Fresh installation asking for a password?

Hi everyone.
I can think of better things to be doing at 10.30pm on a Friday night, but I've just installed Vista Home Premium on a Dual Core HP laptop and I've enountered a strange problem.

I used my "Anytime Upgrade" disk and entered the COA number attached to the laptop, and everything went well until the very end.
It's asking me for a username and password, despite the fact that I never set one.

It's a fresh installation on a hard drive that had partitions deleted, then was formatted, so I seriously doubt if it was anything from a previous installation.

Any ideas?

You could try entering "Administrator" as the user name with a blank password field (although I'm not sure if this account is disabled by default on install). Another option would be to use a bootable disk such as KON-BOOT - ULTIMATE WINDOWS/LINUX HACKING UTILITY :-) to boot into windows and create an account.

Thanks PLXPLY I'll try that later if my current attempt doesn't fix it.

The previous owner of the laptop complained that it wouldn't let him install XP as it kept coming up with errors. He never had a vista disk to try and sold the machine to me (minus the hard drive).

I've got a known good hard drive in it but I've just changed both the 512mb ram sticks and am halfway through another vista installation.
Will update the thread with the results.

No :huh:

I think we'll have to put this one down as a hardware fault, probably motherboard.
The installation went very smoothly with the new ram and I thought I'd cracked the problem. I went on to install all the drivers and started windows update (106 updates plus 9 optional), but the updates are taking forever and the computer has became really sluggish.

It took it about 40 mins to go to 5% of the updates and when I tried minimising a window it froze and then restarted. It's an HP DV1665 dual core with 1gb ram so it's definitely got some kind of issue.
Looks like it'll be broken down for spares... unless anyone knows a solution? :D

I gave it one more try this morning and I'm getting an error when it's booting up:

Winload.exe
0xc0000221
The file is possibly corrupt. It's header checksum does not match the computed checksum.

:sa: