MS makes me go hmmmm....
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Okay, last night I had a sphincter tightening moment, care of MS. I have a number of development boxes, but my bread and butter is my Dell 9100 laptop. Been married 30 years. She who I fear does not touch the laptop ;). Period. Not negotiable. Some months back, MS released SP3 for XP. No way was MS touching my laptop. So, secondary box gets SP3 for burn in. Installs fine, runs fine for 3 months. The other day my laptop reports that I have updates available. Hey, it's SP3 for the laptop. Well, SP3 worked fine on my other box, long burn in, no woes, let's do it. 70 MB later, the install is going, and, I kid you not, something crashes (exception violation) in the install. The installer reports: "SP3 install crashed and failed to install. Your computer may not boot." Not the exact words, but pretty close. I went from :omg: to X| to :mad: to :^) But it booted. I still don't know what happened, but I am NOT clicking on the shieldy thing for a while...... :)
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin
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Okay, last night I had a sphincter tightening moment, care of MS. I have a number of development boxes, but my bread and butter is my Dell 9100 laptop. Been married 30 years. She who I fear does not touch the laptop ;). Period. Not negotiable. Some months back, MS released SP3 for XP. No way was MS touching my laptop. So, secondary box gets SP3 for burn in. Installs fine, runs fine for 3 months. The other day my laptop reports that I have updates available. Hey, it's SP3 for the laptop. Well, SP3 worked fine on my other box, long burn in, no woes, let's do it. 70 MB later, the install is going, and, I kid you not, something crashes (exception violation) in the install. The installer reports: "SP3 install crashed and failed to install. Your computer may not boot." Not the exact words, but pretty close. I went from :omg: to X| to :mad: to :^) But it booted. I still don't know what happened, but I am NOT clicking on the shieldy thing for a while...... :)
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin
charlieg wrote:
a sphincter tightening moment
makes for very squeaky flatulence!! :laugh:
-------------------------------------------------------- Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in fruit salad!!
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Okay, last night I had a sphincter tightening moment, care of MS. I have a number of development boxes, but my bread and butter is my Dell 9100 laptop. Been married 30 years. She who I fear does not touch the laptop ;). Period. Not negotiable. Some months back, MS released SP3 for XP. No way was MS touching my laptop. So, secondary box gets SP3 for burn in. Installs fine, runs fine for 3 months. The other day my laptop reports that I have updates available. Hey, it's SP3 for the laptop. Well, SP3 worked fine on my other box, long burn in, no woes, let's do it. 70 MB later, the install is going, and, I kid you not, something crashes (exception violation) in the install. The installer reports: "SP3 install crashed and failed to install. Your computer may not boot." Not the exact words, but pretty close. I went from :omg: to X| to :mad: to :^) But it booted. I still don't know what happened, but I am NOT clicking on the shieldy thing for a while...... :)
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin
That used to happen about 50% of the time when I allowed MS to update one of my machines. They've got much better since, but they're still dodgy. My experience with MS Update service is almost completely negative as a result, and I have many "fond" memories of having to completely rebuild a machine because of them. If only I could have those days months of my life back... :sigh: My lesson, trust nothing endorsed by Microsoft - they're incompetent at most everything but marketing. At that they excel, but nothing else. Test it thrice, then still don't trust it. Your lesson - test it, backup everything you care about, cross your fingers, pray a bit, sprinkle on a healthy splash of holy water, and install. Then plan on spending days recovering from the experience. The very worst that can happen is that your pessimism will be justified, and you'll spend the time doing exactly what you planned on doing. The best is that it just might, this once, work as advertised, and you'll have all that time you reserved for repairs available for things you'd much rather be doing. :-D Someday Microsoft will write a meaningful error message - I have faith. Someday I'll die, too. I'm not sure which will come first, though... My first MS error message was in 1988 or so, running Windows 2.x; like all subsequent messages, it was entirely content-free. I admire consistency.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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Okay, last night I had a sphincter tightening moment, care of MS. I have a number of development boxes, but my bread and butter is my Dell 9100 laptop. Been married 30 years. She who I fear does not touch the laptop ;). Period. Not negotiable. Some months back, MS released SP3 for XP. No way was MS touching my laptop. So, secondary box gets SP3 for burn in. Installs fine, runs fine for 3 months. The other day my laptop reports that I have updates available. Hey, it's SP3 for the laptop. Well, SP3 worked fine on my other box, long burn in, no woes, let's do it. 70 MB later, the install is going, and, I kid you not, something crashes (exception violation) in the install. The installer reports: "SP3 install crashed and failed to install. Your computer may not boot." Not the exact words, but pretty close. I went from :omg: to X| to :mad: to :^) But it booted. I still don't know what happened, but I am NOT clicking on the shieldy thing for a while...... :)
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin
That's why you're supposed to backup before installing a service pack. ;) Personally I don't run any XP boxes anymore, and all of my Vista boxes have automatic updates enabled. I've never had any update problem in Vista that the OS didn't automagically fix.
Eric Haskins KC9JVH
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Okay, last night I had a sphincter tightening moment, care of MS. I have a number of development boxes, but my bread and butter is my Dell 9100 laptop. Been married 30 years. She who I fear does not touch the laptop ;). Period. Not negotiable. Some months back, MS released SP3 for XP. No way was MS touching my laptop. So, secondary box gets SP3 for burn in. Installs fine, runs fine for 3 months. The other day my laptop reports that I have updates available. Hey, it's SP3 for the laptop. Well, SP3 worked fine on my other box, long burn in, no woes, let's do it. 70 MB later, the install is going, and, I kid you not, something crashes (exception violation) in the install. The installer reports: "SP3 install crashed and failed to install. Your computer may not boot." Not the exact words, but pretty close. I went from :omg: to X| to :mad: to :^) But it booted. I still don't know what happened, but I am NOT clicking on the shieldy thing for a while...... :)
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin
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That's why you're supposed to backup before installing a service pack. ;) Personally I don't run any XP boxes anymore, and all of my Vista boxes have automatic updates enabled. I've never had any update problem in Vista that the OS didn't automagically fix.
Eric Haskins KC9JVH
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do you have to deal with development tools that don't play well with Vista?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin