So, I am having trouble updating my copy of ME to last month’s critical update wherein I significantly lower the risk of people doing all sorts of awful things to my computer regardless of whether or not I actually use IE. The download will not work because…I dunno. I get an error message during boot that says, “Windows cannot upgrade file %2 from %1.” Dell’s team of crack email techs says that my winint.ini file exists and that the solution is to rename this file.
OK, so I search for the file and…nothing. So I search for *.ini and come up with about 200 files, none of which are named anything closer to winint.ini. Another email says, “ah, your problem is that you need to rename the winint.ini. Do that and your problem will be solved!”
“But I have no winint.ini file. What should I do?”
“Well, what you should do is rename your winint.ini file?”
“BUT I HAVE NO WININT.INI FILE. DOESN’T THAT MEAN MY COMPUTER SHOULD BE WORKING PROPERLY IF THE SOLUTION IS TO RENAME IT?”
Their other suggestion is to reinstall Windows. They are suspiciously evasive on whether or not I can acutally just go into the arcane System Restore CD and find a copy of this winint.ini file.
Does anyone have any idea if I can find the file on the CD or not? Perhaps it’s actually the lack of the file that’s causing the problem. When I get some not-so-lazy, I’m going to finally get around to instaling XP.
From what i can tell from looking at my computer and a quick Google, the file winint.ini does not in fact exist. There is a very similarly named file called wininit.ini and that controls some important things on boot. Are you sure this isn’t the file youre looking for?
I ran into the problem once, and renaming WININIT.INI didn’t help. I had to disable System Restore, then boot from a Win98 floppy and rename the C:_RESTORE folder in DOS. I was then able to re-enable System Restore and install all Critical Updates.
WinME is notoriously flaky, so there’s no telling if this will fix the problem in your case.
Perosnally, I don’t bother with the “critical” updates. That may be unwise of me, but they’ve caused more damage to my system than anything anyone else has done. Downlaoding a “critical update” and then spending two days trying to get my computer to work again left a bad taste in my mouth.
Hmmm, that’s pretty much what the latest (latest, latest) help said. We’ll see.
I mistyped Wininit.ini. That file doesn’t exist on my computer either. I’ll give this a shot. If you don’t hear from me for months, we’ll all know why.