A word of warning
 

I had an email today from a friend PollyG who occasionally posts here. Apparently she has a PC with a 64bit AMD processor and they don't like M$ SP2 which her machine tried to download and install. It has completely trashed her machine, which will no longer boot up. She is having to get new Restore discs from Mesh and consequently will lose all her data.

On a similar point, I have yesterday purchased a brilliant backup software system. It is called Goodsync and it does exactly what is says on the box. All my data is quickly and easily synchronized to my external drive. It cost me under £11 and is I think worth every penny. Everytime you run it it will update the files on your backup, deleting files that no longer exist as it goes. You get an exact copy of your current state, fantastic :)

Thanks for the tip, Sorry Polly is having fun with her machine.

That software sounds ideal for backing up photos automatically, something I have been wanted for a while.

Could you please post a link for further information.

There is a free version HERE but if it thinks you are using it too much it prompts you to by a licence. If you do, try using Paypal in USD its cheaper than using GBP

Hi Stephen, What is M$ SP2 out of interest.

Ahh sorry, its Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Windows XP

I have an AMD 64 bit machine and have been running XP sp2 for over a year on it with no problems at all !

Apparently it was the Windows automatic update download of SP2 that the machine did not like. According to Mesh they knew straightaway what the problem was. It seems the system failed to detect the download and presumably take the necessary action. They attempted to shut the door after the horse had bolted, but to no avail

Other than that I know little more, I am only the messenger ;)

I run an AMD 64 machine, downloaded all the updates automatically including SP2, with no problems so don't know what happened but don't think you can blame the AMD 64. More likely a corrupted file in the download. Anyway, bad luck and sooo annoying!

Mmmm, it would seem however after doing a simple Google search that there is a potential conflict with AMD 64bit processors and MS SP2. Check this out

The resultant symptons described in the article were the same as those encountered by Polly

Stephen,

Instead of loosing all of the data, can she not pull the hard drive and slave it to another machine to extract all of her info?

It should only be windows which has been corrupted, not the file structure of the drive.

Cheers
:)