My woes with the Microsoft Vista and AOL AIM 6.5 bug came to some finality on Friday. Even after uninstalling AIM 6.5, which gave me back network access, the Windows WMI service wouldn't run and every audio program fell on deaf ears (not mine, the computer's.) A commentor suggested I turn UAC back on and reinstall AIM which I strong considered doing, but since everything on the system was so wacky I thought there might be downstream effects to doing that. (I do appreciate the suggestion though.)
There was no new news on the TechNet forums, other than more people experiencing the same problem, so I decided to reinstall Vista and start all over again to make sure I fully recovered from this crippling AIM bug.
I'm on my second laptop from HP. This after years of using Dell and IBM laptops, I've really come to greatly prefer the HP Pavillion laptops for business use. But one thing that's always bothered me is that HP laptops don't ship with the stock Windows installation disks. The laptop has a recovery partition on the main hard drive (about 7GB in size) and a restore CD that will put your laptop back to the factory configuration (both the main OS boot, and recovery partitions). This always bothered me, as most of us know that restoring from backups often has its own set of issues, including just plain old not working. I've always reinstalled from either the stock Windows CD disks and applied all the drivers and updates, or from a Ghost image.
So I decided to give the HP recovery partition a try, rather than install Vista using my Microsoft Partner Action Pack software licenses. After backing up all my files, pictures, music, email data and preferences, I used the HP Recovery Manager to start the laptop and reinstall the main OS boot partiton, using the software on the recovery partition.
To my great surprise, it worked - and it worked flawlessly. My laptop was back to the exact condition (hard disk wise) as when it arrive out of the box from HP months ago. All the drivers loaded properly, Vista behaved well, and it all happened in about 1/4th the time as compared to loading from the Vista CD disks. The lengthy part was applying all of the Vista and Microsoft Office software updates, and then reloading all the other software apps and tools I use.
Number one, I've very happy with this experience using the HP Recovery Manager. And two, I am much less anxious about not having orginal Vista installation CDs come with my laptop. I'm sure thankful now that I didn't delete that recovery partition when I wanted to get back those 7GBs so many times earlier.
HP. My hats off to you for a very satistfactory customer experience recovering my laptop.
Mitchell Ashley is principal consultant at Converging Network LLC where he provides product, technology and social media consulting to emerging technology companies. A successful CTO and product innovator, Mitchell has created many successful, award winning products in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular StillSecure After All These Years podcast.
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The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Nice to know it worked for
Nice to know it worked for you but I have run up against a brick wall with mine.
Having deleted Vista and installed XP I tried to use the recovery partition but it didn't work (F11 during boot but just carries on to XP)
Contacted HP and they told me Recovery Manager was part of Vista and as I had deleted it - "tough luck, but we'll sell you the recovery disks". As the laptop is less than a week old I am not happy to say the least!
What is the point of a recovery partition if you have to have a viable Vista OS in order to use it?
Have I missed something or did your recovery partition contain the Recovery Manager application?
what is the point of
what is the point of deleting vista and installing xp and after only a week of owning the laptop wanting to start all over? seems like you screwed the pooch, buddy.
I had a similar experience,
I had a similar experience, but I can't say that the recovery was flawless. After several automatic reboots over several hours, each time getting a little bit further, I went home for the day. When I returned to the office the next morning, it was rebooting again. It finally stopped rebooting about 24 hours after I started the recovery, and everything was perfectly restored. 24 hours for a restore is not something that I, as a network manager, am happy with.
Mine Worked Great!
While trying to access a myspace page on my 3 month old HP notebook, I got a vicious virus which I could not get rid of with the help of MajorGeeks and several other knowledgeable sites. It made the computer almost unusable, so after some soul searching, I did the HP vista partition re-install. It was quick, worked great and all I had to do was reload my software which I keep on a networked drive. It runs like new and I put better front in anti-malware software on the system now. Thanks HP! My model was a Tx1210us.