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Old October 26th, 2009, 08:53 PM
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home4tea home4tea is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2009
O/S: Windows 7 64-bit
Location: UK
Posts: 96
Mrs Fenwick,

Interesting problem. Firstly, no you are not supposed to upgrade anything other than the laptop that the upgrade came with; the upgrade is for that machine only. So, what we need to do is get you back to running Vista on your desktop machine.

Please bear in mind that I cannot see your PC and may have to guess a little.
I suggest we take this one step at a time.

The machine keeps trying to progress with the upgrade. This is probably because the BOOT.INI file has been set to (a) launch/continue the upgrade program at boot and (b) not allow you time to select otherwise. If we can modify the BOOT.INI file then we may be able to break the cycle.

So, let's see if we can boot the PC from the Vista CD. You said that the PC doesn't do this but didn't say what happens. I am going to assume that the PC is set to boot from the hard disk first ... because we may be able to fix that ;-)

When the PC boots, look for messages (usually at the bottom of the first black screen) showing function key numbers (F1, F2...F12) or [Del] or [Delete] and a word/term next to each. Ideally we are looking for 'Boot options' (or similar). If you can see it, select the key for that option before the PC boots and Windows tries to upgrade again. If you don't get it the first time, try again.

A new screen should appear offering you some devices to boot the PC from. You need to identiy the DVD/CD-ROM drive from that list. Typically it will have 'CD' or 'DVD' in its name. Use the arrow keys to move down to the correct entry. Insert the installation/recovery disk then, with the correct entry highlighted, press the [Return/Enter] key. Hopefully the PC will boot from the CD. Where we go from there depends upon the options you are given.

If, at the initial black screen, you cannot see 'Boot options', look instead for 'BIOS' or 'Settings' or 'Setup'. If you can get one of these to work, I will need you to tell me the menu options shown so that we can select the correct one. It's probably going to be called 'Boot' (or similar).

That's enough to be going on with.
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