Question : Dealing with Corrupted System Files on Vista

I have a client w/ a Dell Latitude D830 laptop (running Vista Business) that was crashing constantly. Went ahead and cloned the C: drive to an external drive and did a new installation from Dell OS DVD of Windows Vista. Updated to SP2 and installed all OS updates. Laptop seemed to be working fine and I returned it to the client. But now a week later client says it is crashing multiple times each day. I got the laptop back from her. I was suspicious that maybe the RAM was bad but I ran the memory diagnostics and it reported no memory problems.

I ran sfc /scannnow to check the system files. At the end of the scan it said that some system files were corrupted but that not all of them were fixed. So clearly there are still corrupted system files, but I don't know to go about fixing them.

Answer : Dealing with Corrupted System Files on Vista

There was an XP Repair option available on the WinXP installation CD to reinstall XP over itself, which would in most cases not disturb your data or installed programs.  Vista has an option like this also, described here:

http://vistasupport.mvps.org/repair_a_vista_installation_using_the_upgrade_option_of_the_vista_dvd.htm

The difference between XP repair and Vista repair is that you must be able to boot into Vista in order to repair it, while the XP repair option was chosen in XP's Recovery Console, which meant that XP didn't necessarily have to be still bootable.

However, you note that SP2 has been installed, while the original DVD has only SP1.  In that case, you would have to go through the procedure on this page for integrating SP2 into the DVD files (just substitute SP2 everywhere you see SP1 mentioned):

http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/slipstream-vista-sp1-bootable-windows-vista-dvd-integrated/2750/