flashed the motherboard to the latest BIOS. This was a trial as PC manufacturers still seem to think that people have floppy drives. I managed to dig one out of a cupboard so I was ok. Why don't they release BIOS upgrades as CD iso images. The motherboard did offer an autoflashing mechanism where you put the ROM on to a CD or floppy and it will read it but it seemed to hang when ever I ran it!
After flashing the Vista install stopped stalling and ran a lot more smoothly. It patched itself on boot and all seemed fine. So after a day of playing with BIOS settings, retrying installs and typing the bloody Vista product code in I was ready to hand it over to my brother.
After all that though WoW didn't work. It just blue screened. It was nice to see that at the heart of the OS with hundreds of MB of code (Vista seems to use 600 MB of memory on boot) an application can still cause a blue screen. This is with certified drivers as well. You can't install anything other then certified drivers!