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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Behold! The power of 4!

The other day, Lifehacker had a post about Microsoft releasing Sp3 for XP. Read article here. The release is actually RC2, which in layman's terms, just means it's not quite done yet. But I, being the technofiend that I am, decided, why the hell not, I'll update. Boy did I have the time of my life...

So it all started out innocent, I download the patch to allow my auto-updater to download the sp3 files. And as it starts out, Norton freaks out, starts yelling at me that all my windows files are changing and I should abort now or I will be forever doomed with failure. After this, it finishes downloading, awesome! Tells me to restart, and Bluescreen!

Wonderful!

So what is a man in my situation supposed to do? Get pissed off of course. So after a bout of swearing and yelling curse words I've never heard of before(wtf is a Douche-Fuck anyway?). As I calm down, I start assessing my situation, I decide I'll boot into safe-mode and see what I can find out.

Now the fun part about working in safe mode is that I have a 27inch tube monitor, the internet explorer icon was about as big as my head. As I'm looking around my computer I find out, I have no idea wtf I'm looking at. Ever notice that if a guy's car breaks down, the first thing he does it pop the hood and stand there like an idiot thinking he will look masculine before calling a tow truck? Yeah, that was me. Finally, I decide system restore was the way for me. I restore back to right before I started installing sp3 and it's fixed.

Most sane minded human being will have cut their losses and call it a day, NOT THIS IDIOT. I decide, what the hell, I'll uninstall Norton, as I'm using trend micro AV anyway, and try again. I'll let you in on a little secret here... It does the same thing. More Blue, More swearing, More Meowing (yeah, the cat's pissed off now too). It's a good thing I didn't live in the 1700's because Mr. Franklin and I would not likely have gotten along, and I quote, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

You can see where this is going.

Let's do it again! After round 3, with every monitoring program disabled, I try again!

That blue looks awfully familiar...

SON OF A BITCH!!!

Ok, so this isn't going too great, so I call it a night and go to bed, very upset at this point and unfortunately taking it out on the poor cat who only wanted to be petted. Oh well.

So, Day 2 of The Service Pack 3 Incident.

After the last system restore, I'm back to my sp2 self thinking I might as well upgrade to the beast that is Vista, but then looking back on my previous conquest, it doesn't seem like a good idea. Now, the smartest thing I have done so far, I go to www.microsoft.com and look at the tech support forums, turns out, there are 2 of us having the same problem!

So you're now sitting there thinking, Troy, you titled this "The Power of 4," please explain.

I was told, check out your registry settings, something might be messed up there. Who would have thought that this:


Was the source of my problems, turns out, if that little 4 there is a 0, everything is fucked up. But if it's a 4, life is peachy. I have no idea wtf that does, but it fixed my problem...

Anyone care to enlighten me with what that does? Or want to share any of your fun windows issues?




2 comments:

Rob said...

Ah...the beauty of Windows. I'm sorry to hear about your problems, and can associate whole-heartedly. I used to work tech support for a Fortune 500 company and after 1.5 years of working there I decided to abandon Windows and bow the power of Apple OS X.

Be even more weary of Vista. My dad's Vista PC downloaded an auto-update the other day that tanked his PC as well. Luckily, there are some very patient support people in India.

Best of luck in the future. I'm glad that you're OK for now!

Jillian said...

So this was pretty funny. Don't feel bad, because I never leave well enough alone either. Good you got it working, a functioning computer is essential.