While installing Windows Vista on a computer (on that I had previously had a copy of Vista installed on) I ran into the following error while installing Vista from while running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). I tried installing Vista on this machine by booting from a CD, and by installing Vista from within Windows XP.

While booting from CD, I’d get a Blue Screen everytime, and when installing from within Windows XP SP2, I’d get the following message:

You must make the following changes before installing Windows:

This computer is not compliant with the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) standard. Windows must be installed onto a computer that supports ACPI. Contact your computer manufacturer for a BIOS update or install Windows on an ACPI-compliant computer.

The compatibility report will be saved to the Windows desktop.

My computer is running an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard with and AMD Athlon 3700+ processor, 1GB of RAM, so on and so forth. I went into my BIOS and verified that it was ACPI compliant, tried installing again with no luck. The solution to my problem was as follows:

Solution

Tweak your serial and parallel port settings in the BIOS. I changed my parallel port from IRQ5 to IRQ7 along with some other setting that I can’t remember offhand (I don’t think it really matters because nobody uses parallel ports anymore anyways) so just tweak away. After changing these setting, I booted up from the Windows Vista CD and was able to install everything just fine with no quirks.