Have a good weekend everyone? Having computer problems? Just me eh?
Fucking service pack three for Windows sent my computer into an endless reboot. And before anyone says “Well why not go into Safe Mode and uninstall it?” Well this fuck up prevented even safe mode from booting. Seriously what the fuck is going on here? After a reinstall of windows (which ended up wiping my C: drive which had several documents my wife was keeping on here plus save games from many different games we both were playing) I finally got it up and running again. Also the fun of calling up windows tech support to get another activation of XP (I’ve gone past my install limit having had this XP disk since it came out). After that I went to download the updates again curious if I had some weird tweak that caused the issue or if it was the update itself.
It was the update.
Ok well on some research I found it effects HP computers (mine is not) or AMD computers with a certain mother-board (That’d be me). There’s two workarounds posted one involves finding the PS/2 Adapter for your mouse (Don’t have) or plugging in a USB flash drive before boot. This did work for me but seriously WHAT THE FUCK? What the hell is in this update that would fuck up an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard? It’s a fairly decent fairly common motherboard from an extremely popular motherboard maker. I realize they can’t test for all configurations but how do they screw up so badly that safe-mode doesn’t even work? I’m far from a tech wiz but I have to ask what the hell is up with the flash drive making it work? How does that even do anything at boot? Well I guess I shouldn’t question it too much it at least fucking works.
Oh and the first person who says “Get a Mac” or anything along those lines I’ll personally come over and take a chainsaw to their computer.
I got the SP3 notification in my Windows Update this week, and i decided not to download it for the moment.
While i don’t have an AMD processor or an HP computer, and i’m sure the update would probably go fine, i’m in the middle of a whole bunch of shit right now, and the last thing i need is my computer going tits-up. I’ll download and install SP3 next month or something.
Yeah, I usually wait a month after a service pack is released before I download it. If the buzz is positive by then I figure it shouldn’t brick my system.
Heh in the past I’ve managed to not win the bug lottery on windows updates so I wasn’t really worried this time. I guess it was just my turn to be one of the first to experience the fun.
Sure you meet me there…While I go to your home with my chainsaw.
Not that it’ll help you now, but in the future I’d also be putting all my documents/music/save games, etc. on my D: partition. If you don’t have 2 partitions, then since you just re-installed, you probably only have a few documents that you can easily back up on that flash drive; as such, if you haven’t already, re-install with 2 partitions. Then, change the location of your My Documents folder to the D: partition.
You should be prepared at any time to wipe and re-install your C: partition without losing your data.
Let’s add in stop running wgatray.exe every fucking time my computer boots. It checks for serial numbers Microsoft doesn’t want running. They make you install it before updates works. You have to go to a special effort to deactivate it for startup. It extends my startup time a very noticeable amount. It interferes with the loading of some of the startup programs I do want to run at startup.
That exact issue came up with SP2 with Dell notebooks, IIRC. You would think that would have been something to test for before unleashing …I mean releasing… it, eh?
I have three partitions I just always neglect to move the My Documents folder. Thanks for the reminder though I’ve just done that.
Oh well I’m on the cusp of upgrading to a new computer and giving this to my wife anyway. I guess now I waste all that time I’ve had spent uninstalling the games she’ll never use on this.
I’m not looking forward to re-installing the Sims 2 million expansion pack extravaganza she enjoys so much.
Let me guess: you have an AMD-based computer from HP? You can then blame HP for the problem, not Microsoft. They used the same image for Intel and AMD-based PCs and needed to use different drivers but didn’t.
Damn, I’m glad you posted this, I was about to make a serious mistake. You’re right, how on earth could they fuck that up?
This basically cements my position that the next OS service pack on my machine will be the latest release of Ubuntu. Windows will be relegated to some backwater dual-boot partition for playing PC games.
