tried to do a fresh reinstall of vista, made things worse!

Hello,

I was trying to fix my girlfriends computer for her by completing a reinstall of vista via the recovery partition on her Compaq Presario F500.

I managed to do this fine and so i started to uninstall all the bloatware and do windows updates etc.

However, the computer went into restart and now i'm getting a BSOD very early on OR the computer just turns itself off.

I tried pressing F11 to start a fresh reinstall of vista again but there was an error. I then made a bootable XP cd as a last ditch effort and a BSOD occurred.

Is there anything i can do to try and get this machine working??

Thanks,
James

 

Was the restart part of the installation of Windows Updates?

 

Hi there,

Thank you very much for your replys. I have tried a lot of different things since i first posted and ive made some progress. So here is a recap:

1) Reinstalled vista, commenced windows update.
2) computer started crashing with BSODs and sometimes not even being able to startup at all.
3) Then, all of a sudden, the computer loaded up but would BSOD after 1 minute of being idle.
4) I then tried shutting down the computer and windows started "configuring updates" starting at the 21 out of 80 mark.
5) It managed to complete this and since then there have been no more BSODs.

My theory is that maybe the computer was unstable because the updates hadn't completed?

Hopefully the crashing side of things is fixed!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

however....i also have one more question related to the laptop, if thats ok:

the main problem my girlfriend had with this laptop is that the wireless no longer worked. I did some research and found that the compaq presario models have well documented problems with the wireless card. HOWEVER, during the computers tumultuous time of crashing and not starting properly, the wireless was sometimes working?! I thought i was going to get into some serious good books but now the computer is stable the wireless no longer works. Do you have any understanding why it would stop working and how i could fix it??
The wireless card doesn't even appear in device manager!

Thank you very much for all your help,
James

 

Thanks for everyones help!