Adventures in Vistasitting

After Christmas last December, I took some of my hard-earned gift cards and cash and bought an eMachines T3516A desktop computer for the family’s general use. It was a pretty good deal. It was more computer that we’d need for daily computing and they actually took $50.00 off of the price of the computer if I’d take home a monitor and printer. Another bonus for me was that I’d get a free upgrade to Windows Vista when it was released a month later.

I submitted my forms and got my disk. I was hesitant to leave XP, since it had done me no harm, but I do love the latest and greatest. I ran the upgrade and after the first reboot, I got a STOP: 0x0000005C blue screen error. Very nice. At the time, there was no help to be easily found on the internet, so I had to reverse the upgrade and learn the intricacies of bcdedit to get things back to normal.

A few months later, I decided to give it a go again. Same STOP: 0x0000005C blue screen error. Google revealed that this was probably a BIOS issue. Nervous about flashing the BIOS, I reversed the process and waited again.

This past weekend, I gave it one more shot. Same error. However, this time I found a great site called The Unofficial eMachines Tech Info Site that had the download and offered some reassurance that this process would probably go well.

I gave it one last shot and actually got past the first reboot. Vista got completely installed. However, on boot (normal or safemode), it would hang on loading crcdisk.dll. None of the solutions I found had anything to do with me, so I had a much more painful rollback and am now back to faithful XP.

I think I’ve sworn off upgrading this eMachine to Vista for good.