Prob. Booting windows vista

Hi. First time here. Read the many posts of others who are having probs with Vista. I have an HP Pavilion with windows Vista home premium. Screen is saying: windows failed to start. A recent harware or software change....etc. From what I've read here, I need to burn a cd to restore my windows back to the time previous to the error. Only have one computer in the house, so will have to ask the neighbors for help on this. How do I know if I should burn the 32 or 64b? If I do go ahead and do this, do you think I will really be able to do it? I am very computer illiterate. I don't want to messthings up more than they already are!! I'm nervous.

Hi Liz, welcome to NST.
Most computer systems are 32 bit by default, and so my guess is yours is as well.
Anyway, even if your computer can support 64 bit, the 32 bit one should still work AFAIK.

I have a Dell Studio 1535 laptop running Vista Home Premium 32 bit, XP Professional 32 bit, and Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit, and all run perfectly fine (at least all the way up until my XP failed the other day, and I'm still trying to get that one booting again...).

Our recovery disk must match your Version of Windows to work (32 or 64).
If you get the wrong one it will tell you.
Have you tried F8 (extended boot menu) as you power up the PC.
Before you go messing with our repair disk, try first
"last known good configuration".
If that doesn't work, try
"safe mode" and from there use system restore to take you back before the problem started.

Terry, thanks for your reply. The computer wouldn't let me do F8-safe mode. I was able to download and burn your torrent file. I have it in my computer right now. Aren't I supposed to go under "repair your computer" now, not "install now" ?

Yes, you can only use "repair......". The install button won't do anything (except fail).
Then chose "startup repair" if the boot process is broken (3 times normally to fix all possible problems)
If that doesn't get the PC booting, use "command prompt" and from the recovery console run a chkdsk /r against your Windows partition.
It will take a long time, but might fix problems on your HDD which are responsible for the OS failure.

It worked the first time!! Yea!! But now what? I've booted up via the CD. Do I shut down the computer and boot up to the hard drive?

Yep. Make sure you remove the CD before starting the computer again, so you can verify its truly booting on its own.

I just wanted to thank you all here at neosmart. The rescue CD worked fast and easily. I am so impressed. I feel so lucky to have stumbled upon this site!! I had called the HP help desk posted on my computer, and they said all I could do is restore to factory new-losing all my files. They were SO wrong!! To anyone reading this with a problem pc, don't give up! If I did it, so can you!! Thanks again for the help. I will surely spread the word of this site!

Hey Liz, that's wonderful news. Yeah, restores usually their default answer, since it takes care of majority of potential software problems and costs them less except it always puts the user at risk of losing valuable information.

We aim to please.
Glad you're OK again.
Sadly "help" desks at OEMs are prone to use what should be last resort measures as their opening gambit.
Get yourself a copy of a Linux distro like this, burn it to a CD and keep it in the cupboard for a rainy day.
If ever your PC really needs to be factory reset, boot the CD, choose the "Try Ubuntu without changing your computer" option, and you have a portable OS which can navigate around the wreckage of your PC, and rescue your user data before the OEM recovery process destroys it all.