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Thanks for the replies. I have now come to the conclusion that moving the special folders does not have as many benefits as I originally though. Given that it seems to be much harder than on XP, I am going to leave the data on the system drive. Thanks again

Changing special folders default Vista I have always kept two copies on different internal hard drives as well as an external, off-site copy. Main benefit now I think about it a bit more is with defragmenting the system drive (data gets much less fragemeted when seperated from the system files I find). Other reasons I have now realised can be met in other ways. Faster virus scanning of system but that can be acheived by adding extra scanning schedules. This what I have always done with XP to guard against drive failure and system theft. Not taking any chances ;) Internal Disk 0 - Files stored in My Documents (XP) but relocated to a seperate data partition to the system. Internal disk 1 - Realtime and 30 minute mirror of data partition above. External Off-site Disk - Weekly mirror of data partition.

Can anyone help....? I have tried moving the default locations of the Vista special folders now a few times by using the move location route. All seems to go well until at some point, something goes wrong or I do something wrong and I find a whole host of files being copied over when I know there is nothing in the default folder location as yet. These files seem to have nothing to do with the folder I am moving. What is happening? Trying to work it out and put everything back where it was does not see very straightforward. On this I much preferred XP. Right click myDocuments, Move, Browse, OK. Done. The whole lot. This way of doing it in Vista is a complete pain in the arse in comparison. For now I've given up and am just leaving them where they are, after another reinstall (no repair options as this is a recovery disk). But I don't want to be beaten by this. So can anyone suggest where I may be going wrong, if I am...?

Don't beleive this! After the unmpteenth reinstall, the machine just booted into windows after the install routine. What do you make of that? Does this still the new hard drive...?

Vista / hardware install problems...? Hi I think that is very unlikely as hard drive activity looks fine for the install but bought two, one as back up so will put that one in and see what happens. If it's the hard drive then it's basically knackered from new. Once the initial install of Windows is done from the CD, on first reboot is the system then trying to boot from the windows installation on the hard drive...? You are right in that this is where the issue starts.

Vista installation hardware issue? Win 7 install same result so it is not the MESH installation CD. Could it be hardware related. Maybe that old keyboard getting in the way....? Something funny is happening with the keyboard indicator lights. Just noticed that even with machine switched off two lights remain on. Something I have not seen before. Am going to plug in my other keyboard and a wired mouse to see if that gets me anywhere. Am barking totally up the wrong tree...?

If I reboot now or take out the disk I think I will get the disk read error again with instruction to CTL ALT DEL to restart which does not work.

OK this time when the installation rebooted for the first time I did nothing. I did not press 'ESC to boot' and I did not 'press any key to boot from CD or DVD' when that message appeared. That was about 3 minutes ago and the screen is still hung with the latter message. When installing XP and Win 7 I have never seen the 'ESC to boot' DOS message before, only the 'press any key....' message. Do you think this significant?

vista installation Hi Thanks for that. I'll give it another go but when I just left it the install just seemed to hang. I've never had such problems before, it seems different to the installs of both XP and Windows 7 that I have done. Haven't installed Vista before though. I will post back on results but I am not hopeful.

Have a friends PC to fix. Hard drive appears to ahve gone belly up. Cannot read fully, clicking etc. Have new hard drive and trying to install Vista from the MESH recovery CD is giving odd result. Install goes fine until reboot. BIOS gives option to 'ESC to boot' but doing so just takes me round again with the previous install of vista being moved to allow for the next install. Pressing ESC to boot gives another dos command to press any key to boot from CD. This prompts another reinstallation. Trying anythign else just results in DOS disk read error. I am not inexperienced in reinstalling operation systems. I have tried settign BIOS back to boot from hard drive as MESH advise that disk is not needed for rest of installation process. Same result. The new hard drive is partitioned with a GB primary active partition for the system and the rest (400GB or so) a logical partition for data. I am corresponding on the MESH forum but this is painfully slow as posts cannot be read until moderator has allowed them and they are not coming up with much. BTW there is only 1GB RAM so it's not the 'Vista doesn't install with 2GB RAM or over' issue. Can anyone give me any pointers? I have searched on web but have not found much but maybe I am searching for the wrong thing.

system.ini not boot.ini naaaa I meant system.ini that's why I mentioned system.ini :) I have doen this by restoring system using system restore then just had to reinstall and uninstall a program.. Shame the option to edit system.ini directly is not there as it is for boot.ini. The other way I realised of course is to select a to restore the system.ini file back to it's previous state by restarting. I did not read the selective start up message correctly :o Thanks anyway.

I have added an entry to system.ini file and XP now detects that as a selective start up. I now want to remove the entry. How do I do that? I guess this is not a registry edit. I have taken a copy and edited the entry from there but how can I save back so that SP uses it?

Athlon XP 3200 / Intel i7 comparison Hi Nev Have already defragged. I have never really found defragging to make that much difference on ntfs file ssytems. Maybe will try CC cleaner as well. Thanks for your reply. Will post back if using CC cleaner makes any difference.

Hi Am just getting around to tackling this having upgraded my old machine from an Athlon XP 3200 (2.2GHz) and an Intel i7 2.66GHz overclocked to 3.2GHz. There is no doubting that this processor runs stuff like Photoshop CS2 and Lightroom etc much faster, just how they should be. My old Athlon used to struggle. However, with everyday computing tasks there can be noticable lag. Examples are opening an excel spreadsheet, opening Outlook, add/remove programs population, applying changes to display settings etc. All usually just okay but not quite as instant as my old Athlon. There can be processing delays with basic tasks that just were not present with the Athlon. Task manager never really shows much activity. In fact I have never seen any core above 17% with the i7. These issues are always worse at start up when I can see disk activity but I am not sure what is going on. I have been experimenting with Windows Desktop search which was certainly implicated. I have uninstalled this. I have also changed the settings on my backup application (Mirror folder) so that it does not run whilst the machine is starting up. These have definitely improved the situation but I still don't see much if nay improvement with these basic tasks. Maybe I am just running into a hard disk bottleneck....? Can anyone shed any light for me on what I am seeing? Rest of the set up is as follows: Case: Coolermaster Cosmos S PSU: Corsair HX1000w Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5R Processor: Intel i7 2.66GHz o/c 3.6GHz Cooling: Zalman CNPS 9700 LED RAM: 3GB Corsair PC10600 1333Mhz DDR3 Hard Drives: Samsung F1 1TB x2 Graphics: 1GB nVidia GTX 280 Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 Optical: LG / Pioneer 116 Monitor: NEC 2470WNX Operating System: XP Home and Pro