Safety Second! (Seriously)

Hello to you all!

While reading my Master Visually: Microsoft Windows Vista, I happened to find a useful tidbit that may be useful to those having problems during driver upgrades or hardware tweaking; specifically, it concerns the safe modes in Vista. When configuring anything, mistakes can occur, leaving you at times when your computer will not even load Vista.

However, Vista has stripped-down, backup versions which allow the user to troubleshoot the problem that they face. In total, there are five different versions that can be used, depending on the problem.

In normal Safe Mode, Vista will restart with minimal services; afterwards, the user can add services until he is able to determine which service misbehaves.

In Safe Mode with Networking, network capability and Active Directory connectivity is added to the normal configuration - possibly to test whether the network is to blame for the error.

Safe Mode with Command Prompt restarts Windows to a command prompt - possibly so the user can see if file association and command lines are correct within the system.

VGA Mode allows the user to run Windows with a generic graphics driver, which uses 640x480x16 color display; this is useful to check if the normal graphics driver is to blame.

Finally, if all else fails, one can use the Last Known Good Configuration- a Safe Mode which restores the last mix of drivers that allowed the user to get to the Windows desktop. It may not be the best working copy of Windows, but the user can do something with it if the previous methods failed.