Some Issues with Vista

[Canadian in Berlin]

I've searched the forums and google but couldn't find exactly my problem, or no specific solution. So I figured I'd try and post and you can all spam me with "OMG RTFF ( read the.... fine.... forum" and link me to threads.

Vista Booting:
I have XP and Vista installed. I keep XP now almost exclusively for the fact I can use my Zen Touch on it without having to update the firmware (plays for sure is shit).

When I pick vista at the boot menu, half the time the screen goes black. This almost never happens when I reboot, and never when it wakes up from sleep (then I turn the power off). When I say the screen goes black, I mean nothing happens. Vista does not load (the harddrives go silent and make no more noise), when I reboot I get the "windows didn't load properly" I pick "start normally" and usually it works (sometimes I have to repeat this 3 or 4 times before it works).

I SEEM to have solved this by turn on boot logging and GUI boot. But I'm curious as to where this problem comes from, it started about 3 months after I installed vista. But I hadn't installed any updates, I installed all the updates from windows update without success.


Vista Sound:
I have a Creative X-Fi Gamer. Whenever I do anything from a wide variety of things on the desktop (create a folder, open a big folder) my sound makes screechy beepy time noises for a few seconds, reminds me of holding a cellphone to the headphone jack on my zen (weird spikey interference). I've tried a variety of headphones, no problems. The sound in XP is fine.

I found tons of information on this with Google, but no solutions. Any ideas?

 

[zupahwez0e]

Are the drivers for your xfi the latest drivers? There was a problem with vista64 with 4 gigs of ram and xfis but it has been fixed. Thats what i have on my system right now with no problems.

 

[Canadian in Berlin]

Ok, I'd heard some bad things about the latest drivers mine are a few months old. I'll give that a shot and post back.

Anyone have any ideas on my bootup problem?

 

[Canadian in Berlin]

Update: Driver updates didn't help. Its generally only music that skips, but it happens with WMP, foobar and VLC player.

My Hardware:
Abit IP35 Pro
Core2Duo E6750 (no overclock)
4GB Ram
EVGA 8800GTS
Vista64 bit

 

[The One And Only]

Do you find that anything else acts jerky or slow?

Was thinking theres a small chance your drive might be in PIO mode. That would cause those symptoms. Check your drives in Device manager > IDE drives.

 

[Canadian in Berlin]

No, its only with music, and nothing is jerky or slow (no noticable spikes in performance usage either). I'll take a closer look at that tonight.

edit: thats why I made this post, I'm trying to get ideas that I've overlooked.