Reinstalling your OS

This is relatively an easy task first thing is first though, always always always back up your important information so that you can reinstall/copy it back on to your newly formatted harddrive.

#1 reboot your computer, usually your system BIOS screen will pop up first and give you a few choices before booting up your current OS. Usually if you press f2 from here it will take you to a set up screen with a bunch of choices. What you want to do here is change the boot priority so that your CD rom ( which will have your OS on CD) boots first. Typically there is a boot priority option on your set up screen, go ahead and configure it so that your CD ROM boots first.

#2 put your copy of your OS in the cd rom and reboot the computer, now it should be booting from the CD. From here it will guide you fairly smoothly through the initial set up.

#3 this is an important step, the computer will ask you where you want to install your OS. You want to format the harddrive first, go ahead and select this option as it is listed on the screen. If you don't format you will be installing the OS again on the computer therefore taking up more space on your hard drive.

These are the three basic steps nin formatting your harddrive. Once you have gone through all these steps Windows will take you through the customizartion process of setting up your OS. Good luck!

COM surrogate stopped working in Vista?

Quite a common problem in Vista as its been noted. You are trying to load a video and this message pops up" COM surrogate has stopped working". This is simply a codec incompatibility in Vista. There are a few fixes that might help fix this.

#1 got to www.divx.com and make sure you have the latest Divx codec.

#2 If you have Nero on your computer it could be causing the problem. Navigate to--->computer--->Program Files----->Common Files---->Ahead------>DSfilter.

Once you are in here change the file NeVideo.ax to NeVideo.ax.bak. you may need to change the file NeVideoHD.ax to NeVideoHD.bak.


This will stop Nero Showtime from running but you can usually use Windows Media Player as your default media player. fix #2 worked for me.