Vista trouble

[Artisian]

Hello all.. And hello Davey.

I had a problem a couple of months ago, I sorted it out thanks to the help of people here and to many hours twiddling and tweaking nodes. Now however I have another problem and once again I need your help.
Last night I took the leap and upgraded my OS to Vista 32bit Ultimate. I had no trouble installing it and upgrading it, but now whenever I try to play any games, such as Crysis, The Witcher, Bioshock or anything I get an error message saying 'the application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.'
I have browsed a few forums and it seems that a problem like this has been around for at least a year (And more likely since the dawn of Vista). Everything else works on Vista, I have downloaded and updated my 8800 gts driver and let Vista update itself twice.
One thing that I've noticed which is really odd is the fact that I can't set the resolution higher then 1280 x 1024 in 32bit colour in my display settings.
I have also uninstalled some games and reinstalled them to see if it would work from a vista installed baseline, but no. Same proplem. I think the worst thing is the fact that I can't actually go back to XP without deleating all my files. And even if I back them up I know it won't be near the same. But I would love if I could keep Vista and get the games working on it properly.

Please let me know if anyone can help.

Regards,

Eoin

[excalibur2]

There should be a stickie here to promote dual booting between winxp and vista...........solves so many problems.

[Splash]

Sounds like a driver issue to me - if you can't get your resolution higher that 1280*1024 with a GTS something ain't right (or you have a really poor display, if it's the one in your My System it should easily go higher)

Possibly worth cleaning out the display drivers and reinstalling them?

[this_is_gav]

I assume you've downloaded the latest nV drivers for Vista?

Why should you be able to get larger than 1280x1024 though? That's the resolution of your monitor. If you were able to set it higher (I have seen it once, but can't remember what system it was - it certainly won't on mine) it would simply show 1280x1024 at any time and you'd have to move the mouse to the edge of the display to have it 'scroll' across the desktop. Your monitor isn't physically capable of showing a higher resolution.

There should be a stickie here to promote dual booting between winxp and vista...........solves so many problems.

Completely off topic, but I'm bored of this. Vista's fine if you sit back and think things through and set it up properly, and it's only down to lazy 3rd parties (Speedtouch and Creative reading?), some older software (Sony Vegas being my only issue for instance, and you can work around that) and inexperienced users where problems arrive. If you don't like Vista, that's fine (there's some aspects of it I don't like either), and I do dual-boot, but not everyone has licenses for both or the hard drive space either.

[Splash]

My bad, I'll hold my hands up and admit I didn't check the monitor specs...

As this_is_gav states, the limiting factor is your monitor. I just assumed (which was wrong, I know) that you had it running at a higher resolution under XP.

[Blitzen]

There should be a stickie here to promote dual booting between winxp and vista...........solves so many problems.

Why?
If you get everyting right including drivers Vista is very stable and runs anything released over the last 5 years.

[dangel]

Completely off topic, but I'm bored of this. Vista's fine if you sit back and think things through and set it up properly, and it's only down to lazy 3rd parties (Speedtouch and Creative reading?), some older software (Sony Vegas being my only issue for instance, and you can work around that) and inexperienced users where problems arrive. If you don't like Vista, that's fine (there's some aspects of it I don't like either), and I do dual-boot, but not everyone has licenses for both or the hard drive space either.

I couldn't agree more - let the sheep bleet all they like!