Vista Continually Rebooting After Installing Update?

Tonight I was tasked with the job of reinstalling Vista on my sister’s new Dell laptop. Why? Because for some odd reason, Dell doesn’t know how to install an operating system correctly and she was having constant problems. Anyways, after installing the OS (which took ~30 minutes, w00t), I ran Windows update. This, for the first time for me, decided to continually reboot the machine after it was “done” with the install.

Hmm. Well, I went into the extra options mode (F8 during Bios) and ran the Directory Services Restore / Repair Mode. This got me to a “Configuring updates” screen which was farther than before. After finishing the machine rebooted and kept restarting. So I did it again, and this time the updates were able to finish!

[b]Update (07/07/08):[/b] It started doing it again. After some tracking on the web I found out it has to do with an outdated driver that came with the Dell Vista install disc. Installing Vista SP1 did the trick, but to get there I had to put the drive into IDE mode (via the BIOS) so Windows could boot.

Installing SharePoint 2007 on Windows Server 2008

Ben Curry has made an excellent post about installing SharePoint 2007 on WS2008 by slipstreaming SP1 updates. I am now running SharePoint and AD on my internal server!

Windows UX Task Force

Long Zheng of istartedsomething has started an initiative for bringing attention to Microsoft the biggest problems facing the Windows UI. Head on over to the Windows UX Task Force page to submit ideas, problems and inconsistencies with the current Windows UI.