Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Stephen
You make a good point, and it is something that had occured to me too. I suspect however that being the canny Geordie lass she is, with a computer savvy son, this may have already been done. However I will pass on the suggestion.
|
Thanks for the thread,Stephen. Many thanks for the suggestions too.
My trashed PC is a 2yr old Mesh with an Athlon processor. I'd been delaying upgrading to sp2
because I knew some people had been having problesm but MS had stuck an icon on the dektop to warn me there's be no further sp1 security updates after October.
The updater did the usual PC scan, listed the service pack for my machine and went ahead as it usually does with the update. When the time came to restart the machine it closed down as normal, started rebooting then went into a loop repeatedly restarting but never fully booting up. It wouldn't go into safe mode - nothing could break the loop.
I'm not very technical but one of my sons knows his way around PCs so he came home to see what could be done. No joy with anything he tried. He phone Mesh technical support and they sussed immediately what was happening. They told us there's an incompatability problem with the processor and sp2 and emailed him a patch that they said may or may not fix the problem. He managed to install the patch but it didn't solve the problem adequately - though we have been able to get into Windows enough to retrieve one important email I didn't have on a backup disc.. managed to read it in wordpad and get what I needed from it.
We phoned Mesh again and let them know it hadn't fixed the problem and apparently it sometimes doesn't work - so they're sending an envelope containing a boot disc and detailed instructions as to how we may get the restore disc working - apparently the original restore disc won't work once this sort of incident occurs and the patch hasn't fixed things .... so I guess we were just very unlucky.
My son will be coming home again on Monday to see if he can reformat the PC with the 'fix' discs from Mesh so we'll see how things go and take it from there. They seem to have had quite a few people having the same problems so my son is following their advice as well as trying everything he can do himself - aiming to try every last resort before a reformat.
All my most important stuff is backed up on CD and/or DVD and I only lost maybe 500Mb of photos, the most recent and none especially important - so that's ok.
The incident has also given me the push to go ahead and order a laptop so at least I should be able to get back online again fairly soon - and it also means my son can work on restoring the PC with less pressure as he's also busy at work and lives up some distance from home.
Perhaps it's because my PC and processor date back to 2003/2004 - dunno. However, I do feel the M$ update scan
should have detected and incompatible processor and NOT listed it as a recommended and *urgent* update for the PC ...... then stuck an permanent icon in the taskbar with a warning I wouldn't be able to have further security updates unless I installed SP2. But it's done now so I'm just thankful we have a son who can do all the necessary to try to fixed things for me.
See you all again as and when I can - this old PC just ain't up to it.
TTFN
Pol